Blasphemy Laws and the Muslim Protests Against France

Over the past week or so we’ve seen mass protests across the Islamic world, including the Islamic community in Britain, over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. These have followed the assassination of school teacher Samuel Paty for simply showing his class the cartoon as part of a lesson about free speech. It’s been pointed out in articles in the I that Paty was far from a racist or Islamophobe. He had taken lessons in Islam in order to understand his Muslim students better, and had warned the Muslims in his class what he was about to do so they could leave to avoid being offended. One girl remained, told her father, her father told the local mosque, the mosque told the community. And a Chechen Islamist heard them, and took matters into his own hands. Other Islamists have carried out further attacks on innocents, who had absolutely no part in the affair. Three people, including a priest, were stabbed to death in a church, simply for being Christians, and there have been shootings in other nations.

The murders of these innocents has not been denounced by the Muslim protesters, however. Instead we have seen former cricketer Imran Khan, now leader of an Islamic party and the president of Pakistan, denounce Macron for the publication of the cartoon. He has been joined by Turkish president Erdogan, another leader of a Muslim party Who wouldn’t know free speech if it came up and bit him on the elbow. Tunisia has also denounced France, and when I looked online last night, Islamists in Bangladesh were giving their government a few hours to sever links with France.

It’s been reported that Khan has been complaining about the hurt felt by Muslims around the world about the publication of the cartoons. Supposedly the right to free speech does not mean the right to offend. But others have pointed out over and over again that that is precisely what it means. The type of free speech that only permits what is inoffensive is no free speech at all.

At the heart of this are the Muslim blasphemy laws. This is an attempt to impose them on France and, by implication, other western nations. However, Muslim are a minority in Europe and so the only arguments Khan and the others can use against Europeans is that their feelings are hurt, and that there will be political repercussions.

I looked up the article on blasphemy in The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, ed. by John Bowker (Oxford: OUP 1997). This provides information on the concept of blasphemy in Christian, Judaism and Islam, its punishments, and the problems of enforcing such laws in Britain. It runs

‘Blasphemy (Gk: ‘speaking evil’ ). Impious or profane talk, especially against God; and in many western legal systems , the offence of reviling God or Jesus Christ or an established church. To be blasphemous a publication must be intended to shock and endanger the moral fabric of society; one that is merely anti-religious (e.g. denying the existence of God) is not. In England in 1977 the editor of Gay News was convicted of blasphemous libel for publishing a poem which portrayed Christ as a practicing homosexual. This was the first successful prosecution for blasphemy since 1922, and showed the difficulty of objectively applying the common law definition. The appearance of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, raised the issue whether blasphemy should be extended to become a more general offence (in the UK), or whether it is an offence in the domain of inciting unrest.

‘In Judaism, ‘blasphemy’ is speaking scornfully of God (Heb. gidduf, heruf) and is described euphemistically as birkat ha-shem (‘blessing the name’, i.e. God). According to Leviticus 24. 10-23, the penalty for cursing God is death, but in discussing this passage, the rabbis defined blasphemy in such a way that it became an improbable crime-and thus the death penalty did not need to be invoked. Excommunication (herem) became the punishment in any case once legal autonomy had been lost…

‘The nearest equivalent in Islam is sabb, offering an insult to God. Qur’an 9.74 condemns those who sear by God that they said nothing but in fact spoke a word of rejection (kalimat al-kufr) after they had become Muslims. This relates blasphemy closely to apostasy (ridda). The expression of contempt for God, the Prophet Mohammed, the angels, or the traditional explications of revelation constitute the offence. Accidental blasphemy is not usually excusable (though Malikites allow it if it is expressed by a recent convert to Islam).. The punishment varies between different Schools of Islamic Law -e.g. the Hanafites remove the offenders legal rights, declare his marriage invalid, and declare any claims to inheritance or property void; the Malikites demand immediate execution of the death penalty.,’

The British prosecution for blasphemy mentioned in the article was brought by Mary Whitehouse, who made it her professional duty to be offended about everything. The gays on the opposite side took this as an attack on them, and launched their own protests against Whitehouse. There’s a comic aspect to this, as Whitehouse recalled that she woke up one morning to find militant gays marching about her garden waving placards.

I think the enforcement of the blasphemy laws is more or less impossible. They’re a dead letter, if they haven’t been repealed. As an example, just consider how many TV comedians since then have expressed their own contempt for Christ and his followers. The comedians Lee and Herring regularly did so on their BBC 2 programme, Fist of Fun. It came as a surprise to me a few years ago when Muslims around the world were again up in arms demanding the execution of blasphemers because of something Pope Benedict said about Mohammed in a speech when one of the two appeared on television attacking Islam. When they were interviewed by the short-lived mag Comedy Revue in the 1990s, they were asked about their attacks on Christianity and whether they would do the same to Islam. They laughingly made it clear that they definitely wouldn’t because they were afraid of violence and attempts on their lives. And thought themselves very clever for doing so. Which shows the British media establishments general attitude to Christianity.

The Muslim blasphemy laws are extremely dangerous. At the moment there are 200 people on death row in Pakistan on charges of blasphemy. Most of these are probably entirely spurious. They’re brought for entirely cynical reasons, such as getting rid of an opponent in a dispute over a completely unrelated issue. Muslims have also claimed that their attacks on Christians were also motivated by the outrage they felt at blasphemies committed by their victims. But some of it seems to me to be an attempt to enforce the Pakistani caste system. Indian and Pakistan Islam has a caste system like Hinduism, only not as severe. Most of the Christian community in Pakistan are of the lowest caste, and many are bonded labourers in brickyards, effectively slaves. One of the Christian women accused of blasphemy was accused after she brought water from a well to a group of Muslim women. Along the way she took a sip of the water. It looks to me that the real crime here was that she broke their laws of caste purity, and that the accusation of blasphemy was added on after this offence.

The ex-Muslim vloggers the Apostate Prophet and Harris Sultan have also pointed out the hypocrisy in Khan’s denunciations. When western countries have criticised Pakistan for human rights abuses, Pakistan has simply told them to mind their own business. But when France defends the publication of cartoons Pakistan and its Islamic leadership find offensive, suddenly he’s justified in interfering in their affairs. He has also denounced the closure of radical mosques and the expulsion of extremist imams as an attack on Islam. It isn’t. It is simply France protecting itself against Islamist violence, in the same way right-wing terrorist groups are banned. And Khan is again being hypocritical in his denunciations. When the Taliban made a series of bloody attacks in Pakistan a few years ago, the armed forces and security services cracked down hard. According to the two above vloggers, they went from house to house in the province of Waziristan arresting anyone with a beard. I haven’t linked to the two because I don’t want to offend any Muslims reading this blog. But you can Google the articles on YouTube if you want to find out more.

Macron should stand firm against all this. Blasphemy laws are a severe attack on free speech, and the penalties inflicted for it and the flagrant abuse of such accusations are particularly dangerous. Freedom of speech and conscience, including that of Muslims, is far too important to be sacrificed because of hurt feelings and outrage.

‘I’ Columnist Wants MPs to Defend Palestinians After Joining Anti-Semitism Smears against Labour

The I’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is one of the few Fleet Street columnists, who I respect. She writes about racism, but acknowledges that it is not confined to Whites hating Blacks, but affects people of all races and colours. She’s also a genuinely moderate Muslim, fiercely critical of the bigots and preachers of hate in her religion, and condemns the White, non-Muslim politicians who pander to them in the hope of garnering votes.

Tweezer’s Denial of Asylum to Asia Bibi, Pakistani Persecuted Christian

A few weeks ago, she attacked Tweezer for refusing sanctuary to Asia Bibi, the Christian Pakistani woman acquitted of blasphemy in Pakistan. Other companies have offered to take Bibi in, but not May, who feared that it would upset this country’s Muslims. Alibhai-Brown then described the case, showing how dubious the accusation was, and the prejudice and hatred Pakistani Christians face. She also stated that the country was also unsafe for Shi’a Muslims like herself. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, had intended it to be a secular state with separation between state and mosque. But this had swiftly been overturned, most notoriously by the military dictator General Zia ul-Haqq, who ruled the place in the 1970s. Everything she said was correct. The Beeb has also screened documentaries about the arrests of people in Pakistan for blasphemy. It’s a crime that carries the death penalty, and Bibi has spent over a decade on death row. Most of those accused, however, are Muslims, and it looks very much like the majority of accusations are false, being used as a weapon in family and clan disputes. In the case of Bibi, she was accused of blasphemy by a group of women with whom she was working. They sent her to fetch water for them to drink. She stopped to take a drink herself, so they accused her of ‘polluting’ it before going to accuse her of blasphemy. Everything about it says to me that this is all about caste. Islam in Pakistan has a caste system like India, though not as severe. Many of Pakistan’s Christians are sheikhs, one of the lowest castes, working as bonded labourers in the brick kilns. It looks like Bibi was one of these low caste workers, and the Muslims for whom she fetched the water were outraged at her taking a drink from it because they believed that the touch of a low caste person polluted it. Just like high caste Indians at one time would throw away their food if even the shadow of one of the Dalits, the Untouchables, fell on it.

There’s more to be said about the case, but Alibhai-Brown was right to attack the vicious, murderous bigotry behind the accusation and Tweezer’s own cowardice in refusing to give Bibi asylum. I’d go further, and say that while there is a danger that the preachers of hate in British Islam would try to capitalize on Bibi being given asylum, that’s no evidence for not admitting her to Britain. And it also shows Tweezer’s low view of British Islam, if she thought the intolerance of bigoted minority was worth capitulating to. Not all Muslims are fanatics and bigots by any means, but Tweezer’s refusal to take in Asia Bibi suggests that she feels that nevertheless, enough of them are. It’s a decision which would delight the Islamophobes, who believe that all Muslims are a threat to traditional British religious freedom, and that liberal governments are too afraid to confront them.

Alibhai-Brown on Israel’s Persecution of the Palestinians

In yesterday’s I for the 27th November 2018, Alibhai-Brown tackled the plight of the Palestinians and their oppression under the Israelis in an article entitled ‘The Holy Land needs some goodwill: Plight of the Palestinians should be remembered by all’, on page 15. She began the article by stating that Christmas is the time when devout Christians turn their minds to the places where Christ lived, preached and died, and that there is a massive tourist industry in the Holy Land. It is a country which contains sites sacred to all three of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and that for centuries the religions coexisted in peace.

This is true no longer, as Israel increases its dominance. She states that Bethlehem has been turned into an open air prison, and that last year Palestinian Muslims were denied entrance to the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam. Netanyahu’s oppression of the Palestinians is supported by Donald Trump and American Christian fanatics, whose decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem shows that Muslim Arabs mean nothing to him and his government.

Shalhoub-Kavorkian and Dimbleby on Oppressed Palestine

She then goes on to quote Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kavorkian of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the routine brutality and second class status of the Palestinians. The prof. wrote

Violence is central to the political logic of the Israeli state and its occupation of Jerusalem. Enacted in the hundreds of daily acts of harassment perpetuated by heavily armed soldiers, police, settlers, and undercover security personnel belonging to the state of Israel, much of the violence occurs routinely and it goes largely unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Palestinians, native to and residing in Jerusalem, are categorized by Israeli law as ‘permanent residents’ or as foreign residents who hate to prove to the Ministry of Interior that their ‘centre of life’ – where they live, go to school, get medical care and pay for utilities are all taking place in Jerusalem.

She then moves on to discuss a ‘poignant’ book on Palestine, published by Jonathan Dimbleby, now the presenter of Question Time in 1980. This was when he was the maker of foreign documentaries, and the book was accompanied with photographs by Sir Donald McCullin. The book apparently shows the great diversity of Palestinian life and culture as well as moving tales of dispossession and pain. Re-reading it now, she realized how much worse their plight had become. She quotes the book as saying

The struggle is still presented in a woefully lopsided fashion: a small embattled, occasionally obstinate but usually admirable democratic state (Israel) under challenge from a despicable, occasionally pathetic, but usually brutal gang of desperadoes (the PLO).

Defending Palestine and Anti-Semitism Smears

She is very aware that simply discussing the plight of the Palestinians is met by accusations of anti-Semitism. She writes

Now the reporting of Israeli injustices brings on instant accusations of anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, she also swallows the line that Israel was created in response to the horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. It wasn’t. Jewish colonization began long before, after the Balfour Declaration during the First World War. She states that Israel exists and must exist as a safe homeland, before going to make the point that the horrors of the Nazis’ persecution don’t give Israel the right to break international laws and violate the human rights ‘of those whose land was taken to create their homeland’.

Pro-Palestinian Pilgrimage to Jerusalem

The article then goes on to discuss the book, Walking to Jerusalem, by Justin Butcher, a playwright and activist, whose launch she attended. This is the record of a pilgrimage made by hundreds of ordinary people, who went on foot to Jerusalem, funded by a small charity, the Amos Trust. The pilgrims arrived just before the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, in order to ‘change the record of a hundred years of injustice to the Palestinian people.’ She states that the marchers included Jews, which should surprise no-one, who knows how very many Jews are critical of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and the crimes committed in their name by Netanyahu’s thugs.

She also notes that over 200 Gazans were killed by Israeli forces, some of whom were medical workers and journalists. Settlers were stealing more land and homes. Although some Israelis were also wounded and killed, and too many live in fear, this was an unequal clash.

Alibhai-Brown’s Call for the Public to Contact their MPs

She concludes the article

Maybe one thing we can all do this Christmas is to ask our MPs to be more openly critical of Israel and do what the walkers did – support peaceful Palestinian men, women and children who have for so long been denied rights, livelihoods and dignity. Sometimes goodwill is the best present.

Alibhai-Brown and the Anti-Semitism Smears against the Labour Party

It’s a good article, but marred by Alibhai-Brown’s own behaviour towards Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. When the Israel lobby and Conservative media and Jewish establishment once again attacked Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour for not signing up to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, Alibhai-Brown was one of the hacks denouncing the Labour party as full of anti-Semites. But this article suggests she know how false at least some of those allegations must have been. But there is no retraction. The Fleet Street Groupthink about the Labour party, and the bias of the I’s editor and proprietor apparently appear to be too strong.

She also must realise that with the Israel lobby holding power in both the Tories and the Labour party through their ‘Friends of Israel’ groups, and the Jewish Labour Movement in the Labour party, any chance of MPs stepping out of line to risk their careers defending the Palestinians is remote. Not while there’s a chance that someone at the Israeli embassy will pick up where Shai Masot left off and start deciding that they’re a person, who shouldn’t be in the next cabinet. And although the media may claim that the affair’s all over, their haste to do so shows that the conspiracy – and the accusations of anti-Semitism against people like Mike who correctly called it that – has had the desired effect. MPs aren’t going to risk being sidelined or thrown out as anti-Semites if they dare confront the lobby.

The Israel Lobby and the Suppression of Pro-Palestinian Reporting

As for Dimbleby and his book, I very much doubt there’s much chance of anyone at the Beeb now being so courageous in criticizing Israel. Ten years ago Peter Oborne made his documentary on the Israel lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches. This showed not just the extent of the lobby in the parliamentary parties, but also how they bullied and intimidated journalists with accusations of anti-Semitism. This included Graoniad editor Alan Rusbridger, and several very well respected Beeb journos, who dared to describe the atrocities committed by Israel and the massacres by its allies, the Lebanese Christian phalange, in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. These accusations were found by the broadcasting regulatory bodies to be without foundation. But that tactic is still being used by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the other thugs and bully-boys in the Israel lobby.

And this tactics will continue to be made, unless more people stand up to it. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t anti-Semites, but they were smeared as such simply because they defended the Palestinians. The Israelis are afraid that there just might be a foreign prime minister, who doesn’t defer to them, and won’t tolerate their persecution of the indigenous Arabs. Alibhai-Brown must surely realise this, but she joined their attacks on Corbyn and Labour anyway.

And those attacks on Corbyn and politicians like him will continue, unless journos like Alibhai-Brown practice what they preach and actively support and defend him and other Israel-critical politicos in their columns against such mendacious and false accusation of anti-Semitism.

The Racists and Reactionaries Who Are the ‘Honorary Patrons’ of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism

On Wednesday, Tony Greenstein also put up a very revealing post discussing some of the honorary patrons of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. This is the organisation responsible for many of the anti-Semitism smears and libels, including that of Mike. Greenstein notes that it’s suspected of being funded by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs as part of their campaign of dirty tricks against the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement. And the CAA’s patrons are a grim lot of reactionaries, racists and islamophobes. They include the former archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, Eric Pickles, Bob Blackman, Matthew Offord, Mike Freer, and Richard Kemp.

Carey got himself into trouble with Britain’s Muslim community in 2004 with a tactless comment about Islam, which included the words ‘During the past 500 years, critical scholarship has declined, leading to strong resistance to modernity’. It’s a very simplified version of Islamic history, which leaves out Modernists like Mohammed Abduh, the Egyptian ulema, who began the process of modernisation in their country before its conquest by the British and French, and secularist radicals like Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk.

Eric Pickles, whom Buddy Hell at Guy Debord’s Cat has nicknamed ‘the Sontaran’ because of his striking resemblance to those aliens from Dr. Who, used to be progressive and anti-racist. That is before he and Maggie’s Tory cabinet decided to back Ray Honeyford, the headmaster of a Middle School in Bradford. Honeyford had written a piece in the right-wing Salisbury Review, claiming that there was a link between race and intelligence. The local authority wanted to sack him, but he was supported by the Daily Heil and Thatcher. And so Pickles also decided to throw in his lot behind Honeyford. And he’s been a populist ever since.

Blackman, Offord and Freer all put their weight behind the campaign ‘Operation Dharmic Vote’ by the National Council of Hindu Temples back in 2017. This looks like an attempt to copy David Lammy’s Operation Black Vote earlier this century, which was a campaign to get more Black people to vote so that more would be done for them by a more diverse parliament. ‘Operation Dharmic Vote’ sounds similar, but was definitely not as benign. The National Council of Hindu Temples were annoyed that British parties, like Labour, were trying to outlaw caste discrimination, especially against the Dalits. This is the term now used for the Untouchables, the people of the lowest caste, who are given the dirtiest, lowest paid and most demeaning jobs. Indian Dalit activists and writers have described their conditions as ‘slavery’. There are reports in this country of Dalits being refused medical treatment by their doctors. It’s disgraceful, but Blackman, Offord and Freer decided to back the campaign to get the votes of the most reactionary elements of British Hinduism.

Blackman also went further, also hosted a meeting in parliament, at which one of the speakers was Tapan Ghosh, an Indian islamophobe and christophobe. Claiming to be defending human rights, Ghosh talked about ‘800 years of Arab Islamic’ aggression, and ‘200 years of European Christian aggression’. He also described the Rohingyas, now being butchered in Myanmar, as ‘violent’.

Both Islam and Christianity largely entered India through military conquest, though India also has a community of indigenous Syriac Christians in Kerala, who entered the country as refugees from persecution in the Persian Empire. The Hindu Nationalist right bitterly hate Christianity and Islam, as neither religion has a formal caste system like Hinduism. There is a kind of caste system in Indian Islam, but it’s less severe than Hinduism. As a result, many Dalits have converted to Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. The Hindu nationalists have reacted by organising pogroms against Christians and Muslims, as well as Sikhs and extreme right-wing Hindus have carried out forced conversions of Christians. This seems to be the type of Hinduism Ghosh seems to represent, and it’s as racist and intolerant as the militantly extremist forms of the two religions Ghosh denounces.

Then there’s Colonel Richard Kemp, who was successfully sued by Baroness Warsi after he wrote a column in the Jewish News claiming that she was trying to excuse the horror committed by Daesh.

For further details, see Tony Greenstein’s article at http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/the-campaign-against-anti-semitism_9.html

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is the group that’s claiming that since Jeremy Corbyn became head of the Labour party, it’s been infested with anti-Semites. Perhaps there should be an outcry instead on the way it’s supported by very real racists and islamophobes.

Vox Political: Thatcher Was Urged to Levy Poll Tax on the Homeless

This piece from Mike over at Vox Political shows not only what utterly contemptible villains were in Maggie Thatcher’s government, but also how they were blissfully unaware that their wretched tax reforms undermined the basis of civilisation itself. Just as their successors are doing now.

Recently declassified documents released from the National Archives show that Thatcher’s Welsh Secretary, Peter Walker, wanted to impose the ‘Community Charge’ not just on those with homes, but also the homeless. He was afraid that if they were exempt, then people would start sleeping on the streets to avoid paying it. Mike says of this

Obviously Peter Walker was scum and the Poll Tax was a disaster – but worse people than him are running the Conservative Government now.

The idea of charging homeless people a tax on property is clearly ridiculous but that wasn’t the point Walker was trying to make.

He wanted to ensure that every last penny was squeezed from the poorest people, in order to support Conservatives and Tory voters who no doubt needed the money to clean the moat in their duck pond or suchlike. He’s further afraid that the intervening years have made people more susceptible to Tory lies, not less, and that they’ll be taken in the next time they peddle another fraudulent scheme.
See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/19/margaret-thatcher-was-urged-to-make-homeless-people-pay-poll-tax-by-senior-cabinet-minister/.

It’s a truly grotty piece of legislation, but what has been missed is the way that it effectively threatened to destroy part of the fabric of society. If people cannot afford to pay a tax, so that they are forced to leave their homes and sleep rough, then you’ve effectively dealt a blow to civilisation. The very word after all comes from the Latin civilis, a city. It’s part of the reasons why Rome fell: the taxes became so great, urban citizens could no longer afford to pay them. The senatorial aristocracy all moved away to avoid paying their whack, and the burden of taxation fell to the free poor, who couldn’t. As a result, they too moved into the countryside. The result was that in the Third Century AD there was rising inflation and a declining number of urban tradesmen – the bakers, butchers, cobblers, carpenters, smiths and so on that form the industrial and commercial life of cities. The Romans tried to stop this steady migration of tradesmen away from the cities by making certain trades hereditary, setting up a caste system rather like Indian. Unlike India’s, it didn’t work. And so the empire tottered on to its doom as the barbarians invaded.

Not that you’ll hear this from the Tories, including classicists like Boris Johnson. Oh, Boris admires the early Roman Empire with its small bureaucracy, but you won’t hear him talk about how, like now, the Empire fell because the senatorial super-rich decided to escape paying taxes by fleeing to their country estates, just as the super-rich today try to shirk their financial responsibility to society by registering their companies offshore. And they really, really won’t want to talk about how they shifted the tax burden on the free Roman poor, just as today’s working and lower middle classes are also required to make up the tax deficit left by the rich.

No, to them, the real threat to western civilisation comes from an influx of foreigners, just like the Romans had during the barbarian invasions.

But their tax policies and continuing impoverishment of the poorest sections of society are undermining our society and weakening it, quite apart from its complete absence of any morality. These are people, who will grind down the poor to the extent it’ll bring down society itself, just to be that little bit richer.
Complete amoral psychopaths.

Daily Heil Rejoices as Priti Patel Joins the Brexit Campaign

Mike at Vox Political yesterday posted a piece about the Daily Mail’s piece yesterday raving at Priti Patel’s decision to tell David Cameron that she would fight ‘tooth and nail’ for Britain to leave the EU. He then points out, with suitable meme, just how nasty Patel is.

Patel was one of the authors of the vile Tory screed, Britannia Unchained, which castigated British workers for being the laziest in Europe. She and the others argued that if Britain wanted to compete in the global market, then we had to adopt the work ethic of the Developing World. British workers should work longer hours, for less. The Heil’s article claimed she learned the value of hard work from her parents, ethnic Gujaratis from Uganda, who were forced to leave by Idi Amin. Allowed into Britain with the other Ugandan Asian exiles, her father set up a string of 17 newsagents.

Patel is, however, a classic case of Tory hypocrisy, an example of the ‘Do what I say, not what I do’ mentality that runs through the Tory party like writing in a stick of rock. Her own record voting in parliament is decidedly lacklustre. She has only been present in debates just over 81 per cent of the time, far beyond the 95 per cent + attendance many of the others manage. This probably won’t dismay her followers or the Tory spin doctors, who will argue no doubt that she works terribly hard for her constituents, or some such.

The Daily Heil, for its part, has heaped praise on her ever since she first appeared on the national Tory scene in the 1990s. Then it ran admiring articles on her titled ‘As Priti as a Picture’, and praised her for showing that the Tories were including ethnic minorities, and that the Blacks and Asians in the Tories were far better than their embittered counterparts nursing their racial grievances in Labour. This is also very much the Heil’s view of the advantages she brings to the Brexit campaign: she is supposedly disproving that the campaign is overwhelmingly pale and male.

Actually, I’ve no doubt that most of the people in the Brexit campaign, like those in UKIP, are voting for Britain to leave Europe, because they somehow believe it will stop immigrants, and especially non-Whites like Patel and her parents, entering Britain. They’re wrong. The Angry Yorkshireman and Mike have repeatedly stated that Britain’s acceptance of asylum seekers is governed by the International Convention on the Refugee, not by Europe, which only stipulates that Europeans must be free to move between countries.

The reason Patel, and Tories like her, are backing the Brexit campaign, is not because they’re hostile to immigration, although that’s no doubt a factor. What really angers them about the EU is the Social Charter that grants certain rights to European workers. Quite apart from the EU convention on human rights, which Cameron would dearly love to scrap and replace with a much weaker ‘Bill of British Rights’. They’re motivated by the authoritarian desire to keep the workforce cowed and oppressed by a powerful surveillance state, which gives its full force to the employers and the propertied class.

As for the Britannia Unchained author’s argument that Britons should work harder, that’s actually the complete opposite of what happened and what should be happening. As workers in the Developed World were told to work longer hours, so were their counterparts and competitors in the Developing World, until they’re just about working round the block. If we genuinely want to give workers in the Developing World a proper break and a decent standard of living, we could actually begin by cutting hours here.

And there have also been strong criticisms about the admiring verbiage surrounding the Asian work ethic and the long hours British Asians put in running the family business. I’ve read pieces recently on the web – though unfortunately I can’t remember where – which stated that this was actually racist. Asians should benefit from the same attitude to work as the rest of the British population. After all, the argument read, would you want to spend 11 hours + a day – and I think that was an underestimation of the horrendously long hours these people put in – behind a desk in a corner shop, still serving customers at all hours of the day and night?

And besides, the argument that the British are lazy is incorrect. It wasn’t that long ago that the Daily Heil and the rest of the Tory rags were telling us all that the French were horrendously lazy. As were the supposedly ruthlessly efficient Germans. And as for the Greeks, they’ve been subjected to a tirade of abuse for being supposedly a nation of lazy welfare scroungers who’ve brought the current economic collapse of their nation on themselves. In fact, when one German financial house moved part of its business to London from Manhattan am Main, as the Germans were styling Frankfurt, the Mail reported that the German staff were all making jokes about the English working themselves to death. So much for British people being lazy. Except when it serves Tory propaganda.

And there’s the whole issue of why British workers should work so hard, if it won’t benefit them. It hasn’t, after all, benefited workers in India. They’ve seen their wages fall massively, while the upper classes and castes have seen their pay massively escalate. Just like it has over here. The nouveaux riche of Delhi are literally living the champagne lifestyle, while hundreds of millions of their countrymen effectively live on starvation wages. The situation is so bad in the poorest states, that it’s bred a Maoist rebellion – the Naxites. What are they up in arms against? People like Priti Patel.

Patel and her fellows have nothing to offer British workers, who will only suffer if Britain does leave Europe.

Mike’s article on her and the Brexit campaign is at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/08/priti-patel-poster-girl-for-brexit-that-should-add-millions-of-votes-to-the-stay-campaign/