Ash Sarkar Urges Us to Get the Tory Cabinet of Millionaires Out of Office

Very short video by Novara Media’s superb Ash Sarkar urging people to get out, knock on a few doors in marginal constituencies, and vote out the Tory ‘cabinet of millionaires’. Because it is they, who are holding us back.

She’s shown walking down a street, saying ‘Forty years of being told’ and the video shows Cameron, Thatcher and Tweezer saying the Leaderene’s favourite catchphrase – ‘there is no alternative.’ ‘Four years of the pundit class being wrong for a living’. There’s then a clip of Jon Snow saying, ‘We, the media, the pundits, the experts, know nothing.’ This is a followed by footage of a demonstrating crowd. ‘We’re old, we’re young, we’re Black, White, Asian and ‘funny tinged’ – a dig at Angela Smith of the Change.UK group – ‘we’re students, we’re workers, and it takes a cabinet of millionaires to hold us back. Polls move when people do, and today we’ve got the chance to move the only poll that matters. So get yourself down to a marginal, knock on a few doors and take the opportunity to kick the Tories out of government. It’s time to put the people in power’.

Chuka Umunna Cynically Joins Lib Dems – Collapse Imminent!

Okay, after years of rebuffing their advances Chuka Umunna has finally given in and joined the Lib Dems. The MP for Streatham is going to stand as their candidate in a safe Labour seat. So much for the man, who said that he would never put on the yellow rosette. I can understand why the Lib Dem leadership want him – he’s young, Black and ambitious. He was angling for leadership of the Labour party until he was defeated by Jeremy Corbyn. And as a good New Labour Thatcherite, he’s spent the past few years intriguing and campaigning against the Labour leader.

And now, six months after splitting from the Labour party to form Change UK with the other splitters and quitters, he’s now decided that they aren’t a grand enough vehicle for their ambitions. So he’s departed from them and joined the Lib Dems. It’s not wholly unexpected – Change UK and a similar, minuscule ‘centrist’ party, Renew – were talking about some kind of alliance with the Lib Dems. But forging a party alliance is different from betraying it altogether and joining a different and competing party.

Mike has argued in his article on this sordid incident that Umunna was probably moved to do this by the Lib Dem success at the Euro elections. He believes they’re on a winning streak, but ignores the fact that this success was based on them positioning themselves as the party of Remain in an election that had zero to do with the actual Brexit negotiations. I’ve no doubt that the Lib Dem leadership will be highly delighted, but you can bet there’s a lot of rancour and discontent in the local party about it.

Umunna is, after, all toxic and deeply untrustworthy. He’s shown himself to be cynical, opportunistic and disloyal. His support and membership of political parties seems to be determined solely by how he can use them to boost his own ambitions. He was blocked from the leadership in the Labour party, so he tried to remove its leader, and undermine his support and that for the party generally in order to discredit not just Corbyn, but also the move to traditional Labour values and policies. When this failed, he loudly and publicly split, clearly expecting far more than the eight former MPs who joined him to follow suit. And when Change UK proved to be a dud, he showed his complete absence of sticking power and party loyalty by abandoning them as well. It’s a career that should tell the Lib Dem leadership that they can’t trust him even remotely. His loyalty to them is always going to depend on whether or not he thinks he can be better served elsewhere. It really wouldn’t surprise me if he grows tired of them eventually, and throws in his lost with the Tories if they appeal to him as a centrist Remainer.

As for the local party, you can bet than many of them are going to be furious, as long-term members and activists will no doubt now be sidelined after their years of loyal service in his favour.

Hopefully at the next election, whenever it comes, Umunna will lose massively and spectacularly to the Labour candidate, as he should. And then it’ll be interesting to see whether he sticks with the Lib Dems, or throws another strop and tries appealing to someone else to give him the power he craves.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/06/14/chuka-umunna-announces-end-of-his-political-career-hes-joined-the-lib-dems/

6 of Its Leading Members Leave the Change Party

Ho ho! What was all that rubbish about the Change Party changing British politics? Earlier this evening I just caught a snippet on the Six O’Clock News that six of Change UK’s MPs have left the party following its poor performance at the elections and the recriminations against its leader, Heidi Allen. Some, but not all, would probably go to the Lib Dems, with whom the party has said they wish to have closer ties.

So much for all that nonsense about being a completely new form of politics, which the British public were crying out for. The British public looked at them, and drew the conclusion that they were the same old politics, pushed by the ambitious and arrogant, who definitely weren’t going to broaden British democracy. Not when they refused to fight by-elections after their defections. They were going to be the next SDP. Well, that got merged with the Liberals, and at their height the SDP were far more politically distinguished than Change UK. Their founding members, included David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, who were senior politicos with quite distinct ideas. All Change UK offered and offers is the same threadbare corporatism and neoliberalism, under a pro-Remain banner. They don’t offer anything which the Tories, Lib Dems and Blairites in the Labour Party already aren’t.

With luck, this will be the beginning of the party’s complete collapse. They won’t be missed.

Change UK Candidates Warned against Speaking to Hack Who Libeled Mike

This fortnight’s edition of Private Eye for 31 May – 13 June 2019 carries a very interesting little snippet on its ‘HP Sauce’ column on page 11. The article ‘The Rachel Papers’, reported how BoJo’s sister, Rachel Johnson, opened her loud mouth to Henry Zeffman of the Times and bitterly criticised her party’s leadership and fellow members. In the words of the article, her comrades Heidi Allen, Sarah Woolaston, Chuka Umunna, Anna Soubry and indeed the rest of their politicos, were presented by Johnson as ‘blithering idiots’. But the most interesting part of this article for me and other friends and followers of Mike and his work, was the beginning of the piece. Which stated that the candidates had been warned that Gabriel Pogrund of the Sunday Times wanted to contact them, and that they should not speak to him. The article said

ON 14 May the new Change UK party warned everyone on its candidates’ confidential WhatsApp grou about Gabriel Pogrund from the Sunday Times. He had been “trying to contact various candidates for a pieces he’s working on. If he contacts you, please do not speak to him.”

“Understood,”said Carole Tongue, who stood for Change in London. “what’s he after?” asked Kathryn Heywood in the North East. “I smell a stitch-up,” said Michael Taylor from the North West.

Pogrund, or Poo-Grunt, as I think he should be better called – and yes, I know it’s just infantile name-calling, but that’s all I think this poisonous hack deserves – was the journo, who wrote the article back in 2017 smearing Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, partly based on material leaked to him from the Blairites in the Labour party. From this, and the Eye’s article, it can be inferred that Pogrund is a known smear merchant. There’s more than a little irony here, as the ex-Labour politicos, who split to form Change UK, were more than happy to claim that they were leaving because of the rampant anti-Semitism they claimed was in Labour. And now they stand revealed as being terrified of speaking to one of the hacks responsible for promoting this vile lie.

In fact I think they’re quite right to avoid talking to him. Mike had a call from him, and despite Mike telling him the truth about these smears against him, the Sunset Times still went and libeled him anyway. He, or at the very least, his editor, is not remotely interested in truth, just in smearing and destroying the lives and careers of anyone who dares to criticise Israel, neoliberal Thatcherite capitalism and the Tory party.

He’s a poisonous liar, and even the politicos keen to promote some of his lies realise it and try to avoid him.

Soubry Turns on Allen for Massive Election Defeat of Change Party

Here’s an interesting little piece from today’s I for the 28th Mary 2019. Change UK came very much bottom of the poll in the Euro elections this Thursday, and the recriminations have started. Anna Soubry as criticised her party leader, Heidi Allen, for telling people to vote tactically. She considers that Allen was effectively telling them not to vote for their party.

The article by David Hughes, titled ‘Allen’s bizarre strategy hit votes, says Soubry’, on page 10, runs

Senior figures in Change UK were involved in a public row after the party formed by breakaway Tory and Labour MPs failed to win any MEPs.

Anna Soubry, the party’s Brexit spokeswoman, accused leader Heidi Allen of “bizarre” behaviour for suggesting their supporters engage in tactical voting.

Former Tory minister Ms Soubry said “over 600,000 people went and voted for us, a genuinely new party”, which was an “extremely good” result, she claimed.

But she criticised Ms Allen, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today: “I think it is rather bizarre for an interim leader on the eve of a poll to tell people essentially not to vote for their party.” Mocking the leader, she added: “Let’s engage now in big, grown up politics.”

Former Tory MP Ms Allen acknowledged that her party needed to learn from what went wrong in the European Parliament elections before the next general election.

I caught a snippet of one of the female members of Change UK talking on the Beeb the other day comparing her party’s performance with that Farage’s Brexit. She said that Brexit’s success wasn’t surprising, as it wasn’t really a new party. It was simply another vehicle for Nigel Farage and his campaign against the EU. Which is exactly true. It’s simply another version of UKIP when it was under Nigel Farage’s leadership, complete with the racism, anti-environmentalism, anti-feminism, planned destruction of the welfare state and privatisation of the NHS. All of which the female speaker for Change UK didn’t mention, probably because they’re also mostly policies shared by the Tories, Blairite Labour and Change UK, with the possible exception of the anti-feminism.

She then complained that Change UK really was a genuinely new party, trying a different type of politics. A politics that was no confined to party interests. Here she was utterly wrong. There was absolutely nothing new about Change UK. It was the same old Thatcherite neoliberalism, still demanding austerity, the privatisation of the NHS and the destruction of the welfare state. It very happily continued the existing system of parliamentary corruption by working for the interests of its rich, corporate donors, instead of the British electorate. That’s why it was registered as a private company, rather than a political party, so that they could hide their accounts. It was, unlike the Tories, pro-Remain, and tried to dress up its solid hostility to policies that would genuinely improving conditions for working people by claiming that it was somehow centrist and non-partisan. Which is what the Lib Dems have also been saying for decades. And many people would have been put off voting for Change UK because of their selfish rejection of democratic principle by refusing to hold by-elections in their constituencies after they switched parties.

The simple fact is that Change UK is a party no-one wants and practically no-one voted for. But they really can’t accept that, and so have to carry on with all this rubbish about being a brave, new party and finding someone they blame for a defeat all of them deserved. I doubt, however, that the recriminations and backbiting are going to stop here. Time to get the popcorn in and watch as they melt down!

The Good News in the Euro Election: Sargon, Dankula and Tommy Robinson Lose Massively

There was some crumb of comfort to Labour supporters and other anti-Fascists after the Euro elections. Although Farage’s disgusting Brexit party got 36 per cent of the vote, UKIP was wiped out. And that meant that their far right candidates Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, Mark Meechan, aka Count Dankula, and the infamous Tommy Robinson are very definitely not going to the European parliament.

In this video from the American left-wing Youtube news site, the Progressive Voice, the host goes through the stats for the Euro election. He mentions that UKIP’s leader, Gerard Batten, whom he describes as ‘Sargon’s daddy, in a way’, also failed to get elected to the European parliament. He explains that the entry of Sargon, Dankula and Robinson, who ran as an independent, and others like them caused Farage to leave UKIP, complaining that they were too right-wing for him. He states that Farage was also on the verge of becoming anti-Islam, like Robinson, however. The host then reads out the report on the massive losses of the extreme right Kippers from the Independent. At the time the article was written, the results had yet to be announced for Scotland, so it was unknown how Mark Meechan had fared. Nevertheless, the Progressive Voice states that he definitely lost, though he didn’t know what the exact result for him was.

But the results for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, or Tommy Robinson, as a prefers to be known, were very clear. He lost spectacularly in England north-west constituency, coming eighth, and lost his deposit. He lost his deposit and left the count early, complaining about how he had been banned on social media by the ‘establishment’. It was this, he claimed, that had stopped him from winning.

In the south-west, UKIP fared a little better, but not much. They were sixth on the ballot, with only 3.2 per cent of the vote. Sargon was their second candidate in that constituency.

The Progressive Voice then shows the figures for all the parties from Britain Elects twitter account for the south-west. The Brexit Party were first at 36.7 per cent, Lib Dems 23.1 per cent, Greens 18.1 per cent, Conservative 8.7 per cent, Labour 6.5 per cent, then UKIP, and finally Change UK at 2.8 per cent. He explains that the Brexit Party were able to make their massive leap to nearly 37 per cent because they’re a new party founded by Farage after he left UKIP. And UKIP’s share of the vote has fallen by 29.1 per cent. The Progressive Voice then declares that Sargon, Dankula and Robinson are clowns, who should stay on YouTube. But Sargon’s YouTube account has been demonetized because of his antics, so the Voice doesn’t know where he gets his money from. He suggests it might be from subscribers. He also mentions that Sargon has taken a couple of milkshakes, referring to the incidents where he had them thrown at him, and says he doesn’t know how he feels about that.

The Progressive Voice is, like the rest of us, highly amused by Robinson and Sargon losing the election, laughing as he reads their results out. And he goes on to describe Robinson’s antics when he lost later in the video as ‘hilarious’. This was when Robinson left early claiming he’d lost because of the media. The Voice concludes by saying that these three are clowns, and this is the result they got for so being.

The male feminist and anti-Fascist Kevin Logan, who has put up a number of videos on his channel attacking Sargon, put up another yesterday showing his sober analysis of the statistics for Sargon’s failure. In the titles, he puts it all down to Benjamin’s ‘reverse Midas touch’. In Greek legend, everything that Midas touched turned to gold. In Sargon’s case, everything he touches turns, well, something really smelly that usually gets used to fertilise the garden.

He starts with the statistics for the party, narrowing down to where it states that UKIP now have zero MPs. Their vote share is 3.2 per cent, down 29. 7 per cent, and Benjamin only got 53,739 votes. He then shows a picture of Batten with Sargon, both of whom have ‘Not an MEP’ written in front of them. There’s then photographs of Sargon with milkshake all over him and various logs from Burger King, which may have supplied them, and being pelted with fish in Cornwall. The soundtrack for the video is laughter from the old record, The Laughing Policeman.

As you can see from the above title photograph, Sargon’s been the kiss of death for just about every organisation and issue he’s taken up, from Gamergate, Kek, the Skeptics, his brief Liberalists organisation and now UKIP.

I admit, it’s not much consolation now that the biggest number of votes when to the Brexit party, who are scarcely less as extreme and dangerous as UKIP. But it is something.

Private Eye on ChangeUK MP Stephen Dorrell’s Role in Disastrous and Exploitative Tory Policies

This fortnight’s Private Eye, for 3rd – 16th May 2019 has an article about the major role the former Tory MP Stephen Dorrell played in creating and promoting the disastrous Tory policies of rail privatisation, the Private Finance Initiative and the privatisation of the NHS. These are policies which the magazine speculates will make him unpalatable to those centrist Labour voters that ChangeUK hopes to appeal to. The article runs

The adoption of former Tory health secretary Stephen Dorrell as a Change UK candidate in the European elections may be a Tory too far for ex-Labour voters wanting to switch to the centrist cause.

Dorrell’s Tory CV harks all the way back to the dying days of the Thatcher era when he was a whip – a supposedly “wet” Tory helping push through her ultra “dry” policies.

Under John Major, he became a Treasury minister, active in the Rail Privatisation Group behind the sale of the railways. Against expert advice, Dorrell was one who pushed for separation of responsibility between trains and track – with dire results. Railtrack, the privatised track operator, eventually collapsed after lethal crashes caused by poor maintenance.

As health secretary it was Dorrell who began the 20-year disaster of the private finance initiative (PFI) in the NHS. “I am a strong supporter of the PFI,” he told the Commons, calling PFI “the best opportunity that we have had in the history of the NHS” to “deliver the best healthcare.” It wasn’t. And it didn’t.

Dorrell launched a failed bid for the party leadership in 1997 and never held a ministerial job again. Later, under the coalition, he was seen as a critic of Andrew lansley’s NHS reforms – but not too loud a critic.

Having left parliament in 2015, he has kept up his interest in giving corporations access to the NHS, chairing Public Policy Projects, a subscription-based outfit “focused on the big issues in health and social care”. His group arranges breakfasts and receptions for businesses to meet political and NHS insiders. Recent events have included meals iwth health secretary Matt Hancock, housing and communities secretary James Brokenshire, Treasury committee chair Nicky Morgan and top NHS officials.

Dorrell has also worked as a healthcare and public services adviser to KPMG since 2014; and last year became an “associate” of Cratus Communications, a lobbyist for developers. If Change UK really wants to fix the UK’s “broken politics”, it may have to cast its net a little wider. (P. 7).

These are all very good reasons why genuine Labour voters shouldn’t vote for him. But they’re also reasons why traditional Labour voters shouldn’t vote for any of the former Labour MPs in Change UK. All of the so-called Labour ‘centrists’ are really nothing of the sort. They’re red Tories, as fanatically keen on privatisation and the dismantlement of the NHS for the profit of private healthcare firms as the Conservatives. Blair was responsible for the introduction of much of the legislation allowing the NHS to purchase services from private healthcare providers, including the operation of the health centres and polyclinics, which he hoped would be run by private firms. His health secretary, Alan Milburn, wished the NHS to become simply a kitemark for services provided by private healthcare firms.

The real centrists and moderates are Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, who wish to renationalise the NHS, the rail companies, water and part of the national grid. These are policies both the Tories, Change UK and the Labour ‘centrists’ loathe and detest. Just as they loathe and detest his plans to renew and strengthen the welfare state and give workers back proper employment rights and powerful trade unions able to defend them.

As Mike, Zelo Street and the various other left-wing bloggers have described on their sites, Change UK and its mixture of former Tory and Blairite Labour MPs shows that there really isn’t any difference between the two.

Private Eye’s article is thus a very good reason not to vote for Dorrell personally nor his wretched party in general. And the solid support for Blair’s own privatisation and destruction of the welfare state by Change UK’s former Labour MPs and their fellows still in the Labour party also demonstrates why working people need to see a genuine socialist Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn once again in power and winning elections, from the European all the way to Westminster.

Sargon Begins Car-Crash UKIP Campaign

As it’s now certain that we’re still going to be in the EU for the European election, the various racist, anti-EU, anti-immigrant and islamophobic parties are lining up to campaign. And that includes UKIP, who, as I’ve blogged previously, have selected Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, to be one of their two listed candidates for the southwest. Sargon’s a right-wing internet personality with a hatred of ‘political correctness’, meaning feminism and anti-racist and gay rights activism. He styles himself a ‘centrist moderate’ and a ‘classical liberal’. The latter means that he isn’t moderate, but believes in the classical economics of the 19th century: everything should be privatised, and there should be little or nothing in the way of a welfare state. And as an anti-feminist, Sargon is notorious for a Tweet he sent to the Labour MP, Jess Philips, when she was describing the rape and death threats she’d received via twitter, which said ‘I wouldn’t even rape you’.

Sargon launched his campaign at a big UKIP conference last week or so with his fellow internet rightist, Mark Meechan, aka Count Dankula, and current Kipperfuhrer Batten. Dankula is the man, who was convicted of spreading hate by making a video showing how he had taught his girlfriend’s pug to make the Nazi salute when he shouted ‘Gas the Jews’. It was not a pretty spectacle. In fact it was, as Star Trek’s Ferengi used to say, ‘Ugly. Very ugleee!’ Although it was supposed to be a press conference, Sargon started by attacking the press, boasting that their audiences were collapsing while he had a million subscribers. When asked about his notorious rape tweet by a female reporter from Sky News, Sargon got defensive and said that it wasn’t a rape threat. Which is disingenuous, as no-one said it was. What everyone found offensive was that it was directed at a woman, who had suffered rape. Kevin Logan, discussing the tweet and Sargon’s catastrophic press meeting with Dr. Kristi Winters, argued that his tweet was threatening, in that by including the word ‘even’ Sargon was suggesting that there were people, he did consider worth raping.

And everyone has picked up on that Tweet. Sargon has been massively pilloried for it in the mainstream press, with the Scum – of all papers! – describing him as a ‘sicko’. But this hasn’t deterred Sargon and his supporters from defending it. They try to wave it all off by saying that it all happened three years ago, and so it’s no longer relevant. But it is, as unlike the other politicos, who’ve been forced to apologise for ill-judged or malign comments, they’re still defending it and haven’t changed their views. In fact, the evening before the press conference Meechan and Sargon had held an event at which they talked about themselves. And Meechan told a joke that was arguably even worse. He was talking about how he had been poor at university. The were so poor, they couldn’t afford hook-ups, and so had to resort to rape. But it was worse for the women, who were also poor and always being raped. It’s the kind of joke which would have any other political party demanding an apology or considering suspending the politico involved. Not so UKIP, apparently. Back at the press conference, Sargon said he wasn’t going to answer any more questions from them, as they were ‘dirty, dirty smearers’. Which he then contradicted by immediately asking, ‘any questions?’

Sargon is also notorious for a post he put up on his YouTube channel in which he used a range of racial slurs against Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays and the mentally handicapped. The anti-racist/ anti-religious extremism organisation has dug it out, and yesterday put up a piece about this wretched video, including a transcript. The post was made in November 2015, and was titled ‘Offence Is Never Given, Retard’, but has since been pulled from YouTube for violating their community guidelines. Sargon’s video was a response to another piece trying to get people to stop using racial slurs. This featured a Black man, Hispanic woman, gay man, an Asian, a Jew and a woman with Down’s Syndrome, who come forward and say, ‘It’s not acceptable to call me – ‘ and then the racial or sexual slur, ‘n***er’, ‘Sp*c’, ‘f*g’, ‘k*ke’, ‘Ch*nk’ and ‘retard’. Sargon then protests against all this, and claims it’s perfectly acceptable to call Asians ‘ch*nks’ because they are more privileged than Whites. He then ends his video with a piece of text reading

DON’T LET THESE AUTHORITARIAN BUSYBODIES CONTROL YOU.

IT’S NOT UP TO YOU TO PROTECT THE FEELINGS OF OTHERS, IT IS FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL TO DO THAT FOR THEMSELVES.

AND IT CAN BE SO LIBERATING TO BE PURILE [sic] OCCASIONALLY.

GOD FORBID THESE STODGY BASTARDS OUTLAW OFFENDING PEOPLE.

Oh yes, and just to be really offensive he puts up in front of the Black man the title of a notoriously offensive Danish movie, Gay N*ggers from Space.

The piece by Hope Not Hate also states that Benjamin’s cameraman, Michael Brooks, is another rightist, who has described himself as ’14 and 88′, a far right code mixing ‘Heil Hitler’ with the notorious ’14 words. He has contributed to various far right sites, and once posted a graph showing how the birthrate in Africa was outstripping that in Europe with the phrase, ‘Planet of the Apes is coming’. Brooks appeared alongside Sargon at another Brexit rally organised by UKIP and the Islamophobe Tommy Robinson.

UKIP Euro Candidate’s Vile Racial Slur-Ridden Rant

And this week Sargon kicked off his campaign in his home town of Swindon. He arranged to meet his public by the fountain, before moving to the pub, which he considered to be a more comfortable environment. He showed his characteristic lack of punctuality by turning up half an hour late. No-one from the mainstream media bother to be in attendance, and even the reporter from the Swindon Advertiser packed it in and went off after a while. Which doesn’t bode well for Sargon’s media coverage. Not that he can really complain – he deliberately baited them at the UKIP press conference, expecting to be able to pick up votes online. Kevin Logan pointed out that what he doesn’t seem to understand is that of his million subscribers, many are abroad and so can’t vote for him, while those in Britain are spread all over the country, so that there may be very few of his supporters in the southwest. Which means that the number of people, who know who he is, yet alone intend to vote for him, may be very small. He did turn up in Bristol on Wednesday, where he had a small gathering, but the UKIP rally was vastly overshadowed by Change UK’s.

See Kevin Logan’s and Kristi Winter’s video discussing Sargon’s campaign at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOd0KMVJDBQ&t=7193s This is two and three-quarters of an hour long, but the last 50 minutes or so are about an incident in America where the racist YouTuber Andy Warski was threatened with violence for his stupid antics.

Also, as Zelo Street has pointed out, Aubrey Attwater, the chairman of UKIP’s Swindon branch, has also demanded Sargon’s deselection because of his rape tweet. See https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/04/carl-benjamin-forgotten-already.html

Sargon is proud of having appeared at the European parliament supporting UKIP, but this looks like it’s going to be the high point of his career. With antagonism, hostility and apathy from the press and his own local party, and more general outrage from the rest of the population at his racism, misogyny and bigotry, hopefully Sargon’s hopes to be an MEP are doomed to failure.

Torygraph Predicts Labour Set to Win General Election

Ho ho! An article in yesterday’s I for Monday, 15th April 2019, might explain why the Sunset Times was so keen to try another anti-Semitism smear against the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn the day before. The article, entitled ‘Labour on course to win general election’ by Cahal Milmo reported the findings of a poll by the Sunday Torygraph that in a general election, Labour would defeat the Tories, taking 59 seats from them. The article ran

The Conservative Party faces being swept from power by Jeremy Corbyn with the loss of nearly 60 seats in the event of a general election, according to new polling.

Labour would become the largest party in the House of Commons with prominent Tories, including the Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd and arch Brexiteer Iain Duncan Smith at “high risk” of losing their seats.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that the steep fall in support was being fueled by anger among Conservative voters at the party’s failure to deliver Brexit on 29th March, despite repeated promises by Theresa May that the date would not be changed.

Professor Sir John Curtice, president of the British Polling Council, told the paper that it appeared Leave voters were being drawn back to Ukip or Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.

The “poll of polls” by Electoral Calculus, based on surveys of 8,561 people between 2 and 11 April, found that in the event of an immediate general election Labour would become the largest party with 296 seats against 259 for the Tories – a net loss of 59 MPs for Mrs May’s party.

But despite such a victory, Mr Corbyn would not automatically become prime minister – he could only form a government if he secured support from other parties such as the SNP.

“The Conservatives’ failure so far to secure Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union is at risk of costing them dearly,” said Sir John. (p. 6).

While it’s refreshing to read a story that predicts Labour winning a general election, obviously it’s still incredibly biased. It comes from the Torygraph, and follows that rag’s pro-Brexit line. But while I don’t doubt that the Tories’ continued incompetence, factionalism and May’s stubborn determination to hang on to power and force through the same tired, discredited and utterly unwanted deal, there are other powerful factors that might bring about a Labour victory.

Firstly, as Mike has also pointed out this week, Remainer Tories are also being drawn towards the Tinge Group, Change UK, thus disproving their claims to be ‘centrist’ Labour. And secondly, Labour’s policies are massively popular. People want the health service renationalized and restored, electricity, water and the railways taken back into state ownership, the trade unions strengthened, workers given better employment rights and places in the boardroom, as well as the creation of a proper welfare state. All the policies that the Tories and the rest of the neoliberal establishment hate with a passion, and revile as just a return to the policies of the 1970s.

But Labour are very definitely ahead in the polls, but rather than admit that this is because the Party is genuinely popular and neoliberalism and Thatcherism are dead, zombie economics, the Torygraph is trying to spin this to discredit the ‘Remain’ camp within the Tory party. But hopefully it won’t be too long before there is a Labour election victory, and the entire Tory party is swept from power and kept out for decades.

Charity Claims Brits Turning Away from Parliamentary Democracy to Strong Rulers

There’s an ominous piece in today’s I, Monday, 8th April 2019, reporting that a charity, the Hansard Society, has found that British people are increasingly fed up with parliamentary and looking instead for a strong ruler that govern without its consent. The article by Joe Gammie, ‘Britons want new rules – and new leaders’ runs

Growing public dissatisfaction with Britain’s political system is leading people to entertain “radical solutions” which challenge the core tenets of democracy, a charity has warned.

The annual Hansard Society audit of political engagement found that nearly three-quarters of people felt the UK’s system of governing needed “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of improvement.

At 72 per cent, this is the highest level in the 15 years the audits have been published – worse than the previous peak of 69 per cent in the 2010 study which was taken in the aftermath of the MPs’ expenses scandal and the financial crises.

The research and education charity warned that the increasing public dissatisfaction with the system of governing meant some people were saying Britain needed a “strong leader willing to break the rules” and that the country’s problems could be better deal with if the Government did not not have to worry about parliamentary approval.

Dr Ruth Fox, the director of the Hansard Society, said: “This year’s audit of political engagement shows that the public are not apathetic about politics, but they are increasingly dissatisfied with the way our system of governing works – so much so that sizeable numbers are willing to entertain quite radical solutions that would challenge core tenets of our democracy. (p.6).

The article seems to be saying that a majority of Brits now want a strong ruler, who gets things done without parliamentary checks. It means they’re turning to centralised, authoritarian, personal government. And the end of that road are the highly authoritarian regimes of leaders like Putin, or outright dictatorship.

I have some caveats about the article. It doesn’t describe how the polling was conducted, how large the canvassed groups were, or its composition. There is no information on precisely which sections of society made up the polled group, or their voting preferences or political allegiances. I’ve also read similar scare stories in the press before, where an organisation claimed they had found, for example, that 2/3 of Brits would support a strongly anti-immigrant party of the type of the BNP or National Front. In fact, while there is massive demand for restrictions on immigration, and as we’ve seen with successive governments, a very harsh, punitive approach to immigrants and asylum seekers, there’s very little support for the parties of the extreme Right. They’re a danger, and shouldn’t be encouraged, but they attract only tiny minority of supporters. People instead look to the mainstream parties to formulate and carry out policies against immigration. I think the same attitude underlies the comments here, if they can be believed. Those demanding a more centralised, personal government doubtless want it carried out within the system, rather than parliamentary democracy to be smashed and completely overthrown by an aspiring dictator like Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists tried in the 1930s.

If there is such radical dissatisfaction with parliament, my guess is that it’s being fueled by the continuing debacle over Brexit, where the different factions in the Tory party are tearing each other to pieces, coupled with Tweezer repeatedly trying and failing to get it all past parliament. In these circumstances, it looks like the 72 per cent demanding a strong leadership against parliament are supporters of Tweezer, who have swallowed her lies and those of the Tory press that the reason no progress is being made is entirely due to treacherous MPs blocking her proposed deal. And not because the deal itself is rubbish and massively unpopular. If there’s a problem, then it’s not with parliament, or rather, not directly, and the solution is not to take power away from it and give it to a Russian-style silovik, or strong man. The proper solution would be to demand a general election to break impasse, one that would put a Labour government and Jeremy Corbyn into No. 10, and allow some real progress to be made.

But this is completely unacceptable to the Tories, for obvious reasons, and the rest of the neoliberal media-industrial complex, who wish to keep the Tories in No. 10 and blame parliament, not the PM, for the continuing massive failure of Brexit.

And this is extremely dangerous. When parliamentary democracy fails, Fascism seizes power. Both Hitler and Mussolini gained power through the failure of parliamentary democracy. In both Germany and Italy, the mainstream parties elected to parliament refused to work with each other. Hitler and Mussolini were then invited by the governing party to join a coalition in order to give them a majority. They did so, and then passed legislation giving their parties an overwhelming majority, and then destroying parliamentary democracy altogether through banning rival parties and elevating Hitler and Mussolini to positions of supreme leadership, Fuehrer in German, Duce in Italian.

There is also another danger to parliamentary democracy right at the opposite pole to political fragmentation. This is when it becomes discredited when MPs from an opposition party join the government without a mandate from their own party or constituency. For example, last week Tom Watson, the conniving deputy leader of the Labour party and other right-wing Labour MPs announced that they would be willing to join Tweezer and the Tories in a government of national unity. Watson has spent his time as deputy leader intriguing against the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who has the overwhelming support of party members. A sizable section of the parliamentary Labour party has also plotted to undermine and overthrow Corbyn, against the wishes of their own constituency parties and the members of the Party as a whole. The result has been a series of ‘no confidence’ votes against right-wing, Thatcherite MPs like Joan Ryan and Luciana Berger. Who responded by smearing their opponents as Communists, misogynists and anti-Semites, and then split to help form Change UK, thus betraying the Labour supporters and activists that got them elected. It’s been pointed out that Watson and co. do form a coalition with Tweezer, it would effectively be an anti-democratic coup, carried out by parliament against the wishes of the wider electorate.

Parallels have also been drawn between this and the coalition government of 1929, when Ramsay McDonald, then leader of the Labour party, joined forces with the Tories to introduce a series of cuts that hit the working class. This split the Labour party, and McDonald was thrown out. He has been reviled ever since as a traitor to the party. This may well be what Watson wants, as he and other Labour right-wingers were talking of coups and forming splinter groups long before The Independent Group finally took the plunge. It’s part of their plot to marginalise genuine socialism, and retain power under the name of the Labour party for Thatcherite entryists like themselves. But if they do take this step, it will discredit parliament, and the result could a further turn to radical solutions demanding the removal of parliamentary democracy or its radical curtailment.

It’s also similar to the plans for a coup in the mid-’70s to overthrow Harold Wilson’s minority government. The Times then was demanding a government of national unity, to include moderate Labour MPs like Shirley Williams alongside the Tories. This was to be achieved by a military coup and everyone else further left was to be rounded up and interned.

If the Hansard Society is correct, and people are becoming radically dissatisfied with parliamentary government, then the solution isn’t the greater centralisation of power in the Prime Minister. Tweezer is the cause of this problem. She has put her own personal interest in remaining premier, and her vile party’s determination to cling on to power at whatever the cost to the British people ahead of her duty to the country. Just as the Labour right has put its own privileges and Thatcherite agenda before the wishes of their constituents and the needs of the British people. The solution to these problems should be more democracy, so that Tweezer has no choice but to obey the wishes of parliament, and cannot pass the buck by blaming them for her own failures. At the same time, Watson and the rest of the Thatcherites should be brought to heel and made to represent their constituents, not their own selfish interests.

But this is too much for the British establishment and media, who will continue to support Tweezer against parliament, until people really are completely fed up with the whole charade. And then will come the real danger of demands for proper authoritarian government. But if it’s against the Left, this will certainly be backed by the Times and the rest of the press. All in the interests of national unity, of course.