Alex Belfield’s Suspension from YouTube: Update

Andy the Gabby Cabby posted another video yesterday discussing mad right-winger Alex Belfield’s suspension from YouTube. The Cabby didn’t appear himself, but gave the video over to Belfield to say what had happened. According to Belfield, he’d been suspended for several reasons. One was the factcheckers complaining against his remarks about Covid. The second was because he’d been contacted by a journalist for the Times, who wanted to ask him about the smears against Keir Stalin that appeared on one his videos and accused him of making them. Belfield states that he doesn’t even appear in the video and that it’s just Boris Johnson speaking. He therefore called the hack a ‘farthead’, and so got himself banned on that account. And the remarks left by his commenters suggest that it was also because of his personal comments about Carol Vorderman. Not that he seems dismayed by the ban. He talks about having expected it 1 1/2 years ago, and is proud of all the support he’s had from his fans, who he regards as a real family., He’s going to set up his private VOR club, charging a pound a week, which’ll be set up in March.

I’m not surprised that Belfield got a strike against him because of his attitude to the Coronavirus. He’s one of a number of right-wingers, who don’t believe that the disease is all that bad and urge the lockdown to be lifted. He does, however, urge everyone to take the vaccine and has been very careful about what he says about it. But clearly, not careful enough. This comes after 157 medical professionals wrote to YouTube urging that it ban Joe Rogan because one of his guests was sceptical about the efficacy of the lockdown. This was followed by Neil Young taking his videos off the platform, or threatening to.

I can sort of sympathise with him to a certain extent with the Times journo after the way its sister paper smeared Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Nevertheless, even if Belfield didn’t speak on the video and it was all Johnson, the video repeated a terrible, dangerous smear that Belfield didn’t correct. A smear that has resulted in the Labour leader being mobbed, vilified and receiving death threats. And no, I don’t have much sympathy for him, not when he and the other Blairites were all too keen to smear decent , anti-racist women and men as anti-Semites. This was even when they’d opposed real Fascism and anti-Semitism all their lives, like Mark Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and so many others, and were themselves Jewish, like Walker and Greenstein. Because of those smears, these people have been viciously abused and received death threats. Jackie Walker talks about some of the horrendous messages she’s had in one of her videos. She’s been told she should be lynched – an especially horrible comment as her mother was a southern American Black civil rights activist – and she should be cut up, set on fire and her body dumped in bin bags. One entirely blameless Jewish lady in Devon had her car firebombed after the Campaign for Anti-Semitism declared that she was an anti-Semite. These smears are all because these people supported Jeremy Corbyn and/or opposed the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Or else like Mike they dared to correct the fake history pushed by the Labour apparat to show that those accused were innocent.

As for Belfield vanishing behind a paywall, this may well be the end of his popularity. He may retain his fandom, but I can’t see it growing again without the massive public exposure through YouTube. Even if it’s only a pound, people don’t like paywalls, as some of the newspapers have found with their online content. Besides this, there are still unanswered questions about his legal entanglements. Jim Round, one of the great commenters on this blog, has remarked

‘This was predicted by some as the July court case gets closer, he has still not admitted that he is the defendant, and refused to answer questions about donations.
It is not a “ban” as such, as he is still deleting a lot of his content, Playboard is your friend here.
With regards to free speech, as said before, Belfield is quite hypocritical here as if you disagree with him, you get cut off, abused and/or harrassed by him.
I know what you are getting at with over zealous T&C’s but human nature will always unfortunately bring out the bullies who think they can say what they like with no right to reply.’

I’ve seen some of that bullying attitude myself in a video Belfield put up several weeks ago., accusing a caller of wanting to let in 100 million immigrants. The caller, a polite young chap, had called in to challenge him on his opposition to asylum seekers. Belfield responded by saying that there were millions of starving people who’d like to come to Britain. There were 100 million such people in Nigeria, so should we let them all it? Should we round them up and take them here? The lad didn’t know how to respond, so eventually Belfield cut him off. He then sneered and joked with the next caller, who did agree with him, how the poor fellow wanted to allow in 100 million immigrants. But while the lad hadn’t handled the question well, he hadn’t said anything about letting in 100 million people. It was Belfield misrepresenting him, and by extension everyone else who doesn’t share his opposition to ‘dinghy divers’. And Belfield’s remarks about BBC personnel being ‘Guardian-reading, champagne-sipping, oyster-eating, uni-educated Naga Manchushi types’, or alternatively saying they’re lesbian, Celie Imrie-types with clipboards, really is just abuse.

But it does show the poisonous hatred of some parts of the right towards the left, articulated on behalf of working class Whites, who have been left behind by the middle classes and affirmative action.

Right-Wing Internet Host Belfield Now Pushing for NHS Privatisation

It’s now the morning after the council and elected mayoral elections that were being held up and down the country yesterday. And to no-one’s surprise, Labour lost the Hartlepool bye-election to the Tories. The media commenters have identified Brexit as the cause of the defeat. For those of us on the left of the party, Brexit was a major factor, but it was also partly due to the shoddy, ineffectual leadership and arrogance of the current leader, Keir Starmer. Starmer parachuted into Hartlepool his preferred candidate, a Remainer, over the heads of local Labour party members, activists and supporters. Mike on Vox Political predicted that this would lead to defeat, and so it did. Because of this, the right-wingers on the Net were putting up videos stating that Labour was insulting Hartlepool’s working people. This was further compounded by the fact that Starmer has been such an ineffective opposition leader, that some people didn’t know who he was. Mahyar Tousi, one of the Brexiteers with arch-Thatcherite views, included a clip from Sky News on his video about Labour in Hartlepool yesterday. This showed Starmer earnestly talking to people. The presenter then stopped a passing woman and asked her if she knew who that man was over there. She didn’t. The presenter told her it was Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party. The woman still didn’t know. So much for Starmer’s glittering leadership.

And it was also yesterday that right-wing internet radio host, Alex Belfield, put up a video openly calling for the NHS to be handed over to private management. This isn’t the first time he’s done this, and I doubt that it will be the last. He’s already put up videos with titles like ‘Private NHS Now’. Belfield is vehemently against the lockdown, which he feels is unnecessary and actually harmful, as it has prevented the elderly in nursing homes being visited and comforted by their relatives. It has also created another crisis in the NHS, as the concentration on the Coronavirus has meant routine operations, examinations and treatment have been postponed to the point that waiting times have increased. Highly vulnerable people, like those suffering from cancer, are going untreated.

This is a terrible problem, and much of it, like the grotesque mishandling of the Coronavirus crisis that has seen well over 100,000 die from the disease, can be put down to Boris Johnson’s ineptitude and his cavalier disregard for human life over the economy. Plus the way the NHS has been run down, starved of funds and partially privatised over the past ten years.

But not to Belfield. The ginger-headed man with the tiny man-sausage, as he has described himself, knows better. He put up a rant yesterday claiming that it was all due to increased bureaucracy and ‘box-ticking Celia Imrie types’. Belfield has a feud going with the BBC, and he never fails to include jabs at that organisation. I don’t know whether he has anything against Celia Imrie, or whether it’s just he’s using the kind of parts she’s played as an example of a certain kind of fussy, totally unnecessary management type. You know, the sort of people the Golgafrinchams put into an ark to send into space and crash on Earth on the grounds that they were ‘a bunch of useless bloody loonies’ according to the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The solution, according to Belfield, is for the NHS to be handed over to private management.

This is no solution, as it is private management that has created this situation.

Jacky Davis and Ray Tallis have comprehensively shown in their book, NHS – SOS, that private enterprise is very definitely not as efficient as state healthcare. It’s actually more bureaucratic, as the US private healthcare companies can spend as much as 40-50 per cent of their income on management and legal issues. A book I bought a few years ago discussing the privatisation of healthcare in places like Canada as well as Britain found that the privatisation of parts of the health service over here had actually increased costs by 6 per cent. Parts of the NHS are being handed over to private management, and the effects are not good. Private enterprise is all about profit, not service, and so we’ve seen the private healthcare chains close down doctors surgeries even though they were needed by local people who were then left without a local GP. At the same time, Tory MPs have been demanding the levying of payments for users of certain NHS services, which are supposed to be free at the point of service.

This is all part of the long-time project of privatising the NHS, and turning it into a for-profit healthcare system like the American.

And Belfield is fully behind it.

Belfield likes to present himself as an ordinary working class lad without a degree, who’s despised by the middle class White liberals. His audience seem to be the middle aged, White working class, who feel left behind, excluded from political representation in favour of ethnic minorities. The kind of people, who voted for UKIP.

But these are exactly the people, who will suffer if Belfield’s political aims are realised. If Belfield and the other Tories have their way and privatise the NHS, it will be the working class – and that includes the White working class – who will struggle to pay for healthcare treatment. It’s already happening now, through hospital and GP closures due to private management. And thanks to the privatisation of the dentists, many people have been struggling for a long time to find dentists, who will take NHS patients.

Belfield may well be a working class lad, but his politics are those of the upper classes, who wish to impoverish and exploit working people.

And that means privatising the NHS, even, or especially, if it harms working people’s health.

They won’t care, so long as it turns a profit.

I’m not going to post his video, but if you want to see it, it’s on YouTube at Booze 🇬🇧 Disaster 🍻 Told Ya 🤦‍♂️ Chickens 🐓 Coming 🍺 Home To Roost 🍷 Price Of Last 14 Months – YouTube

Just remember, it is right-wing, pro-privatisation propaganda.