Is this the type of electoral success Starmer is trying to tell us all will sweep Labour into government and himself into No. 10? Labour came third behind the Tories in the Newark and Sherwood by-election. Labour got 16.7 per cent of the vote, the Tories 17 per cent, but the seat was taken by an independent, who got 66 per cent of the vote. Starmer may be surprised at the result, as he seems massively deluded to the point that the declares Labour just scraping in as a major victory and endorsement of his leadership, but you could have predicted the result. How? Because Starmer is a Blairite, and this is how a large part of the British electorate acted in defiance of Blair and the Tories.
Blairism is just Thatcherism taken up by the left. As Blair sought to purge the party of any awkward left-wing policies, these were instead taken up by single issue activist groups outside parliament. And one of the issues the British people feel most strongly about is the closure of their local hospitals. Unfortunately, the Private Finance Initiative means that any hospitals built through such public-private partnerships are more expensive than would be the case if they were funded directly through government. As a result, the hospitals built under the scheme are smaller. And for those built, existing hospitals had to be closed. Blair tried doing this to a much-loved local hospital up in the midlands. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the exact constituency. What I do remember is that the local people weren’t pleased. And neither were the staff at said hospital. In fact, they were so annoyed that they formed a political party with the aim of saving the hospital. One of the hospital doctors stood as their candidate in the election.
And they won.
Which also had the positive effect of embarrassing and annoying Blair, who poured scorn on the whole idea only to find his own MP out on their ear.
This is what will happen again if Starmer and the Blairites retain control of the Labour party.
Mike’s article about this grotty defeat also quotes from an article in the Morning Star, warning left-wingers that any success Starmer has will be made through a rejection of socialism and a genuine progressive political agenda. Starmer wants left-wing Labour members to vote against their own political ideals. And if Starmer is successful in purging the party and political system of socialism, it will be the coming generations that will be most harmed.
Mike therefore askswhy people would vote for a party that doesn’t do what they want?
It’s a good question. I’m hoping that there’s a way the left can make a comeback from the leadership’s grossly anti-democratic attempts to keep them out of power permanently. But I also think that if Starmer and the other Blairites carry on, people will start looking at alternative groups and parties promoting goals that once upon a time Labour would have stood for. Like defending the NHS. I don’t trust Starmer to do it, and expect that as soon as private healthcare companies start sponsoring Labour, like they did Blair, he’ll suddenly be all for privatising it. There is, however, or was, a specific party set up to defend it – the NHS Action Party. If Starmer’s Labour doesn’t defend the NHS, then I suspect that people will start embarrassing him by voting for it, or parties like it, instead.
Just as they did so against Blair, and just as they did against Starmer and Johnson in Newark and Sherwood.
Hat tip once again to Tim Fenton for his excellent article on yet another grotty point on GB News’ downward trajectory. As he points out, the channel must be really desperate if one of its presenters, Patrick Christys, has far-right activist Jack Buckby as a guest, and even boasts about it on Twitter. The wretched station even called Buckby a ‘counter-extremism researcher’ and proudly boasted of his praise for Christys, tweeting “‘People on the right are so scared of being smeared as being far-right extremists to the point where they say the far-right doesn’t exist’ … [Jack Buckby], counter-extremism researcher, praises Patrick Christys for talking about extremism”. Well, the real counter-extremism researchers over at Hope Not Hate have been following Buckby for years along with the Islamists Buckby is claimed to be an expert on. Because Buckby may himself be justly described as a far-right extremist. Citing pieces from the Liverpool Tab and Examiner Live, Zelo Street then proceeds to give a brief precis of Buckby’s career.
Buckby is a former member of the BNP, getting mixed up with them when he was at school and then going on to study briefly at Liverpool University before he was thrown out for his views. Buckby said, “I initially got involved with the BNP in high school. I wasn’t very political, but I had my opinions, as everyone does. I saw Nick Griffin and the real bias that he was facing on the television and I thought, ‘That can’t be right.’ I did my own research and thought, ‘Shit, I agree with him. He actually seems like a good bloke.’ I started supporting it and went through college being the notorious BNP guy. It was later that I met Nick and started talking about these culturist ideas”. He was expelled eight years ago in 2013, and went on from the BNP to Liberty GB, which describes itself as an anti-Islamisation party and a radical patriotic conservative organisation. Following the murder of MP Jo Cox, Buckby stood for Liberty GB against Labour in the Batley and Spen by-election, stating that Labour could not go unchallenged. He also claimed that Labour had duped working class people and were walking into the election with smug little grins on their faces. He also issued tweet stating that if Jo Cox’s murder was true, it was either a case of the ‘moronic’ Britain First damaging the cause of the far right, or a false flag attack by the Remain campaign. He was also strongly criticised for a rant on Channel 4 News in which he said to Barbara Ntumy, ‘Take in a Syrian refugee, I hope you don’t get raped’”. The good peeps of Batley and Spen weren’t impressed, and Buckby got 1.1 per cent of the vote and lost his deposit. Tim’s article also quotes tweets from Dr. Louise Raw and anti-racism campaigner Mike Stuchbery. Dr. Raw was horrified at the platforming of Buckby, because he had called for terror attacks in the Netherlands and was in the BNP, as was David Copeland, the man who radicalised Jo Cox’s assassin. Stuchbery has also been a victim of fanatics claiming to fight Islamisation. He was targeted for harassment by the noxious Tommy Robinson. Stuchbery also wondered why GB News was platforming him, ending his tweet with“Disgraceful from [GB News] … A known fascist with despicable views on the murder of Jo Cox & much more that should shame [GB News], who clearly did no background checks here”.
Tim, on the other hand, ends his piece with the conclusion that GB News knew exactly what they were doing, and should hang their heads in shame. But they won’t, because they don’t have any.
I’m afraid Tim’s precisely right. A quick search on Google reveals this article on For Britain, its leader Anne-Marie Waters, and Jack Buckby. https://hopenothate.org.uk/research-old/investigations/undercover-inside-britains-far-right/for-britain/. I realise that neither Buckby nor Hope Not Hate are exactly household names, but the researchers at GB News would have known of them and who Buckby was when gathering information for the show. Even if they didn’t come across Hope Not Hate, they would have been able to get the facts about Buckby. It looks very much like the broadcaster wanted someone controversial to talk about Islamisation in the aftermath of David Amess’ murder, and weren’t particular about who they were inviting.
As for describing Buckby as an anti-Islamisation expert, this strikes me as nonsense. I think it’s a mistake to underestimate the Islamophobic far right, as from my own reading of their web pages there are people there who do have a deep knowledge of Islam. This is apart from the football hooligans and other thugs who simply want to beat up brown people. There are issues with Islam in Britain. I think some sections of it are very alienated from mainstream British society and there is a danger of the creation of parallel societies. But the vast majority of British Muslims aren’t terrorists and have very publicly condemned it.The problem is that Fascists and Islamophobes like Buckby don’t distinguish between Islam and Islamism.
From what I’ve read and watched, many of the Islamist activists and terrorists have a similar background. Apart from those radicalised abroad, they seem to be individuals, who’ve been radicalised over the Web or from particular hate preachers. A number had connections to Anjem Chaudhury, a grotty individual who’s spent time in the slammer for supporting terrorism. I don’t know if this the case with Amess’ alleged killer, but quite often they’ve spent their lives drinking, taking drugs and having sex before their conversion to radical Islam. Chaudhury, if I’m correct, is a case in point. Some of them, like those responsible for attacks in France, seem to have been violent criminals. Quite often they’ve precious little connection to their local mosque, the congregation of which haven’t seen them in years.
As for the political motivations behind the attacks, some of it simply seems to be rage at the west’s repeated invasions and attacks on Muslim nations, such as the invasion of Iraq. While there’s more to the ideology than simply this – it also seems to be coupled to stupid conspiracy theories about the Jews plotting against Islam and Mohammed from the foundation of the religion in the 7th century onward, cultural shock and dislocation caused by the massive changes in Middle Eastern and broader Islamic society, as well as an idealisation of pre-modern, traditional Islam – that seems to be the primary motive.
This is a tense time. Our Muslim brothers and sisters are naturally afraid of increased prejudice and abuse following Mr. Amess’ horrendous murder. I saw a piece on the internet news page yesterday stating that Muslim organisations were giving them advice on handling this increased suspicion and hate. We need informed, sane experts, who can properly explain the issues, drawing people together to dispel such prejudice and unite against violence and hatred.
This means real experts, not bigots and Nazis like Buckby.
GB News risk increasing tension simply by platforming him. It seems to be a publicity stunt, though I also wonder if the broadcaster couldn’t get anyone who really knew about Islamist terror and radicalisation on.
Either way, it shows how low it really is going on its way to being eventually wound up.
Despite Starmer’s less than stellar performance at the Labour party conference, Britain’s wretched press continues to regard him as the saviour of the Labour party. Yesterday’s I had their columnist Stephen Bush opining that the bargain basement Stalin had put Labour’s house in order. There was also a piece by Ayesha Hazarika, another Blairite Labour MP, giving readers the benefit of what she would like to say to Keef. And on Wednesday the Depress quoted Stalin as telling his audience, or possibly just the Depress, that Corbyn nearly destroyed the Labour party.
This is untrue. Corbyn didn’t destroy the Labour party. Under his leadership its membership expanded until it became the largest socialist party in Europe and it outstripped the Tories’, who had up to them been the larger party. These members paid membership fees, and so the party’s finances were very healthy. And his policies were and are massively popular with electorate. They wanted the renationalisation of the utilities, an end and reversal of the privatisation of the NHS, a strong welfare state and strong trade unions, proper rights at work and strong trade unions that actually protect working people. But these policies are anathema to the Thatcherite establishment, and particularly the Blairites who are trying to turn the Labour party in Conservatives .2.
And so the press and media vilification began. This initially just concentrated on calling him a Communist or Trotskyite, which was taken up by people who really don’t know what either of those actually are. But this didn’t actually make much of a dent in his support. Far more damaging was the accusation from the Zionist establishment of the Jewish community – the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and press – that he was a vicious anti-Semite because he spoke out in favour of the Palestinians. This was eagerly taken up by the wider British establishment, and used as a weapon by Corbyn’s enemies in the Labour party to undermine him. They did so by smearing and expelling his supporters.
Meanwhile the Blairites in Labour plotted a series of coups, ostentatiously resigning from his shadow cabinet live on television, and gave interviews to the press attacking him at every opportunity. The Blairite bureaucracy actively conspired to throw the 2017 and 2019 elections, and actively withheld from their leader the extent of real anti-Semitism in Labour in order to further blacken him. They also bullied and abused Black and ethnic minority MPs and activists like Diane Abbott and there is, thanks to them, a rise in Islamophobia in the party.
Now Corbyn did make some serious mistakes. I’ve heard it said that he should have purged the party bureaucracy of the Blairites, as was expected when he took over as leader. He didn’t, and so made a rod for his own back. But the most important was that he took the anti-Semitism accusations in good faith. Instead of defending his supporters from the spurious charges, Corbyn threw them under the bus in a policy of appeasement. This didn’t work and ended, as Tony Greenstein predicted it would, with Corbyn himself being personally attacked and ousted.
But Starmer’s leadership has been disastrous. After publicly embracing Corbyn’s policies, he started betraying them and the party’s left-wing membership almost as soon as he got the leadership. He broke all his election promises and blithely carried on the purge of left-wing members, all on the pretext that they were terrible anti-Semites. Even when the vast majority of those accused have been decent, self-respecting Jews. People, especially Blacks, Muslims and ethnic minorities, are leaving his racist Labour party in droves. In contrast to his attacks on the left, he has said little against Boris Johnson’s corrupt, inept government. Before last week most Brits didn’t know what he stood for. Now he’s come out laid his Blairite vision of Labour policy before the country. But this hasn’t increased his popularity either. Yesterday Tory vlogger Michael Heaver put up a video showing that Labour was still behind the Tories in the polls, and in fact their popularity had fallen slightly by a point during the conference. And among working class voters the Tories were massively ahead. Well, the Blairites were never interested in working class voters. They wanted middle class voters, and as a result, Blairite Labour is paying the price.
With supporters and members abandoning the party, its finances are in crisis and it is near bankruptcy. Starmer is trying recruit people, who aren’t traditionally Labour (meaning presumably Tories) as members and MPs, but they’re not coming forward. BFAWU, one of the founding unions, has disaffiliated and if more follow it will tear the historic guts out of the party. And under Starmer the party lost a swathe of local authorities and by-elections, thanks to his refusal to respect the Brexit vote in the referendum. Labour is on the point of collapse, but he’s been talking up what few victories he’s had as if they were splendid and overwhelming whereas in fact Labour barely held on to the contested seats.
But nevertheless, the Tory press are trying to delude this country that he’s made the party electable again and that somewhere down the line they’ll be in power.
Here’s Heavers video about the Labour poll results.
Oh, what delightful irony! What goes around, comes around. And it’s come around to hit Gary Spedding. Spedding’s one of the ultra-Zionists who took it upon himself in 2018 to join Kieron Monks and the fake anti-racism outfit, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism in smearing Mike as a Jew-hater and holocaust-denier.
Mike had critiqued a piece by Monks that appeared in Prospect claiming that there was an anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Prospect is a moderate, left-wing political magazine very much like Encounter was in the ’60s and 70’s. This magazine was later revealed to have benefited from CIA funding, and there are suspicions amongst the watchers of real conspiracies and the covert activities of the intelligence agencies, like Lobster, that Prospect is similarly a conduit for secret state propaganda.
Mike briefly questioned whether Tony Blair had been influenced by a secret Jewish cabal, but the subtleties of his prose escaped, or, more likely, was wilfully misinterpreted by the anti-Semitism smear merchants. They claimed that Mike had claimed that Blair was influenced by such a cabal, and that this constituted a form of the old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews secretly controlling events and politics. Mike was hauled up before the NEC and then thrown out. The lies against him were leaked by person or persons unknown in that august body to the SunsetTimes. And in an argument with Mike on the web, Spedding repeated the smears, libelling Mike as an anti-Semite and holocaust-denier.
As has been abundantly demonstrated over and again, Mike is neither. He couldn’t afford to prosecute Spedding for libel, but he was able to clear his name by IPSO. As for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, it is in my view nothing but an ultra-Zionist front organisation. It was founded in 2012 by Gideon Falter, who was outraged that severely normal Brits didn’t back Israel during the bombardment of Gaza. It has made so many fake accusations of anti-Semitism that I feel it should really have a new name. Perhaps ‘the Campaign Against Truth?’ Or may be, as so many victims of the anti-Semitism smear campaign are Jews, ‘the Campaign for Anti-Semitism’ or ‘Campaign Against Jews’?
Further confirmation that the Israel lobby and ultra-Zionists in Labour were behind the anti-Semitism smears against Mike and the other victims is shown in one of the other names that crop up in Monks’ tweet: Dave Rich. Rich wrote a book a few years ago claiming that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left was deeply anti-Semitic. Rich, however, was the head of a Zionist organisation, which indicates to me that he was pushing the smears to defend Israel against a Labour leader, who had been a very strong opponent of the country’s brutal oppression of the Palestinians.
Now Spedding himself is facing expulsion on the trumped-up charge of having disseminated material from the Green party during the Hartlepool by-election. Now he is complaining about the unfair and brutal treatment of people like him by Starmer. But Starmer gained the leadership precisely because of people like Spedding. And Spedding now wants to ‘join in the solidarity with the other victims’. Mike therefore doubts his motivations considering his past conduct.
Spedding is asking for an apology from Starmer, so Mike asked him if he would care to apologise to him. He was brusquely refused with the curt reply ‘Why would I apologise to you?’
Which shows very clearly that he’s still convinced of his lies and libels. Mike states that he’s toxic and so doesn’t deserve a minute of anyone’s time.
Quite. Until Spedding acknowledges that the accusations against Mike and the other victims of the anti-Semitism witch hunt are false, there can be no real solidarity between them and him.
It’s now the morning after the council and elected mayoral elections that were being held up and down the country yesterday. And to no-one’s surprise, Labour lost the Hartlepool bye-election to the Tories. The media commenters have identified Brexit as the cause of the defeat. For those of us on the left of the party, Brexit was a major factor, but it was also partly due to the shoddy, ineffectual leadership and arrogance of the current leader, Keir Starmer. Starmer parachuted into Hartlepool his preferred candidate, a Remainer, over the heads of local Labour party members, activists and supporters. Mike on Vox Political predicted that this would lead to defeat, and so it did. Because of this, the right-wingers on the Net were putting up videos stating that Labour was insulting Hartlepool’s working people. This was further compounded by the fact that Starmer has been such an ineffective opposition leader, that some people didn’t know who he was. Mahyar Tousi, one of the Brexiteers with arch-Thatcherite views, included a clip from Sky News on his video about Labour in Hartlepool yesterday. This showed Starmer earnestly talking to people. The presenter then stopped a passing woman and asked her if she knew who that man was over there. She didn’t. The presenter told her it was Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party. The woman still didn’t know. So much for Starmer’s glittering leadership.
And it was also yesterday that right-wing internet radio host, Alex Belfield, put up a video openly calling for the NHS to be handed over to private management. This isn’t the first time he’s done this, and I doubt that it will be the last. He’s already put up videos with titles like ‘Private NHS Now’. Belfield is vehemently against the lockdown, which he feels is unnecessary and actually harmful, as it has prevented the elderly in nursing homes being visited and comforted by their relatives. It has also created another crisis in the NHS, as the concentration on the Coronavirus has meant routine operations, examinations and treatment have been postponed to the point that waiting times have increased. Highly vulnerable people, like those suffering from cancer, are going untreated.
This is a terrible problem, and much of it, like the grotesque mishandling of the Coronavirus crisis that has seen well over 100,000 die from the disease, can be put down to Boris Johnson’s ineptitude and his cavalier disregard for human life over the economy. Plus the way the NHS has been run down, starved of funds and partially privatised over the past ten years.
But not to Belfield. The ginger-headed man with the tiny man-sausage, as he has described himself, knows better. He put up a rant yesterday claiming that it was all due to increased bureaucracy and ‘box-ticking Celia Imrie types’. Belfield has a feud going with the BBC, and he never fails to include jabs at that organisation. I don’t know whether he has anything against Celia Imrie, or whether it’s just he’s using the kind of parts she’s played as an example of a certain kind of fussy, totally unnecessary management type. You know, the sort of people the Golgafrinchams put into an ark to send into space and crash on Earth on the grounds that they were ‘a bunch of useless bloody loonies’ according to the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The solution, according to Belfield, is for the NHS to be handed over to private management.
This is no solution, as it is private management that has created this situation.
Jacky Davis and Ray Tallis have comprehensively shown in their book, NHS – SOS, that private enterprise is very definitely not as efficient as state healthcare. It’s actually more bureaucratic, as the US private healthcare companies can spend as much as 40-50 per cent of their income on management and legal issues. A book I bought a few years ago discussing the privatisation of healthcare in places like Canada as well as Britain found that the privatisation of parts of the health service over here had actually increased costs by 6 per cent. Parts of the NHS are being handed over to private management, and the effects are not good. Private enterprise is all about profit, not service, and so we’ve seen the private healthcare chains close down doctors surgeries even though they were needed by local people who were then left without a local GP. At the same time, Tory MPs have been demanding the levying of payments for users of certain NHS services, which are supposed to be free at the point of service.
This is all part of the long-time project of privatising the NHS, and turning it into a for-profit healthcare system like the American.
And Belfield is fully behind it.
Belfield likes to present himself as an ordinary working class lad without a degree, who’s despised by the middle class White liberals. His audience seem to be the middle aged, White working class, who feel left behind, excluded from political representation in favour of ethnic minorities. The kind of people, who voted for UKIP.
But these are exactly the people, who will suffer if Belfield’s political aims are realised. If Belfield and the other Tories have their way and privatise the NHS, it will be the working class – and that includes the White working class – who will struggle to pay for healthcare treatment. It’s already happening now, through hospital and GP closures due to private management. And thanks to the privatisation of the dentists, many people have been struggling for a long time to find dentists, who will take NHS patients.
Belfield may well be a working class lad, but his politics are those of the upper classes, who wish to impoverish and exploit working people.
And that means privatising the NHS, even, or especially, if it harms working people’s health.
One of the most entertaining books I’ve read on the stranger or more remarkable items of the English lexicon is simply entitled Words, by the American author Paul Dickson (London: Arrow Books 1982). It’s subtitled ‘A Connoisseur’s Collection Of Old And New, Weird and Wonderful, Useful And Outlandish’ -. And one of the most useful political terms it records, in the chapter on ‘Neologisms’, is ‘Democrapic’. The book gives its definition as ‘Garson Kanin’s word for the expression of democratic beliefs by those who cannot tolerate democracy in action.’ (p.168).
It’s particularly appropriate at this time, as we heard a lot of democrapic last week from the Independent Group. They are the breakaway politicos from Labour and the Tories, who are so passionate about democracy and parliament, that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, don’t have any real policies, except opposition to Brexit – or at least, not any they want the public to know – and have registered as a private corporation so they don’t have to do what real parties do and reveal who their sponsors and donors are. Nor do they have any infrastructure to allow a mass membership that would decide party policy.
Of course, they have serious rivals in their use of democrapic by the Blairites in the Labour Party, the Lib Dems and the Tories. The Blairites maintain that they’re the true heart of Labour and stand for genuine inclusion, equality and diversity, while all the time trying to purge the real moderate and left-wing members of the party. At the same time, Tony Greenstein has noted that there’s also a very nasty racist undertone in the anti-Semitism smears, in that they’re targeted primarily at anti-Zionist Jews and anti-racist Black activists. The Lib-Dems are very democrapic since they effectively dumped John Mills’ On Liberty as their founding text determining the pursuit of real democracy to support David Cameron’s secret courts, where in the interests of national security, you may not know who your accuser is, nor the evidence or charge against you, and the whole trial will be held in secret. Pretty much like Labour’s Compliance Unit examining charges of anti-Semitism. And when you come to the Tories, there’s a whole mountain of democrapic coming from a party that despises the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, Blacks, Asians and Muslims, but make a lot of noise about how they stand up for British ideals of tolerance and democracy when anyone challenges them on all this.
Democrapic is a very useful term to describe this type of political hypocrisy. Just as the old slang term ‘gentleman ranker’, for a ruined gentleman reduced to serving as a private in the army, aptly describes Iain Duncan Smith. Who was rumoured to have failed the office course at Sandhurst and Returned To Unit.
IDS is now out of office, but sadly, not out of parliament. But I predict that ‘democrapic’ will remain intensely relevant, especially as applied to the Independent Group, who are particularly democrapic.
Haim Bresheeth is another Jewish critic of Israel. He’s put up a number of videos on YouTube covering the Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and their demonstrations of solidarity with him and against the anti-Semitism smears. In this video, posted on 20th February 2019, the academic and film-maker talks to the Iranian news service, Press TV about the Independents and particularly Joan Ryan.
The video begins with him telling the host that the only thing the Independents have in common is support for Israeli apartheid and the attacks on Gaza, and for wars everywhere. It that’s going to be their platform, and the founding eleven may be joined by one or two more, then Bresheeth states that he thinks they have no future. They are supporting another government, which is legally an apartheid government, is not going to bring voters to that movement.
The host asks Bresheeth for his response to her claim that she left Labour because of its anti-Semitism. Bresheeth states that he has been a member of the Labour party has been living in Britain for 45 years, and he has not met an anti-Semite, either in the Labour party or anywhere else in Britain. So they must be hiding so well it’s unbelievable. He’s not saying there are no anti-Semites in Britain, but they’re not in the Labour party. They’re more likely to be in UKIP. Joan Ryan was not only shown to be a friend of Israel, and is definitely not a friend of Labour, but she was working with Mossad people, Shai Masot, as shown in al-Jazeera’s documentary, ‘The Lobby’. They were plotting to bring down a British minister tells you just what Joan Ryan is about. She’s not the MP for North Enfield, she’s the MP for Mossad.
Readers of this blog will know the absolute contempt I have for the Iranian regime, its human rights abuses, corruption and oppression of that ancient nation’s working people. But, like RT, which is owned by Russia, it’s one of the few news broadcasters that’s actually telling the truth about the anti-Semitism smears.
Haim Bresheeth is not along when he states that he’s lived in this country without meeting an anti-Semite. Corbyn’s Jewish supporters in organisations like Jewish Voice for Labour, who are resolutely ignored by the media, have also said that, like him, they’re sure it exists, but they’ve never encountered it personally. Statistics show that only 3.6 per cent of the Labour have anti-Semitic views. In the Tories, it’s 3.9 per cent. And in UKIP it’s something like 4.2. per cent. I don’t know whether Masot really was part of Mossad, but it is certainly true he was conspiring to remove a Tory member of cabinet, Alan Duncan. Just as Ryan was shown manufacturing a fake anti-Semitism accusation against another Labour supporter, Jean Fitzpatrick. Ryan’s notorious advocacy of Israel at the expense of her own constituents is notorious in the Labour party, and earned her the soubriquet ‘the MP for Tel Aviv North’.
And I’ve no doubt that Bresheeth is also right when he says they stand for more wars everywhere. They all supported the Iraq invasion, and they are all desperate for there not to be a public enquiry, as this would no doubt expose their illegality, acquiescence and promotion of Blair’s lies. And as supporters of Israel, an apartheid state, they are definitely not anti-racists, no matter what they scream about anti-Semitism.
Domestically the Independents, or at least Chris Leslie, stand for supporting the Tory party against Jeremy Corbyn, privatisation, including that of the NHS, tuition fees, keeping the water companies private, destroying the welfare state, and more tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor. They are warmongering Tories, who have nothing to offer Britain’s working people, except possibly membership of the EU. There is absolutely no doubt that we should have bye-elections now, so that they can be voted out, and replaced with those, who really do respect the wishes of their constituents.
I found this short video by Mark Braithwaite on his channel over on YouTube. It’s just under two minutes long, and is of Ann Soubry being told by her constituents exactly what they think of her for leaving the Tories and not holding a bye-election. They ask her why, if she believes in democracy so much, she doesn’t hold a bye-election. One tells her that he thinks she only left because she wasn’t in the cabinet. Another tells her that while she thinks she’s a rebel, she isn’t. She is also told that she is showing disrespect to her constituents for not holding a bye-election, because they didn’t vote for her as an Independent, they voted for her as a Tory. And she’s also disrespecting the 17.5 million people, who voted to Leave by demanding a second referendum on Brexit.
It’s all rather amusing. And I can quite believe that her motivation for leaving the Tories is frustrated ambition. A Labour MP yesterday said he believed that Chuka Umunna hadn’t left Labour for any better or nobler reason than that. He departed because he knew he would never be the party’s leader.
But Soubry doesn’t seem to have left the Tories at all. Not in her heart. According to a recent post by the Angry Yorkshireman over at Another Angry Voice, she’s said that she still intends to campaign for the Tories. And she and Umunna also believe she should be allowed to go back to the Tory party when she wishes, and that it’s terrible that the Tories won’t have her. Which shows how utterly inept Umunna would have been as a Labour leader, if he believes it’s acceptable for a member of his political grouping to campaign for a rival party. See https://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com/2019/02/chuka-umunna-thinks-ex-tory-members-of.html
The Independents are quickly showing themselves to be an absolute farce. And I don’t doubt that they’ll be gone at the next election. And good riddance!
In this 20 minute long video from Novara Media, presenter Aaron Bastani utterly demolishes the new ‘Independent’ grouping of MPs. He shows that rather than being any kind of new politics, they are simply the old, Blairite and Tory politics neoliberal politics. They are radically out of tune with what people really want, especially millennials, who have left much worse off than the preceding generation by the same politics the Blairites and Tories were pushing. And they’re being promoted by the media because they represent the old style of politics the media like: austerity with a smiley face.
Labour MPs All Going Before They’re Pushed
Bastani begins the video by describing how the departure of the seven Labour MPs – Gavin Shuker, Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Ann Coffee, Luciana Berger, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, who left to form the Independents – wasn’t actually a surprise. They were all loud critics of Corbyn, and almost all of them had been subject to motions of ‘no confidence’ or were facing deselection. They were then joined the next day by Joan Ryan, another critic of Corbyn, who had also lost a ‘no confidence’ motion. They were then joined the day after that by Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston from the Tories, who complained about the old, ‘broken’ politics of Labour versus Tories.
Independents Not Democratic, and Not a Political Party
The Independents, however, aren’t a political party as such. Which means that they don’t get the Short Money given to opposition parties. This could add up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. They also don’t have to conform to the same standards as proper political parties, although they claim that they will try to do so as best they can. They also don’t have a membership. You can give them your name and contact details, and make a donation, but there is no mechanism for creating a mass organisation where the membership can determine policy. It’s a private organisation more than a political party. But what concerns Bastani the most is that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, because this would ‘crush democracy’. It’s doublespeak, and the truth is that they don’t want bye-elections because they’d lose.
Angela Smith’s Racism
He then goes on to describe how the seven founding ex-Labour members claim that they were driven out of the party by its racism, only for Angela Smith to say within hours the most racist thing he’s ever heard a politician say on television. To show how badly their launch went, Bastani produces some viewing figures. On the Monday the video of their launch had 75,000 views on Twitter. The video of Angela Smith’s apology got 700,000 views. But the video of Smith making her racist comments got even more – 1.5 million views. And while the Mirror and the Guardian wanted to splash on a video by Tom Watson, which got 500 shares on Facebook, Novara’s video of their own Ash Sarkar showing the corruption at the heart of the group – she challenged smith on her chairmanship of a parliamentary group supporting water privatisation, funded largely by the water companies – got 200,000 views. Chris Leslie then appeared later on the Beeb to sort this out. Where once again he talked about their love of democracy. A love so strong, that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, thus disenfranchising the hundreds of thousands of people, who voted for these 11 MPs. They claimed to be anti-racist, but set a new record by being racist ‘pretty much by lunchtime’.
People More Politically Engaged, Not Less
But their fundamental principle is that people don’t want Labour or Tory, but what Labour used to be 15 years ago. But at the 2017 election, 82 per cent of the population voted for either of the two main parties – Tories or Labour. That was the highest percentage the parties had since 1979. In 2010 only 65 per cent of the public voted Labour or Tory. The idea that people are turning away from the two main parties when there is a clear choice, socialism or neoliberalism, isn’t true. And the claim that people are disengaged from politics doesn’t stand up either. Voter turn-out was higher in the 2017 election, just as it was higher during the Scottish reference in 2014, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Which was the biggest democratic exercise in British history. More people voted in that than in any previous general election or referendum. And Labour now has more than 500,000 members – more than it has had in a generation. The same is true for the SNP. More people are members of political parties now than at any point in Bastani’s lifetime. And if people genuinely do want centrist politics, how is it that the Lib Dems, who got only 8 per cent of the vote in 2015, got even less in 2017? This was despite the ‘media Einsteins’ telling us all that they would do well against the two main parties in a Brexit election. It’s almost as if, says Bastani, that the media don’t know what they’re talking about when they claim to know what the public wants.
Labour Policies Massively Popular
And then there are the policy issues. Labour’s policies are very popular. They’re right at the top of the list of why people voted Labour. But they don’t want to imitate these popular policies. Chris Leslie in an interview with New Scientist said he didn’t want a top tax rate of 50 per cent. That’s not a Corbynite policy, it’s one of Gordon Brown’s. He was also against stopping tuition fees and rejects the renationalisation of the railways, both extremely popular policies. These aren’t just popular with Labour voters, but also with Tories and Lib Dems. And polls conducted by IPPR And Sky News did polls at the end of last year which showed clear majorities of the British public wanting the Bank of England to keep house prices down and a minimal presence, at least, of workers on company boards. People don’t want centrist policies. They’re moving left, as shown on poll after poll.
Millennials Left-Wing because of Neoliberalism
And there’s a clear generational difference. At the last Labour split in 1981 when the SDP was formed, there was a clear movement to the right and post-war socialist policies had become unpopular. And yet when this split happened, the Economist carried an article decrying the popularity of socialism amongst millennials both in America and Britain. This meant ‘Generation Z’ young people, who want the government to address climate change as a fundamental part of 21st century politics. And these millennials despised the Tories, as shown by footage of an anti-Tory march. These are going to be the voters of the 2020s. And they’re not going to be bought off. They’re not left-wing because of something the read in a book, or because they want to be countercultural. They’re left-wing because their living standards and expectations are lower than their parents, they have a less expansive welfare state, they’re going to have higher levels of debt and earn less, and they will have to deal with systemic crises like demographic aging and climate change. They rightly feel that they’re screwed over. And the idea that these same people are going to agree with Chris Leslie’s idea of politics is probably the stupidest thing you’ll hear this year. And this is only February.
The Failure of Centrist Parties in France, America, Italy, Spain and Canada
But since 2015 centrist politicians have been hammered in election like Hillary Clinton in 2016. Emmanuel Macron in France was hailed as the saviour of French centrism, despite only taking 24 per cent of the vote in the first round. Now he’s the most unpopular president in French history after months of protests by the gilets jaunes, which have been met with tear gas attacks by the gendarmes, which have left people losing their eyes and their lives. Then there’s Matteo Renzi of the Partito Democratico, the Democratic Party, the Italian sister party to Britain’s Labour. In 2014 they took 42 per cent of the vote. But he was out within two years, having lost a referendum by 20 points. And in the last election the party lost half of their senators, leaving Italy governed by the Five Star Movement and the far-right Liga. Then there’s the example of the PSOE’s Pedro Sanchez. The PSOE is the Spanish equivalent of the Labour party. He’s also suffered mass protests and this week Spain called new general elections, which his party are certain to lose. Centrism is not popular in Europe or America, so the Independents have to turn to Canada’s Justin Trudeau. But Trudeau is now less popular in his country than Donald Trump in the US. Not that the media pushing ‘centrism’ will tell you this.
The Centrist Real Policy: More Austerity
The unpopularity of centrist politics is due to the fact that they still haven’t solved the problems of global capitalism created by the 2008 crash. They believed that financialisation would create the economic growth that would support public services. But financialisation hasn’t created growth since 2008. And as they can’t create prosperity and tackle income inequality, all they’ve have to give us is austerity ‘with a nice smiley face’.
Labour Splitters against Iraq Inquiry, For Welfare Cuts
And not only do the eight former Labour MPs have Brexit in common, they also voted against an independent inquiry into Iraq. A million people have been affected by the war, along with those, who suffered under ISIS, and Iranian influence has expanded across the Middle East. The idea that Iraq is irrelevant is not only absurd, it is a disgrace. People have died, and it has made an already volatile region even more so. And Britain is directly responsible. The former Labour MPs also abstained on the vote of welfare reform before Corbyn came to power. They do not stand for a moral foreign policy, or for a more just social system at home.
Their politics are a mixture of careerism and opportunism, and their opposition to Brexit actually makes a new deal more likely. They are driven by fundamental democratic principles, but won’t stand for a bye-election. No members, no policies, no party democracy, no vision. Bastani states that this isn’t the future of politics, it’s the past, and the worst aspects at that. He looks forward to sensible people joining them, because they’re going to be found out sooner or later. And if we want to establish the primacy of socialist ideas, he says, then bring it on.
Here’s an antidote to all the ant-Corbyn smears and propaganda by the Tories, the media and the ‘Independents’. It’s this two and a half minute video put up by Chunky Mark the Artist Taxi Driver of a Labour party rally for Corbyn in Broxtowe.
The video shows the immense crowds there, and the banner for East Midlands Labour Party. Mark asks one of the ladies speaking there what she thinks of Anna Soubry, the austerity supporting former Tory, who joined the Independents the other day. The lady replies
‘She’s a Tory! She’s a Tory! The new Independent grouping has cuddled up to Tories. What do they think they’re doing? All their doing is propping up the Tory government. It’s disgraceful.’
She’s not alone in condemning them. Another woman says ‘Anna Soubry’s resigned from her party so we’re looking forward to a bye-election and getting some in place, who can sort out the problems around here. The cuts have had a detrimental effect on elderly people, on schools – I’m a teacher’ A young woman says that the party needs to pull together and get behind Corbyn. They should be fighting the Tory government, not among themselves. What is important is to get a socialist into No. 10.
A young man appears, who says that he thinks it really is important that there should be a bye-election, and that Anna Soubry should do the right thing. She has no mandate to represent people on the new basis here. An Asian gent says it’s nothing to do with politics. Soubry should resign and have a bye-election. Mark asks him why he thinks she won’t resign. He replies that it’s because she wants to stay and a hold on to power.
The video then moves on to show the first lady on the podium telling the crowd that the Independents are wrong, and they just don’t care. They would rather see a Tory government than a real, socialist Labour government. They would rather support the politics of austerity, the draining of our public services of the money that they need. They would rather see the bitterness and appalling unfairness of Universal Credit.
The video then goes to an elderly White man, who says that it’s a continuation of what Thatcher started, and it’s got even worse. He thought Thatcher was bad enough, but… And then he shakes his head, saying ‘I don’t know what’s really happening.’
The video then moves back to show the first lady telling the crowd ‘Stand tall! Stand firm! Be proud! Our future is coming and it is coming soon! I introduce to you the next prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn!’ There is rapturous applause.
Back to the elderly gent, who says, ‘Corbyn – they’re frightened of him. And they’re frightened of all the their privileges and wealth dwindled away’.
The video ends with a picture of Chunky Mark with a cardboard placard reading ‘2019: Get Rid of the Tories’.
Absolutely! Get rid of them both within and without the Labour party!
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