Sent Off the Suggested Motions from the Labour Left to My Local Labour Party

Okay, folks, I’ve sent off the model motions that the Arise Festival of Left Labour Ideas suggested to their followers and supporters that they should propose them to their local Labour parties ready for the upcoming Labour conference to my local party in south Bristol. I put up a piece yesterday showing what they were: renationalising the public utilities, including education and the NHS; ending the deportations to Rwanda; raising the minimum wage to £15; and stopping the further Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. All excellent policies. I don’t know if they’ll be proposed at the meeting, as the email I got from them about the meeting said they had six already. But you have to try.

As for whether or not they’ll be accepted and passed by conference even if they are passed by the local party, well, unfortunately the ‘100 per cent Zionist’ Starmer is in charge, a true-Blue Labour Tory infiltrator. And there’s Jess Philips, who said that Labour would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories. Neither of them would welcome these policies, and neither would the rest of the Blairites now packed in the parliamentary Labour party. But there’s always hope.

Update

After sending them off I got a kind reply from the local party secretary stating that they’re only accepting one proposed motion per person. So which one would like I like to choose? It’s a hard one, as they’re all good and necessary. However, I chose the £15 minimum pay rise because people are starving and they need the money now. I really hope it goes through.

Other motions being proposed for the local meeting this Thursday include:

Green New Deal – Proportional Representation – Support for Striking Workers

Reproductive Rights – International Development – Industrial Strategy (End UK Childcare Crisis).

Reproductive rights obviously refers to abortion, which people are afraid is threatened after the repeal of Roe vs Wade in America.

Paxo Draws Blood Again and Savages May

The Beeb’s crowing about how they caught out Jeremy Corbyn over the costs of free childcare on Woman’s Hour has shown several things that the Beeb definitely wouldn’t have intended. Firstly, it revealed how massively biased the Corporation is towards the Tories. As the French Philosophical Feline, Guy Debord’s Cat, has pointed out, the Beeb never, or rarely ever, asks where the money is going to come from when the Tories announce tax cuts. It sounds counterintuitive, but he makes the point that tax cuts also involve costs as well. Not that this would have mattered – none of the Tories’ policies are costed. But it also shows how desperate the Beeb and the Tories are getting, now that Corbyn is closing the gap between them and Labour.

A poll conducted shortly before the Manchester bombing showed that the gap was down to 5 per cent.

Hence the Beeb trying to make as much out of this minor victory as possible.

Last night, May and Corbyn were interviewed separately by Paxo. And, for many people, May’s performance was a debacle, while Corbyn came out far better. How poorly May performed can be seen on the clips Mike put up on his blog earlier today.

Paxo showed that he still had the power to lay into the great and powerful after leaving Newsnight and becoming the scourge of student quiz teams on University Challenge. Commenting on May’s various U-turns, such as when she announced she wouldn’t call a general election, and then did, and reversals she had made over Brexit, he said that instead of finding someone who was a good negotiator, the EC’s politicos and functionaries would instead find ‘a blowhard who falls down at the first sign of gunfire’. May, at least, had the decency to acknowledge they were U-turns, but tried explaining them away as necessitated by the circumstances.

And the responses from Twitter have been brilliant. WirralinItTogether, in response to Paxo’s brief, pithy characterisation of May as a negotiator, posted a picture of a little girl falling out of her chair laughing. Tory Fibs put up a list of the devastating cuts that have been inflicted on the NHS, and their equally devastating effects, like waiting lists are now at a seven year high. Members of the audience laughed at her, were seen mouthing ‘that’s bollocks’ when she spoke. And Martin Lewis posted the results of the poll.

Asked who they believed won,
48 per cent, who also supported Labour, thought he’d won.
37 per cent, who were not supporters of Labour, also thought he had.
11 per cent, who were Tories, though May had won.
And 9 per cent, who weren’t Tories, believed May had been the victor.

For more information, go to Mike’s blog, at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/30/battle-for-number-10-more-of-a-rout-as-theresa-may-falls-apart-under-questioning/

He has various clips, including a whole video of the interviews, so you can judge for yourself, along with other Tweets and videos showing Labour’s promises, including their pledge to reverse the damage to Britain’s security inflicted by May’s cuts to the police, border guards and armed forces.

Biased BBC Savages Corbyn over Woman’s Hour Slip of Childcare and Brexit

I’m writing this up because I’ve just had all I can stomach from the biased BBC and its blatant partisanship against Jeremy Corbyn and in favour of Theresa May. As Mike has already blogged, Jeremy Corbyn was asked on Woman’s Hour about how much his plan to give free childcare for children between the ages of two and four would cost. The Labour leader had forgotten it, and so the interviewer, Emma Barnett, pressed him on this point. Mike states that the Beeb has been making much of this, running it on their website and discussing it on the Daily Politics.

It has also been played up on this evening’s Six O’clock News, where George Alagiah and John Pienaar have been gloating about it. They’ve played the interview as if it was a triumphant ‘Gotcha!’, with Barnett asking how the public can trust him with their money if he doesn’t know how much this will all cost. Alagiah and Pienaar were saying pretty much the same thing themselves, with Pienaar commenting that Corbyn would need to convince more people.

Pienaar did cover the loud welcome the Labour leader was given when he went to meet his supporters, but he sneered that it couldn’t be worse (than the Woman’s Hour interview) and declared that he needed all the friends he could get.

The programme then moved on to the Tories, where it was all about Theresa May’s claim that she was the best person to negotiate with Europe, and then if Corbyn goes into negotiate, he will be ‘naked and alone’. This was then followed by a vox pop with two ladies with Brummie accents saying how impressed they were with Theresa May, because everything she did was wonderful, and they didn’t like Corbyn.

At that point, I gave up. It was one of the worse, most blatantly biased pieces of journalism I’ve seen outside the Tory press.

And many people have been similarly unimpressed. Mike over at Vox Political has reblogged some of the Tweets people have put up condemning the Beeb for the handling of the Woman’s Hour interview. They’re worth reading, as they rightly point out that Corbyn and the Labour party have costed their proposals. It’s the Tories, who haven’t. Owen Jones commented that the press is rewarding the Tories for insulting the electorate by not costing their proposals, while ‘Isobel’ commented that this was ‘typical Woman’s Hour, insulting women and children just to get at Corbyn. She also made the point that the programme apparently had the attitude that only good Tory women listened to their programme.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/30/bbcs-shame-attack-on-corbyn-over-womans-hour-interview-is-crushed-by-the-public/

Alagiah and Pienaar made much of the Labour leader’s failure to provide the costing for childcare, citing that it showed that Labour didn’t know how the extra money would have to be raised through new taxation. This shows where the real anxiety comes from.

Yes, folks, we’re back to the Tory scare tactics that Labour is going to grind ‘hard-working’ people down with a massively increased tax burden.

In fact, most people won’t be paying any new taxes. The only people who will, will be the extremely wealthy earning over £80,000.

People pretty much like upper 25 per cent of the population, who have done extremely well from the Tories, and from the poverty, insecurity and hunger they have inflicted on the other 75 per cent of the population. That means top earning BBC producers and presenters. Such as, I’ve no doubt, George Alagaiah and John Pienaar.

As for Theresa May being a tougher, better equipped negotiator for Brexit than Corbyn, don’t make me laugh! Mike also reblogged this little piece of damning judgement from Ian Dunt of the politics.co.uk website.

“So what can we learn about May’s negotiating tactics over Brexit from the way she has handled this election? She makes spur-of-the-moment decisions for which she has not prepared. She is a control freak who receives too little advice from outside her immediate circle. She pays insufficient attention to limitations in her operational capacity. She does not stress-test ideas before implementing them. When the ideas then fall apart she quickly capitulates, but even then is unable to halt the bleeding. She U-turns in a way which maximises the humiliation but does not close down the issue. She makes promises which will do little to benefit her but which make her disproportionately vulnerable in other areas. She diminishes her reputation with the very people she most needs on side in order to placate those who she already has on side. She adopts a strategy upon which she is unable to deliver.”

See:http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/30/if-jeremy-corbyn-went-alone-and-naked-into-brexit-negotiations-hed-still-be-better-dressed-than-theresa-may/

In fact, it’s very clear that Theresa May is nothing like a good negotiator. Remember when she turned up at a Euro meeting, and they all snubbed her? And she has absolutely no clue what she thinks she can achieve, or at least she didn’t. For some time when asked about Brexit all you got was waffled about how she would try to get the best deal for Britain – as if nobody else would have the same objective – and then follow it up with the mantra ‘Brexit means Brexit’, repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

What makes this all worse is Pienaar’s sneer about Labour promising us all ‘nice things’. No, John – Labour’s proposals aren’t about ‘nice things’, as you so patronisingly call them. This is about issues of life and death.

Let’s put some stats to this.

There are over 100,000 people in this country, who have to use food banks. Whatever lies Dominic Raab and Tories like him spew, they don’t do it because it’s free food. They do it because if they don’t, they die of starvation.

And there is something deeply wrong in this country, when nurses have to use it. Well, Andrew Neil asked May about this, and it was damning that she didn’t have an answer except, ‘There are complex reasons’.

And 600 or so people have died of starvation after being thrown off disability benefit through the heinous work capability tests. They have been the subject of artworks, very moving videos on YouTube, and commemorated by Johnny Void, Stilloaks, Vox Political, and so on. Mike a few days posted a piece about a disabled man, who took his own life after the DWP told him his benefit had been overpaid, and he was due to be investigated for fraud.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/24/grandfather-took-his-own-life-because-dwp-said-hed-been-overpaid-but-wouldnt-reveal-the-amount/

As for the NHS, the Tories are starving it of funds and privatising it piecemeal, making sure more services are commissioned from private healthcare companies, and more hospitals turned over to them to run. Because they’ve been following the standard line of privatising it by stealth since Maggie Thatcher. Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt were both enthusiasts of private healthcare, as are many of the Tories.

And if you want to know how well private healthcare performs, you only have to see the American system, where 50 million people couldn’t get proper insurance coverage and 30,000 people die ever year because they can’t afford the doctor’s and hospitals’ bills.

And it was very, very much like this in Britain before the Nye Bevan and Clement Atlee set up the NHS.

So if you want more poverty, more starvation, and people dying because healthcare has been privatised, and they can’t afford whatever it is they’re being charged by Unum, Circle Health, Virgin Healthcare and Bupa, then vote Tory.

If, however, you want people to have proper education, proper healthcare and be able to go home at night secure in the knowledge that they’ll have something to feed themselves and their children without relying on charity, then you have only one choice.

Vote Labour.

As for Pienaar and Alagaiah, I’m sick of them. They’re now as bad as Laura Kuensberg. With this disgraceful hatchet job, they’ve shown they’ve thrown away any pretence at objective journalism long ago.

Starvation: the Latest Part in the Tories Long Campaign against Young Mothers

Mike this evening put up a piece reporting that a survey of 300 young mothers found that they were experiencing severe financial problems. Two-thirds of those questioned said that they were only just managing, and a quarter had been forced to use food banks.

This is disgusting, and Mike takes apart the equally revolting attempts of the DWP to put a positive spin on these statistics. They claimed that it was ‘encouraging’ that more children were living in ‘working households’. Mike points out the obvious: this has absolutely nothing to do with child poverty. Similarly, doubling free childcare for three and four years may look like an improvement, but it’s questionable how many this will actually help.

And he also shoots down the lie that ‘work coaches’ are ‘encouraging people into jobs’. They don’t encourage. They just bully, adding more stress to people already under considerable financial strain.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/03/28/young-mothers-are-starving-because-they-are-shortchanged-on-benefits-and-cant-find-paying-work/

Mike makes clear the reasons why these young women are starving: they’re being short-changed on benefits, and can’t find paying work. This is, of course, all part of the Tories long campaign to create a cowed, impoverished workforce willing to accept any job, no matter how poor the conditions and pay.

But it’s also part of the deeper Tory hostility to young mothers. Mike acknowledges this in his article, stating that the Tories’ hidden policy here is to prevent people having children at a young age. He’s right, and some of them have expressed their hatred of young mums in particularly grotesque rhetoric. Way back in the 1970s Maggie’s mentor, Keith Joseph, declared that unmarried teen mothers were ‘a threat to our stock’ – a nasty eugenicist turn of phrase, for which he was rightly pilloried. It’s even more sinister when you realise that Sweden continued sterilising people on eugenics grounds right into the 1970s. Among those targeted for sterilisation as a threat to Swedish genetic stock were promiscuous young women. I don’t know if Joseph wanted to see such legislation introduced here, so he could sterilise a few British unmarried mothers. Given his comments, it really wouldn’t surprise me.

A little while ago I posted up here episodes I found on YouTube of a BBC series broadcast in the 1980s investigating government secret and the way this undermined democracy. In one edition of the programme, they discussed the way the police had compiled secret reports and records of ordinary people they found suspicious, even though they had committed no crime. These included young people simply following the latest fashions in dress and music, like punks. In one area, they were also writing down the names of young pregnant women, who did not appear to have boyfriends.

And then in the 1990 there was the unsavoury spectacle of Peter Lilley prancing about the stage at the Tory conference one year, reading out his ‘little list’ in what he thought was a parody of the Mikado. On it, amongst all the other people, like the unemployed and welfare recipients he and the rest of the attendees hated were unmarried mothers.

This is why so many young mothers are finding it so difficult to cope now. The Tories have always despised them as part of the ‘undeserving’ poor, to use the language of the Victorians that Maggie thought was so ‘virtuous’. And so I doubt very much whether they are at all sorry to see these poor young women starve. In fact, given the eugenicist views expressed by Keith Joseph, I can imagine some are probably only too delighted.

Which raises the question whether these women are also part of those targeted for ‘chequebook genocide’ – the term Mike has coined for those the Tories seem happy to see starve to death after having their benefits removed. Mike coined the term in response to the deaths and mass poverty caused by the DWP and their wretched Work Capability Assessment. As Jeffrey Davies on here has pointed out, the congenitally disabled were the subject of Nazi extermination as well as the Jews, Gypsies and others they considered subhuman. Mike and many other bloggers from the Left and disability rights movements have speculated whether the Tories have the same policy, but heavily disguised. The news that a quarter of young mothers now have to use food banks makes you wonder if they’re also targeted for extermination as a threat to ‘our stock’, in the same way that the Swedes also forcibly sterilised promiscuous young women.

Conservatives Want Primary Schoolchildren to Be Taught To Work Not Live on Benefits

This is how desperate the Tories are to try to stop people claiming unemployment benefit. According to a couple of pieces in today’s I, the Tories want children in primary schools to be taught about work and careers in order to stop them claiming benefits. It says in the article on page two, Primary Children ‘to Attend Career Talks’ that

Ministers are considering proposals that would oblige children to attend careers talks before they finish primary school to help discourage them from claiming benefits in the future. The initiative will be particularly relevant in communities with high adult unemployment, but teaching unions feel careers talks at 11 could be “too much too soon”.

This was all outlined in a speech given by Sam Gyimah, the education and childcare minister, to the Westminster Employment Forum. The article, Children in Primary School ‘Should Learn about Work’, by Oliver Wright, gives further information, and begins

Primary school children are to be taught by the time they leave junior school at age 11 that “in the future they will work”, under new proposals being considered by ministers.

Information and talk about future careers will be included in the curriculum while at the same time teachers will be expected to act early make clear connections between reading, writing and arithmetic and decent jobs in the future. Ministers believe the new initiative will be particularly relevant in communities with high adult unemp0loyment as part of a wider effort to end the cycle of benefit dependency.

However, teaching unions have expressed some concern at the plan, qu4estioning whether careers talks at 11 are a case of “too much too soon”.

The newspaper also gives the criticisms of the proposal by Christine Blower, the general secretary of the NUT. The I states that she

said while she agreed that it was good for children to learn about work, she had concerns. “There is a danger of ‘too much too soon’ in what is proposed,” she said. “School should be a preparation for life, and there is no better means to achieve this than through a creative space in the curriculum for teachers to discuss issues about the outside world, including work.”

As if schoolchildren aren’t under enough pressure already to get good grades.

I also wonder where the Tories get their ideas from. Young children have always had some idea that they were going to work after leaving school, as well as generally idealistic dreams about the kind of jobs they want to do, like train drivers, scientists, police, firemen, hairdressers, pop stars, and, when the space programme was still glamorous, astronauts. I think some schools already do arrange for outsiders to come in to tell primary school children about the jobs they do. I do voluntary work at one of the local schools helping children with their reading. When I was going there the week before last, a number of children in the playground asked me if I was ‘the doctor’. I thought at first that they meant, The Doctor, and felt like saying that I might be ancient, but I’m not over a thousand years old, don’t come from a different planet, and, sadly, don’t have a TARDIS. It turns out that they meant an ordinary medical doctor. One was coming in that afternoon, along with other professionals, to tell them about the kind of work they did.

This isn’t just about preparing children for the world of work, though. It’s about getting them to internalise the Tory belief system that if you’re unemployed, then it’s all your fault. You should have studied harder at school. It also seems to be part of the belief that people are voluntarily unemployed, because they want to be scroungers. No matter how often that belief is attacked, how often it is refuted, it still doesn’t get through their thick, brutal heads. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they still believe that the majority of people on the dole are there because they want to be there, because they’re lazy, or feckless.

Now it strikes me that the most powerful disincentive to trying anything at school is simply the lack of available jobs when you leave. To some children it may well seem that there is no point in working as hard as possible, if it will do them absolutely no good in the end. And the incessant testing schoolchildren are made to go through could also act as a disincentive. If you’re told you’re no good at reading, or mathematics, at a young age, it might stop some children trying to improve if they somehow get the impression that this will never happen. The school at which my mother taught also used to test children regularly, but this was intended to be diagnostic only, to show where the children needed more work in order to improve.

This latest proposal by Gyimah and other, unnamed ‘ministers’, is all about getting children to internalise Tory ideology. That the state will not provide jobs or welfare benefits, and unemployment is due purely to personal failure, not their disastrous handling of the economy based on an economic theory that deliberately sets an unemployment rate at 6 per cent. It should be thrown out, along with them.

Vox Political on Cameron’s Lies at Tory Conference

Mike over at Vox Political has also written a piece attacking Cameron’s lies at the Tory party conference. In response to Cameron’s claim that he’s going to give the British people a government that supports them, and gives them a good home, a well paid job, a well-funded and operating NHS, access to childcare, effectively managed immigration, and so on, Mike shows how the Tories in practice have broken every one of these promises. And it’s a long list.

Mike also goes further, and tackles one particular lie: that Jeremy Corbyn thought that the US’ assassination of Osama bin Laden was unjust, with the implication that Corbyn somehow supported al-Qaeda.

I’ve already posted pieces about how Guy Debord’s Cat now has articles on his blog showing that the Tories are lying about Corbyn and his supposed support for terrorism, and the Tories own clandestine talks with the IRA. Not to mention their Unionist allies links to Loyalist paramilitaries in Ulster.

It seems I may have made a mistake, though. I thought given the Tories’ previous form of accusing Labour of sympathising with the IRA, they meant that Corby was a supporter of Irish Republican terrorism. No, apparently they would like us all to believe that he’s a supporter of Islamist terror.

Mike points out that this is another gross lie and misrepresentation of what Corbyn actually stands for. Corbyn opposed bin Laden’s assassination, not because he supported him, but because he wanted him captured and brought to trial for the deaths and destruction he and his wretched allies have committed. Corbyn condemned bin Laden’s killing by the US as unjust, because he wanted him to face justice in the form of a court of law. And if bin Laden had been captured, he would also be interrogated and we could glean valuable information that would help us act against al-Qaeda.

This is very different from Cameron ranting about how Corbyn supposedly has now time for the 3,000 or so who were killed in 9/11. But then, the Tories have always lied about Labour being somehow in cahoots with the enemy, whichever enemy that happens to be. They’ve done it going all the way back to the 1920s and the Zinoviev Letter, forms of which were re-run again by the Scum in the 1987 election, and then by the Times when it smeared Michael Foot as a KGB spy. Well, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the government is busily trying to ingratiate itself with the capitalist giant that is ‘Communist’ China, so they can’t exactly run another Red Scare. So they’re trying to smear him as a supporter of Islamist terrorism.

This is part of a strategy Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have been running for about ten years or so now. A decade ago the Spectator carried a book review of a novel set in a future Europe, where the remains of the European Socialist parties have merged with Muslim organisations to seize power and begin a new holocaust against the Jews. One part of Republican propaganda, echoed by Tories like the Dorset MP, Daniel Hannan, and the bloggers at the Telegraph, is that the Nazis were Socialists. There is also endless discussion about the threat Islam poses to democracy, and how it is being promoted by ‘left wing enablers’. Like the Democrats in America, and the Labour party over here. And year in, year out, for most of Obama’s administration, they’ve been accusing him of being a Communist-Nazi Muslim infiltrator intent on destroying America from within. They can’t do that exactly to Corbyn, as he’s white with a British name and, unlike Obama, doesn’t come from a Muslim background. So, if they can’t accuse him of being a terrorist infiltrator, they’ve tried smearing him as a terrorist supporter.

It’s still lies and smears, and shows that the Tories really haven’t changed. It’s the same tactics they’ve always used.

But the observation Mike makes about bin Laden being a potentially valuable source of information to the US if he had been captured alive in itself raises some very, very unsettling questions. Of the 19 terrorists behind 9/11, 17 were Saudis. Bin Laden came from one of their leading business families. His family were in America at the time the atrocity occurred, and were allowed to fly back home to Saudi Arabia before the investigation started. This in itself has raised considerable suspicion amongst the Conspiracy fringe. You don’t, however, have to believe that the US secret state organised 9/11 to believe that there is something highly suspicious about the bin Laden being allowed to leave the country before the investigation. Saudi Arabia does support a number of Islamist terrorist organisations, including al-Qaeda, but no-one in the Western ruling elite really wants to admit or confront that fact. It looks to me that the bin Laden family were allowed to leave America in order to prevent them revealing anything politically inconvenient, like how far the Saudis were involved in supporting 9/11. And the same could be said about the assassination of bin Laden himself. Was he shot and killed in execution for his crimes, or simply because, if captured, he would have said too much about the support for his organisation back home in Saudi Arabia?

Mike’s article is at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/10/07/camerons-lies-show-he-must-go-now-not-later-and-all-the-other-tories-with-him/. Go and read it to see how badly Cameron is lying.