More Jewish music from the left. This comes from the Klezmer group of Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, one the Oriente Musik YouTube channel. It bitterly attacks the corporate rich and the culpability for mass unemployment in America. It talks about how the factories have been closed down, ‘there’s no manufacturing in the land’, workers are being made made hungry and homeless, living in tents and subsisting on bread and water while lazy CEOs guzzle fine wine. It also attacks useless unions, for taking the dues from the workers but not standing up for them, so all their work goes in making goods for the rich. This is repeated in Yiddish, and the final verse ends with an optimistic look for a new, just land where everyone has work.
The video shows the band marching and dancing through abandoned factories, meeting solitary workers doing carpentry or working at a sewing machine, before people finally come together for a stately traditional Jewish dance.
It’s an excellent riposte to the racist nonsense that Jews are all rich businessmen, somehow responsible for the evils of modern capitalism. This is the real, murderous anti-Semitic conspiracy theory pushed by Hitler and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Unfortunately, the Blairites in the Labour party didn’t get the message. Remember a few years back when Jezza was leading the party, and one of the female MPs appeared on Radio 4 to blithely declare that socialism was anti-Semitic because it attacked capitalism, which was somehow synonymous with Judaism? That was torn to shreds by the Corbynist left, as it should have been by any decent person who knows their history. Because Hitler and the wretched Protocols also claimed that ‘Marxist socialism’ was also controlled by Jews to enslave Aryans. And Corbyn was supported in the party by a strong Jewish contingent, like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and Jewish Voice for Labour, who stood for Jewish working people, who like their gentile comrades were worried about deteriorating working conditions, the destruction of the welfare state, cuts to public services and the privatisation of the NHS. Who wondered how they would pay for the social care their elderly parents and relatives needed, and support their families with the wage freeze.
But there also was in Britain are real ‘Jobless Corps’ – the National Union of the Unemployed, which I think was set up by the Communist Party. As part of their protest, they staged a kind of invasion of the Ritz hotel in London. They went in and ordered a meal. Of course, as working people they weren’t welcome in such an exclusive establishment. They replied by pointing out that plenty of the rich also went down and had their meals in cafes in the working class parts of the capital. They called this ‘slumming it’, but the protesters said they were perfectly welcome there, just as they should be in the Ritz.
We’re supposed to have the lowest unemployment rate for years, but I don’t trust official figures. They’ve been fiddle too often. One of the problems is that they only count people receiving benefit. This obviously doesn’t include the masses who’ve been thrown off thanks to the sanctions system. And it doesn’t count the underemployed, like the poor souls on zero hours contracts, who are effectively unemployed when their employers don’t need ’em.
Perhaps we need a revival of the idea of unemployed workers’ unions, that will attack current neoliberal capitalism and the Thatcherites and Reaganites who are doing their best to prop it up to deprive ordinary people of properly paying work for their own profits.
This was the headline for one of the videos pasted up by GB News this morning, and it’s one where I felt I didn’t need to watch the item itself. Because Mike and the other great left-wing bloggers and YouTubers have covered this issue before, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, and Private Eye would say. The Tories and Blairites – ’caused it was Blair who introduced the vile Work Capability Tests – are convinced and would like you to believe that a large portion of claims for disability benefit are fraudulent. Thanks to right-wing rags like the Heil, the British public believes that 25% of all disability claims are fake. In fact the opposite is true: the overwhelming number of claims for disability benefits are genuine. Only a vanishingly small number, less than 1 per cent, are attempts to defraud the benefits system. But obviously, this detracts from the Tory desire to punish the poor for not working or being able to work, while they could be gainfully exploited by all the rich industrialists they want to give massive tax cuts to. And so we have suffered 40 odd years of Thatcherite cuts to the benefits system while Tory and Blairite mouthpieces have told us that such cuts are ‘self-help’, encouraging self-reliance, going to revive proper Christian charity and private initiative without the safety net of the state. I’ve put up a number of posts about how Thatcher viewed the principle of less eligibility – how the whole process of claiming state support was to be as unpleasant as possible in order to deter people from doing so – was one of her ‘Victorian Values’ that she wished to reintroduce into the welfare system. So did Blair, who created the Work Capability Tests because of pseudoscientific, discredited research on behalf of US insurance fraudster Unum. This assumed that most disability claims were fake, and that getting people back into work would do them good.
Complete, destructive bilge.
The assumption that a certain percentage of all disability claims were fake has led, according to whistleblowers, to the imposition of quotas inside the DHSS which demand that a set percentage of disability claims should be turned down. This has led to severely ill, even terminally so patients, being judged fit for work. It has led to moronic D.H.S.S. clerks asking amputees when their absent limbs are expected to grow back. And it has led to hundreds, if not thousands of genuinely sick and disabled people dying from poverty and hunger because they were denied an income. This included people with serious mental health problems and conditions like diabetes, who were found starved to death.
It’s been denounced by disability activists as a genocide. Harsh words, but this is mass murder by governments who know exactly what the consequences of these sanctions are. They just don’t want you to know.
And whatever money has been saved by overturning benefit claims, has been massively outweighed by the cost to the government of challenging them in the courts. And the courts have upheld British law to the point where the overwhelming number of disability claims have been upheld.
This is a government that wasted nigh on nearly half a billion on a vindictive persecution of those who genuinely cannot work. It shows the real sadism at the heart of Tory attitudes to the poor.
Scrap Thatcherism, ditch Johnson and get rid of Starmer, who I believe will also do absolutely nothing to overturn this vile, murderous policy.
Another week, Labour ahead of the Tories once again in most polls, except those the Beeb and the rest of the lamestream media pay attention to, and once again the Blairites in the party are threatening to leave. According to yesterday’s and today’s papers, it’s all about the anti-Semitism, you see. Again. I caught a glimpse of the Beeb’s news today, and it showed the far-right islamophobic hate group, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism once again camped outside parliament, or Labour HQ, waving their lying placards against ‘anti-Semitism’. While inside parliament, the Thatcherite entryists were all ready to up sticks and leave if Jenny Formby doesn’t satisfy them that enough is being done to tackle anti-Semitism.
But this isn’t about anti-Semitism. Never has been. And the row erupted long before Corbyn was elected leader of the party. On Sunday, when the threats were first made, Mike put up a piece reproducing the Tweets of CremantCommunarde, who showed very clearly that it all blew up when the Jewish Ed Miliband was leader of the Labour party. He was accused of anti-Semitism, despite his Jewish heritage and conspicuous absence of genuine Jew-hatred, because he had dared to recognize Palestine as an independent state. Veteran actress Maureen Lipman left the party in disgust. Just as she claimed to have left the party in disgust last year because Corbyn is an anti-Semite. Except that he isn’t, and has worked tirelessly to counter all forms of racism, including genuine anti-Semitism. Being pro-Palestine does not mean hating Jews, or even Israelis. It means attacking a bigoted, racist state imposing apartheid and a slow genocide on the indigenous population. A state that was set up as part of imperialist machinations by us and then maintained and supported for geopolitical reasons to maintain western, US and UK, dominance in the region.
As for the people angrily denouncing anti-Semitism in the Labour party, their true moral stature is shown by their own actions. Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks a few years ago led a contingent of British Jews to Jerusalem to participate in the March of the Flags. This is an ultra-nationalist occasion where right-wing Jewish Israeli thugs parade through the Muslim quarter of the Holy City vandalizing Palestinian property and threatening and intimidating its people. The same people claiming Corbyn is the next thing to Adolf Hitler included the kind of people one Jewish Israeli scholar called ‘Judaeonazis’. Like the couple who decided that they would show their racial tolerance by wearing T-shirts with the symbol of a banned Fascist Israeli terrorist group, Kach. As well as members of the Jewish Defence League and other Zionists, who mix easily and unashamedly with the EDL and various unsavoury characters from Britain First. The kind of people who, if they were not Jews and not connected with Israel, would automatically be denounced by everyone as Fascists and Nazis.
And now the Blairites are trying to use the pretext that Labour is riddled with genuine Jew-haters to threaten once again to split the party and leave. Just like the ‘Chicken Coup’ plotters threatened to do a few years ago. And then again a little later, when the media reported that they would leave the party to join a new centrist, pro-EU party that was being formed. A party that boasted the backing of millionaire corporate donors. An exciting new party that has since fizzled out and vanished without a trace.
But never mind! We are reliably informed by a corrupt, mendacious media, that there are more than six right-wing Labour MPs ready to depart. And Vince Cable is hoping they’ll come over and join his gang of morally corrupt corporatists and sell-outs in the Lib Dems.
The right-wing Labour MPs supposedly ready to depart aren’t really upset because they honestly believe that Corbyn’s an anti-Semite. They’re upset because they’re Blairites, Thatcherite entryists, who believe in continuing her poisonous, destructive policies of privatization, outsourcing, the destruction of the welfare state, and selling the NHS off to private healthcare firms. And destroying the trade unions in the name of creating a cowed workforce ready to accept any kind of work, no matter how ill-paid or precarious. A party so enamoured of the corporate elite that they eagerly took their donations and then gave the chairmen of these companies and senior management positions in government. All in the name of creating a properly business-friendly environment, introducing the alleged greater expertise and efficiency of private industry, creating a fluid labour market. And generally rewarding the corporate elite, who also offered them not just donations but nice, lucrative places on their boards when they left office.
Corbyn threatens all that, because he believes in a genuinely socialist Labour party, overseeing a mixed economy where the utilities, including the railways and water industry. A Britain whose working people are properly served by strong unions and have job security and rights at work from day one. A Britain whose poor are supported by decent benefits, where the jobless don’t have to wait weeks or months for welfare payments, and where a quarter of a million people aren’t forced to use food banks to stop themselves from starving in misery. A Britain where the disabled aren’t deprived of the support they need because they’ve been found ‘fit for work’ by a rigged system of tests, based on pseudo-scientific bogus theories. In other words, everything that threatens the Tories’ and Blair’s precious, poisonous Thatcher revolution.
That’s really why the Blairites have been trying to undermine Corbyn from day one. It’s why the press and people like Joan Ryan have been sneering at him and his supporters as Trotskyites, Communists and Stalinists, and why they are so desperate to claim that he’s unpopular and that he’ll never get elected by the general public. Because he threatens the Blairite policy of taking over the ideology and policies of the Tory party. Because they’re scared that he will get elected, and the Thatcherite policies they admire uncritically will be consigned to the dustbin.
I’ve had enough of their constant attempts to undermine a democratically elected and popular leader, as well as their disdain and contempt for the party’s grassroots and this country’s working people as a whole. I’m sick of them constantly threatening to leave, only to stay in the party to threaten to leave again later, whenever they feel they can do the most damage. Or whenever they think anyone will back them. I just now want them to go. They’re Conservatives anyway, and really don’t have any place in a party that genuinely supports working people instead of the corporate elite.
But as Mike has pointed out on his blog, they won’t. Because the moment they resign the party whip, their constituents will vote against them at the next election. And so they’re determined to hang on, all the while fraudulently claiming that they’re the really Labour party and whining about ‘Labour values’. They aren’t really Labour, and the party’s real values go back to Clement Attlee, Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan and the Webbs and Fabians. Genuine socialists, whose achievements Blair and his cronies have done their best to destroy.
They should now either leave for good, or shut up and support their leader. But whatever they do, it’s going to be glaringly clear to an increasing number of people that, despite their lies, they’re not interested in anti-Semitism. They’re only using it as ploy to destroy Corbyn for the same reasons as the press and the Tories they claim to want to defeat electorally.
Last Friday, 15th June 2018, the I newspaper carried an article reporting a warning about the Beeb’s future given by Fran Unsworth, the Corporation’s Director of News and Current Affairs, at the Women on Air conference. Young people are increasingly turning away from the Beeb, and if this continues, it will threaten the Beeb’s future as it no longer has an audience.
The article, under the title, Youth Exodus from News ‘Threatening BBC’s Survival stated
The BBC’s existence is under threat if it cannot encourage more younger viewers to watch its news services, a senior executive warned.
Fran Unsworth, BBC director of news and current affairs, said the corporation was playing a “deadly serious” version of The Generation Game. She told the Women On Air conference: “The most significant challenge facing the BBC is how we reach younger audiences. Less and less are under 35. Our very existence might be called into question.”
Recent BBC figures showed that 16-24 year-old spend more time watching Netflix in a week than with all of BBC TV, including the BBC iPlayer. The sizes of audiences tuning in for scheduled news bulletins is declining rapidly, the Digital News Report, published yesterday, found. (P. 9)
The remainder of the article dealt with the issue of getting more female experts on television news. Unsworth stated this was right, but they couldn’t just sack people.
Okay, I’m not the best person to explain why young people under 35 aren’t watching the Beeb, as it’s well over a decade since I was that age. I can’t really talk about changes in entertainment tastes, as I don’t share many of them. Or at least, I’m not interested in some of the programmes that excite the reviewers in the media, like the various TV dramas about detectives hunting down deranged serial killers, and uncovering a web of lies and corruption. Or equally tense dramas about child abuse. My taste in detective television basically extended to Columbo and Van Der Valk, when he was last on back in the 1990s.
But I can make a good guess why young – and older – people aren’t tuning into BBC news. And it’s because of the Beeb’s appalling pro-Tory bias. Young people are the section of the British public in which support for Jeremy Corbyn is strongest. And the Beeb’s coverage of Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party has been overwhelmingly, and very blatantly biased. And it’s become very, very obvious. The Corporation no longer has the same strong position as Britain’s trusted news broadcaster it once had. People are able to get their news now from a wider variety of sources through the internet, as well as the Corporation’s competitors on the commercial channels. And these news shows, such as RT, Democracy Now, Telesur English, Al-Jazeera, and in America The Young Turks, Secular Talk, Sam Seder’s Majority Report, the David Pakman Show and so, present a very different picture of what’s going on in the world. While the Beeb runs the establishment propaganda that our invasions and interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere are all for humanitarian reasons, these show how the real motivation is simply western corporate imperialism. They will also show just how the Israeli state is oppressing and viciously persecuting the Palestinians, and how the US – and Britain- has sponsored coups in Latin America, Iran and elsewhere, which have overthrown liberal and socialist regimes and installed Fascist dictators. All to protect US and British corporate interests, of course.
The Beeb, however, is very much part of the establishment, and its broadcasting is very much aimed at the corporate and political elite on the one hand, where it reflects their interests and concerns, and on the other aimed at getting the rest of us to accept it. There isn’t anything particularly unique about this. The Corporation’s bias against Labour is shared by the rest of the lamestream media and press. But they’re also increasingly under pressure from these alternative news sources.
If the Beeb really wants to get young people, and a large part of the older generation, back watching the news, then they should change their bias and start reporting Corbyn and the Labour party objectively and truthfully, as well as stop repeating flag-waving establishment propaganda about the wars in the Middle East. But this would be too radical a change, I fear. It would mean clearing out all the various Tories in the Beeb’s news teams, like Laura Kuenssberg and Nick Robinson, or telling them to do their job properly. And so the Beeb is stuck as the voice of a right-wing, Tory, imperialist establishment, while more and more people take their news from elsewhere.
Mike last week put up a piece about the report compiled by a number of British universities, which showed that the sanctions regime imposed by the DWP does absolutely no good at all, and in fact has negative consequences for claimants. It does not help them to find work, and in fact pushes them further into depression and mental illness.
In this clip from RT, presenter Bill Dod talks to Steve Topple of the Canary, here credited as a political commenter. Topple states that the report, which was compiled over five years from countless individual cases, just shows what disability rights activists and organisations like DPAC, and political commenters like himself have known all along.
The programme quotes the DWP, which states that 70 per cent of claimants said that the regime helped them to find work, and that sanctions were only meted out in a small minority of cases and the DWP tailored its help to individual cases. Topple states that the Department’s response, that 70 per cent of claimants say that it helped them find work, is meaningless because they were looking for work anyway.
Dod then challenges him with the question of whether some people, who can work, do find life on benefits more attractive than getting a job. Topple despatches this myth by quoting the real figures for benefit fraud, which is something like 1.6 per cent.
Topple then goes on to attack the sanctions’ systems origins with New Labour. It was Tony Blair, who introduced it in 2007, with disastrous effects on the disabled. Instead of being given the care to which they were entitled when the NHS was set up, disabled people were now redefined as ‘fit for work’, even when they weren’t. Topple makes the point that the sanctions system now divides people into two groups. They’re either fit for work, and so supposed to be out looking for a job, or unfit and marginalised. He points out that there have been five reports already condemning Britain’s sanction system – four from the UN, one from the EU, and that what is needed is a thorough report into the DWP. Topple clearly has his facts at his fingertips, as he says very clearly after dismissing the DWP’s rebuttals point by point that he could go on for hours.
In fact, it’s possible to attack and refute all of the DWP’s statement about benefit sanctions. Sanctions are not imposed on a small minority of cases. They’ve been imposed on a large number, apparently for no reason other than that the Jobcentres have targets to meet of the number of claimants they are supposed to throw off benefits. And they have been imposed for the most trivial reasons. As for help being tailored to meet the needs of individual claimants, it’s true that sometimes there are schemes that are available for some claimants in some circumstances, but I’ve seen no evidence that the DWP does this with all, or even the majority of claimants. And the statement that it is reasonable for the Department to impose certain conditions on claimants for the receipt of their benefits is just more self-serving nonsense. It doesn’t, for example, say anything about the way some sick and disabled people have been thrown off benefits for missing interviews, when they have had extremely good reasons: like they were ill in hospital, for example.
Mike in his post about the report wondered why the government carried on with the sanctions system, when it didn’t work. The answer’s fairly obvious. The Tories, and New Labour, hate the poor and the ill. New Labour’s policy was based on the assumption that many people claiming disability benefit were simply malingerers, courtesy of a series of quack studies supported by Unum or one of the other American private health insurers. And the Tories and the Tory press hate the unemployed, the poor and the disabled because they see them as a drain on the money that the rich should be allowed to keep for themselves, rather than taken in taxes to support them. And they also know that it’s a very good tactic for them to divide the working class by getting those in work, but feeling the pinch from low wages and job insecurity, to hate those out of work by demonising them as malingerers and idle fraudsters. It distracts people from attacking the true source of the poverty and insecurity – the rich, corporate elite and their programme of low wages, zero hours contracts and increasing freedom to lay off whomever they choose, for whatever reason.
No, the sanctions system doesn’t work. But it expresses the right-wing, Thatcherite hatred of the poor and sick, and is a useful tool for maintaining a divided, cowed workforce, and generating the entirely misplaced anger from those deceived by the system, which keeps the Tories in government.
This is another piece bashing Boris Johnson, our vain and incompetent Foreign Secretary. But it also tackles much more than that. This is another video from Chunky Mark, the Artist Taxi Driver. In this piece, he comments on how Boris is tired of flying first class with other people, and now wants his own jet. This is while the rest of Britain is labouring hard with paper hats on, working to pay for the royal wedding, the Tories’ stately homes, and the corporate elite knocking back their Pina Coladas in the Bahamas. He shows the covers of the newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Mirror. The Mail launched an attack on the House of Lords, which Chunky Mark compared to a snake eating itself, beginning with its tail, until only the head remains. Moving on to the Mirror, he comments on their front page story, which is how amused Meghan was when a bee flew into Harry’s ear. And this will go on forever. He makes the point that while this is on the cover, there’s grim news inside. The Tories have cut 700 school nurses, attacking children’s health in schools. Marks and Spencer’s are to shut 100 stores. The cuts in the number of school nurses is to pay for the corporate feasts and the Tories’ garden parties, while the closure of the M&S stores will devastate towns up and down the country. This is Theresa May’s hostile environment: child poverty, homelessness, austerity, Grenfell, Windrush.
After all the miserable news of the Tories’ continuing persecution of the poor, the disabled, the unemployed and ethnic minorities, here’s some positive news: Labour gained massively during Thursday’s council elections. And Chunky Mark, the Artist Taxi Driver, is here sharing his joyous laughter.
He begins the video by stating that Labour now has 1,353 councils, while the Tories only have 800. Plymouth has gone Labour, as has old Trafford. This was a Tory stronghold, and now there are absolutely no Tories in Manchester. In Liverpool, they’re down to only two. ‘What!’ say Mark, ‘the government is dictating to Liverpool! Liverpool should be a republic!’ He also discusses how the Lib Dems have shown themselves to be Tory-enablers once again, by attacking Jeremy Corbyn over Brexit. He makes the point that if they were serious about undermining the Tories over Brexit and smashing them, they’d back Corbyn. He goes on to looking forward to a general election, which would result in a Labour victory. He describes how this country is suffering under the Tories, with services cut, people living in immense poverty, the decimation of social care resulting in the elderly living in nappies. People are turning against them, and the parasitical industrial elite who are benefiting from their policies. He ends with ‘Bring on the next general election! Labour would storm it!’
It’s really optimistic news, but we’ve a long way to go before the next general election. And I don’t trust the Tories not to pull some stunt that’ll get them re-elected, no matter how much people suffer in the meantime. Labour has done well, but the response to their victories from the Tories will be that governments always do badly in council elections, especially those in the mid-term. As for general elections, it seems to me that the Tories always wait until nearly the last minute, and then announce tax cuts and a new period of prosperity. They also claim that, perhaps they went too far with the cuts, and promise to reverse them. They then get voted back in, and immediately throw all their election promises out the window, and go right back to cutting and privatising.
But the elections yesterday, if all went as Chunky Mark describes, do offer some hope of throwing them out.
It isn’t just the Windrush Migrants, who have been savagely persecuted by the Tories. They’re just the latest victims in their ongoing campaign to humiliate, degrade and impoverish the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, BAME people, in fact anybody who isn’t rich and a member of the corporate elite.
Whiting was a young mother, who tragically took her life a few weeks ago. She had been thrown off benefits because she missed a jobcentre interview. She had good reason. She was in hospital at the time, being treated for a cyst on the brain. Common sense should tell you that this is a severe illness, and that treating it comes very much before attending jobcentre interviews, or indeed, anything else. The jobcentre didn’t see it that way, and stopped her benefits. Just as they stopped them for so many other seriously ill people in exactly the same situation.
Fearing that she would be unable to cope without state support, she took her own life. She dropped her kids off at school, went to the local forest and hanged herself. She had appealed the decision, and her benefits were reinstated. This came too late for her, after she was dead.
Mike put this up on his blog. It’s been a scandal in Scotland, and someone pointedly shouted to ‘Rape Clause’ Ruth Davidson about her, when she appeared to defend the Tories’ record before the Scots parliament. But Whiting is just one of nearly a thousand or more victims of Tory benefit sanctions, who have either starved to death penniless, or taken their own lives out of sheer desperation. There are so many that I’ve lost count. Stilloaks, one of the great commenters to this blog, has published a list on his site, as have disabled organisations and a number of other left-wing bloggers, including Johnny Void.
Many of these people left suicide notes explaining that they were killing themselves because of benefit sanctions. But all you hear from the Tories, when this issue is raised, is the constant refrain that there is no evidence to link their deaths with government policies.
It’s vile, murderous lie, to cover up what Mike and other bloggers are calling the genocide of the disabled.
Stop the deaths. Vote out May and her murderous crew.
On Monday, Jeremy Corbyn attended a Passover seder with Jewdas, an organisation of religious, politically left-wing Jews. News of this was then leaked by Guido Fawkes, and the Jewish establishment of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council went berserk, as did the Blairites in the Labour party.
One of the right-winger, John Woodcock, tweeted about how this showed that Corbyn was still being anti-Semitic. Woodcock’s a gentile, and so annoyed very many Jews by telling them what their religion was. Michael Rosen, the poet and, I believe, children’s poet laureate, put his feelings into verse challenging Woodcock to tell him what kind of Jew he should be. I can remember reading some of Mr. Rosen’s poetry when I was a kid, in the verse collection Rabbiting On. From what I can remember, it was largely light, entertaining stuff, which I think children need considering the immense pressure now being placed on them by the school and educational system. Other Jews also shared his opinions, and tweeted their views on Woodcock’s presumption. I can appreciate how they feel. When I was arguing apologetics with atheists, I wasn’t impressed when some of them were amazed that I believed in evolution and told me that I shouldn’t.
Then the Board of Deputies of British Jews decided to wade in, with their partners the Jewish Leadership Council. One of the Board’s leaders appeared on the BBC six O’clock news on Tuesday loftily declaring that Corbyn’s meeting with Jewdas showed how he was ignoring the concerns of mainstream Jews and did not take the allegations of anti-Semitism seriously. A spokesman for the Jewish Leadership Council also denounced Corbyn for attending the seder, and said it was a ‘two-fingered salute’ to mainstream Jews.
Jewdas, however, were very appreciative and praised the Labour leader for taking an interest in the Jewish community and seeking their views on the issues that mattered to it.
As the BDJ and Jewish Leadership Council know, Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite, and whatever they say, the Labour party takes the allegations very seriously. That’s why tens of thousands of people were purged from the party, often just on the unsubstantiated allegations of them or related groups, like the woefullly misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Arbush, the president of the the Board of Deputies is a true-blue Conservative, who hailed the election of Donald Trump and his Alt Right lackey, Steve Bannon. He’s in no position to moan about anti-Semitism to anybody, given Trump’s support for these Nazis. But the Jewish establishment likes him, because Trump is pro-Israel.
This is the real issue here. Corbyn isn’t anti-Israel, but he is pro-Palestinian, which to the pro-Israel lobby is the same thing. If he becomes prime minister, it will mean an end to the automatic deference given to Israel and complete lack of criticism for its continuing persecution and ethnic cleansing of its indigenous Arab population. The Board and Jewish Leadership Council know this. Hence their smears against Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites, even though they are no such thing. Indeed, many of them are decent self-respecting Jews and anti-racist gentiles, who have been abused and assaulted by racists and Fascists. These smears show just how desperate the Israel lobby is.
It seems to me that the Board and the Jewish Leadership Council represent the politically Conservative, neoliberal elite in the Jewish community. The same Conservative, neoliberal business elite which in the wider British community has done so much to wreck the economy and reduce ordinary working people, whether Jews, gentiles or whatever, to even greater extremes of poverty, all for corporate profit.
Corbyn is a left-winger, and it is natural that he should seek the views and company of those, who support him and his plans to undo nearly four decades of Thatcherism. They naturally include Jews, and as the messages of support for him show there are a large number of Jewish organisations and individuals, who do.
This is what worries the Board and the Jewish Leadership Council. They are becoming increasingly unable to present themselves as automatically representing British Jewry. And so they and the Blairites are trying to destabilise Corbyn’s leadership by making false, libellous accusations of anti-Semitism under the pretence that they do.
And even with these, they’re sounding increasing desperate. The Israel lobby has said that such smears are not being taken as seriously as they once were. In other words, ordinary people are waking up to the fact that these scoundrels aren’t concerned with anti-Semitism, only with using it as a weapon to defend Israel. And in America at least, Jewish young people are increasingly either indifferent to Israel, or actively hostile because of its maltreatment of the Palestinians.
Corbyn enjoys the support of a wide cross section of British society for his determination to bring the Thatcherite regime of benefit cuts, outsourcing and privatisation to an end. He is respected because of his decades-long stance against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. He’s a real threat to the Thatcherites, both in the Tories and the Blairites in Labour, as well as the Israel lobby.
But their shrill cries of outrage and smears show that it is they, who are desperate, aware that it is their power and influence that’s waning. And there’s absolutely no reason why Corbyn should listen to them. They’re Tories and Thatcherites to a man and woman, who have tried to unseat him and used the accusation of anti-Semitism to libel his supporters. He has every right to ignore them, no matter how they may try to pose as the representatives of mainstream Jews in this country.
RT put up this video yesterday, reporting that the Friday before, Jeremy Corbyn and Noam Chomsky had been awarded the Sean MacBride Peace Prize by an international committee, the International Peace Bureau in Geneva. The committee had been impressed by the Labour leader’s ‘sustained and powerful work for disarmament and peace’. But they also note that this has not been widely reported in the British press.
Mike also covered the story from the NHS Skwawkbox. They reported that the All Okinawa Council Against Henoko New Base also received the award along with Corbyn and Chomsky. The Bureau was impressed by Corbyn’s work as an ordinary member, then vice-chair and now vice-president of CND, as a past chair of the Stop the War Coalition, as well as his work over 34 years as an MP. They were impressed by his statement that he could not press the button for retaliation in a nuclear attack, and arguing that military spending should be cut and the money spent instead on health, education and welfare.
The award ceremony itself was held on November 24th in Geneva, but Corbyn had to wait until this weekend to collect it.
Mike also noted at the very start of his piece about Corbyn receiving the prise that the British media was silent about it. He wrote:
<strong>Where are the celebrations from the mainstream TV and newspaper media in the UK? The leader of the Labour Party has won a major international peace prize and I can’t find any headlines about it at all, apart from in Skwawkbox!*</strong>
There’s no need to look very hard to find reasons why the Beeb, ITV, Channel 4 and the British press weren’t keen to report this honour for the Labour leader: they cordially hate him as a threat to the Thatcherite corporatist agenda that is ruining the country and forcing millions of Brits into mass poverty. And his fellow recipients are also enough to give any right-winger a touch of the vapours. Noam Chomsky is a veteran critic of American imperialism. I think in his personal political beliefs he’s an Anarchist/ anarcho-syndicalist. Which means he believes the best form of society would be one where there was no state, and everything was run by the workers through trade unions. The All Okinawa Council against Henoko New Base sounds like one of the local organisations set up on the Japanese island of Okinawa to oppose the presence of the American military base. The Japanese are increasingly resentful of American bases on their territory, and see it very much as military occupation, especially after the Fall of Communism and the removal of the Soviet Union as a threat to Japan.
But America now is a warfare state. It has expanded the war on terror to include military strikes and campaigns in seven countries, and its economy is heavily tied in to government spending on the arms industries. And where you have arms manufacturers with a powerful voice in government, you also find wars. And Britain is being dragged into them through the ‘special relationship’. Not that in Blair’s and Cameron’s case the Americans needed to do much dragging. I got the impression that Blair was enthusiastic for the Iraq invasion, and Blissex, one of the very highly informed commenters on this blog, stated that, according to the Americans, it was Cameron and Sarkozy in France, who pushed for the airstrikes to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya.
Throughout his period as head of the Labour party, the British media has been bitterly biased against Corbyn. When the plotters in the Chicken Coup staged their mass resignations the other year, it began with the collusion of one of the plotters to do it on Andrew Neil’s show. Now that Corbyn has made a genuinely positive achievement, which they can’t very well sneer at, or spin so it reflects badly on him, the media have no choice but to remain silent.
Apart from the issue of defence and western militarism, there are other reasons why the corporate media hate Corbyn: he wants to strengthen the welfare state, and embark on a campaign of renationalisation – renationalising the NHS and also the utilities industries and railways. This frightens the multimillionaire businessmen, who control the papers.
And so in the I yesterday, in the column where it quotes the opinions of the other papers, you had a quote from Simon Heffer in the Torygraph ranting about how ‘Stalinist’ Momentum were trying to deselect the ‘thoroughly decent’ moderates in the Labour party. And another quote from Karren Brady of the Apprentice declaring that Corbyn was a ‘Communist’, who supported nationalisation for his own peculiar reasons. She also reminded us that the nationalised industries had been failures, citing British Gas particularly.
Well, Heffer has always been a Tory spokesman, and the Telegraph has been particularly vocal in its hatred of the Labour leader. Not only is Heffer a dyed in the wool Tory, he was also a contributor to a book celebrating Enoch Powell that came out a few years ago, entitled Enoch at 100. Not only was Powell responsible for inflaming racism in Britain with his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, he was also a Monetarist, which became Thatcher’s favourite economic doctrine. Monetarism was regarded at the time by the majority of economists as stupid and ridiculous, and was effectively abandoned by Thatcher herself later in her tenure of No. 10.
And the ‘moderates’ in the Labour party are no such thing, nor are they ‘decent people’. They are liars and intriguers to a man and woman. They did everything they could to unseat Corbyn, and silence or throw out his supporters. But now that the likes of ‘Bomber’ Benn – so-called because of his enthusiasm for airstrikes on Syria – have failed, the Torygraph has to lament how they’re being ‘persecuted’ by Corbyn’s supporters.
As for Brady’s comments about the nationalised industries, yes, I do remember how there were problems with them. British Gas was notorious, and became notoriously worse after privatisation. But private ownership has very definitely not brought more investment nor improved the performance of the utilities companies. Quite the reverse – the rail network is actually performing worse now than it was in the last years of British Rail. It now consumes a higher government subsidy and charges more for worse services, all to keep its board on their expensive salaries and bonuses and bloated dividends to its shareholders.
But Brady really doesn’t want you to know that. She’s a businesswoman, who clearly stands four-square for the companies seeking to make vast profits from the former state sector. So she very definitely isn’t going to admit that there’s a problem with them.
Brady herself also likes to project herself as some kind of feminist heroine, thrusting through the corporate glass ceiling and inspiring other women and girls to take up the fight to make it in business. As Private Eye mischievously pointed out, this would be more convincing if she hadn’t begun her business career working in the offices of one of the porn companies.
The business elite are frightened of Corbyn, because he’s set to renationalise industry and empower British working people. And so if they can’t vilify him, as they couldn’t with the award of the Sean McBride Peace Prize, they have to keep silent.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 