One of the defining features of every dictatorship has been rigid control of the press. In the former USSR and Soviet bloc until Gorbachev, the media was owned and controlled by the state, and it dutifully followed the party line. The leader was praised, and his opponents were vilified. Before being rounded up, imprisoned and shot, of course. It was exactly the same in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The newspapers there were privately owned, but even so had to follow the party line. In Germany, this was set by Josef Goebbels, the infamous ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment’. The Tories also have an intolerant attitude to the media. Most of the newspapers are owned by proprietors, who support the Tories and so have a strong Tory bias. The Tories therefore expect the press and media to follow their line. When they don’t, they start flinging around accusations of bias. When it’s state-owned companies, like the Beeb, they start making threats of ending the license fee or privatising the corporation, as I remember them doing so in the 1990s. With private broadcasters they threaten to remove their broadcasting license. Thatcher did this to London Weekend Television in the 1980s following the company’s documentary, ‘Death of the Rock’. This showed that the SAS team that killed an IRA terror squad in Gibraltar had acted as a death squad. The terrorists had been under army surveillance during their entire journey through Spain, and could have been picked up at any point with minimal bloodshed. The programme concluded that they had been deliberately executed. Thatcher went berserk at this demonstration of British lawlessness, and withdrew LWT’s broadcasting license. It was replaced instead by Carlton, no doubt named after the infamous Tory club.
And the Tories were making the same threats yesterday to Channel 4, after the programme humiliated Johnson in its leaders’ debate over climate change. Johnson has now resorted to Tweezer’s tactic of running away from possible tough or hostile interviews. He refused to turn up to be grilled by Andrew Neil on his show on the Beeb, which has embarrassed our state broadcaster, as they got Corbyn on his show by falsely telling him that they would be interviewing Boris this week, and that it had all been agreed with the Tories when it hadn’t. Fearing a repeat of last Friday’s leader debates, when Britain’s oafish Trump junior was properly shown to be a blustering moron, Johnson scarpered again. Channel 4 therefore took the decision to go ahead with the debate, but put in a melting ice sculpture to represent the BoJob.
Realising that a Conservative non-appearance didn’t look good, the Tories decided to send Boris’ father and Michael Gove, his best mate. Who weren’t allowed on the programme for the simple reason, as Channel 4’s news editor Ben de Pear pointed out, that as lovely and charming as they were, they weren’t the party’s leader. Gove started lying about how he turned up at Channel 4, but was turned away because Corbyn and Sturgeon didn’t want to debate a Conservative. This was disproved by Robert Peston, who tweeted
Classic Vote Leave tactics this whole ‘Gove turns up’ while CCHQ complains to regulator Ofcom about Ch4 barring him. It is all about proving to supporters that the London media establishment are against them (don’t laugh) while trying to intimidate all broadcasters.
Unable to get their own way, the Tories have complained about the debate to Ofcom, claiming that the channel has broken its legal requirement to be impartial and that the refusal to admit Gove and Stanley Johnson was a partisan stunt. They also told Buzzfeed News that if they’re re-elected, they would review Channel 4’s broadcasting license.
Sunny Hundal pointed out the sheer hypocrisy behind this.
If Corbyn had threatened Channel 4’s license over climate change debate, every newspaper in Britain would rightly be calling it ‘Stalinist’. Yet the press is silent and BBC is treating it as a legit story.
Zelo Street concluded
‘Tory commitment to free speech does not include dissent. Who’s being Stalinist now?’
The Tories don’t like freedom of speech at all. They withdrew LWT’s broadcasting license after ‘Death on the Rock’, and had a Panorama documentary how the party had an overlapping membership with the BNP, National Front and other Fascists, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’ suppressed. And during their coalition government with the Lib Dems, they passed legislation providing for a system of secret courts. If the government decides it is necessary for reasons of national security, the accused may be tried in courts from which the press and public are banned. They may not know the identity of their accusers, nor the crimes of which they are accused or the evidence against them. It a system from the pages of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, and is the same as the perverted judicial systems of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. And Cameron also wanted to make street demonstrations more difficult by passing legislation that would restrict the right to march and demonstrate under the pretence of protecting local residents from ‘nuisance’.
With this latest threat to Channel 4, the Tories have shown themselves not only cowards and bullies, but an active threat to freedom of speech. Get them out, and Labour in!
Questions are being asked about After Boris’ performance on the Question Time leader’s special on Friday. According to Zelo Street, the peeps on Twitter are wondering whether he was secretly being coached in his answers, as there he seems to have had what looks suspiciously like an earphone. Will Black posted images of Boris’ right ear, which may show the device. Cathy Higgins called on Johnson, Cleverly and Tory HQ to clarify if it was an earphone. Matt Buck suggested it could just be for the studio’s sound system. But Zelo Street observed that it raises the question why it was so discreet. Suzy Williams, however, complained about it to the Beeb by telephone and email. And even if it was an earpone, it did Johnson no good whatsoever. Julie-JC4PM-Stevenson observed that if he was wearing an earpiece, it didn’t help him much. Paul Usher expressed the same view, that even with it in he was ‘incredibly shit’. And Rinders declared that “I reckon he had Cummings shouting, ‘GET BREXIT DONE’ (sic) down his earpiece every 5 seconds. Johnson was ridiculous”.
Some idea of how terrible Johnson’s performance was can be gleaned from the rage from the Tory press, who started screaming that the Beeb was biased against him. Thus the odious Sarah Vine, Gove’s missus, declared that the audience was a labour stitch-up. Allison Pearson announced that she was complaining about the Labour bias of the BBC audience. Darren Grimes moaned about how the BBC behaved typically and there weren’t any pro-Tory, pro-Brexit voices. Murdoch hack Tim Shipman complained that Johnson was interrupted 45 times, far more than the other leaders Corbyn, Swinson and Sturgeon. The Daily Heil’s Andrew Pierce complained that the audience was packed with ‘Corbynistas’ and wondered if there were any Lib Dems or Tories in the audience. He didn’t know, as he hadn’t seen the programme because he was presenting his LBC show. Ian Dale made the same complaint, and also made a cheap sneer about whether Daniel Blake, the titular character of the film of that name, would appear. Along with another sneer about Momentum packing the audience. The Scum’s political editor, Tom Newton-Dunn, and Guido Fawkes’ invertebrate Tom Harwood Tom Harwood both complained about Kate Rutter, an actress from the film I, Daniel Blake and Coronation Street being in the audience.
Zelo Street concluded of Johnson’s wretched performance that
‘Bozo The Clown failed to live up to the hype once again. That is not the fault of the BBC, but those who put him in 10 Downing Street and his press cheerleaders. End of story.’
In addition to his account of the proceedings, the commenters on his story also made some very good points. ‘Mirandola’ and ‘Mark’ both pointed out that a South African, Ryan Jacobsz, appeared at the very beginning of the programme to ask Corbyn questions. Jacobsz had definitely been on Question Time four or five times before. Jacobsz was a Conservative, who the Tory hacks had somehow overlooked in their moans about Labour bias.
And Andy McDonald commented on the Tory mentality behind these complaints. They took it for granted that they would win, and when they don’t, they start whining about bias.
What’s interesting is the assumption, the default expectation that their side is going to win. That any criticism isn’t just the natural way arguments work, but an aberration. That it has to be a “stitch up”, because they cannot conceive of anyone naturally reaching the conclusion that Labour might be better for them.
Says an awful lot about the Oxford debating club mentality driving the Tories (what larks, all a big game, call daddy’s lawyer if shit gets a bit real).
In fact, as Zelo Street, Mike and various other left-wing blogs have pointed out numerous times, Question Time has a massive Tory bias both in its guests and the audience, so it’s massively hypocritical for the Tory hacks to complain of bias in their turn.
Martin Odoni also put up a piece describing how terrible Johnson was as a speaker at the ITV leaders’ debate, filmed near him at MediaCity in Salford Quays. Martin was part of crowd determined to give our farcical Prime Minister the benefit of their opinions on his squalid, malicious government and character. He points out that BoJob has all of May’s faults as a speaker. Both of them repeat meaningless catchphrases. With May it was ‘strong and stable’, with BoJob it’s ‘getting Brexit done’. They both stutter and stammer. And they both run away from hostile crowds. Martin describes how Boris took one look at the mass of protesters, and order his driver to go in the back way. Corbyn, by contrast, came out to talk to them. Martin comments
I must remind everyone once again though, evading the public was a dreadful weakness May showed for most of the spring and summer of 2017. I criticised her myself for refusing to speak to the public, given that, in a country that likes to call itself ‘a democracy’, politicians should be accountable to the people, especially during a General Election. How can that happen if the Prime Minister refuses to speak to them? It looks arrogant, high-handed, and cowardly, and yet Johnson is now emulating it almost daily, after his embarrassing experiences on visits to hospitals during the Autumn.
Martin also discusses how Johnson also shot himself in the foot by declaring that the monarchy was beyond reproach, at a time Prince Andrew is in serious trouble about his relationship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.He’s also shown how hopelessly out of touch he is through his frequent remarks about how the rich deserve sympathy as they are a ‘put-upon minority’. As for the Tories trying to rebrand their HQ as ‘Factcheck UK’, Martin states
Now, it is insulting enough that the Tories would imagine significant numbers of people would be stupid enough to fall for this. But if it had worked, that would be worse, because once again the Tories have shown a pathological willingness to corrupt the democratic process to advance their power. If the Tories had actually been seeking a way of convincing the public to trust Corbyn more than their own leader, they could have found no more certain way than this.
Boris fancies himself as a statesman of truly Churchillian stature. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that, literary ambitions as the great man’s latest biographer aside, he is nowhere near. And the more he speaks on television and in public, the clearer it is. Zelo Street remarks that if the object in his ear was an earphone, ‘then it tells you all you need to know about the Tories’.
Exactly. They don’t believe they can win except by cheating, and that includes whining about BBC bias. They’re a danger to this country, it’s people, and to democracy itself. Get them out, and Corbyn in!
This is yet another brilliant piece from yesterday’s I. The Tories’ decision to rebrand Central Office as a fact-checking centre, in order to mislead people into thinking that their tweets claiming Johnson won the ITV leader debates were objective, journalistic fact, has been condemned. And not just by the folks on Twitter, as a reported yesterday, but also by the real organisations doing the job. The article runs
The Conservatives were accused of misleading the public last night by renaming their Twitter account ‘factcheckUK’.
The party used the account to carry out “fact checks” on the ITV debate – with all of Boris Johnson’s claims rated true and Jeremy Corbyn’s rated false.
Full Fact, an independent fact-checking charity, called the ruse “inappropriate and misleading”. Toby Perkins, Labour’s candidate for Chesterfield, said: “Just fundamentally dishonest.” Hundreds also reported the account to Twitter.
Zelo Street yesterday also posted a piece about this odious deception, He quoted Full Fact as saying
“It is inappropriate and misleading for the Conservative press office to rename their twitter account ‘factcheckUK’ during this debate. Please do not mistake it for an independent fact checking service such as [Full Fact], [Fact Check] or [Fact Check NI]”.
Matthew Thompson of LBC said that the Tories’ stunt was ‘unbelievable’, and Zelo Street also quotes the Sun Apologies Twitter account, which asked Twitter if CCHQ would be losing their verified status because of it. But unfortunately the Tory site still retains it for now.
The Tories’ deception didn’t prevent Corbyn beating Johnson hollow at the debate, but it has added further confirmation that they can’t be trusted about anything.
Well, boys and girls, and children of all ages, here’s more proof that the Tories are really running scared of Corbyn. Despite all the claims that they’re 20 points ahead of him in the polls, this latest trick seems to show that they’re afraid the opposite is true. Last night after the Labour leader apparently utterly trashed Johnson in the debate on ITV the Tory Press Office took the unusual step of rebranding their Central Office as ‘factcheckUK’. As Mike says, this was presumably so they could tweet false claims that Johnson had won the confrontation. In fact CCHQ announced that Johnson was the clear winner, putting a video about it up on Twitter. Presumably they thought we’d forgotten about how they’ve got form editing videos to present a false impression of their opponents. Like the way they inserted a pause into a video they put out of Keir Starmer’s interview on the Andrew Marr show, to make it look like he hesitated and couldn’t answer a question.
But the folks on Twitter weren’t impressed, and the attacks on Tory Lies Central came thick and fast. Mike’s put up a few of them. Jess Brammar posted this tweet, responding to a post stating that this rebranding was so dystopian, Charlie Brooker had taken a leaf from Orwell’s 1984 and declared war on East Asia.
So, let’s get this straight…in this election campaign, journalists have to engage with a Tory press office that thought it was ok to pretend to be a fact checking service to deceive members of the public on twitter during an election debate.https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tory-hq-
@RalfLittle posted a satirical piece calling the Labour Party a bunch of pussies and stating that food banks rock under the heading ‘Conservative Press Orifice’. He also posted this piece under the same heading
The Conservative Press Office would never appear to be something it isn’t in order to spread disinformation. We resent the accusation. Also Boris Johnson has loads of kids but won’t say how many.https://twitter.com/AdamMarkDavis/status/1196897520905048065 …
Technically Ron declared that Corbyn intended to put Thatcher’s ghost into a jar and hurl it into the Sun, and reminded us that David Cameron had had carnal intercourse with a pig, and we were now leaving the EU.
Mike concludes
Way to go, Tories. Not only did your man mess up his big TV appearance…
But you’ve also ensured that nobody will believe another word to come out of your publicity machine.
The Tories already have a very unenviable reputation for lying. Apparently on the debate last night Johnson started to bang on about ‘transparency’, at which point there was laughter from the audience. I think Cummings and his other advisers might have to wake up soon and realise that their party has a ‘credibility gap’.
As for their party election broadcasts, perhaps they should give them the title of one of the Police Squad movies as they’re so desperate. How about ‘The Smell of Fear’. That would accurately sum up their claims about Labour.
The latest round of anti-Semitism smears and faux outrage against Jeremy Corbyn for attending a Passover Seder with the ‘wrong sort of Jews’ in Jewdas, came after Guido Fawkes leaked news of it on his website. Guido Fawkes is a right-wing, political gossip site, which has regularly run smears and falsehoods against the left. And, indeed, other Tories, when it suits him.
Guido Fawkes himself is Paul Staines, a Libertarian Tory with a with a very unpleasant political past. He used to be a member of British Briefing, editing their magazine. This was an organisation of industrialists and company directors, who compiled black lists of trade unionists and socialist activists. He was also a member of a fringe Libertarian group in the Tory party, who invited the commander of a South American Fascist death squad as Guest of Honour to their annual dinner. This is a man, who was responsible for unimaginable atrocities in his country, too horrific to be decently put in a website like this. Fawkes has no business smearing anyone as a Fascist, or anything remotely like it.
Now, it seems, Staines was also part of the illegal rave seen in the 1980s. Robin Ramsay has added a very interesting article by Nick Must, ‘South of the Border’, to the latest issue of Lobster, which describes how the future Guido Fawkes was off his head much of the time on MDMA, an hallucinogenic much favoured by drug gurus and ravers. See the snippet ‘Paul Staines and the Cheesy Quavers’. Go to the Lobster website, look at the present issue, 75, and click on the Must’s article to see it.
The illegal raves scene in the 1980s was run by the rich children of the Tory elite out of Tory Central office, at the same time that Maggie Thatcher was trying to crack down on it as a threat to law and order. I’ve also heard rumours that they also went off to hold dissolute parties at Ibiza, long before it was taken over by the proles. Someone, who had seen what they got up to out there, is supposed to have said it was like ‘the Fall of Rome’.
So much for Fawkes as the guardian of political morality. I’m just surprised he’s got a few brain cells left.
Presented by the Conservative journo Peter Oborne, this is a very hard-hitting and extensive investigation into the malign influence and tactics of the Israel lobby. It covers not just the soft corruption of political lobbying – the various donations in money and paid trips to Israel given to Tory and Labour politicos, but also the co-ordinated smear campaign against anyone who dares to speak out in favour of the Israeli state’s victims. It’s a smear campaign that has seen very respected members of the Jewish community, including senior rabbis, and BBC journos like the late Orla Guerin, Jeremy Bowen and even Jonathan Dimbleby accused of anti-Semitism. The result has been that the Beeb was pressured not to put out an appeal for the victims of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and there was complaints about its coverage of those murdered by Israel’s allies in the Christian Fascists of the Lebanese Phalange in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. And there has been constant pressure by these same bullying thugs on the Groaniad under its former editor, Alan Rusbridger. Who really does look like Harry Potter. Much of this pressure and screaming abuse seems to have come from America. The organisations are carefully structured, so that they keep the total number of donations secret, and their donors hide behind anonymity. When investigated they repeat the same, smooth words about just trying to keep the argument open by presenting Israel’s case, or mutter platitudes about supporting a two-state solution. All the while doing their level best to make sure that their voice is the only the British public hear, and rabidly pursuing business deals on stolen Palestinian land.
I’m afraid I may have misheard some of the names in the programme, and so misspelled them, but they should be roughly accurate.
The documentary begins with the Israeli invasion of Gaza and the Conservative Friends of Israel. Despite the horrendous carnage and destruction wrought, David Cameron in a speech made no mention of this, but instead praised the Israelis and his pledged his lasting support to them if he became Prime Minister. It was this that prompted Oborne to launch his own investigation into the Israel lobby. He makes the point that they have influence on both sides of Parliament, as shown by an exchange between a Conservative MP, who was a member of Conservative Friends of Israel, who asked a question about Israel’s continuing safety. This was answered by a Labour MP, who was a member of the Labour Friends of Israel. Oborne then interviews Michael Ancram, former Tory Shadow Foreign Secretary from 2003-5, about the Israel Lobby’s influence. as well as Sir Richard Dalton, the former British ambassador to Iran from 2003-6. Dalton states clearly that the Israel Lobby does exist, and is important in defining the debate about Israel and the Palestinians. The Conservative Friends of Israel is highly influential, and boasts that it includes 80 per cent of all Tory MPs. Its chair, Richard Huntingdon, received £20,000 last year (2008) in donations, and gave £34,000 to the Conservatives. And the director of the No. 10 club, that exclusive Tory fundraising outfit in which, for a mere £50,000, you can meet David Cameron or have lunch with William Hague, is also included. The Tory Friends of Israel also arrange paid trips to Israel for MPs. So far there have been more of these than equivalent trips to America and Europe combined. Oborne states that in fairness, he has to say that he went on one of these, and there was no pressure to report favourably about Israel. But two MPs, who went on one of these trips, then received afterwards £25,000 in donations. This prompts Oborne to ask Ancram if this explains the soft line taken by the Tories about Israeli influence, and why the Tories don’t like to talk about it.
The documentary then moves on to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, during which 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed, and $3.6 billion’s worth of damage inflicted. Michael Howard gave William Hague £25,000 in donations. Hague then made the mistake of making a speech criticising the Israeli response to Lebanese attacks as disproportionate. As a result, Lord Kalms, a CFI donor and head of the Dixons electronics chain, was outraged, and threatened to withhold further funding. Which he did, and Hague never received a penny more. The Israel lobby attacks even the mildest criticism of Israel. The director of the CFI, Stuart Pollak, had a meeting with David Cameron after the speech. Then, at his lunch with the CFI, Cameron didn’t mention the Lebanese invasion at all.
The programme then moves on to the organisation’s income, as revealed by the Parliamentary Accounts Register. For comparison, the pro-Arab lobby revealed that they had been given £43,000 in donations. How many had the CFI been given? No-one knows. They didn’t register any. They’re structured as a group of individuals, and are not incorporated, so they don’t have declare any under the rules. In 2008 the CFI gave the Tories £2 million, but this is not the whole story. One Tory MP said that after a chance meeting with Stuart Pollak, he received two donations from businessmen he had never met, and who did not live in his constituency. The CFI gave £30,000 to Cameron’s team. And in 2005 Cameron met Plocha Zabludowicz, who gave the future Tory PM £15,000 and a further £35,000 to Tory Central Office. The total figure for the donations given by the CFI is £10 million, more than the other lobbies.
Then there’s the incident of the UN vote over a motion censuring both Hamas and Israel for the carnage in Gaza. The CFI rang Hague up to condemn the resolution and demand that he criticise it. Which he duly did.
But the Israel Lobby only became really powerful in Britain under Maggie’s favourite Labour pet, Tony Blair. Jon Mandelsohn, a prominent pro-Israel lobbyist, stated that ‘Zionism is pervasive in New Labour’ and ‘It is axiomatic that Blair will come to Labour Friends of Israel meetings’. There are more Labour MPs in Labour Friends of Israel than their opponents across the benches in the Tory Friends of Israel. The documentary describes how Blair met the rock entrepreneur, Lord Levy, at the Israeli embassy, who then raised £15 million for the Labour party before the row over ‘cash for questions’. When Blair became PM in 1997, he gave Levy a life peerage. Levy, however, was unpaid and never a formal servant of the British state, so that the deals he made as Blair’s special envoy to the Middle East between Israel and the Arab nations could be kept secret. The programme interviews Prof. Avi Shlaim of Oxford University’s Middle East department, who states that he considers Levy has damaged Britain’s reputation in the Middle East.
The documentary then moves back to CFI lobbyists at the Tory party conference. Their purpose there is to make sure Cameron’s policies are in line with Israel’s This means that Michael Kaminski, the Polish leader, who heads a small, far right nationalist party, is lionised by the Tories, despite his record of making anti-Semitic remarks and his refusal to apologise for the suffering of Jewish Poles during the Second World War. Stuart Pollak was most keen not to have Cameron’s speech to the CFI at the Tory conference covered. He is shown waving the camera crew away. The CFI totally support Kaminski. They also plead that they’re totally transparent through the distinction between their donations as a group, and those of individual businesspeople.
Mike reported yesterday that Activate, the Tory ‘grassroots’ campaign, that isn’t connected at all to the Tory party, except for what it says about working to get Tories elected and defining itself in its constitution as a Conservative organization, found itself mired in controversy over its members’ conversation on WhatsApp, in which they expressed some very unpleasant comments about ‘chavs’. It was, as one of those involved dimly began to realise, Nazi stuff. They were talking about sterilizing them, gassing them, and turning the Isle of Wight into a giant prison for them. As well as using them for medical experimentation.
Activate splutteringly denied that they were responsible for all this Nazi hate speech, claiming instead that they were hacked. It’s a convenient excuse which doesn’t ring true, as someone else had appeared on their page after the conversation telling them that they should be careful what they say.
It’s now been revealed that all the ‘Nazi chat’ really did come from members of Activate, as their membership director, Fizarn Adris, had a Twitter feed which showed a very unpleasant attitude to the poor and vulnerable. This has now conveniently been taken down.
I am not remotely surprised that members of a Tory support group have such a deep hatred and contempt for the poor and marginalized. And I admit that I’ve made some of the same comments myself about the criminal members of the underclass. A friend of mine used to work in a very rough area in Cheltenham. Don’t be surprised – they do exist. She and her colleagues had been threatened several times at work, and gangs had also tried to break in and rob the place by people, who could fairly be described as ‘chavs’.
The Activate members’ gloating descriptions about what they’d like done to the desperately poor, however, is just pure Tory class prejudice. It comes across as the stupid sneering of upper class public schoolboys and girls, smugly convinced of their own superiority as members of the privileged class, with a bullying attitude to those beneath them. Oh, isn’t it great fun to give the lower orders a good bashing, even if it’s only in the form of tasteless jokes. It comes from the same mindset that produced the Assassin’s Club in the 1980s. That was a group of public schoolboys at Oxford, who used to pay restauranteurs so they could come in and wreck the place.
And I’m not remotely surprised that the jokes being made involved the same treatment that the Nazis inflicted upon Jews and other persecuted groups, including the disabled. There’s a section of the Tory right which has always overlapped and sympathized with the Fascist fringe, despite their denials and the attempts by Thatcher and her successors to quash all mention of it. Some of us can remember the antics of the various Tory youth movements in the 1980s, like the Union of Conservative Students. This bunch of upper class charmless nurks, to use Norman Stanley Fletcher’s descriptive epithet, used to run around singing such inoffensive ditties as ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks or Asians’, to the tune of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. As well as ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’. I also remember how the leader of one of these Tory youth outfits in Northern Ireland was also something of a racist, although he sort of denied it. Very sort of. In fact, if I recall correctly, he issued a statement which said, ‘We are not Fascists. We are Thatcherite achievers. But if Mrs. Thatcher won’t have us, then we will go to the Far Right’. Which, like Trump’s condemnation of the Nazis who goosestepped in Charlottesville two weeks ago, really isn’t a denial at all. As for the Union of Conservative Students, from what I recall, it was just so riddled with overt, unapologetic racism, that Tory Central Office closed it down and merged it, along with the Young Conservatives, into a new organization, Conservative Future.
Since the 1980s, racism, or at least very open displays of it, have become much less acceptable in British society, quite apart from the legislation in place to protect ethnic minorities from prejudice, intimidation and violence. And the Tories have tried to weed out, or at least be seen to be weeding out, the Nazis in their midst. In the 1970s the Monday Club opened its membership books to the Board of Deputies of British Jews to show that they didn’t have anti-Semites amongst their membership. However, the organization still remained so extremely anti-immigrant that in the early part of this century Cameron and IDS severed the Tory party’s links with them because of their racism.
So the upper class members of Tory support organisations have found that they can’t be as racist as they were back in the 1980s. But they still have the urge to punch downwards, to mock and sneer at the underprivileged. And so instead of joking about abusing and deporting ethnic minorities, they’ve gone on to making Nazi comments about maltreating and exterminating chavs. Which is supposed to be quite acceptable, because they’re white, and so this doesn’t count as racist abuse.
Not that there’s anything much different in their attitude towards the poor here. Keith Joseph, Maggie’s mentor, caused a storm of outrage in the 1970s when he expressed a similar eugenicist, Nazi attitude in a speech in which he attacked unmarried mothers as a threat to ‘our stock’.
The jokes Activate’s members were making about killing, sterilizing and experimenting on members of the underclass are disgusting and offensive. But there’s nothing remotely new in their attitude, or in what this has revealed about part of the Tories’ constituency. It’s always included sneering members of the upper classes, with a chilling contempt for those they see as the inferiors. They only difference now is wider society finds this more offensive than it did, and they’re expressing their vile views on social media, rather than on the rostrums at party conferences.
Our liberal friends and cousins across the Atlantic have also picked up on the pessimism and desperation that the British media have detected in May’s campaign. In this clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, the host comments on a clip from British TV where the man interviewing May states that her campaign has been ‘low-key’ and that she’s ‘a bit of a glum-bucket’ compared to the dynamism of Boris Johnson.
The Majority Report’s anchor says that the take such an interest in British politics, as compared to it, American culture is ‘adolescent’. But he comments that you need to have 100 years of decadence and imperialism before you get to call the Prime Minister ‘a glum-bucket’. And, he adds, you have to be ‘frickin’ mad’ to want Boris as your leader.
Of course, May rebuts the remark, stating with the fixed, squinting, rictus smile she adopts whenever anyone even obliquely suggests that she is not the greatest thing since Margaret Thatcher walked this earth, that she is very optimistic.
But the blurb for the clip on YouTube says it has obviously got her rattled.
Well, of course she’s rattled. Her lead in the polls have been cut down to 5 per cent, far more people in England trust Labour with the NHS, most people don’t want the backdoor privatisation the Tories – and New Labour – have been sneaking in, and Labour has far more sensible polices on defence than the Tories. Such as actually restoring the strength of our police, border guards and armed forces, which the Tories cut.
And May is a ‘glum bucket’. She very obviously does not like meeting the public, as is shown by the fact that she only conducts her meetings with ordinary people behind closed doors, and often they’ve been carefully selected beforehand, so it’s invitation only.
When she does encounter crowds, they boo her and she is left scuttling back to whichever grim biotechnology lab under Tory Central Office spawned her. A few days ago she was forced to beat a hasty retreat from a council estate in Bristol. Possibly she felt that she’d find some loyal, Alf Garnett-style working class Tories. What she found instead was local people ground down by welfare cuts, stagnant wages and zero hours contracts, who were understandably angry.
Hence a swift walk back to the black limousines, which vanished off as quick as they could.
Any optimism she affects is painfully false. And the fear underneath the mask is showing as the wheels fall off the Tory battle bus.
The current crisis hitting the NHS isn’t an accident. The Tories – and Blairites – have had a decades-long policy of privatising the NHS and starving it off funds going back to the days of the molten Tory tin goddess herself, Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS as part of her campaign to destroy the welfare state as a whole. That she couldn’t was down to two things – there was a massive cabinet revolt, as they realised it would be, er ‘highly courageous’ in the words of Sir Humphrey in ‘Yes, Minister’. In other words, they knew it would cost them the next election. Also, her private secretary Patrick Jenkin actually visited America and found that there healthcare system is rubbish, with 55 million people unable to afford their health insurance before Obamacare, and about 30,000 folks dying every year due to lack of medical care.
But this didn’t stop her or them. She wanted to engineer a situation where 25 per cent of Brits would have private medical insurance. And over the next three decades and more the Tories and the Blairites opened up more of the NHS to private industry through the Private Finance Initiative and other schemes whereby private hospitals and clinics are now contracting in to provide services for the NHS, while the NHS is being privatised, starved of funds and broken up.
Even as far back as the 1970s Britain actually gave less funding to its health service than the other countries in what is now the EU. And that funding has been further slashed as part of a spurious programme of cutting the deficit by the Tories.
Jeremy Corbyn has said he intends to reverse this. He will find an extra £37 billion for the NHS, including £10 billion to correct the hardware problems, which left our health service vulnerable to hackers last weekend.
Well, as the TV host Victoria Derbyshire tweeted, they had seventy years to solve the problems of the NHS, but didn’t.
One of the journos at the Beeb, Jon Ironmonger, doorstepped Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, for his comments on Labour’s pledge. The result is very telling. Hunt kept his mouth firmly shut, and peddled off as fast as he could into the London traffic.
Like May, Hunt depends on first being programmed by the spin doctors at Tory Central Office. Without Linton Crosby to type the soundbites into ZX 81 1 Kilobyte powerhouse that is his brain – for those of you, who remember ’80s home computers – Hunt and the rest of them have nothing to say. And so they disappear as fast as they can into the smoke and petrol fumes.
This is another excellent video from Reichwing Watch. Entitled Peasants for Plutocracy: How the Billionaires Brainwashed America, it’s about how wealthy industrialists, like the multi-billionaire Koch brothers, created modern Libertarianism and a stream of fake grassroots ‘astroturf’ organisations, in order to attack and roll back Roosevelt’s New Deal and the limited welfare state it introduced. And one of the many fake populist organisations the Koch brothers have set up is the Tea Party movement, despite the Kochs publicly distancing themselves from it.
The documentary begins with footage from an old black and white American Cold War propaganda movie, showing earnest young people from the middle decades of the last century discussing the nature of capitalism. It then moves on to Noam Chomsky’s own, very different perspective on an economy founded on private enterprise. Chomsky states that there has never been a purely capitalist economy. Were one to be established, it would very soon collapse, and so what we have now is state capitalism, with the state playing a very large role in keeping capitalism viable. He states that the alternative to this system is the one believed in by 19th century workers, in that the people, who worked in the mills should own the mills. He also states that they also believed that wage labour was little different from slavery, except in that it was temporary. This belief was so widespread that it was even accepted by the Republican party. The alternative to capitalism is genuinely democratic self-management. This conflicts with the existing power structure, which therefore does everything it can to make it seem unthinkable.
Libertarianism was founded in America in 1946/7 by an executive from the Chamber of Commerce in the form of the Foundation for Economic Education. This was basically a gigantic business lobby, financed by the heads of Fortune 500 companies, who also sat on its board. It’s goal was to destroy Roosevelt’s New Deal. Vice-President Wallace in an op-ed column in the New York Times stated that while its members posed as super-patriots, they wanted to roll back freedom and capture both state and economic power. The video also quotes Milton Friedman, the great advocate of Monetarism and free market economics, on capitalism as the system which offers the worst service at the highest possible profit. To be a good businessman, you have to be as mean and rotten as you can. And this view of capitalism goes back to Adam Smith. There is a clip of Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal, answering a question on why the media is so incurious about the true origins of Libertarianism. He states that they aren’t curious for the same reason the American media didn’t inquire into the true nature of the non-existent WMDs. It shows just how much propaganda and corruption there is in the American media.
The documentary then moves on to the Tea Party, the radical anti-tax movement, whose members deliberately hark back to the Boston Tea Party to the point of dressing up in 18th century costume. This section begins with clips of Fox News praising the Tea Party. This is then followed by Noam Chomsky on how people dread filling out their annual tax returns because they’ve been taught to see taxation as the state stealing their money. This is true in dictatorships. But in true democracy, it should be viewed differently, as the people at last being able to put into practice the plan in which everyone was involved in formulating. However, this frightens big business more than social security as it involves a functioning democracy. As a result, there is a concerted, and very successful campaign, to get people to fear big government.
The idea of the Tea Party was first aired by the CNBC reporter Rick Santilli in an on-air rant. Most of the Party’s members are normal, middle class Americans with little personal involvement in political campaigning. It is also officially a bi-partisan movement against government waste. But the real nature of the Tea Party was shown in the 2010 Tea Party Declaration of Independence, which stated that the Party’s aims were small government and a free market economy. In fact, the movement was effectively founded by the Koch brothers, Charles and David Koch. Back in the 1980s, David Koch was the Libertarian Party’s vice-president. The Libertarian Party’s 1980 platform stated that they intended to abolish just about every regulatory body and the welfare system. They intended to abolish the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Authority, Occupational Health and Safety Administration, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, National Labor Relations Board, the FBI, CIA, Federal Reserve, Social Security, Welfare, the public (state) schools, and taxation. They abandoned this tactic, however, after pouring $2 million of their money into it, only to get one per cent of the vote. So in 1984 they founded the first of their wretched astroturf organisation, Citizens for a Sound Economy. The name was meant to make it appear to be a grassroots movement. However, their 1998 financial statement shows that it was funded entirely by wealthy businessmen like the Kochs. In 2004 the CSE split into two – Freedom Works, and Americans for Prosperity. The AFP holds an annual convention in Arlington, Virginia, attended by some of its 800,000 members. It was the AFP and the Kochs who were the real organising force behind the Tea Party. Within hours of Santilli’s rant, he had been given a list of 1/2 million names by the Kochs. Although the Koch’s have publicly distanced themselves from the Tea Party, the clip for this section of the documentary shows numerous delegates at the convention standing up to declare how they had organised Tea Parties in their states. But it isn’t only the AFP that does this. Freedom Works, which has nothing to do with the Kochs, also funds and organises the Tea Parties.
Mark Crispin Miller, an expert on propaganda, analysing these astroturf organisations makes the point that for propaganda to be effective, it must not seem like propaganda. It must seem to come either from a respected, neutral source, or from the people themselves. Hence the creation of these fake astroturf organisations.
After its foundation in the late 1940s, modern Libertarianism was forged in the late 1960s and ’70s by Charles Koch and Murray Rothbard. Libertarianism had previously been the ideology of the John Birch Society, a group harking back to the 19th century. Koch and Rothbard married this economic extreme liberalism, with the political liberalism of the hippy counterculture. They realised that the hippies hated the state, objecting to the police, drug laws, CIA and the Vietnam war. Ayn Rand, who is now credited as one of the great founders of Libertarianism for her extreme capitalist beliefs, despised them. The film has a photo of her, next to a long quote in which she describes Libertarianism as a mixture of capitalism and anarchism ‘worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two different bandwagons… I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect.’
The documentary also goes on to show the very selective attitude towards drugs and democracy held by the two best-known American Libertarian politicos, Ron and Rand Paul. Despite the Libertarians’ supposedly pro-marijuana stance, the Pauls aren’t actually in favour of legalising it or any other drugs. They’re just in favour of devolving the authority to ban it to the individual states. If the federal government sends you to prison for weed, that, to them, is despotism. If its the individual state, it’s liberty.
And there’s a very telling place piece of footage where Ron Paul talks calmly about what a threat democracy is. He states clearly that democracy is dangerous, because it means mob rule, and privileges the majority over the minority. At this point the video breaks the conversation to show a caption pointing out that the Constitution was framed by a small group of wealthy plutocrats, not ‘we the people’. This is then followed by an American government film showing a sliding scale for societies showing their positions between the poles of democracy to despotism, which is equated with minority rule. The video shows another political scientist explaining that government and elites have always feared democracy, because when the people make their voices heard, they make the wrong decisions. Hence they are keen to create what Walter Lipmann in the 1920s called ‘manufacturing consent’. Real decisions are made by the elites. The people themselves are only allowed to participate as consumers. They are granted methods, which allow them to ratify the decisions of their masters, but denied the ability to inform themselves, organise and act for themselves.
While Libertarianism is far more popular in America than it is over here, this is another video that’s very relevant to British politics. There are Libertarians over here, who’ve adopted the extreme free-market views of von Hayek and his fellows. One of the Torygraph columnists was particularly vocal in his support for their doctrines. Modern Tory ideology has also taken over much from them. Margaret Thatcher was chiefly backed by the Libertarians in the Tory party, such as the National Association For Freedom, which understandably changed its name to the Freedom Foundation. The illegal rave culture of the late 1980s and 1990s, for example, operated out of part of Tory Central Office, just as Maggie Thatcher and John Major were trying to ban it and criminalise ‘music with a repetitive beat’. Virginian Bottomley appeared in the Mail on Sunday back in the early 1990s raving about how wonderful it would be to replace the police force with private security firms, hired by neighbourhoods themselves. That’s another Libertarian policy. It comes straight from Murray Rothbard. Rothbard also wanted to privatise the courts, arguing that justice would still operate, as communities would voluntarily submit to the fairest court as an impartial and non-coercive way of maintain the peace and keeping down crime. The speaker in this part of the video describes Koch and Rothbard as ‘cretins’. Of course, it’s a colossally stupid idea, which not even the Tory party wanted to back. Mind you, that’s probably because they’re all in favour of authoritarianism and state power when its wielded by the elite.
I’ve no doubt most of the Libertarians in this country also believe that they’re participating in some kind of grassroots, countercultural movement, unaware that this is all about the corporate elite trying to seize more power for themselves, undermine genuine democracy, and keep the masses poor, denied welfare support, state education, and, in Britain, destroying the NHS, the system of state healthcare that has kept this country healthy for nearly 70 years.
Libertarians do see themselves as anarchists, though anarcho-individualists, rather than collectivists like the anarcho-syndicalists or Communists. They aren’t. This is purely about expanding corporate power at the expense of the state and the ordinary citizens it protects and who it is supposed to represent and legislate for. And it in practice it is just as brutal as the authoritarianism it claims to oppose. In the 1980s the Freedom Association became notorious on the left because of its support for the death squads in Central America, also supported by that other Libertarian hero, Ronald Reagan.
Libertarianism is a brutal lie. It represents freedom only for the rich. For the rest of us, it means precisely the opposite.
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