More on the hidden racism and bigotry seething away under the surface of the Tory party. A week or so ago, Mates Jacob got tired of James Cleverly’s decision not to do anything about the rampant islamophobia in the Tory party, and published his extensive dossier on it. Zelo Street put up the details of ten of the Tory politicos caught expressing bigoted views about Muslims. They happened to be local councillors, and had made the usual rants about Muslims being ‘barbarians’ and invaders, who forced their views on others through war and conquest. One also thought that immigration from Africa should be stopped, and famine was just nature’s way of dealing with overpopulation. Another was angry that the Muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was still in Britain. Which shows how perverse their bigotry is. Alibhai-Brown’s a committed anti-racist, but she’s no friend of Islamism and has criticised extremist Islam for its bigotry and repressive attitudes. Just as she’s also criticism anti-White racism, as well as that directed at Blacks, Asians and Muslims.
Mates Jacob stated that his dossier of 25 Tory islamophobes showed that the party was a hostile environment for Muslims. Miqdaad Versi of the Muslim Council of Britain commented
“Islamophobia is truly endemic within the Conservative Party & yet they still do nothing and ignore the problem … The scale of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party continues to be ignored by the mainstream political commentariat, with little scrutiny or accountability despite the Party’s total inaction & despite the depth of Islamophobia across all levels of the Party”.
Faced with its publication, the Tories were forced to act and suspend the 25, pending an investigation. A spokeswoman declared that the swiftness with which they were suspended show the seriousness with which the party took racism and discrimination, which they would not tolerate in any form. As Zelo Street drily commented, ‘Cue hollow laughter all round’.
And the blog concluded
‘Sadly, the reality of the situation is that it is only the Guardian and Mirror showing a willingness to follow up Mates Jacob’s work, and the impending election, that has spurred the Tories into pulling their fingers out. Moreover, there has been no action, and most likely will not be, against Jacob Rees Mogg, Priti Patel, and Michael “Oiky” Gove over their recent veering across the anti-Semitism line. Which leads to just one conclusion.
The Tory Party is institutionally racist from top to bottom. I’ll just leave that one there.’
Following this, Mates Jacob reported that he had uncovered a Tory Jew-hater. He’d been going through the alphabet, starting at ‘A’, and got as far as Aberdeen North before he found one.
This was Ryan Houghton, who the Scottish National reported had been suspended from the Tories because of comments he had a made several years previously. What were those views? Apparently, they were about gays as well as Jews, as well as Holocaust denial. The paper reported that
“Houghton said the National newspaper had taken a ‘selective look’ at comments he made in discussions about terrorism, LGBT rights and anti-Semitism and vowed to clear his name. He said that in the discussions seven years ago, when he was 20, he referenced the views of discredited historian and Holocaust denier David Irving but had made clear in subsequent posts that he was not defending them”.
Houghton tried to hang on as the prospective candidate by apologising unreservedly to the Jewish community, and saying that he was in contact with them. Put the Scots Tories didn’t accept it, declared his blogs about these issues were unacceptable, and suspended him.
Zelo Street notes that he wasn’t the only Tory to be suspended for anti-Semitism. Amjad Bashir, the Tory candidate for Leeds North East, had described British Jews returning from Israel as ‘brainwashed extremists’, He also accused the chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee of also being an apologist for Israel. Leeds has a large Jewish population, and that constituency was represented for years by Keith Joseph. The Tories really had no choice if they wished to retain the seat. They had to get rid of him.
Zelo Street also reminds its readers in this article that the Tories have made some very anti-Semitic remarks using coded language. Suella Braverman had ranted about ‘cultural Marxism’, a term that goes all the way back to the Nazis, and which has been used to refer to left-wing Jewish intellectuals. The smirking Priti Patel praised Viktor Orban, the anti-Semitic far right president of Hungary. Michael Gove confused Israel and Jews, which is a mark of anti-Semitism according to the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. But Benjamin Netanyahu has passed a law in Israel stating they’re one and the same, so he got a pass. And then there was Jacob Rees-Mogg calling Oliver Letwin and John Bercow ‘illuminati’, from the far right conspiracy theory about Freemasons, Jews and Satanists trying to take over the world. He also claimed that George Soros was behing the Remain campaign, which follows the Nazi conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers.
As Jewish bloggers like David Rosenberg and Tony Greenstein have pointed out, anti-Semitism has always been far more prevalent on the right than on the left. Conservatives value tradition, and Jews have been seen as an invasive threat to traditional social structures, ideologies and values. In the 1930s the membership of the various British pro-Nazi organisations was largely made up of upper and upper middle class Tories. The Daily Heil is notorious for its support of Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler in this period. And certain sections of the Tory party had such a reputation for Jew hatred that in 1970 the Monday Club opened its membership books to the Board of Deputies of British Jews in order to show them that it didn’t contain any anti-Semites or Fascists. That didn’t stop the Monday’s Club’s deserved reputation for racism, stemming from its intense hostile to Black and Asian immigration. It’s reputation was so toxic that when David Cameron became leader of the Tory party, he made a great show of cutting the party’s ties with it as part of his campaign to clean out racists from the party. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
The Nazis and racists were still there throughout the 70s and 80s. I can remember the uproar during Thatcher’s tenure of No. 10 when the Union of Conservative Students decided to support racial nationalism as their explicit ideology. That’s the same one as the BNP and former National Front: you’re only British if you’re White. This provoked a crackdown by Norman Fowler, who was forced to merge them with the Young Conservatives to produce Conservative Future, a new youth organisation. The overlap between the Tories’ membership and that of far-right organisations was so great, that Panorama was going to screen a documentary about it, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’. But that was never broadcast due to pressure from the PM in an act of explicit state censorship.
Despite their claims to the contrary, the Tories are still a deeply racist party, but this is overlooked by a Conservative press and media establishment, which shares and promotes their bigotry and hatred. And so it’s silent about the vicious racism within the Tory ranks, while hypocritically doing all it can to present Labour as an institutionally anti-Semitic party.
Ho ho! Things definitely aren’t going too well for the Blonde Generalissimo. Yesterday he lost his majority in the Commons when Philip Lee crossed the floor to join the Lib Dems while he spouting something about the G7 summit. Lee gave his reason for joining them his opposition to the immense harm being done to this country by Brexit. He declared
“This Conservative government is aggressively pursuing a damaging Brexit in unprincipled ways. It is putting lives and livelihoods at risk unnecessarily and it is wantonly endangering the integrity of the United Kingdom. More widely, it is undermining our country’s economy, democracy and role in the world. It is using political manipulation, bullying and lies. And it is doing these things in a deliberate and considered way.
“That is why today I am joining Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats.”
Even with the odious DUP supporting him, BoJob only had a majority of one. Now he doesn’t even have that. Which means that, democratically, he can’t pass any legislation whatsoever.
But the humiliation got worse. The 21 Tory MPs who were threatening to rebel against Johnson over the vote whether to debate a bill preventing a no deal Brexit put their money where their mouths were and actually did it. They voted with the opposition. From today backbenchers have control of commons business. The Old Etonian Duce becomes the first Prime Minister since Pitt the Younger to lose his first vote.
The Tories, who voted against him were Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Guto Bebb, Rory Stewart, Oliver Letwin, Dominic Grieve, David Gauke, Nicholas Soames, Richard Benyon, Steve Brine, Alistair Burt, Greg Clark, Justine Greening, Sam Gyimah, Stephen Hammond, Richard Harrington, Margot James, Anne Milton, Caroline Nokes, Antoinette Sandbach and Ed Vaizey. Clarke is, I think, the father of the House, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer under John Major. Hammond was also Chancellor until a few weeks ago, while Oliver Letwin and Nicholas ‘Fatty’ Soames have been prominent, even notorious, Tory politicos since the days of Thatcher, as I recall. And unlike many Tory chancellors, such as George Osborne,Clarke did seem to understand something about economics. When a prominent MP like him rebels, the fault’s very much with Johnson, not with him.
But BoJob also reacted as he threatened. He removed the whip from them, effectively expelling them from the Tory party. But there are also rumours that, following the advice of his adviser Dominic Cummings, he also removed their parliamentary passes so that they’d find it difficult getting into the Commons today to vote against him. One of the rebel MPs, Sam Gyimah, was reported by Sky News to have said that it seemed he had disabled their passes when they came in yesterday evening.
This was followed by the bizarre behaviour of the Polecat himself. It seems that with nothing to do during the debate except wait, Cummings retired to the bar, where he became, as Private Eye would have said, ‘tired and emotional’. Peter Walker, one of the Groaniad’s hacks, spotted him wondering down the parliamentary press corridor, lost and clutching a bottle of red wine, looking for the office of a particular newspaper. Then Cumming lurched over to Portcullis house where, according to Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Murdoch propaganda sheet the Sunday Times, he started yelling at Jeremy Corbyn ‘Come on Jeremy, let’s do this election, don’t be scared’. Shipman claimed the Labour leader was then whisked away by horrified aides. The Labour MP Cat Smith tweeted that, ‘As one of several shadow cabinet members stood right next to Jeremy (who was on the phone at the time) I just thought there was some loud bloke who stunk of booze yelling at us’. Commenting on this bizarre spectacle, Brexitbin tweeted ‘ Drunk & disorderly in Westminster is a new low even for him. The way to beat these people is not to play their game. Put them under pressure and they crack”. To which Zelo Street added ‘Didn’t need much pressure, did it?’ and concluded ‘Cummings is cracking up. Expect more pissed apparitions before he is taken away.’
Johnson has also confirmed that he’s a Stalinist by purging the Tory rebels, who now have absolutely nothing to lose by voting against the government and bringing it down. And as various bloggers, like Zelo Street, have already remarked, it also shows up the horrendous hypocrisy of the press. They were howling a few months ago that Corbyn was an evil Stalinist because he gave the constituency parties the power to deselect their MPs. How terrible and dictatorial, reinforcing internal party democracy like that! In fact, Corbyn hasn’t deselected anyone. But Johnson has. And the Tories are likely to have been embarrassed by it. When BoJob first made the threat, James Cleverly – surely a misnomer? – tweeted out that the party has no mechanism for deselecting MPs. Perhaps not, but Duce Boris has still kicked them out of the party nonetheless. Still, it could have been worse. Dictator Boris could have gone full Hitler and had them all killed like the SA during the Night of the Long Knives. I wonder who would have taken the part of the SS? Conservative Future, perhaps? They seem to be racist enough, if not necessarily that violent.
Here’s the Guardian’s video of Philip Lee crossing the floor:
I hope these are just the first of many defeats leading to this vicious, murderous government finally collapsing. And hopefully taking the whole Tory party down with it for good.
Here’s another snippet of information from that evil Russian propaganda machine, RT. And it’s one that very definitely hasn’t been on the mainstream news, which alone shows why we need alternative sources like RT and the others.
In this video, they reveal how 968 individuals from the Alt Right were referred to the government’s anti-extremism programme from March 2017, an increase of 28 per cent. 272 of these Fascists were under 15. 37 per cent of them were referred to the channel scheme, an increase from 26 per cent. There were 3,740 cases of Islamist extremism, but this had decreased by 26 per cent.
Clearly the majority of people being referred to Prevent are Islamist fanatics. But the extreme Right is doing its best to catch up fast. But no-one wants to talk about them, except the Israel lobby, which is trying its best to claim that it’s all about Momentum and the far Left in the Labour party. In America, Trump shut down the parts of the FBI which specifically investigated White Fascist terrorism. The government banned the Nazi youth group National Action last year, after the horrifying murder of Jo Cox. But the youthful storm troopers are still around. They’ve just gone under cover. They’re still training for violence, and making vile speeches about how the Jews are trying to destroy the White race through racial intermixing. And then there’s the influence of the Net, which allows Richard Spencer and the rest of them an outlet for their vile views.
But not a peep about this from the mainstream news. Probably for the same reasons that White racist shooters are always described as ‘lone wolves’ or ‘deeply disturbed individuals’, while Islamist butchers are called precisely what they are: terrorists. And so should murderous White fascists.
But despite the denials and smears of the Tories, the Conservative party has always had links to the extreme right, and consistently promoted the anti-immigration policies that are an integral part of modern British Fascism. Anyone remember the furore in the 1980s when parts of the Tory party declared they wanted ‘racial nationalism’ adopted as the party’s official policy? ‘Racial Nationalism’ is the ideology of the NF and BNP. Only White, traditional Brits, can be true citizens. It had massive support amongst the Union of Conservative Students, which is why Norman Fowler closed them down and merged them with the Young Conservatives to form Conservative Future. And a friend of mine in Cheltenham told me years ago that it split the Tories in his ward, as half of them were very definitely in favour of it.
This is what the Tory dominated media isn’t telling you. And by not doing so, they are reinforcing racist double standards and protecting the racist Tory right.
Mike put up a piece on his blog today, commenting on the distinction the lamestream media makes between White and Muslim terrorists. He was discussing the coverage of Darren Osborne, the islamophobe who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of worshippers leaving two mosques in London. Osborne had become obsessed with killing Muslims after watching a documentary on the Muslim grooming gangs and radicalised by following various anti-Islamic groups, including the notorious Britain First, on the net.
What drew Mike’s ire was the way Osborne was described as a ‘loner’, in sharp contrast to the various Islamist mass murderers, who were rightly described as terrorists. They were. So is Osborne. He killed and maimed innocent people for a political ideology. And there is no difference in the pattern of his radicalisation from the Islamists. Many of them were self-radicalised, turning to hatred and violence by following the propaganda spewed over the internet by groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. They were described as ‘lone wolves’, which I think is how the Islamists themselves want to promote them and their actions.
But White killers like Osborne aren’t described as what they are – terrorists.
Mike wonders if this was propaganda. And he has a Tweet by Tom London, who also comments on this distinction, and makes the point that to understand these peoples’ action, you need to understand the causes.
Mike and Mr London aren’t the only people, who’ve noticed this peculiar double standard. The American left-wing and progressive news shows – The Young Turks, in particular, – have also commented repeatedly on the way the media in America also makes this distinction. Whites are ‘loners’, Muslims are ‘terrorists’. And Islamist terrorism is taken very seriously. As it should. White racist terrorism should also be treated in the same way. In fact, it deserves more attention and effort to combat it, as there’s actually more of it than Islamist violence. But Trump’s decided to just about close down the parts of the FBI dedicated to monitoring and tracking White supremacist terrorist organisations. Of course, some of this is self-interest for Trump, as he’s received strong backing from White Supremacist groups, most notably the Alt-Right. Which has its own gang of violent, SA-type thugs in the ‘Proud Boys’, who believe that combating the threat to White America means going out and beating up Anti-Fascists.
But there’s a wider, underlying assumption here. It’s that White America and Britain is tolerant and non-racist, and that the threats to British and American society come from outside. From the ‘unassimilable immigrants’ the Daily Mail, Express and the Torygraph talked so much about under Thatcher, and continue to discuss in those terms. And when the Scum declares that we are a tolerant society, attacking a White racist outrage, you have to be amazed at their hypocrisy. This is a paper that never missed a trick to vilify Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Nearly twenty years ago Private Eye ran a piece about the rag’s double standards, pointing out that there had been 19 complaints against the Scum for racism upheld by the Press Complaints Commission, as was.
Now I don’t doubt that most Brits now aren’t racist, although there still is lingering prejudice, particularly towards Muslims. Some of that is the result of the War on Terror and Israeli propaganda – when the word ‘terrorist’ began entered widespread use in the 1960s-70s, it was always in the context of Muslim and Palestinian/Arab terror. It was the deliberate use of language to present Israel as the noble, wronged party, standing against murderous fanatics. Who were, as orientals, terrible others to be feared and hated. And some of it comes from the real fanatics, who organised demonstrations demanding the death of Salman Rushdie and the Pope, waving banner proclaiming that we would soon be visited for our crimes by the jihadis. And some of this is media bias, as the counterdemonstrations organised by far more tolerant, liberal Muslims against the bigots, firebrands and wannabe mass murderers didn’t receive nearly so much coverage.
There are also dangers with accusing White society en masse of racism. Nobody likes to be told they’re racist, and I’m afraid some of the self-proclaimed anti-racist and Black and ethnic minority advocacy groups did go too far in claiming that British racism was endemic and widespread. Some of them really did give the impression that they regarded all White people as racist. And this has provoked a backlash. Way back around 2004 the Spectator ran a piece, ‘Blackened Whites’, attacking anti-racist groups for unfairly smearing the White British majority, and particularly White men. It was the Tories attempt to use the Republicans’ tactic of appealing to ‘angry White men’, who feel threatened and demonised by feminism and the rise of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Pushing anti-racist campaigning too far, and labelling all Whites, or nearly all Whites racist, risks further alienating ordinary people, who would otherwise be sympathetic. It plays into the hands of the Tories, who would like to present themselves as the nice, anti-racist party, in contrast to all the White proles in the Labour movement. See Owen Jones’ book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, for the way the media deliberately misrepresented an industrial dispute about the use of immigrant workers to see how the Tories and their lapdogs in the press do this.
But there is real racism there. The Tory party was riven in the 1980s with groups declaring their support for ‘racial nationalism’ – the ideology of the National Front and BNP. The Conservative youth organisations were notorious for it, before they were shut down by Norman Fowler and merged into Conservative Future. But these racists haven’t gone away, and neither has the anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s still there in the right-wing press. A little while ago that side of the Tories tended to decamp to UKIP. But now that UKIP’s very definitely on the rocks, they’re all coming back. In the meantime, there’s always Boris Johnson and Toby Young to make horrifically racist pronouncements, although in fairness to Johnson, he did apologise for his comments about ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon grins’.
And so a White racist, who killed and injured innocent people, simply because of their religion, gets called a ‘loner’, but not the terrorist he is.
Buddy Hell over at Guy Debord’s Cat also posted a piece about two weeks ago, asking what has happened to the Tory bullying scandal. The Cat begins
As the Crown Prosecution Services prepares to announce whether it intends to prosecute over 30 Tory “individuals” (sic) for failing to correctly declare elections expenses during the 2015 General Election, it’s worth remembering the other scandal into which the Tory Election Expenses Scandal is interwoven. That scandal is the Tory Bullying Scandal.
It is worrying that for more than a year the entire story has gone quiet. Indeed, a current government minister, a former minister and the party chairman are entangled in its web. A party worker actually committed suicide after a campaign of bullying and intimidation, and a sitting MP was blackmailed for having an affair.
The Cat provides a handy list of the salient facts. These include the following points
In 2014, Mark Clarke was appointed director Conservative RoadTrip2015 by Grant Shapps, the then party chairman. This organization, bussed activists around the country to key marginals. RoadTrip2015 is at the heart of the Tory Election Expenses Scandal.
Clarke threatened to blackmail Robert Halfon, MP over an alleged sexual infidelity.
Elliott Johnson, a young party activist committed suicide after being bullied by Clarke and Andre Walker, whom he regards as a friend. Walker himself was covertly recorded on a train plotting to smear Alison Knight, the deputy leader of Windsor Council with an associate. Walker also claimed to be Johnson’s lover.
There was considerable overlap between Thatcherite group, Conservative Way Forward (CWF), Conservative Future (youth wing), RoadTrip2015 and Young Britons’ Foundation (YBF). It was revealed that Clarke had sexually assaulted several female members of YBF. This forced Donal Blaney, the YBF’s leader to cancel their annual conference. Blaney was also forced to resign from CWF.
The internal Tory Party inquiry found there were 13 alleged victims. The same inquiry, conducted by Clifford Chance, concluded that senior party figures were “unaware” bullying was taking place. Elliott Johnson’s parents condemned the inquiry as a “whitewash”.
The Cat also notes that Clarke and friends also plotted to take over the Corporation of London and that he and Aidan ‘Nazi Boy’ Burley, the former MP for Cannock Chase, also worked together in an organisation dedicated to smashing the unions. He speculates that the links between the various individuals involved suggests that the bullying also included several members of Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Association.
Apart from Clarke and his cronies, in December 2015 it was revealed that Lucy Allen, the Tory MP for Telford, had left bullying messages to one of her workers on the answerphone. She also added the words ‘unless you die’ to a message from someone criticising her for wanting to bomb Syria. Despite this, Allen has never been investigated.
The Cat concludes
This is a scandal that goes right to the heart of Downing Street. But why has this story gone so cold? Could it have something to do with the Conservative Party’s internal inquiry, dubbed by some as a “whitewash”? The corporate media dropped the story soon after the inquiry. Yet questions about bullying in the Tory Party and the connection between RoadTrip2015 and the Tory Election Expenses Scandal persist. Will we ever get to the truth?
He also adds an update from a report in the Guardian, which states that the Tories have not handed a report on the allegations to the cops, despite repeated calls for them to do so.
Just like they haven’t handed over a report into their electoral fraud.
This also has a link to the Guardian’s article on the scandal.
Somehow I’m not surprised that this scandal involved the party’s various youth sections. Some of us can still remember the uproar in the 1980s when the Nazi sympathies of the Union of Conservative Students came out, including their commitment to racial nationalism, their bullying of Tory ‘wets’ during a conference at one British university, their condemnation of Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, and how they used to sing ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks or Asians’ to the tune of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’.
With the allegations over supposed anti-Semitism in the Labour party, let’s not forget that the Tories also have a long history of racism, including the various organisations of which Cameron and at least one of his cabinet colleagues were a part. I’ve reblogged the timeline of vicious xenophobic prejudice put up by Tom Pride in the history of the Daily Mail. A few years ago Mike put up a piece attacking Cameron’s hypocrisy sending his condolences and eulogies for Nelson Mandela at the great man’s death. Cameron was a member of the Federation of Conservative Students in the 1980s, at the time when Thatcher was loudly proclaiming that she was not going to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa, and denounced the ANC as terrorists. Her views were enthusiastically shared by the Tories’ youth wing, many of whose members used to sing ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’.
A few years ago, just after the Tory/ Lib-Dem coalition government weren’t elected, Cameron appointed another former member of the Federation of Conservative Students to a cabinet post. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the precise details, by Private Eye ran a piece pointing out that the gentleman in question was a Conservative student at Loughborough when the Federation of Conservative Students was very much dominated by the hard Right.
The Federation became infamous after a scandal surrounding its members’ behaviour at a Federation conference organised at the Uni. The Eye stated that Tory Wets were terrorised and attendees left excrement in the showers. They were also notorious for singing ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks and Asians’ to the turn of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. After further hard-Right antics like this from other parts of the Federation, Tory Central Office finally lost patience, and the Federation was closed down and merged with the Young Conservatives to form Conservative Future.
But this obviously didn’t stop Cameron from choosing one of his fellow stormtroopers from those heady days to serve in his cabinet.
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