I really don’t want to labour the point about the witch hunt and victimisation of decent, anti-racist members and supporters of the Labour Party under the pretext of purging it of anti-Semitism. But I wanted to show graphically how utterly pathetic and grotesque it was. Images that showed how far from reality the Blairites’ and British establishment’s idea of who anti-Semites are.
This photo below is of John Tyndall and Martin Webster, two of the fuhrers of the National Front at a demonstration. It’s from Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987).
They were the face of British Fascism when I was growing up in the 1980s. The caption for the photo reads:
John Tyndall and Martin Webster at an NF demonstration. Tyndall’s imitation of Mosely’s style with the use of flags, megaphone and inter-war economic and political programmes is combined with a thinly disguised and cleaned-up version of Arnold Leese’s obsession with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and gutter racism. It is presented in the more acceptable language of the conservative fascist tradition with due homage to the influence of A.K. Chesterton.
And This Is What They Don’t!
This is Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the two left-wing Jews recently suspended from the Labour Party. She’s the vice-chair of Chingford CLP and one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Labour, and has been vocal in her support for Jeremy Corbyn. She is absolutely no kind of racist, anti-Semite or Fascist. Quite the opposite. I found this photo of her on the web. It’s from the Socialist Workers’ YouTube channel, SWP TV. And while I don’t agree with the Socialist Workers, the image does show her commitment to combating racism. The image is blurred, but behind her there are posters urging people to fight Fascism and racism, as well as the attacks on benefits and climate change.
She’s been targeted because, like Moshe Machover, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and many others, she’s the ‘wrong kind of Jew’. The British establishment wants the Jewish community to conform to an unswerving support for Israel. Any Jew that steps out of line, like the peeps above, is immediately accused and reviled as ‘self-hating’ and anti-Semitic. They suffer truly horrific abuse and death threats. Mira Bar Hillel, another Jewish journalist, has said that many Jews are afraid of speaking out about Israel because of this. But as these images show, there are very many Jews like Naomi and the others, who aren’t afraid to criticise Israel and attack its apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
This appears to be Naomi at another pro-Palestinian event, and as you can see from the slogans and the name of the organisation on the banner, it’s a Jewish event. The slogan reads ‘It’s Kosher to Boycott Israeli Goods’. And underneath the organisation’s monicker is Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods.
This is why Naomi and the others are being accused of anti-Semitism and self-hatred. Despite the fact that they are not ashamed of their Jewish identity. If they were, they’d try to hide it, and if they really were Nazis, you’d see them with real Nazis. They wouldn’t stand on the barricades fighting them, as the above do.
Here’s another, related pic showing a banner for the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.
I don’t know who this organisation is, but I would imagine they were another group of Jews outraged at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. So, more of the ‘wrong kind of Jews’, the kind of Jews the establishment don’t want you see or even know exist.
I hope these images show very clearly the difference between the real and falsely accused anti-Semites. The real anti-Semites are Fascists thugs like Tyndall, Webster, and their successors, Nick Griffin, National Action and the rest. They aren’t respectable Jewish ladies or eminent Israeli mathematicians and philosophers, like Moshe Machover, or ordinary, Labour supporting Jews like Martin Odoni or Tony Greenstein. Real Nazis and anti-Semites tend not to speak to Marxist gatherings about anti-racism and the fight against fascism.
It’s a travesty that left-wing Jews like Naomi and the others are being smeared and purged simply for being left-wing and critical of Israel. Just as it is that decent, anti-racist non-Jews like Mike, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth and Jeremy Corbyn himself are being smeared.
This shameful farrago has to stop. Now. They should all be reinstated and their accusers instead suspended and tried for their sectarian anti-Semitism. It is they who are really bringing the Labour Party in disrepute!
Please hold your noses for this, as it’s a video from the Torygraph. It’s of part of speech Corbyn made at Bangor University in Wales in which the Labour leader denounces Universal Credit, pledges not to sell off the NHS, make Social Care universally available, bring the utilities back into public ownership, give remote communities broadband internet, and compensate WASPI women. And the pride with which he describes his announcement that the Labour party would end Universal Credit in Iain Duncan Smith’s own constituency is a direct challenge to the wretched policy’s architect. The Labour leader begins
In 2010 a political choice was made. They could have invested for the future. Instead, they decided to cut for the present and damage the life chances of a whole generation of people all across the UK. And that austerity started off with Universal Credit being rolled out. Universal Credit, which is cruel in the way it operates, brutal in the way it does PIP assessments, Work Assessments, the way in which it does not give support to children in larger families…
I was very proud to go to Chingford and Woodford Green in the northeast of London, a constituency represented by Iain Duncan Smith and announce a Labour government will end Universal Credit. This is greeted with applause.
You can’t cut your way to prosperity! You invest your way to prosperity! And there’s no more important investment than investing in young people, children and the next generation. And that is what – applause – and that is what I want our Labour government to do. More applause.
Under Labour our NHS is not for sale to anybody… I want Social Care available for everybody all across the UK and I’ll save this today(?) to make that available. Applause.
Our manifesto here, this wonderful red book, I’ve got two red books, one in which I write my memoirs, notes and speeches, and this one is the manifesto – they’re actually much the same thing really….
We, the Labour government, will compensate the WASPI women. Applause.
I’ll give you an example. Less than 18 hours after he’d become Prime Minister he came to parliament to make a statement and announced there were going to be 40 new hospitals. I was very impolite and asked him where they were going to be. Corbyn then imitates Johnson’s blustering manner, saying there’s no answer to that, old boy, it’s not possible, how can I possibly know…
A Labour government will be one that will empower people but will also ensure that public ownership comes back for rail, mail and water, the national grid, and that we will – applause – we will invigorate poor and remote communities by broadband to every part of the UK within 10 years.
These are great policies which will make this country a better, more prosperous and more equal place. A place were it’s people will get the health and social care they need and deserve, women the pensions they should have had, if it weren’t for the Tories, and an end to the austerity that has killed 130,000 people at minimum.
And against that the Tories are offering just more poverty, privatisation, starvation and misery, but are trying to deny this with smears and lies.
Also on the subject of hypocrisy and racism, Buddy Hell has written an excellent little piece about it in the Lib Dems under Jo Swinson. He notes that she said nothing about the Tories Hostile Environment policy and how it disproportionately affected Blacks and Asians, and said little about the Windrush scandal. She also hasn’t raised any objections to the Tories’ persecution of Gypsies and Travellers, has said nothing about islamophobia and has also said little about the rise in hate crimes against people of colour. He observes how she was silent in the House of Commons when Sir Paul Beresford called Travellers ‘a disease’. She has also welcomed into her party former Tory Philip Lee, who has also expressed racist views on immigration, hidden behind coded language. She also welcome the former Labour MP Angela Smith, formerly of the Change group, who infamously referred to people of colour as having a ‘funny tinge’.
The shadow equalities minister, Labour’s Dawn Butler, was also angered by her failure to act properly over the claim of one of Swinson’s activists that Butler had made up her own experience of racism. The activist involved was Steve Wilson, Angela Smith’s husband, Wilson wrote to Butler to apologise, and Swinson said that she believed Butler had been racially discriminated against. But Butler was not satisfied as Swinson had not revealed whether Wilson had been suspended or punished. She also wanted Wilson and Smith to undergo diversity training.
He also notes that before Sam Gyimah and Chuka Umunna arrived, the Lib Dems had no people of colour among their MPs. But Gyimah has shown his character by accusing Labour’s candidate for Kensington, Emma Dent Coad, of being one of those responsible for making the decision to use flammable cladding on Grenfell Tower. Coad hotly denies this, and is suing. Dr Geoffrey Seef, the Lib Dem candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, has also been making coded islamophobic comments against Labour’s Faiza Shaheen, who has complained to Swinson with the support of Dawn Butler. Coded racism isn’t anything new to the Lib Dems either. In 1991 one Langbaugh produced leaflets urging constituents to vote for a ‘local candidate’. Presumably he thought he and his constituents lived in the League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vesey. In 2009 the Lib Dems in Islington were accused of camouflaged racist campaigning against Travellers, and used the same tactics in Tower Hamlets to try and get votes from BNP supporters.
He also describes how Swinson has lied time and again over a number of other matters. Despite claiming that the Lib Dems must own the failures of the coalition with the Tories, she’s done absolutely nothing to change their policies. She was caught lying about her misleading graphs claiming that the Lib Dems were the leading opposition party in certain constituencies by Sophie Ridge on Sky, but continued repeating the lie. She also has fantasies about becoming prime minister, something that is beginning to irritate her followers. He notes that she has done precious little herself about racism and anti-Semitism, while falsely accusing Jeremy Corbyn of it all day long.
Absolutely. She’s a massive liar and hypocrite. She certainly is no progressive, despite her claims. After all, what true progressive would support the Tories’ attacks on the poor and vulnerable through their welfare cuts and the bedroom tax, for example. I also strongly believe that she isn’t a serious remainer, and that it’s just a voting tactic to provide her with an excuse not to go into coalition with Corbyn. If she’s given the opportunity, she will show her true Tory nature and go back into coalition with the Conservatives again. Just like Nick Clegg.
Don’t be fooled by her egregious lies. Don’t vote for her, or the Tories, but Corbyn.
This was put up on the official Jeremy Corbyn Channel on YouTube three days ago, on the 29th of September, 2019. In it, Corbyn states that Labour will end Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship policy of Universal Credit. Corbyn says
Our social security system should support people back into work, not punish them and their families. The Tories’ flagship policy, Universal Credit, has caused an explosion of people going to food banks, pushed children into poverty, and even resulted in people dying at the hands of this cruel system. In government Labour will scrap Universal Credit. We’ll end the inhumane sanctions regime. We’ll do away with the ridiculous five-week wait for payments. And never again will any woman have to fill in a form to prove her child was born as a result of rape. Universal Credit is a heartless and cruel policy based on a lie. It wasn’t the sick, the disabled or the vulnerable who caused the financial crash of 2008. It was the bankers. But the architect of Universal Credit, Iain Duncan Smith and the Tory party, chose to give tax cuts to bankers as they dismantle our social security system. Things will change under Labour. We’ll build a society which is compassionate, where support is there for all of us when we need it. And where people come before privilege.
The video shows Corbyn filling boxes in a food bank, as well as the exterior of a jobcentre, snaps of the City of London, and, unfortunately, shots of Iain Duncan Smith in parliament. Viewer discretion is advised.
It’s the same message Corbyn gave at his speech this weekend in Chingford, IDS’ constituency, that provoked the vile little liar, whose policies have killed tens of thousands of disabled and other people, into a ranting reply on YouTube. He claimed that Corbyn’s policy of restoring Social Security would be unjust to taxpayers – this was his first priority – and that it ignored the fact that work is still the best way out of poverty. This is, simply, a lie. It’s based on discredited, bogus research produced by Unum’s pet scientist at their funded centre at Cardiff University. There is a mountain of proper scientific evidence very loudly refuting it. I’ve published some this on my blog, from material put up by Mike over at Vox Political and Kitty S. Jones and other great disability activists. IDS himself has no understanding of poverty whatsoever. He’s an Eton-educated Toff with a country mansion and acres of land in Scotland. Well, actually, it might be his wife’s, but it’s still his.
Despite the press claiming that the Labour party is behind the Tories in the polls, Corbyn’s policies evidently have the Tories rattled. Boris Johnson has started lying again about building 40 more hospitals – in fact only six, and at least one of those isn’t a hospital. Sajid Javid is claiming that he’s going to build up Britain’s infrastructure. All lies, or at least what Mike Yarwood famously called in one of his impressions ‘election promises’.
Don’t be taken in by Tory lies, and the murderous deceit of the right-wing press and Beeb. Universal Credit is a colossal failure and the cause of more grinding poverty. It is there not because it works, but because it keeps the poor down and so cements the wealthy elite, from whose ranks BoJob and IDS come, in their wealth, power and position. Get them out, and Corbyn in.
Mike put up a piece yesterday about a speech Corbyn had made in Iain Duncan Smith’s constituency of Chingford in which he outlined the Labour party’s reforms of the welfare state. Top of the list was to change the DWP back into the DSS and scrap the welfare to work tests. This was pretty much a provocation to Smith, who presided over the DWP under the Tories under relatively recently, and was directly responsible for the immense harm and the mass deaths of the poor, the sick and the disabled that came from the Tories’ welfare reforms. The Guardian has put up a video of the speech, or at least this part of it, on YouTube. It’s two minutes 20 seconds long. In it the Labour leader states that
They will change the DWP’s name back to Social Security to bring back real Social Security for people. But changing it’s name doesn’t mean anything on its own, so there are a number of things Labour will leading up to the scrapping of Universal Credit in its entirety.
Firstly, they will end the work capability tests that are so brutal to people in their lives.
They will end the bedroom tax because it is unfair, unjust and wrong.
They will raise ESA by £30 a week so that people have something reasonable to survive on.
They will raise carer’s allowance to the same level as Jobseekers’ Allowance in recognition that carers do an amazing job for the people they love, and shouldn’t be impoverished in doing so.
They will end the two child policy in benefit distribution.
They will pay Housing Benefit direct to landlords so that claimants don’t get in problems with housing debt or arrears.
They will end the sanctions system as a whole and replace it with 5,000 benefits advisors coming into the DWP.
He also outlined some great policies on education.
Labour would have a properly funded education system, so that head teachers won’t have to raise funds for their schools to make sure they are properly funded.
Family education will be brought back under the control of Local Education Authorities by a National Education Service.
He also calls for unity, saying that the Labour party has so much to do and so much to achieve, but they can only do it if they are united, and that they have to go out there to engage in that debate and that conversation with people in order to ask them to lend Labour their support so that they can deliver all those things.
All I can say about this is what we used to say in the playground as schoolchildren back in the ’70s and ’80s: Brill! This really is exactly what the country needs. And it’s really going to annoy and upset the Tories, the Lib Dems and the Blairites because it’s another outright attack on Thatcherism. It dares to say that the sanctions system and the welfare to work tests, so beloved of Chingford Petty Dictator, Iain Duncan Smith, are keeping people in poverty.
And it also dares to say that the privatisation of the British school and education system too is an abject failure. They’re really going to hate that, as if Labour brings schools back under national ownership or at least local authority control, how are all these wretched academy chains going to find their money, the money they give to the Tories? And before the Tories and right-wing press start raving about Communism here, Corbyn is only voicing a policy that Thatcher herself had to back to. She also wanted to take schools out of local authority control, and so set up what were ‘academies’ in all but name under Norman Fowler. There was only thing wrong with it, as Blackadder famously said. It was rubbish. The new academies didn’t work, and the scheme was quietly wound up. Until Blair took the idea out of the dustbin and relaunched it, and his wretched reforms were then carried on and expanded by Cameron and the Tories and Lib Dems in turn.
Academies don’t work, and it’s long past time this was recognised and the recognition given practical expression in the renationalisation of British education.
So how did Iain Duncan Smith react when Corbyn opened a frontal assault on his welfare reforms right on the nasty little creep’s doorstep? He appears to have commented on the Express’ ‘Comment Is Free’ site attacking it because it would be unfair to taxpayers!
He declared that
Corbyn’s plot to axe universal credit is cynical and would be devastating to the taxpayer. The fearmongering Labour have whipped up over Universal Credit is counterproductive. They refuse to accept the objective truth work is the best route out of poverty.
To which Corbyn replied
No, “cynical” and “devastating” is making sick and disabled people pay for the financial crash. Your policy pushed hundreds of thousands of people into poverty, made families lose their homes and denied benefits to the terminally ill. That’s your legacy. That’s what Labour will end.
Mike comments on the Labour leader’s reply
I have been waiting years for a political leader to pin the deaths of the innocent on the former Work and Pensions Secretary. It was exhilarating to read this.
But he also points out it doesn’t go far enough. The Tories haven’t just killed disabled people, but also individuals, who could have led fit and productive lives if they hadn’t been thrown off benefits. Mike concludes
We need an undertaking from Labour to investigate the fate of everyone who suffered as a result of that man’s decision to pervert the benefit system into a punishment for being poor.
And then we need to see prosecutions. In the words of Kipling, nothing is ever settled until it is settled right.
Absolutely right. Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories are directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, no matter how they blusher, obfuscate and lie about it. And it’s interesting to see that the first point the Gentleman Ranker tries to make in his wretched attempt at a refutation is that replacing the welfare reforms would be harmful to the taxpayer. Once again, we see the Tories worried about their rich donors actually having to pay a bit more tax, rather than tens of thousands die in misery and poverty.
His second point is that work is the best way out of poverty. This little gem is also discredited. It comes from a piece of research written by a doctor sponsored by the American insurance fraudster, Unum. As Katie S. Jones and Disabled People Against Cuts have shown with copious documentation, this is completely false and utterly bogus scientifically. But the Tories cling to it because it justifies their attitude towards the poor. It provided the basis for Smith’s article in one of the papers which began, I believe, with a justification of that infamous phrase above the Nazi concentration camps, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – ‘Work Makes You Free’. That paragraph mysteriously disappeared after people started noticing it. Smith has been challenged on the scientific validity of the statement, and when he has, he’s retreated into saying that he knows or feels it to be correct, without citing any supporting evidence.
Which tells you everything you need to know about how spurious the real science is behind IDS’ vile, murderous policies.
He and the rest of the Tories, who continue to implement and support this horror – the sanctions system and work capabilities tests – need to be charged and put into the dock to face the consequences for their actions.
One of the institutions of the Italian Fascist state was the Corporations. This was partly developed from Syndicalism, the form of Anarchism that advocates the abolition of the state and the control of industry by trade unions. The Corporations in Fascist Italy were a type of giant trade union, based on the medieval guilds, which included both the trade unions and the employers’ organisations for a particular industry. Instead of parliament, there was a council of corporations, which was supposed to regulate the economy. Il Duce claimed that this was the cornerstone of the Fascist state, which had transcended both capitalism and Socialism, and had created social peace. In fact the Fascist corporations were a device used to break the power of the unions, and place them under the control of the state and the employers. The main ideological influence in their creation was that of the Nationalist, Alfredo Rocco, rather than radical National Syndicalists like Augusto Turati or Panunzio.
And so of the regulations contained in Musso’s Charter of Labour read very much like standard Tory screeds against welfare scroungers, nationalisation and the trade unions. The Fascists did indeed grant some concessions to the workers, like free Sundays, an annual paid holiday, extra pay for night work, and insurance paid both by workers and the employers.
It begins with the statement ‘Work in all its forms is a social duty’. Articles VII and IX also state ‘The Corporative State considers private enterprise in the domain of production to be the most efficient method and the most advantageous to the interests of the nation … The state intervenes in economic production only when private enterprise fails or is insufficient or when the political interests of the state are involved’. See Elizabeth Wiskemann, Fascism in Italy: Its Development and Influence (Basingstoke: MacMillan Education 1970) 23. As well as making work ‘a social duty’, the Charter also criminalised its withdrawal. Strikes and lockouts were banned under the Fascist state, and there were Labour Courts which were supposed to settled industrial disputes.
The Tories certainly have the first attitude, that work is a duty, and are doing their level best to criminalise strikes without making them illegal. Hence Cameron’s passing a law that makes a strike illegal, even if the majority of union members have voted for it, if less than half of the members of the trade union have turned up and voted. If this same principle is adopted for politics, then this government should similarly be in jail, as only about 30 per cent or so of the population actually bothered to turn out and vote. They have also voted to use agency workers to act as blacklegs in strikes, just as Mussolini supplied blacklegs in Italian strikes, and his British imitators, the British Fascisti did over here. Cameron also wanted strikers on picket lines to give their names to the police and wear armbands identifying who they were, but this was a step too far even for David Davies, who called it a ‘Francoist’ idea.
Thatcherism has been described as ‘Corporativism without the working class’, and there is more than element of truth in that. The Tory party has been drawn overwhelmingly from the upper and middle classes, including the heads of businesses, and makes no secret of being the party of business. This is when it suits them, of course. At other times, they’re claiming to be the party of the poor. Which is why Cameron, aIDS and Osbo are all pukka Eton-educated Toffs. The legislation they pass is designed to protect the businesses they run, including smashing the unions and keeping wages low to provide a constant supply of cheap, dispensable labour.
Interesting, the Charter of Labour also states that industry was only to use labour from the Fascist controlled Labour Exchanges. I’ve reblogged a piece today from Private Eye, about how the Tories stopped the JobCentres from finding jobs for people, because they were better at it than the private firms that have been set up, and whose directors no doubt donate generously to the Tory party. It also casts a different light on a jobs fair held in aIDS’ Chingford constituency the other year. This was held in the local Conservative Club, which tells you how close Chingford business is to the Tories, and ominously suggests the Tory determination to maintain outright political control of the Labour market.
The Tories got very angry indeed when one leading trade unionist compared their anti-union legislation with the Nazis, but as this shows, there are very strong comparisons with Fascist Italy as well.
Jeremy Hunt’s parliamentary colleague, Ian Duncan Smith, has a long history of running and hiding from his critics. Faced with the prospect of meeting the victims of his wretched policies, the Spurious Major either runs and hides, or hides behind big men with guns. He’s hidden from protestors in laundry baskets in Scotland, run out the back door of a Job Centre in Bath, and scheduled his speech at a jobs fair run by his local Conservative party in Chingford for early in the morning, so he could get away before the proles arrived. And when he was called to speak to the parliamentary Work and Pensions Committee, he turned up surrounded by armed rozzers. And this idiot fancies himself as a leader of men.
Mike points out that this clearly demonstrates how absolutely unpopular the new contracts are, even if it costs our junior medical professionals £15 a head to tell Hunt to his face.
This reminds me of the various incidents where teenagers have seen their homes comprehensively trashed after they made the mistake of telling the world they were holding a party on Facebook, and suffered an invasion of gatecrashers as a result. Except that this was an event that was open to the public, and the doctors bought tickets. They didn’t just turn up. For some reason, the Tories are putting on a lot of these fundraisers. They did one in the summer, where for a certain amount you could get to go on a nine mile run through the Pennines or the Yorkshire Dales with aIDS. I joked with a friend that I was prepared to go in for that, just to get the opportunity of pushing the dreadful man over a cliff.
But there is a more serious point underlying this: the Tories are clearly experiencing a problem with funding. The actual grassroots membership of the Tory party, easily the largest political party in the country at one time, has shrunk massively. Those that remain in the constituency party are angry that their views were ignored by the parliamentary leaders. This is partly due to Cameron, like Bliar and New Labour, taking the party’s ordinary supporters and voters for granted, and running around rich donors for funding instead. It’s bad for democracy, as it’s leading to the gradual withering away of political parties and their replacement by oligarchies funded and maintained by rich paymasters.
It’s another reason why the Tories hate the unions supporting Labour. They’ve always hated the unions and the union levy, but it means that Labour has a grassroots source of funding that they don’t. And it also means that they’re really afraid of Jeremy Corbyn. Apart from being left-wing, he’s also managed to bring tens of thousands more back to the Labour party.
Against this, the Tories put on cheese and nibbles parties, and hope the proles don’t attend.
Mike over at Vox Political has published an anonymous open letter he’s been saving up since last December. It’s from a forty year old, disabled man appealing to the good people of Chingford not to vote Iain Duncan Smith back in. This poor fellow has been out of work for four years, and all that time he’s been subject to continual assessment and harassment by the DWP. He says it’s been hell. Anyone who’s had any contact with the DWP will agree. He urge people to go and vote, but not Conservative. He makes this appeal on behalf of everyone worried about whether they can heat their home this winter, and the old lady, who couldn’t even afford a mince pie. He also reminds us that people have died, thanks to the sanctions regime.
Chingford, as Mike informs us, is a Tory safe seat. IDS got in with a majority of 12,000. But this year is unusual, and it’s possible that if enough people vote, IDS may well be voted out.
If this shabby excuse for a mass-murderer is voted back in, however, the only hope is that the voters in other areas very definitely do not return Tories. Mike says
Remember: It doesn’t matter if your Tory seems nice, or capable, or reasonable, or safe – a vote for any Conservative is a vote to put Iain Duncan Smith back in charge of benefit-related genocide. Yes, it may be described in those terms. Why else would the DWP hide the number of benefit-related deaths, if that number isn’t shockingly high?
Enough is enough. Let’s put the prosperity of the nation before our own selfish, sectional interests and do something genuinely good at this election.
Alternatively, as the “open” letter asks, will you let him take your mum next year?
Benefits and Work have this piece, IDS flees from sister of dead claimant, posted three days ago on the 29th. The minister for killing the poor and disabled was due to appear on a hustings in his Chingford constituency with six other candidates. One of the speakers was the sister of David Clapson, the diabetic ex-serviceman, who died of starvation and his illness thanks to the government’s sanctions. Suddenly, IDS couldn’t make it, because he was unexpectedly called away to the north of England.
I am not remotely surprised that RTU, or ‘Tosser’, as he was known to the squaddies in his unit, ran away from debating with her. For all Cameron’s boasting last week about how physically tough he is, there is very little evidence that he could crush someone’s skull with his kneecaps. Instead, he has a long history of running away from the slightest hint of trouble. Upon in Scotland, he hid in a laundry basket to avoid a confrontation with angry opponents. Speaking to the House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions, he surrounded himself with armed police and bodyguards. Just in case any of the disabled people or their carers in the public gallery decided to attack. When opening a jobcentre in Bath, he sneaked out the back. He was due to open a jobs fair held by the Tories in Chingford, but did so much earlier than the advertised time. This looks again like a piece of monumental cowardice.
This says so much about the man, who is apparently proud of the reforms he has introduced into the benefits system, and has even had the audacity, if not the megalomania, to compare it with William Wilberforce’s abolition of slavery. Somehow, I don’t think Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson or the other anti-slavery campaigners, like Olaudah Equiano, ever shrank from meeting the victims of slavery or human suffering.
Cameron and IDS have absolutely no sympathy with the disabled, or the people, whose lives have been destroyed by their sanctions. Cameron himself desperately tried not to answer Andrew Marr’s question about whether he realised just how much ordinary people were suffering from these reforms. When he finally did answer, he said that the sanctions regime was entirely appropriate.
They know, however, how hard it is hitting ordinary people, and how bad that makes them look. And so they try to change the question, and run from debate with its victims as hard and as fast as possible.
Or failing that, just get a thuggish goon to manhandle their prospective interlocutor away, as Boris did today with Rupa Huq, sister of Konnie, former Blue Peter presenter and wife of Charlie Brooker.
Brooker has recently taken to writing dystopian SF in the shape of the Black Mirror tv series. The violence and thuggish behaviour of certain Tory candidates would seem to be a fitting premonition of a very grim near future if the present lot get back in power.
Ever since Charles Dickens invented the ‘traditional’, Victorian Christmas with A Christmas Carol, ghost and horror stories have been a part of the season’s entertainment. In the 1970s and ’80s the BBC broadcast a series of ghost stories, including a version of Dickens’ The Railwayman, and the chilling tales of the master of the British ghost story, M.R. James. The latter were told by Robert Powell, taking the part of James himself, who every Christmas settled down in his room at Oxford to tell a story of the ghastly and supernatural to his students. Last year Mark Gatiss of the League of Gentlemen and now Dr Who, presented a documentary on James’ life and career. Gatiss and the other members of the League were horror fans, and arguably much of the new Dr Who has its roots less in Science Fiction than Dark Fantasy and Horror. He therefore was a good choice as the programme’s presenter.
Other spooky delights on offer on TV in the past were Hammer’s gory and grisly tales, such as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, and The Wolfman, featuring Oliver Reed as a werewolf, a part, which it could be said, he continued playing in many of his subsequent dramatic performances on chat shows around the world for much of his life. Some of his still remember his finest hour when he was thrown off the final programme of the discussion programme, After Dark.
Now watching the trailers last night for the forthcoming seasonal delights on the Beeb, I came across something that was genuinely unpleasant, far more so than anything dreamed up by Terence Fisher and the other fevered minds at Bray Studios in the 1960s. It was for a celebrity edition of University Challenge, and one of the faces looked like that of IDS.
This is genuinely grotesque. Christmas is traditionally a time of peace and goodwill to all, and yet there’s precious little of that on display with IDS and his actions. This is the politician, who has cut benefits and imposed sanctions to the point where claimants have actually died of cold and starvation on Britain’s streets, in their homes, or taken their lives through desperation. This is the politicians, who has lied and lied again about the effects of his policies to parliament. Not only that, but he is also personally treacherous and utterly without honour. When one lady, a Dutchwoman who had grown up here, worked all her life and paid her tax came to him as her MP about immigration problems, not only did … Smith refuse to help, he tried to have her deported.
Good King Wenceslaus, the song goes, took pity on a poor man ‘gathering winter fuel’, and so took him home to share his food and hearth out of charity. The real King Wenceslaus was the early medieval king of Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, who converted the country to Christianity. I’ve got the feeling that the Czech version of his name is Vaclav, which is obviously still a popular name in the Republic. It’s the first name, for example, of the dissident poet and first democratic Czech president after the fall of Communism, Vaclav Havel. I don’t know whether the real King Wenceslas ever did what the carol describes, but it’s not impossible. Medieval religion strongly emphasised charity and the ‘works of mercy’ as part of the co-operative grace granted to humanity through which they could gain salvation partly through their good works. It formed what modern scholars have termed an ‘economy of salvation’ in which wealthy merchants and rich noblemen were careful to work out exactly how much money they should spend on charity for the poor in order gain time off in Purgatory. Looking after the material needs of the poor was particularly important, as it was believed that they far dearer to the Lord than the rich, and so their blessings and prayers were particularly important in securing God’s pardon.
For all IDS’ rhetoric about ‘social justice’, I’ve seen precious little evidence that IDS has anything but hatred and contempt for the poor. Far from helping the poor man collect his firewood, and show due concern for the page following in his footsteps against treacherous, icy footing, IDS strikes me as far more likely to have taken away the pauper’s firewood as above the level allowed by feudal law, and given him a strong lecture on his improvidence and lack of self-sufficiency in not having rationed his firewood properly in the Christmas season. And the page would have to have made his own way to keep up with the king, as this would have been the only way to give him the proper training to compete in the go-ahead, globalised economy of the 11th century.
It also struck me as the beginning of a charm offensive by the Tory party in preparation for next year’s election. The Tories are keenly aware that they have an image as ‘the nasty party’. IDS himself is surely aware that he is one of the most hated men in Britain. It’s why he opened a jobs fair in his constituency, Chingford, early and left before the masses arrived. It’s also why he has been forced to sneak out the back when appearing at a job centre in Bath, as well as hide in laundry baskets to escape protesters. He’s also such a physical coward that when he appeared before a select committee in parliament to give evidence, he was surrounded by bodyguards and armed cops, pointing their guns at the public, including a number of disabled people and their carers in the public gallery.
His appearance on a festive edition of University Challenge looks like an attempt to present him as genial and family-friendly, a jolly type quite prepared to make a fool of himself on a quiz show at this time of year, rather than the vindictive, mean-spirited curmudgeon his really is.
It also seems to bear out a comment by Mark Kermode about the personal character of the makers of Horror and Family movies. Kermode’s the film critic on Radio 5 Live. He’s a long term Horror fan, having written books on Horror cinema and spoken before the British Boards of Film Certification about the censorship of particular video nasties. You remember them. They were films like Driller Killer, I Spit on Your Grave and Last House on the Left, that were so disgusting that when they appeared in the 1970s and ’80s they were banned. Kermode has said in his reviews that the makers of Horror movies all invariably tend to be really nice people. Wes Craven, who made Last House on the Left and then the Nightmare on Elm Street series, was actually a genuinely nice, highly educated, intelligent man. Craven has said in interviews that the extreme and genuinely disgusting violence and brutality in Last House on the Left was partly inspired by the images that were coming out of Vietnam in 1973. He saw the film as a polemic against violence, and showing how violence simply begets even more violence. To that point, he once walked out of one of Quentin Tarentino’s flicks. When one of the horror great Horror directors asked him how he could walk out of Tarentino’s movie, after he had directed something as revolting as Last House on the Left, Craven replied, ‘Well at least my movie’s about something!’
M.R. James seems to be another case in point. Rather than being a pale, sour misanthrope, Gatiss’ programme described James as quite a jovial, very sociable figure in real life, who enjoyed physically romping with his fellow students. Gatiss talked to the son of one of James’ students, who said that his father believed him to have been a non-practicing gay. Regardless of the speculation about James’ sexuality, what was clear was that James was a genuinely friendly man, who enjoyed his friends’ company and affection.
By contrast, according to Kermode, you can bet that the people who make family films are personally nasty. Well, this seems pretty much the case with IDS, which is no doubt why he wants to appear on TV in a positive light. Forget Hammer, Frankenstein, Dracula and Freddie Kruger, this is one Horror story I’ll be glad to miss.
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