Claire Fox Speech in Parliament Against Housing Predatory Trans Identified Men in Women’s Prisons

Heaven help us, I can’t believe I’m actually agreeing with something Claire Fox has done. Fox is a thoroughly loathsome piece of work. She was in one of the Communist sects led by Frank Furedi, which published Living Marxism. As a genuine, paid-up member of the far left, she and the rest of the LM crew were fully behind the IRA’s right to armed struggle and their consequent bombing and murder of civilians. This continued right up to either the Omagh or Warrington bombing in the 1990s, which did much to discredit the IRA. Among the victims of the Warrington bomb were two small boys. While supporters of terrorism would naturally consider soldiers and politicians fair targets, I think severely normal people, British, Irish or whatever, hate the murder of innocent civilians and positively loathe that of children. The bombings were widely condemned, except by Fox, who defended it. She has never retracted or apologised for her comments.

Then, when Communism fell, she and the rest of the Living Marxism crew decided to abandon it as well. They crossed the floor to become right-wing Libertarian Tory contrarians. Living Marxism was rebranded as the Last Magazine, ’cause the Fall of Communism marked the end of history according to Francis Fukuyama. This went down the tubes, but Furedi and the rest went on to found Spiked. Which, as Zelo Street has so wittily put it, is so called because it should be. The other year the ghastly Fox was then taken up by the Tories for her work on their behalf, and is now a peer in the House of Lords. Ugh!

But this time she has done something right. One of the issues facing gender-critical feminists and anyone concerned with women’s safety is the move to house transwomen in women’s prisons. Unfortunately, this does not just mean the kind of people most us would naturally think of as a transwoman. I think most people, when they think of them have in mind gentle souls, whose identification with born women has led them to transition surgically. If this was the case, and all transwomen were like that, then I think there would be much less opposition to transwomen being placed in women’s prisons.

Sadly this is not the case. The trans category has been expanded so that it includes biological men, who identify as women but retain their male anatomy. Furthermore, the traditional rigorous medical examinations to confirm trans status have been, or are planning to be, scrapped in place of self-recognition. A male prisoner may therefore claim to be a really a woman only on his own say-so, and therefore demand to be placed in a women’s prison. This is a real problem for the safety of the women already there, as many of them are violent rapists and sex offenders. There has already been a series of rapes and sexual assaults in California’s women’s prisons, thanks to the legislation demanding that trans identified men be housed in them, to the point where the prison authorities are actually handing out condoms.

I realise this is a controversial issue, and people have been cancelled and thrown off university campuses for stating that there are only two sexes and other challenges to the trans ideology. I will state again that I am not anti-trans, and do not wish to see anyone persecuted, beaten, discriminated against or denied educational or employment opportunities because of their sexuality or gender identification. But I do believe there is an imperative need to keep women safe from dangerous predators.

I’ve blogged about this issue before. Gillyflowerblog, one of the respected commenters on this blog, has said in a previous comment about a post I made on Sargon of Gasbag and Posy Parker on the dangers of radical trans extremists on the dangers of involving the medical profession. She said: “Lastly, if a medical certificate is required to transition then do you expect the same for gay people. After all, the biology suggests heterosexuality. It is a very dangerous step to invole the medical profession”. I take her point. I’ve no doubt it is, and have every sympathy in this regard as once upon a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence people did seek medical intervention to correct it. However, while I recognise the dangers of medical intervention, you can do much to help women’s safety by removing biologically male rapists and predators from them. I understand the British government is doing so by building separate trans wings for them.

Belfield, the mad right-wing internet radio host, put up this video of Fox making her speech on his blog yesterday, with a comment about how loved her. Well, he would, as he’s as right-wing as she is. Nevertheless, Fox makes very good points, though this doesn’t alter the fact that she and her fellow Spiked crowd are still scumbags.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Demand for the Abolition of the House of Lords

This weekend, our murderous, clown Prime Minister Boris Johnson added more weight to the argument for the House of Lords. At the moment the membership of the upper house is something like 800+. It has more members than the supreme soviet, the governing assembly of assembly of China, which rules a country of well over a billion people. Contemporary discussions are about reducing the size of this bloated monster, many of whose members do zilch except turn up in the morning in order to collect their attendance before zipping off to what they really want to do. Since Blair, it’s become a byword for corruption and cronyism, as successive prime ministers have used it to reward their collaborators, allies and corporate donors. The Tories were outraged when Blair did this during his administration, but this didn’t stop David Cameron following suit, and now Boris Alexander DeFeffel Johnson. Johnson has appointed no less than 36 of his friends and collaborators. These include his brother, who appears to be there simply because he is Johnson’s sibling, Alexander Lebedev, a Russian oligarch and son of a KGB spy, who owns the Metro and the Independent,  which is a particular insult following the concerns about Russian political meddling and the Tories’ connections to Putin; the Blairite smear-merchants and intriguers, who conspired against Jeremy Corbyn to give the Tories an election victory, and Claire Fox.

Fox has managed to provoke outrage all on her own, simply because of her disgusting views on Northern Irish terrorism. Now a member of the Brexit Party, she was a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party which fully endorsed the IRA’s terrorism campaign and the Warrington bombing that killed two children. She has never apologised or retracted her views, although she says she no longer believes in the necessity of such tactics. But rewarding a woman, who has absolutely no problem with the political killing of children has left a nasty taste in very many people’s mouths. It shows very clearly the double standards Johnson and the Tories do have about real terrorist supporters. They tried smearing Corbyn as one, despite the fact that he was even-handed in his dealings with the various parties in northern Ireland and was a determined supporter of peace. Ulster Unionists have come forward to state that he also good relations with them and was most definitely not a supporter of terrorism. The Tories, however, have shown that they have absolutely no qualms about rewarding a real terrorist sympathiser. But even this isn’t enough for Johnson. He’s outraged and demanding an inquiry, because he was prevented from putting his corporate donors from the financial sector in the House of Lords.

Demands for reform or the abolition of the second chamber have been around for a very long time. I remember back c. 1987 that the Labour party was proposing ideas for its reform. And then under Blair there were suggestions that it be transformed into an elected senate like America’s. And way back in the first decades of the twentieth century there were demands for its abolition altogether. I’ve been reading Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s A Constitution of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, which was first published in the 1920s. It’s a fascinating book. The Webbs were staunch advocates of democracy but were fiercely critical of parliament and its ability to deal with the amount of legislation created by the expansion of the British state into industry and welfare provision, just as they were bitterly critical of its secrecy and capitalism. They proposed dividing parliament into two: a political and a social parliament. The political parliament would deal with the traditional 19th-century conceptions of the scope of parliament. This would be foreign relations, including with the Empire, the self-governing colonies and India, and law and order. The social parliament would deal with the economy, the nationalised industries and in general the whole of British culture and society, including the arts, literature and science. They make some very interesting, trenchant criticisms of existing political institutions, some of which will be very familiar to viewers of that great British TV comedy, Yes, Minister. And one of these is the House of Lords, which they state very clearly should be abolished because of its elitist, undemocratic character. They write

The House of Lords, with its five hundred or so peers by inheritance, forty-four representatives of the peerages of Scotland and Ireland, a hundred and fifty newly created peers, twenty-six bishops, and half a dozen Law Lords, stands in a more critical position. No party in the State defends this institution; and every leading statesman proposes to either to end or to amend it. It is indeed an extreme case of misfit. Historically, the House of Lords is not a Second Chamber, charged with suspensory and revising functions, but an Estate of the Realm – or rather, by its inclusion of the bishops – two Estates of the Realm, just as much entitled as the Commons to express their own judgement on all matters of legislation, and to give or withhold their own assent to all measures of taxation. The trouble is that no one  in the kingdom is prepared to allow them these rights, and for ninety years at least the House of Lords has survived only on the assumption that, misfit as it palpably is, it nevertheless fulfils fairly well the quite different functions of a Second Chamber. Unfortunately, its members cannot wholly rid themselves of the feeling that they are not a Second Chamber, having only the duties of technical revision of what the House of Commons enacts, and of temporary suspension of any legislation that it too hastily adopts, but an Estate of the Realm, a coordinate legislative organ entitled to have an opinion of its own on the substance and the merits of any enactment of the House of Commons. The not inconsiderable section of peers and bishops which from time to time breaks out in this way, to the scandal of democrats, can of course claim to be historically and technically justified in thus acting as independent legislators, but constitutionally they are out of date; and each of their periodical outbursts, which occasionally cause serious public inconvenience, brings the nation nearer to their summary abolition. Perhaps of greater import than the periodical petulance of the House of Lords is its steady failure to act efficiently  as revising and suspensory Second Chamber. Its decisions are vitiated by its composition  it is the worst representative assembly ever created in that it contains absolutely no members of the manual working class; none of the great classes of shopkeepers, clerks and teachers; none of the half of all the citizens who are of the female sex; and practically none of religious nonconformity, or art, science or literature. Accordingly it cannot be relied on to revise or suspend, and scarcely even to criticise, anything brought forward by a Conservative Cabinet, whilst obstructing and often defeating everything proposed by Radical Cabinet.

Yet discontent with the House of Commons and its executive – the Cabinet – is to-day  a more active ferment than resentment at the House of Lords. The Upper Chamber may from time to time delay and obstruct; but it cannot make or unmake governments; and it cannot, in the long run, defy the House of Commons whenever that assembly is determined. To clear away this archaic structure will only make more manifest and indisputable the failure of the House of Commons to meet the present requirements. (Pp. 62-4).

When they come to their proposals for a thorough reform of the constitution, they write of the House of Lords

There is, of course, n the Socialist Commonwealth, no place for a House of Lords, which will simply cease to exist as a part of the legislature. Whether the little group of “Law Lords”, who are now made peers in order that they may form the Supreme Court of Appeal , should or should not continue, for this purely judicial purpose, to sit under the title, and with the archaic dignity of the House of Lords, does not seem material. (p.110)

I used to have some respect for the House of Lords because of the way they did try to keep Thatcher in check during her occupation of 10 Downing Street. They genuinely acted as a constitutional check and wasn’t impressed by the proposals for their reform. I simply didn’t see that it was necessary. When Blair was debating reforming the Upper House, the Tories bitterly attacked him as a new Cromwell, following the Lord Protector’s abolition of the House of Lords during the British Civil War. Of course, Blair did nothing of the sort, and partly reformed it, replacing some of the peers with his own nominees. Pretty much as Cromwell also packed parliament.

The arguments so far used against reforming the House of Lord are that it’s cheaper than an elected second chamber, and that there really isn’t much popular enthusiasm for the latter. Private Eye said that it would just be full of second-rate politicos traipsing about vainly trying to attract votes. That was over twenty years ago.

But now that the House of Lords is showing itself increasingly inefficient and expensive because of the sheer number of political has-beens, PM’s cronies and peers, who owe their seat only because of ancestral privilege, it seems to me that the arguments for its reform are now unanswerable.

Especially when the gift of appointing them is in the hands of such a corrupt premier as Boris Johnson.

Private Eye on Brexit Party’s Claire Fox’s Support for Murderous Fascists

The furore over UKIP’s lurch to the far right and Batten’s recruitment of such controversial, deeply bigoted YouTube personalities and activists like Sargon of Akkad, Count Dankula, Paul Joseph Watson and Tommy Robinson has somewhat obscured the issue of just how politically extreme Nigel Farage’s new Brexit party is. The Brexit party seem to be eating UKIP alive at the polls, but although it’s somewhat more moderate than UKIP, Farage himself was credibly accused of racism and Fascist sympathies when he was in charge of the party. He also wants to privatise the NHS and carry on the other Tory policies of destroying the welfare state and impoverishing its working people. All for the benefit of the extremely rich, like himself. And when he was in charge of UKIP, it also was full of racists, anti-feminists, those, who bitterly hated gays and Muslims. And his Brexit party also contains its fair share of very offensive characters.

One of these is Claire Fox, formerly of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who, like the rest of her comrades, ditched Marxism and moved to the libertarian extreme right. Zelo Street have published a series of pieces refuting her claims to have joined the Brexit Party from the Left, and revealing her disgusting comments supporting IRA terrorism at the time of the Warrington bombing. Fox, then in the RCP, wrote a piece justifying the atrocity, declaring that Irish nationalists had the right to use all and every means necessary to achieve freedom for Ulster. Which meant the right to kill innocent men, women and children. When she was asked about these remarks a few days ago, rather than disavow them she doubled down and confirmed her support. And she isn’t alone in supporting Irish Republican terrorism either. Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, one of the Brexit party’s candidates in London, was also a member of the RCP, which as a whole supported Irish nationalist terrorism.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/05/nigel-farages-terrorist-sympathisers.html

Private Eye has also published a piece about Fox’s offensive views in its current issue for 3 – 16 May, 2019, ‘Outfoxing Nigel’, on page 10. It’s written by ‘Ratbiter’, otherwise known as the Absurder journo Nick Cohen, who has taken time off from ranting about how Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. His accusations there are rubbish, and some of his claims are seriously skewed. But in this instance he may well be right. The article runs

“I’ve been a left-wing campaigner for 35 years,” Claire Fox wrote in the Daily Mail after posing alongside Nigel Farage to announce her candidacy for the Brexit Party. “You’d struggle to find a pair of more unlikely political bedfellows.”

Apart from Brexit, is there anything the “left-wing” Fox and the right-wing Farage have in common? Just about everything, as it turns out.

Fox’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was one of the weirdest sects on the far left. Its leading cadres – Frank Furedi, Mick Hume, Brendan O’Neill and Fox herself – decided in 1997 that there was no future in Leninism, since “the working class has no political existence”, and tried their luck with the media class instead.

The RCP’s successor organisations, the Institute of ideas and Spiked magazine, exploited the limitless appetite of the BBC and Tory press for “contrarian” opinions. Such was their success in thinking the unthinkable and saying the unspeakable they drew a $300,000 donation from the billionaire Koch borthers, who fund dozens of right-wing causes.

Farage could not fail to be impressed. He and his former Ukip colleagues opposed attempts by the EU to improve ‘elf and safety, and the rebranded RCP had little time for public safety either. Fox denounced the mollycoddling of the “anti-bullying industry”, arguing that teachers who tried to protect children were sapping their “resilience”.

Famously, Farage doesn’t much like East Europeans. At times, it seems as if the only East Europeans he can stand are dictators: Viktor Orban may have censored the media, packed the judiciary and presided over epic corruption, but to Farage he is a “defender of Hungarian culture” against the EU.

Although Fox told the Mail she disagreed with Farage’s demands for immigration conrols, she and her old RCP comrades have had no problems with the most brutal controls imaginable in on Europeans who stay in their own countries. When Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic organised rape and death squads in the 1990s to “cleanse” Bosnia’s Muslims, they had no more loyal defenders than the RCP’s magazine Living Marxism.

After Penny Marshall of ITN and Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian revealed the appalling conditions in Serb prison camps at Omarska and Trnopolje, Living Marxism declared that the journalists had faked the pictures. Fox and friends and offered no defence of their story when ITN sued for libel. They did not recant when survivors gave testimony in the Hague or when mass graves were found near Omarska. Last year the journalists who run London’s Frontline Club considered inviting Fox to speak. Vulliamy insisted she apologise to the camp victims first, but Fox refused to back away from the modern equivalent of Holocaust denial. Naturally, the BBC thinks she is the ideal person to have as a regular panelist on the Moral Maze.

To be fair to Farage, he has never endorsed bullying children, indeed he broke down when describing how his own children had been bullied. He may have won the Brexit referendum by demonising East European immigrants but he has never covered up their murder. And although he endorses Orban, he has yet to act as a propagandist for Balkan strongmen who have been convicted of crimes against humanity.

The question is now how Fox can bear to be in same party as Farage, but how Farage can bear to in the same party as her.

Francis Wheen on RCP Violence

I’m not surprised the LM/Spiked crowd support bullying children. Francis Wheen in his book on paranoia in the 1970s, Strange Days, describes how the international training camps the Revolutionary Communist Party ran were rife with violence. One girl was raped in one, and a young Black American stabbed to death in another. But the Party’s leader refused to do anything about it, and indeed approved of the violence, because he felt it would toughen the working class up for revolution.

Fox and Ulster Terrorism

As for Fox’s support for IRA terrorism, I’m also disgusted, but not surprised. I think there were quite a few on the extreme left like her. But the murder of innocent civilians is utterly disgusting no matter who does it, whether it’s the IRA, Ulster Loyalists or the British state. And it’s an insult not just to the victims of terror, including the mothers who reached across the aisle in Ulster to demand an end to the violence. I’ve also met plenty of Roman Catholic Northern Irishmen, who would like a united Ireland, but thoroughly reject sectarianism and violence.

Serb Atrocities in Bosia

I’ve also come across allegations that some of the stories about Serb atrocities in the war in Bosnia were falsified by the media and British state in order to provide a pretext for keeping British and other NATO troops stationed in the Balkans. However, the carnage inflicted on the Bosnian people was quite real. Way back in the 1990s Mike spent a week as a guest of a Bosnian Muslim family in a visit arranged by a human rights organisation to show the destruction caused by the war in the Muslim region. Mike enjoyed his stay and his hosts were great people. But the damage caused by the Serb assault was everywhere. Although the war was over by that time, conditions were still very dangerous as the retreating Serbs had left booby traps.

I also used to do voluntary work with a former member of the British armed forces and the British diplomatic team sent to negotiate an end to the war. He told me that, although all the parties in the war, Croats and Muslims as well as Serbs, committed atrocities, on the whole most of them were committed by the Serbs. I’ve also spoken to British army officers, who were sent into Bosnia as part of the peacekeeping forces, and they described some of the atrocities that the Serb forces committed.

Zelo Street in their article on Fox’s disgusting views quoted Times hack Otto English, who wondered how James Glancy, another Brexit candidate in the Euro elections and former member of the SBS felt about Fox celebrating the murder of his comrades. Or Ann Widdecombe about rubbing shoulders with the people, who supported the Brighton Bombing that killed and maimed so many of the Tory party.

Farage’s Brexit Party is far Right, and so should be kept out of power. They aren’t quite a revolting as Claire Fox, whose disgusting views mean that she should be kept out of any party that’s trying for electoral respectability, and definitely not be given a platform on radio or TV to broadcast them.

Don’t Be Fooled: Farage’s Brexit Is Still a Far-Right Nasty Party

Nigel Farage has also unveiled his new anti-EU vehicle, the Brexit Party. They’re currently eating UKIP alive at the polls as old UKIP supporters abandon the party because of Batten’s embrace of far right controversialists and racists, like Mark Meechan, Carl Benjamin and Tommy Robinson. But while UKIP have lurched towards the far right in pursuit of relevance and seeking new members, even under Nigel Farage it had a reputation for racism and contacts with the Fascist right. This was despite the party’s constitution absolutely forbidding it from accepting anyone, who had previously been in a racist or Fascist party. Which is why Tommy Robinson, who was formerly in the EDL and BNP, can only be Batten’s special adviser, not an actual member.

Zelo Street this week has also put up a very timely piece going through the Brexit party’s candidates and leading members, to show just how nasty they also are. They include Bill Etheridge, who is a friend of the White Pendragons, a Fascist group who turned up at a rally against London mayor Sadiq Khan complete with a gallows. They claim they aren’t racist, but this is somewhat contradicted by their reason for objecting to Khan being mayor: he’s a Muslim. And despite claims to the contrary, there is nothing playful about carting round a gibbet like you really are threatening to lynch someone. Etheridge himself was forced out of the Tory party and joined UKIP after he and his wife posted pictures of themselves on Facebook posing with golliwogs in 2011. And his former girlfriend, Lorraine Chew, called him a ‘dirty, disgusting cheat’ believing he was having an affair, after finding a half-used tube of Viagra in his car.

Also joining the party is Lance Forman, who has previously been a member of far-right group Turning Point UK. This is British branch of the American ultra-conservative organisation Turning Point. They provoked controversy a few weeks ago when Black American conservative activist, Candace Owens, declared that Hitler wasn’t a nationalist, but a globalist, and that he would have been all right had he stuck to Germany. Which is very, very obviously offensive, dangerous nonsense.

They were also joined by Claire Fox, who is supposed to be a woman of the Left. She isn’t. She’s a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Zelo Street states that RCP lost a lawsuit in the ’90s against ITV News at the same time they were denying the Srebrenica massacre by the Serb forces during the war in Bosnia. The Revolutionary Communist Party were always a disgusting organisation. Francis Wheen in his book on paranoia in the 1970s, Strange Days Indeed, states that their leader actually encouraged the lawlessness and violence during their training camps, in which a Black man was stabbed to death and a girl raped, because he wanted to make his members hard and tough ready for the revolution. After leaving the RCP, Fox became a member of the Libertarian far right. Yep, she’s another who wants to privatise everything and destroy the welfare state. She also allegedly defended Gary Glitter’s right to download images of child abuse.

And then there’s the Fuhrage himself, whom the great man of Crewe succinctly describes thus:

Nigel Farage, expenses cheat, the MEP whose European Parliament attendance record is one of the worst of all 750 or so MEPs. Nigel Farage, who wants the NHS replaced by something more in line with the wishes of his pals in the USA. Nigel Farage who has been named in Congress as the go-between who delivered that memory stick to the Ecuadorian embassy. Nigel Farage who endorsed Roy Moore.

Roy Moore is the American Republican politico, who has been credibly accused of a string of sexual assaults against underage girls.

And now the party also boasts former Tory cabinet minister Anne Widdicombe, who supported manacling women prisoners, even when they were in hospital giving birth.

As Zelo Street says, the Brexit party really is the new nasty party.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/04/nigel-farage-new-nasty-party.html