A week or so ago a tranche of court documents on Jeffrey Epstein and his vile child prostitution ring were declassified and the names of some of the highly prominent people involved with Epstein, though not necessarily customers of his services, were revealed. They include Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and the late cosmologist and physicist, Stephen Hawking, as well as Prince Andrew. This has, not surprisingly, provoked considerable discussion on YouTube as well as the mainstream media. And one of the YouTube pundits putting his oar in was Paul Joseph Watson. Watson’s very definitely a man of the far right, but his video about it, on his ‘Modernity’ channel, did have some genuinely interesting things to say. And some of these suggestions should be seriously considered by people of more moderate view.
Surprisingly, one of the extremely wealthy and powerful men not on the list was Donald Trump. Who knew that Trump had some shred of personal decency after all his comments about walking through women’s changing rooms unannounced and grabbing the ladies by their private parts? Naturally, Watson was gleeful about this and the supposed disappointment among leftists at not finding the Orange Man’s name among the various pervs and visitors to Epstein and his wretched island. I can’t say Trump’s absence from the list bothers me at all, as there’s far more plentiful information elsewhere showing how exploitative his presidency was for the American working man and woman, its corruption and sheer, glaring, massive incompetence. Trump’s personal sexual morality in many ways is the least of his defects and flaws.
Epstein himself comes across as a weird eugenicist. He believed that he was genetically superior to everyone else, and wanted to open some kind of centre or home on his island to support 20 women he would get pregnant as part of his one-pervert campaign to improve the biological stock of humanity. This is very close to the Nazi Lebensborn experiment, a system of SS maternity homes for the racially pure Nazi elite. Or to go even further back, to the breeding farms some slave owners in America and the Caribbean ran to create a stock of superior slaves.
More important, however, is the suggestion that Epstein may have been spying for Mossad. This comes from a former Israeli intelligence agent, Ben-Menashe, and there is circumstantial evidence that it might be right. Ghislaine Maxwell was the wife of British newspaper magnate, Robert Maxwell, who drowned falling off his yacht nearly three decades ago after he was caught looting the pension fund of the workers on his Mirror newspaper. Maxwell was Czech, who had mysteriously turned up in the west with funding to start his publisher, Pergamum Press. After his death he was buried, I believe, on the Mount of Olives in Israel where the country buries its national heroes. There were rumours even before then that he was a Mossad agent, and indeed may even have been a double or triple agent.
And not least of all this circumstantial evidence, Epstein had cameras in every room of his squalid brothel. He watched what was going on from the security of a fortified room in the centre of his residence and recorded everything. There’s also something very peculiar about the FBI’s inability to seize these tapes as evidence. When they raided the house, for some reason they didn’t seize a stack of these tapes at the time. It may have been because they didn’t have a court order to confiscate them. I don’t know. However, when they came back to grab them four days later, they’d vanished. Were there people involved who would cause major embarrassment for the American government, politics and society, and which the establishment could not afford to arrest or even have the incriminating material demanding it?
The American biologist Brett Weinstein also had a run-in with Epstein which he described on the Joe Rogan Experience. Epstein was posing as a financial wheeler-dealer, and Weinstein had been hired to do some work for him. Weinstein said he really wasn’t comfortable there. Firstly, Epstein had an American flag as his table cloth, and Weinstein wasn’t happy with the idea of dripping coffee over Old Glory. More than that, Epstein was late meeting him. When he did finally appear, he excused himself by saying that he’d been doing some financial securities investment or whatever. Weinstein found it odd, as it wasn’t the way somebody would normally speak in that circumstance. I think they’d probably just tell you they had some business to attend to, and leave it at that. It seemed to Weinstein that Epstein was acting, that he’d been put in place to play a role by somebody else. He also pursued a lifestyle that was well out of his income bracket. Epstein was extremely rich, but he behaved and had the tastes of the really phenomenally rich, and Weinstein pointed out that there was a real difference between the behaviour and expenditure of these two parts of the elite.
Looking at all this, it really wouldn’t surprise me if Epstein was spying for Mossad. Running brothels and spying on and filming the encounters between the prostitutes and their clients is a very old trick of the intelligence services. The Gestapo were doing it with Salon Kitty in Berlin during the Third Reich. The Soviets were doing it during the Cold War, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Putin and cronies were still doing it today. International conventions prevent allied countries from spying on each other, but that hasn’t prevented Mossad from doing so. They were caught doing this a few years ago, but nothing happened. They were also caught spying on us under Blair, but he also let them get away with it. Margaret Thatcher caught them spying, and told them that if they didn’t clean up their act she’d close them down and throw them out. They cleaned up their act. It therefore seems to me to be more than plausible that Epstein was spying for them.
Where I think Watson is wrong is when he strays into ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and occult conspiracies. He cites one of the coffee table books you could get on the occult and witchcraft down the ages to claim that at various times throughout history there have been cults of very rich men using sex magic to try and gain immortality. He is right in that there have been various occultists and occult groups that have incorporated sex as part of their rituals, seeking to harness its power. Alister Crowley is a case in point. There have also been any number of conspiracy theories circulating since the 1980s about how the world is secretly run by an elite group of Freemasons or Satanists. The paranoia on the American right about supposed pagan child sacrifice by the ultra-rich at Bohemian Grove in California is one part of this. But I haven’t heard anything about the various people abusing the girls at Epstein’s dressing up in weird robes to perform bizarre magical rituals. As for Bohemian Grove, the ritual at the centre of these suspicions is a playlet called ‘The Sacrifice of Dull Care’, in which an effigy representing Dull Care is burned at the conclusion of the gathering. While Alex Jones claimed it was a child when he filmed it with Jon Ronson when they infiltrated the ceremony when making Ronson’s documentary Secret Rulers of the World, it looked very much to me and to a number of viewers that the effigy was just a bundle of rags and nothing more sinister. If some of Epstein’s sordid clientele were dressing up in robes and going through occult rituals, it was probably to add an extra piece of dubious fun and theatre to the proceedings, rather than because they really believed in it.
Not that the absence of any occult shenanigans makes this at all better. Young girls were still being abused by the extremely wealthy and powerful for their own pleasure. That’s bad enough. But I still suspect there was an intelligence aspect there. And if it exists, it may well remain hidden. For security reasons, you know.
Rakib Ehsan, Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Ethnic Minorities (London: Forum 2023).
I first came across this in an interview Ehsan himself gave about it on YouTube. I can’t remember now what channel it was on, but I think it may have been the SDP’s as Ehsan’s politics seem similar to theirs – left-wing economically but conservative socially. He also says at the outset that he tries to bridge the gap between Blue Labour and Red Tories. I have very strong issues with both of those groups, as they cloak their Thatcherite economics that disenfranchise and exploit working people in the language of the left. See Philip Blonde’s Red Tory. The book is directed very firmly at the Labour party. Ehsan sees the party as having abandoned class based activism in the wake of the BLM movement for divisive identity politics imported from America. This is a country that has a very different history and political culture from the UK, and this is going to cost them the votes of the very ethnic minorities they seek to court.
Contrary to identitarian propaganda, Britain and its people aren’t racist, although racism still exists and needs tackling where it does. The supposed privilege Whites enjoy over people of colour disappear when examined in detail. Some ethnic minorities are surpassing Whites in school grades, pay and employment. There are also differences in achievement between White demographic groups. Working class White English males are nearly at the bottom, with only Irish Travellers below them. Chinese and Indians outperform Whites. Black Africans are also outperforming Whites academically. There is no overarching ‘BAME’ community, as these are very different peoples who have different levels of achievement. Black Africans, for example, are much more successful than Afro-Caribbean peoples. The success and growing achievements of people of colour is being obscured by the grievance narrative that they are all being held back by systemic racism. As a man of mixed Bangladeshi-Uttar Pradeshi heritage, he felt particularly insulted when Jeremy Corbyn declared that only Labour could unlock the potential of Britain’s Black and Asian communities. This attitude, he warns, is going to cost the Labour party the votes of Britain’s non-White communities. Rather than being obsessed with racial grievances, these communities value the two parent family, religious faith and are patriotically British. It is these values, that are despised by the woke left, that produces their increasing academic, economic and social successes. This success should be celebrated, and the White population, which is trailing behind in many instances, could, he dares to suggest, take a leaf out of their book. At the last election, one million people of colour abandoned Labour for the Tories.
Brexit Not Fascist Project of Nostalgic White Supremacists
He is also a Brexiteer and is at pains to argue that Brexit wasn’t the project of Fascist, backward-looking Whites. Many of the Whites who voted for it did so because they came from communities who believed the country had been harmed by the EU, not because of immigration. And a large proportion of the non-White population also voted Leave. One in three Asians did so. They feared the immigration to this country of large numbers of people from parts of Europe which were much less tolerant of non-Whites. They also wanted Britain to establish greater contact with the Commonwealth.
Ethnic Disparities Based on Other Factors Apart from Racism
As for the disparities between ethnic groups in sport, jobs and education, some of this is down to class, and differences in culture and job expectations. For example, Bangladeshis largely do better than Whites at school, but come from a very traditional culture that sees women’s place as being in the home. There is thus a relative lack of Bangladeshi women in the workplace. He also discusses the question of the absence of British Asians in cricket played at the county and national level. This comes from the allegations of racism at Yorkshire CC. He states that this was clearly a case of racism, and that the club was racist hellhole. But he quotes several British Asian cricketers that there are particular attitudes in British Asian culture against playing cricket professionally. Asian parents want good, secure jobs for their children – jobs like doctor or dentist. Professional cricket is very insecure, and so their parents will try and steer their kids away from it. As for the police, in many instances it’s a matter of family tradition, with children following parents and relatives in the force. Thus, White people tend to predominate simply because of family tradition. And on the subject of the cops, he cites evidence that shows that most people of colour are satisfied with their local police forces. Indeed, more non-Whites trust the cops more than White British. This does not include the Metropolitan Police, who are distrusted because of their proven racism, misogyny and other forms of bigotry. He believes that this could be tackled by breaking it up into smaller, local forces, and letting local forces also run the parts of the Met that extend into surrounding counties like Kent.
Regarding Islam, he cites the statistic that three-quarters of Muslims believe that Britain is a good place to be one. This is much more than the general British population. More Muslims are also concerned about the threat of Islamism than Whites. He also criticises the Labour MP Naz Shah for claiming that the Prevent programme was resented by Muslims for demonising them when the stats showed that 53 per cent of Muslims weren’t aware of it.
Black and Asians Patriotic Brits
The Black and Asian communities were also generally more patriotic and had a greater trust in British democracy, although this was much less so in the younger generation. 78 per cent of older Asians had faith in British democracy, but only 58 per cent of the younger generation, just a bit lower than Whites at 62 per cent. He put this down to the older generation coming from countries which were unstable with very repressive regimes, tracing the history in particular of the British South Asian community. This began after the War with Sikhs from the Punjab, who had been displaced from Pakistan and given poor quality land in India. They were then followed by Gujuratis seeking employment in the NHS. And then came the ethnic cleansing of the Ugandan Asian community by Idi Amin and his policy of Africanisation. The South Asians in Africa were employed as middle ranking officials and businessmen between the White colonial officials at the top and indigenous Africans at the bottom. There were already immigration restrictions in place, but they were admitted by Ted Heath. I’ve heard again and again, including from Asian speakers at our local church, that the Ugandan Asian community is still grateful to Britain because of this.
He also has immense respect for the Queen and King Charles. The Queen had a strong sense of duty to the Commonwealth, while our current liege lord is strongly multicultural. He said in his coronation speech that Britain is a ‘community of communities’ and that he wanted to be known as ‘Defender of Faith’, meaning all Britain’s religious communities, not just the Anglican church. On the subject of which, he notes the strong contribution made by Black Africans to keeping it alive in the face of the massive secularisation of the White population. He states that you are far more likely to get a sense of the deep antiquity of Christianity in Britain in an African cafe eating Jellof rice in London than in many White communities. It is ridiculous to blame the Queen for the evils committed under imperialism and colonialism, and Britain’s non-Christian religions are certainly not resentful of Christianity. He takes issue with the secularists in the Labour party, who feel that religion is outmoded and dangerous. They are actively putting non-Whites off, because these cultures have a very strong religious identity. More Muslims see their religion as important to their identity than Whites. The Labour party has a strong tradition of Christian Socialism, and these non-Christian religious communities would like to see it revived.
Importance of Education to Indians and Chinese
He also puts the growing success of the Indian and Chinese communities in education and professionally to strong families and religion. He cites statistics showing that children from stable, two parent homes are less likely to join criminal gangs, are more emotionally stable, and do better at school and in the world of work. Far fewer Asian children live in single parent families than Whites. They, and the Chinese, are also very aspirational. They want their children to do well, make sure they work hard at school and in the case of the Chinese make sure they keep away from bad influences. They also have the support of the wider community, with elders actively taking an interest in the welfare and progress of the young. He does not decry single mothers, recognising the immense hard work so many do to raise their children, and that the relaxation of the divorce laws were brought in for the very good reason of allowing women in particular to escape abusive marriages. But it has had a devastating effect on marriage and the family in Britain. 63 per cent of Afro-Caribbean children live in one parent families, and 43 per cent of Black African. 25 per cent of Whites also are being raised in families largely without a father. This is holding these groups back, and he dares to suggest that Whites could take a leaf out of the Asian communities in starting to value marriage and the family more. I am in complete agreement, and don’t think this is at all controversial.
On the subject of religion, he states that he has mixed views on the subject, wondering if it really is outmoded and dangerous, especially after the terrorist attacks of 7/7 and the massacre of schoolgirls by a suicide bomber at the Ariana Grande concert. But the stats also show that people, who have a strong religious faith are generally more mentally stable, more optimistic and with a higher degree of life satisfaction than atheists. He also believes that respect for the cultures of ethnic minorities should not be used as a pretext for avoiding tackling crime and extremist attitudes in those communities, which could be excused by their perpetrators as part of their culture.
Britain Not Racist Country
He also cites the statistics showing that Britain is not a racist country. A large majority of Whites -well above 70 per cent – believe that Englishness is a matter of values rather than colour. The number of people linking Englishness to White ethnicity is low, and fell markedly in the last decade. Britain has robust laws against racism and discrimination, and the level of real racism, including abuse and violence, is lower in Britain than in many continental countries like France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. This, he claims, shows the falsity of the Remain argument that views the continent as a paradigm of anti-racism in contrast with evil Britain. Anti-Black racism also isn’t confined to Whites. Eight per cent of Blacks in Britain have experienced discrimination at the hands of other Blacks. 84 per cent of Brits have no problem with a person of colour heading the government. Rishi Sunak, regardless of his wretched political policies, is an example of Asian success, who should be celebrated. His parents both worked in the medical sector – I think his father was a pharmacist. Sunak was privately educated, rising professionally and politically.
This is where the book is really controversial. He takes these stats showing that Britain isn’t a racist country from a variety of reports, including those of CRED and Sewell. The last was commissioned under the Tories, and came under widespread attack for supposedly erasing the reality of racism in Britain. This was despite it being written by mostly Black and Asian academics. Various Labour MPs accused it of being Fascist, with one even Tweeting an image of a Klan meeting underneath. The Black and Asian politicians, who do not accept that Britain is racist, like Kemi Badenoch, are subjected to horrendous racist abuse as Uncle Toms and worse language. He himself has been attacked in these terms. His favourite has been that he is a ‘Muslim Mosley’. Well, I’d say that the Muslim Mosleys were the Islamists convincing lost and alienated Muslims to join Daesh, or march around our cities demanding sharia law while waving the black flag of jihad. The British left, and primarily the Labour party, has taken over dangerous and divisive identity politics imported from America. What many of the people of colour demanding these policies want is not equality, but preferential treatment. He is also suspicious of many of those attacking Islamophobia, as he suspects that many of those are Islamists using it as a strategy to introduce aspects of sharia law. I think he’s right here, as the mass protests against the autistic schoolboy for Islamophobia when he scuffed a Qur’an, a horrendous blasphemy under Islam, certainly shows. He is against the European Court of Human Rights ruling that businesses are allowed to discriminate against women wearing the hijab if this threatens to be disruptive. He points out that the hijab simply covers the face. It is not like the niqub, which covers the whole body, including the face. The ruling threatens to prevent devout Muslim women from finding work outside the home and bring them into contact with mainstream society.
Attacks on Corbyn
Naturally for a man of the right he gives Jeremy Corbyn a good kicking. He claims that Labour lost the 2019 election due to his inability to tackle the anti-Semitism crisis and the promotion of identitarian politics. But this wasn’t the case. Corbyn had very wide support and paradoxically a greater share of the vote than Blair and New Labour, regardless of the fact that it was the poorest electoral performance for the party since the 1930s. What brought him down was a very manufactured campaign by the British right and the official Jews of the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and various pro-Israel groups. They were alarmed by his championing of the Palestinians against the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Israeli state, and so did everything they could to smear him as an anti-Semite. Corbyn has a long career of standing up for Jewish Brits, but this counted for nothing to people who regard any opposition or criticism of Israel as an anti-Semitic. As for the real anti-Semites in the Labour party, the true nature of the crisis was kept hidden from him by right-wing intriguers and traitors within the party. People like Margaret Hodge, who admitted she did everything she could to stop Labour being elected.
Rejection of Labour’s Proposed New Equality Act
He respects the Labour party for the anti-racist legislation it passed in the 70s as well as the Equality Act passed by Blair, but is firmly against Labour’s promised new Equality Act demanding affirmative action. The majority of Black and Asian people do not want or need it. Indeed, he claims that there is a suspicion that Labour will hold people of colour back in order to stop their success invalidating the claim that their lagging behind Whites is all due to racism. He is also critical of organisations like the Runnymede Commission pushing this narrative. Twenty years ago the Commission praised Britain for its multicultural tolerance. Now it claims that Britain is marred by deep structural racism. But British society isn’t racist and hasn’t become worse. It is just that the Runnymede Commission, in order to keep itself relevant, has joined BLM and the other grievance mongers. Labour’s embrace of these groups and individuals, such Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, is putting voters, including those of colour, off. And they may well abandon the party because of it.
The Trans Issue
He also has controversial views on the trans issue. He states that trans people should enjoy the same protection from abuse, discrimination and violence as other protected groups. However, transwomen should not be allowed to enter women’s private spaces such as prisons, toilets and changing rooms. In many ways, this is common sense as trans identified biological male rapists have been put in women’s prisons in California and Scotland, and there has been an outcry against it. The SNP lost much of their support when they also placed these dangerous men in women’s prisons. It does conflict, however, with the view that ‘trans women are women’, even if they are not biologically, and so trans activists and supporters will naturally find it very offensive. And he is also not afraid to call divorce parties degenerate as part of the collapse of marriage and the nuclear family in the west.
Radical Attacks on Marriage and the Family
This is a controversial but necessary book. Controversial because it overturns the received wisdom about British ethnic minorities as the victims of systemic racism needing aid and allyship from mainstream White British society. The statistics about the beneficial effects of growing up in two-parent family are almost certainly correct. They’ve been reproduced several times before. This will jar with some on the radical left. There has been an attack on traditional European marriage since the time of the 18th century French philosophes. Free love instead of marriage was embraced by 19th century Romantics like Shelley and Byron. It has also been part of the Anarchist critique of capitalism as well as Marxism. Marx states in The Communist Manifesto that it degrades women and believed it was dying out among the working class in his own time. This was further expanded by Engels in his The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, which also drew on the Das Mutterrecht of the German antiquarian, Backhausen. Backhausen had believed that society had passed through several phases of development – a communal society without institutional marriage, followed by matriarchy and then finally patriarchy. Archaeologists and historians have since rejected this. Historical research has also shown that marriage very definitely wasn’t dying out among the 19th century working class. Nevertheless, marriage has been attacked by radical activists. I can remember the controversy about Pebble Mill, a BBC lunchtime magazine programme in the 70s, when they invited on a couple who very definitely believed that marriage was dying out, and that this was a very good thing indeed. Over the other side of the Channel, the Postmodernist Marxist Althusser attacked marriage and the family as part of the sociological infrastructure of capitalism and feudalism.
Benefits of Religious Faith
Similarly there is abundant evidence supporting the view that religion is beneficial to one’s wellbeing. A few years ago medical researchers claimed that having a faith in general added six months to one’s life. And back when the New Atheists were beginning their assault on religion neurologists found that people who had mystical experiences were generally in no worse mental health than the rest of the population. This obviously isn’t something secular and atheist activists want to hear. Nor do I think they really want to hear that in general, non-Christian minorities don’t have an issue with institutional, public Christianity. The claim that they do tends to come from secularist and atheist organisations like the Humanist Society as part of their project of removing Christianity and other forms of religion from the public sphere. The philosopher Bruce Trigger tackled this subject in his Religion in Public over decade. He claimed that many Jews did not want the bishops removed from the House of Lords because, so long as they were, it created a public space for religion in politics.
Ethnic Success Also Due to Differences in Culture and History
I also think that the stats showing that Britain is not an intrinsically racist country is likely to be true, even if the report that argued this was commissioned by the Tories. If it is untrue, then it has to be shown to be untrue through further sociological research and polling. The argument that it must be the case from ethnic disparities is false, because as Thomas Sowell has shown, different ethnic groups have different attitudes and economic and professional specialities due to their history and quite often geographical location. The Chinese and Gujuratis are, like the Jews, ‘middleman cultures’ strongly based on trade. They therefore tend to surpass other groups in business, as do the Lebanese in South America. Ehsan himself argues that the success of various ethnic groups depends on the cultural resources and the attitudes and material advantages they may have enjoyed when they left their country of origin. Ugandan Asians have prospered, despite having been robbed of nearly everything they owned by Amin and his thugs, because they were business and professional people. Afro-Caribbeans, however, generally speaking lack this entrepreneurial and professional background and so lag behind. And the idea that all White people are privileged is going to ring particularly hollow for White working class boys and the hollowed out coastal towns and post-industrial communities. The instant dismissal of the claim that Britain isn’t racist is based on prejudice rather than genuine scepticism.
Changes in Patterns of Racism Since the Experience of the First Afro-Caribbean Migrants
The attitude of the identitarian left that Britain must be intrinsically racist seems to come mostly from the experience of Afro-Caribbeans, who are generally more distrustful of the police and democracy than other groups. They have indeed, along with the first generation Asian immigrants, suffered real racism in the form of institutional discrimination – no dog, no blacks, no Irish – racist bullying and violence, particularly from real Fascists in the shape of the BNP, National Front and other lowlifes. It is Afro-Caribbeans in particular who lag behind Whites. This history has bred an attitude among many that Britain is racist and hostile, backed up with convoluted and contrived arguments from the Postcolonial set. This has become part of the general culture of the left, because of the long tradition of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. It looks plausible, because for over four decades now the received view has been that Britain is racist to a greater or lesser extent, even though the situation has changed and is now becoming much more complex. Diane Abbott didn’t want to discuss inter-ethnic minority conflict and racism, but this attitude is contradicted by rioting last year between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester. Ehsan points out that this shows that ethnic conflict isn’t just something confined to Whites. And there is now and industry of grievance mongers in academia and woke capitalism, whose careers are centred around portraying White Britain as innately oppressive, that Blacks and other people of colour are always victims and that Whites should feel guilty as racial oppressors tainted with the blood of the indigenous peoples they exterminated and enslaved.
Multiculturalism Pulling Ethnic Groups Apart, Not Together
Ehsan notes that while Britain may be more tolerant than other countries, there is still a problem in pulling the different ethnic groups together. He cites further statistics shown that a majority of Brits feels more needs to be done on this count, and argues that was is needed is a common set of shared values. But this is one of the problems of multiculturalism. Blair recruited as his community representatives people who very definitely not representative of their communities and determined to push their own sectarian or ethnic politics. And the attack on the welfare state has meant that different communities are competing against each other for government funding and aid. For all his faults, Corbyn did represent a return to class politics, which is another reason why there was such a concerted attempt to remove him. If the working class in general receives proper welfare support, there is less jealousy and resentment between ethnic groups, and so Whites in particular are less inclined to heed racists like the BNP.
Blue Labour and Attacks on the Welfare State
As for the position that government action is needed to strengthen the family, I agree. But this goes further than simply making it a matter of tax. And I am very suspicious of the right when they claim to strengthen the family. All too often it is based around the view that it’s declined due to the welfare state, and so the first thing they do is cut welfare support even further while loudly crying, like Thatcher, that it’s more self-help and will make people more self-reliant.
He is critical of the Tories as a corrupt group wrecking the economy for their own benefit and hope that Labour will put forward pro-working class policies. But this won’t come from Blue Labour any more than it will supposedly come from Red Tories. What comes from the Blairites and the other Thatcherite infiltrators is more privatisation, including that of the NHS, more cuts to the welfare state and more attempts to strangle the unions, all of which you can see in Stalin’s leadership of the Labour party.
This book is necessary as it argues against the current racial narrative from a man of colour, who clearly believes that such narratives are damaging the Labour party. Certainly racial attitudes have changed radically in my lifetime and it is time that the debate recognised this. But at the same time, as Ehsan is careful to state, racism still exists and needs tackling where it does.
This might interest some of the peeps here who are into ufology and the question of whether aliens really are visiting the Earth. I’m a member of ASSAP, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomenon. It’s an amateur psychical research group, which was set up in the 1980s to investigate spontaneous cases of ghosts poltergeists, UFOs and so on in the field, as opposed to the laboratory work of the Society for Psychical Research. It differs from other psychical research and ghost hunting groups by using scientific protocols in its investigations as well as mediums. It’s membership comprises wide variety of people, from those with backgrounds in science and medicine, professional investigators like the police, and ordinary people fascinated with and keen to explore these bizarre phenomena for themselves. It has two magazines, Seriously Strange, which is the more popular of the two and similar in tone to the Fortean Times, and Anomaly: the Journal of Research into the Paranormal, which is rather more academic with articles properly referenced. The most recent edition of Anomaly, for May this year, carries an article by Dr John Tate, ‘George Adamski: The Luxury of Disbelief’ (pp. 172-181). And it’s truly perplexing as it questions whether Adamski was the fraud everyone, or nearly everyone, thinks he was.
Adamski was a Polish-America restauranteur, owning a hot-dog establishment on Mount Palomar. He was the first of the UFO contactees, men and women who believed they’d met aliens, who had given them special knowledge and messages for humanity. They emerged in the 1950s, and many of these messages were naturally warnings from the ufonauts about the threat of nuclear weapons. Adamski was deeply interested in eastern mysticism, and claimed to have met a Venusian out in the Californian desert and observed and photographed his spacecraft. The alien, Orthon, also left a footprint from his boots in the sand, of which Adamski and his fellows took a plaster cast. He seems to have been a dubious figure, at least. There’s a suggestion that he made have been bootlegging and smuggling hooch during Prohibition. He’s supposed to have told his cronies one evening that the end of Prohibition had been bad for him, as he had made money selling wine and telling the authorities it was for religious purposes. Presumably this was as part of the sacrament in Christian holy communion. His photographs have been analysed professionally. One of the alien ships was really his chicken hutch, while there have been claims since that the photograph of the classic UFO he made, which appears on the poster in Mulder’s wall in the X-Files with the slogan ‘I want to believe’, was really the top part of a kerosene or similar lantern. It’s so much taken for granted that Adamski hoaxed his encounter that the late British UFO Magazine, which wasn’t particularly sceptical, titled an article about him ‘The Great Pretender’. There was a little spat a few years ago between the Fortean Times and Colin Bennet, who at that time was the webmaster of a site claiming to be the ‘real Fortean Times‘. Bennet was an enthusiast of Postmodernism and had just then published a book about Adamski, Looking for Orthon. Bennet frequently denounced on his website what he called ‘the cult of the real’ and seems to taken the view of the extreme Greek sceptics and contemporary Postmodern philosophers that there was no objective reality. He had appeared on a panel at the Fortean Times Unconvention that year, where he got annoyed with the Fortean Times crew who tried to get him to say if he really thought Adamski was genuine. Hence there was a lot of ranting and personal attacks on his blog against Lance Sieveking and the rest of the Gang of Fort.
I’d always assumed that Adamski was making it all up, though one of the great commenters on this blog has strongly argued that he was instead the victim of a hoax by the US military or intelligence services. I don’t know about that, but Adamski certainly was suspected by them of being a Communist. In the above article, Dr Tate suggests that there are good reasons for thinking Adamski may have been genuine. Firstly, unlike the popular myth, he didn’t own a hamburger stall on Palomar. It was actually quite large, and more like a restaurant. His account of his journey into space aboard the Venusian craft contains details that were only confirmed later during the manned spaceflight missions of later decades. He mentioned ‘fairylights’ surrounding the Venusian UFO, which was unknown at the time but later observed by astronauts. He also said that in space he saw no stars, which again is what the astronauts observed, contrary to expectations. Other experts have analysed his UFO photograph, to reveal details showing it definitely wasn’t part of a lantern and appears to have been a real object.
Furthermore, Adamski wasn’t alone when he met Orthon. He was accompanied by six other people, who also observed the Venusian and his craft. One of these other witnesses was George Hunt Williamson, a professional anthropologist, who carried out pioneering work excavating the remains of the pre-Columbian Amerindian civilisations in South America. Williamson was also into spiritualism and became an advocate of the ancient astronaut theory that claims humanity was visited in the past by aliens. These were responsible for the creation of the world’s ancient monuments like Stonehenge, the pyramids, Easter Island and so on. Later on Williamson changed his name to d’Obrenovic. I think he may also have become involved in far right politics. But at the time of the Adamski sighting he was a respected academic.
Tate says he has no idea what was going on, which I think is a fair description of ufology full stop. Some UFO sightings are hoaxes, misidentifications of ordinary objects seen under extraordinary conditions, hallucinations or confabulations produced by unusual psychological states, sightings of top secret military aircraft. Others, to me, seem genuinely paranormal in the sense they are more like a ghost sighting or similar supernatural event than nuts and bolts alien spacecraft. But who knows? Maybe a few UFOs have been of visiting spacecraft, or beings from the future or parallel worlds. And may be there isn’t a single explanation at all for the UFO phenomenon.
Tate’s article raises some interesting questions about Adamski, and certainly made me wonder if there was a kernel of truth in what he said. If anyone’s interested, I’ll post a longer piece about the article and some of the points it makes.
This story broke yesterday, just as I’d receive a message from Dawn Butler asking me if I’d join the Bernie Grant programme for developing future Black leaders and politicians in the Labour party. Obviously, they’re not aware that I’m white, and so wouldn’t be eligible even if I wanted to. There have been people, who’d declared themselves to be ‘trans-racial’, similar to the peeps who’ve sexually transitioned, but unlike transgender peeps, no-one’s taken them seriously. When they’ve managed to get into posts and positions reserved for genuine Blacks and people of colour, they’ve caused outrage and been ejected. On the other hand, Bill Clinton was hailed as America’s first Black president before Barack Obama, and I think David Beckham was hailed as an important Black role model. Which just shows you how fluid symbolic racial identification can be.
Three of the right-wing YouTube channels, including that of the internet non-historian, posted videos discussing the decision by Haringey local council to begin Black-only lessons on Saturdays at Coldwell School in Muswell Hill. These would be in partnership with the Nia academy and were intended to help Black pupils with their literacy. The children would be introduced to Black fiction and literature, and the teaching would be by race-appropriate people. In other words, by Blacks. These staff would receive £50 per hour.
The internet non-historian considered that this was an attempt to close the academic gap between Blacks and Whites, in which Black pupils significantly underachieve compared to their White and Asian counterparts. The gap has narrowed and widened over the years, but has always remained despite multiple attempts to close it, beginning with the desegregation of American schools. Zena Brabazon, below, Haringey’s head of schools and education, issued a statement which seemed to say that this was the intention, and that the council was committed to giving everyone a first-rate education. Except they clearly aren’t, when Blacks are given extra lessons, but no similar extra teaching is given to children of other ethnicities.
Zena Brabazon
The New Culture Forum posted a video about it, calling it ‘Apartheid in Schools’, which is a fair description of what is a discriminatory policy. They also point out that the section of the population that actually does worse academically are White working class boys, of whom fewer go on to university than Blacks. The policy seems to be copied from America, where there have been reports that schools in California have refused to teach pre-calculus to Whites and Asians and only teach it to Blacks and Hispanics as a way of closing the achievement gap between these ethnicities in Maths. Mahyar Tousi, another right-winger who openly supports Reform, noted on his video about it that someone on GB News had said that Whites were free to set up their own such groups. Tousi was firmly against that, as this would just mean more apartheid. He just wanted everyone to be given the same teaching by the state. He had no objection to voluntary Black organisations giving extra lessons to Black students outside school, in the way that Asians and Poles had done for their communities. My own view here is that if a White group did set up such a school purely to aid underprivileged Whites, it would be viciously attacked by the Guardian and the rest of the self-appointed anti-racist left as horribly racist and supporting White supremacy.
I sympathise with the rationale behind these extra lessons, but this is nevertheless a disgusting, racist policy. It shows that whatever Zena Brabazon and the rest say, they don’t believe in giving Whites and Asians the same academic opportunities as Blacks. It wouldn’t surprise me if those White families that are able to do so, at the very least choose a different school for their children or try to get out of the borough completely. This policy could contribute to White flight and the further segregation of ethnic communities. Though if Whites start moving, the Groan and the rest will accuse them of racism rather than examine the conditions or policies that make them leave.
‘The prestigious science journal, Nature, reported on 31st May 2023, that the Indian education authority is dropping several key scientific and political subjects from the education curriculum for pupils under 16. the magazine reported:
In India, children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements or sources of energy.
The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15–16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability. Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students.
Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11–18-year-olds in India’s schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year that started in May.
Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked. “Anybody who’s trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it,” says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California. “It’s that fundamental to biology.” The periodic table explains how life’s building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and “is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists”.
Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, says that “everything related to water, air pollution, resource management has been removed. “I don’t see how conservation of water, and air [pollution], is not relevant for us. It’s all the more so currently,” she adds. A chapter on different sources of energy — from fossil fuels to renewables — has also been removed. “That’s a bit strange, quite honestly, given the relevance in today’s world,” says Osborne.’
Some material was cut from the curriculum last year in order to lighten it during the Covid pandemic. It was expected that it would be reinstated once the pandemic and the lockdown was over, but this hasn’t happened. Academics and educationalists appear perplexed by the decision, but it looks like it comes from the RSSS, the militant Hindu nationalist organisation linked to Modi’s BJP.
[Amitabh] Joshi says that the curriculum revision process has lacked transparency. But in the case of evolution, “more religious groups in India are beginning to take anti-evolution stances”, he says. Some members of the public also think that evolution lacks relevance outside academic institutions.
Aditya Mukherjee, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli, says that changes to the curriculum are being driven by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a mass-membership volunteer organization that has close ties to India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. The RSS feels that Hinduism is under threat from India’s other religions and cultures.
“There is a movement away from rational thinking, against the enlightenment and Western ideas” in India, adds Sucheta Mahajan, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University who collaborates with Mukherjee on studies of RSS influence on school texts. Evolution conflicts with creation stories, adds Mukherjee. History is the main target, but “science is one of the victims”, she adds.’
One of the other subjects cut from science teaching is a section ‘Why We Fall Ill’, which seems to me to be particularly wicked and dangerous. Everyone really needs to know about the causes of disease, regardless of their level of education or the country in which they live. This removal threatens to increase the incidence of disease in a country where many people lack access to medicine.
In an article from the previous day, 30 May, Nature reported the Indian education authority’s, NCERT’s, reasons for the changes
‘NCERT says that ‘rationalization’ is needed when content overlaps with material covered elsewhere in the curriculum, or when it considers content to be irrelevant. Moreover, India’s 2020 National Education Policy says that students need to become problem-solvers and critical thinkers, and it therefore advocates less memorization of content and more active learning.
NCERT also wants “a rootedness and pride in India, and its rich, diverse, ancient and modern culture and knowledge systems and traditions”. Some people interpret this as a motivation to remove the likes of Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday, and instead use the time to learn more about India’s precolonial history of science.’
But it comments
‘India is not the only postcolonial country grappling with the question of how to honour and recognize older or Indigenous forms of knowledge in its school curricula. New Zealand is trialling the teaching of Māori ‘ways of knowing’ — mātauranga Māori — in a selection of schools across the country. But it is not removing important scientific content to accommodate the new material, and for good reason.’
It all reminds me of the furore back in the 1990s when Christian Creationists in Kansas banned evolution from being taught in their schools. The great comedian, the late Bill Hicks joked about it, saying ‘In many parts of our troubled world, people are crying ‘Revolution! Revolution’. In Kansas they’re shouting ‘Evolution! Evolution! We want our opposable thumbs’. There have been periodic concerns ever since about the teaching of evolution and Creationism in schools. Western scientists have been particularly worried about Creationism, or Creation Science, being taught as scientific fact. There was particularly controversy nearly two decades ago with the emergence of Intelligent Design, and the Discovery Institute. Intelligent Design accepts evolution, but considers that it has carried out by a God or other intelligent force that has actively intervened at specific points. One form of Intelligent Design, proposed by the cosmologist Fred Hoyle in his 1980s book, Evolution from Space, is that the creator may have been an extradimensional computer civilisation. For years discussions of Creationism and its supposed threat to science was chiefly confined to Christianity. There was some discussion of the rise of Islamic Creationism in Turkey, but from what I recall this was mostly confined to the internet. India at that time seemed not to be experiencing any similar concerns about evolution or other doctrines which may have challenged traditional religious teaching.
This looks very much like it’s going to damage India as an emerging global economic and technological force. Yes, the country has a millennia-old tradition of scientific and medical innovation, but the country has become a scientific powerhouse as well through embracing modern, western science, just as its neighbour China has done. I’ve been particularly struck by the country’s ambitious space programme, which has made some remarkable advances and has made India a space power. If these changes to its schools curriculum continue, I can see the tradition of scientific excellence that the country has done so much to build being severely handicapped.
I also note the similarity of its stance on the environment to various right-wing political lobby groups and think tanks to ban the teaching of environmentalism and climate change, and to make us all believe that the massive pollution of the environment by business isn’t happening and won’t cause permanent damage. Trump when he was in the White House passed legislation preventing the American environmental watchdog from publishing anything about climate change of the environment. This partly came from oil industry, whose own, astroturf climate organisations has a policy of buying up independent climate analysis laboratories and using them to turn out its own, anti-climate change propaganda.
Regarding the excision of material on politics, I’ve got the impression that India is trying to establish itself as the true home of democracy, looking back to its traditional village councils or panchayats. But there seems to be a more sinister purpose to the removal of chapters on democracy and diversity; political parties; and challenges to democracy, as well as a chapter on the industrial revolution for older students. It looks here like the BJP and its storm troopers are trying to stop India’s young people from acquiring the historical and political knowledge to understand how their country could be – or actually is – being taken towards authoritarianism and Fascism.
Vicious totalitarian governments of both left and right, from Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia, have all attacked and refashioned science, history and education as part of their programmes. Now it seems India, under the BJP, is also going down this path.
Okay, I’ve got to confess to making another mistake. Earlier today I put up a piece reporting that Starmer had told the leaders of the Labour party that people weren’t interested in woke, and condemned the Tories for being ‘out of touch’. This had been covered in a video put out by That Preston Journalist. I watched it and got the wrong end of the stick. He seemed to me to be saying that Starmer had decided that woke policies weren’t appealing to the public and was ready to ditch them. At the same time I thought that Starmer was also attacking that part of the Conservative party that is woke.
How wrong I was! It seems Starmer isn’t prepared to ditch ‘woke’ at all. He just doesn’t think that voters care enough about it to vote against Labour because of it. Instead they’re more interested and concerned about the NHS and the cost of living. When he said that Sunak and the Tories were out of touch, he meant that they failed to appreciate that these issues took precedence over the woke policies Starmer is promoting and defending and that the British public generally didn’t share their concerns about woke policies. This is how it’s been interpreted by GB News and their presenters.
Before I go further, let’s try and unpack what is meant by the term ‘woke’. Gillyflower, one of the great commenters here, remarked that I should refresh my memory over what it means. As I understand it, it’s Black slang meaning being awake to injustice. Looking at how it’s now being used, it seems to have replaced the old term ‘political correctness’ for extreme and intolerant anti-racist, feminist, anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic views. More narrowly, it’s being used to describe the various Critical Social Justice ideologies derived from the Postmodernist, Critical Theory revision of Marxism which narrowly sees societal issues through the lens of privilege and oppression. These differ from previous forms of anti-racism, feminism and so on in rejecting individualism. In Critical Race Theory, all Whites are privileged because of their skin colour and the fact that some Whites are less privileged than some Blacks is ignored. It isn’t enough to be non-racist, and judge people on their merits and character regardless of race. You must be positively anti-racist and fight against White privilege and for Black uplift through social programmes that demand the granting of opportunities to Blacks and other underprivileged minorities simply because of their colour. For example, in America Black and Mexican students generally do less well at Maths at school than Whites and Asians. So some schools in California are trying to even these results out by giving pre-calculus lessons only to Black and Hispanic students to the exclusion of Whites and Asians.
In the eyes of GB News’ Mike Graham, however, woke means just about every anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and radical gender view or ideology. Yes, he conceded, people did care about the NHS and the cost of living, but people also cared about: woke teacher telling kids there were 73 genders, environmental protesters gluing themselves to the road, petrol and diesel cars being phased out in favour of electric vehicles, and the cost of power rising due to green energy policies. And so on.
Piers Morgan also did a piece about whether people cared about ‘woke’. This included Reform’s Richard Tice and a woman from the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, Morgan and Tice believed that people did care about ‘woke’. The lady from Labour didn’t. She didn’t like biological men being allowed into women’s private spaces and sports, nor rapists in female prisons, when asked by the former editor of the Mirror. He replied with, ‘Ah, but they’ve prevented you from talking about this’. She replied that they hadn’t, and she’d been talking about it for a year or so. This contrasts with the case of Rosie Duffield, who has been isolated and shunned by Starmer and other senior Labour members for her views. I can’t remember whether the lady believed that people didn’t care about woke policies, or did, but that they were far more concerned about the cost of living and the NHS. I think Morgan had claimed that it was because Labour was pushing these woke policies that it looked like they would not have an absolute majority at the election next year.
My guess is that the Labour lady is probably right. People are directly affected by the cost of living, and wondering how they will afford food, heating and their rent or mortgages. The latter was one of the major issues on the local news tonight in Bristol, which has been revealed as the most expensive city outside London. One woman spoke of how she had been forced to move back in with her parents after the landlord raised the rent by 66 per cent. And they are very much concerned about getting hold of a doctor, thanks to all the wonderful privatisation that Rishi’s so proud of. These are issues that immediately affect everyone. I’m not sure how many people are aware of the debate over transgenderism, let alone so concerned that it affects the way they vote. Some are, and it may become a more important issue in the public consciousness by the time the next election comes round.
But Starmer’s less than exciting performance can also be blamed on other problems apart from the ‘woke’. Like he broke every promise and pledge he made, and has done his level best to purge the left. Corbyn’s policies were genuinely popular, and he enthused and inspired the public in a way Starmer can’t. The turnout at the local elections was low, and my guess is that many of the people Corbyn had appealed to didn’t vote. They had been alienated by a party leadership that was actively hostile to them and which to many people just offers the usual Tory policies, or something not too different from them. Tice, I think, said that Labour’s woke policies wouldn’t appeal to the socially conservative voters of the red wall. He might be right, though if they do become disenchanted with Labour, it’ll be far more to do with the lack of proper, old-style, socialist Labour policies.
Thanks to Gillyflower for pointing me towards this excellent article in Yorkshirebylines on Andrew Tate, the British/American far right activist Andrew Tate. Tate has just been arrested by the Romanian plod on charges of enslavement and human trafficking. His extreme right-wing supporters have been crying that somehow he’s been framed because it came after a Twitter spat with Greta Thunberg. Why the Romanian police would be so worried about that is, of course, never explained. It’s just left to the imaginations of their supporters, who assume that because Thunberg is a global Green activist and celebrity, the Romanian government is somehow desperately keen to defend her by imprisoning her critics and opponents. In fact, it appears that Tate was arrested on charges of imprisoning women and forcing them to perform pornographic acts. If this is correct, then Tate deserves to do a lot of time.
Tate’s father was Black Californian chess champion, who was honoured by the state for his achievements in the game at his death. After his father died, Tate and his brother’s mother moved to Luton, where they lived in poverty. He took up kickboxing, got on Big Brother and then was thrown off it after a video was found of him whipping a woman. He then set himself up as a self-help guru and anti-feminist, men’s right’s activist. He’s been thrown off a number of internet platforms for promoting conspiracy theories, violence towards women and rants about the World Economic Forum. This bunch, led by Klaus Schwab, seem to have replaced the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission as the objects of right-wing paranoia. Tate’s mates have included Alex Jones of Infowars, now facing a $1bn bill for damages for libelling the bereaved parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims as ‘crisis actors’, as well as Paul Joseph Watson, Donald Trump jnr and Nigel Farage.
Eventual things got a bit too hot for him in Blighty, so he fled to Romania. According to the article, 40 per cent of his reason for doing so was to escape rape allegations. He’s also very aware of the promotional benefits of being a controversialist, telling his viewers that if they want their blogs and vlogs to get anywhere, they should aim for a 60/40 mix of friends and haters. After the other platforms got rid of him, he was taken up and promoted by Peter Thiel, an American magnate connected to the Alt-Right. Thiel wrote the foreword for William Rees-Mogg’s Libertarian manifesto, The Sovereign Individual, and, as the head of a private healthcare company, wants a slice of the NHS’ business. He was given a £190 million contract by the Tories before this was challenged over breaches of the commissioning process.
To some it all up, he sounds a very nasty piece of work. The article is well worth reading for exposing the connections Tate has to the extreme right, including the people who want to privatise the NHS. And far from appearing like an innocent self-help guru advising men and boys how to reclaim their masculinity constructively, he instead seems to be a violent misogynist.
Last week Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, proposed that the state should pay reparations for slavery. This would consist in a payment of $220,000 to Black Californians descended from slaves. Newsom had previous passed or proposed legislation for the payment of a monthly amount to homeless trans people for a fixed term of one year. This was because there was a disproportionate number of trans people living on the streets, and the payment was to allow them to begin to purchase or rent a home. Newsom’s proposal to pay reparations for slavery was discussed by the Lotus Eaters over here and there’s a video by Black Conservative Perspective in America criticising it. The Black Conservative was not impressed, calling it divisive and playing a clip of Black speakers before the California state legislature or whatever demanding more. One man wanted the payment to be in a fixed amount of gold for each enslaved ancestor. An angry man wearing the red fez and tie of the Nation of Islam ranted about how God had a particular hatred of America and if the money wasn’t paid, He’d destroy the country with an asteroid or something. The Black Conservative considered that these payments would be inflationary, that the money would go on cars and cocaine, and that it would never be enough. People would always come back asking for more.
These are legitimate criticisms. Simon Webb, of History Debunked, made a video attacking the reparations for slavery campaign a few months or so ago. He also thought that it would cause racial divisions rather than solve them, and illustrated it with this example. Say there were two people living next to each other, in identical houses and with the same amount of wealth, but one was Black and the other White. If the Black man received £40,000 simply as compensation for his ancestors being enslaved but not for anything he personally had done, it would cause the White man to become resentful. It might not be true everywhere and of every White person – some may well share the opinion that it’s right Blacks descended from slaves should receive reparations for the suffering of their ancestors. But many others may well become extremely resentful. It could easily result in insults, abuse and worse. When Bristol city council passed a motion a year ago calling for the payment of reparations, Deputy Mayor and head of Equalities Asher Craig received an enormous amount of abusive messages.
I’m also sure that the Black Conservative also has a point about some of the prospective recipients squandering the money. I don’t doubt that some Blacks would use the money wisely to improve conditions for themselves and their children. But I can also see others wasting the money on expensive luxuries, like top of the range cars. There have been a number of stories in the past about people who’ve won millions on the National Lottery and who’ve then spent it all with nothing to show for it so that they’re back as poor as before. This has been done by people regardless of race, White and Black alike. I am also afraid that if these sums were paid, the gangster element in the Black community would use it to expand their violence and drug dealing, as criminals of any colour would if suddenly given a massive cash boost. Perhaps some would use it to leave the gangs and crime behind and try and establish themselves as respectable, law-abiding citizens. You’d hope so. But I think rather more criminals would simply use it to finance more of their destructive lifestyle, which would cause further damage to the Black community. And I am also afraid that whatever was paid would never be enough, and that they would always come back for more.
Thomas Sowell in one of his books argued against slavery reparations. He felt that the people, who were victimised and responsible for it are now dead, and so beyond our ability to help or punish. He also argued that whatever profits America had made from slavery had vanished in the bloodbath of the American Civil War. Furthermore, the guilt for something as terrible as slavery could not be absolved simply by paying money. He also made the point that no society could survive a moral viewpoint in which it had to be constantly criticising itself and paying compensation for the acts of the past. I think these are excellent points.
When Bristol passed its motion calling for reparations, the practical measures made it seem more like a call for further affirmative action for the Black British community as a whole justified through the connection to slavery. The motion ruled out payments to individuals. Instead they should be paid to Black-led organisations which would work to improve conditions and create sustainable, prosperous Black communities. All Blacks were to benefit from this, not just those of Afro-Caribbean or slave origin. While it’s better than Newsom’s proposal in providing for their real, collective benefit of the Black community rather than just the compensation of individuals, there are real moral problems with this as well. By including all Black, it also makes the British state morally responsible for people we did not enslave and who may themselves be descendants of the very slavers who sold their human cargo to us. It also ignores the fact that other nations, like the Arabs and Indians, were also involved in the African slave trade and the fact that White Europeans, including Brits, were also the victims of enslavement in the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and the Barbary pirates. I sent email messages to Craig and Cleo Lake, the Green councillor who proposed the motion, but got no reply. This, in my opinion, shows their absolute contempt for those challenging the notion.
In the British context, it could be argued that any profits Britain acquired from the slave trade were spent on our efforts to stamp it out through the activities of the British West African squadron and its patrols as well as a wider campaign against slaving and slavery during the Empire. There is also the problem that some of the countries responsible for kidnapping slaves also want reparations paid to them, even though some of their chiefs became extremely rich from the trade’s profits. The Caribbean nations, or some of them, have also demanded reparations. Some of this has been to deflect attention from the failings of their own rulers, while I don’t doubt that the venal kleptocrats are looking at a source of further money they can steal and loot. There’s also a question of the amount paid. Britain paid £20 million in compensation to the slaveowners at abolition, something that has been bitterly resented by some Black activists, just as it was by some abolitionists at the time. This translates into billions in today’s money and we only stopped paying it off a few years ago. If we were to pay a commensurate amount today, I think it would bankrupt us. And I can’t see that being to anyone’s benefit in Britain.
So far I think Newsom is on his own on this issue, and it remains to be seen whether he goes ahead with it. But this could be one issue to watch, as it’s possible other states will take it up, as well as activists over here.
Drag Queen Story Hour, in which drag performers tell stories to children in school and public libraries, is the subject of growing intense controversy. It was started in Los Angeles or one of the other Californian cities with a strong gay community a few years ago. Since then it’s spread across America and into Britain. It’s supporters believe that it promotes tolerance, while their opponents are worried that it’s a forming of paedophile grooming. The accusation has a degree of verisimilitude, as there have been papers written by from the perspective of Queer Theory, a form of postmodern Marxism, promoting Drag Queen Story Hour as a form of ‘queer pedagogy’ intended not to create tolerance and acceptance for gays, or to lead young gay people to become comfortable in their sexuality and become otherwise normal, well-adjusted, happy members of society. Or as happy as anyone can be as capitalism crumbles all around us and the elite get richer while making the rest of us plebs and peasants poorer. No, it has been promoted as a way of getting them to ‘live queerly’ and to make their psychological problems worse in order to generate the militant revolutionary consciousness needed for the violent overthrow of capitalism. One such essay, published in an academic educational periodical is the subject of a series of videos by one of the anti-postmodernist activists and critics. How many people involved in Drag Queen Story Hour are aware of this activist fringe, let alone support it, is a good question.
There have been protests against it in America. An angry group of fathers turned up at a Story Hour event in Texas, where they harangued the drag artiste as a paedophile and groomer. A day or so ago a similar event in Reading here in Britain was stopped after a similar protest was staged. Now there’s this article from Bristol Live, reporting that a Story Hour at a library in the suburb of Henleaze was also cancelled today following protests. The article by Ellie Kendal, ‘Drag Queen Story Hour UK protests: Bristol City Council says discrimination and abuse will not be tolerated‘ begins
‘Bristol City Council has today issued a statement to say it will not tolerate any discrimination or abuse aimed at any community, following protests at a library event for young children in the city. Drag Queen Story Hour was scheduled to begin a series of library appearances in Bristol today, starting at Henleaze Library, however the event was later cancelled as protesters against the event gathered outside.
Drag Queen Story Hour began its national summer tour on Monday, July 25, in Reading where its founder and performer Aida H Dee, who grew up in Bristol, had her reading interrupted by protesters, two of which organisers said had “gained access to the story hour by using their own disabled autistic child as a ‘human trojan horse’.
The police had to get involved and Aida herself had to be escorted out of the event, with officers having to form a ‘human wall’ to protect her from an assault, or a ‘citizen’s arrest’ – something even protesters here in Bristol today said they were planning on doing. Police also attended today’s Bristol event in Henleaze, acting as a barrier between two opposing groups of protesters.
Meanwhile, parents and their young children queued up outside the library mere metres from the protesters – some fearing for their safety. They were let inside, however the event was later cancelled. The next event is due to take place at another library in Bristol at 1pm.’
I think the Reading Drag Queen event was part of a national tour organised and begun by Bristol libraries service. The event got the attention of the American right-wing internet pundits a few weeks ago when there were protests about the ‘family sex show’, advertised as suitable for children as young as five, staged by a group at the Tobacco Factory theatre in Bristol.
Thomas Sowell is a Black American conservative. I’ve started reading his Race and Culture, whose title suggests it should be some wretched Nazi screed, but which isn’t. Sowell believes that peoples are shaped by their history and the environments in which they were formed, and thus different people can develop different skills and attitudes to education, commerce and so on. These may be retained by those peoples when they immigrate to a new country. In the chapter on ‘Race and Migration’, he describes how various immigrant groups came to dominate particular areas of the economy in places like Latin America, Africa, and Australia. For example, European immigrants came to dominate trade and industry in many South American countries because the indigenous landowning elites looked down on those sectors. Their preferred occupations were in the profession, such as law or medicine, or in government. He discusses how the Lebanese similarly became important in trade and industry in West Africa, and the Indians, particularly Gujaratis in East Africa. He notes that immigrant success in these areas is often resented, as if the industries the immigrants create somehow happened naturally and the immigrants somehow seized control of them over the indigenous peoples. This was the mentality of the Ugandans when they expelled their Asian population in 1972.
Sowell doesn’t believe in ‘political correctness’ or multiculturalism, and states that often the association between an immigrant group and higher crime rates or poor sanitation really isn’t one of perception and stereotype. He is also critical of multiculturalism as it can seal ethnic minority groups off from the skills, education and values of the mainstream society, skills and attitudes that would allow them to successfully integrate and compete. But he also makes the point that immigration does not necessarily mean that immigrant groups take jobs away from the indigenous or host society. Indeed, the may actually create them. He writes
‘In addition to real costs entailed by immigrants, there are often also false charges that they are a burden to the native-born population, in situations where they are not. However, sometimes there are hidden costs which may be different from what is charged, but significant nonetheless. A common charge against immigrants, for example, is that they take jobs from native-born workers. But there is no fixed number of jobs, from which those going to immigrants can be subtracted. More producers coming into an economy mean more output and more demand, which in turn creates more jobs.
It is an empirical question whether the additional jobs created as a result of the immigrants economic activities equals or exceeds the number of jobs the immigrants themselves take. It is by no means out of the question that native workers may have more jobs available after immigrants arrive. Studies of the large influx of Mexican immigrants into southern California, for example, showed no adverse impact on either the unemployment rate or the labour force participation rate of Blacks in that region, who might be competing for similar jobs. In fact, job trends for Blacks were more favourable in this area heavily impacted by Mexican immigrants than in the nation at large. But while there has apparently been an increase in the total number of jobs, there has been a correspondingly lower pay scale, as the large influx of immigrants has lessened the need for employers to raise wages in order to attract sufficient workers.’ (p,.43).
Which is all very interesting. You often hear the claim that immigrants are taking jobs, and the right are claiming that wages are lower because of foreign immigration. But you don’t hear that immigration can create jobs, and that’s an important omission.
Perhaps it should be made more often in response to the anti-immigration brigade.
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