This is just a fun, short video from 1WTC’s YouTube channel. It’s just the titles from Camberwick Green with the Orange Man appearing from the music box. It looks like the beginning of a much longer video, as Trump doesn’t actually do anything when he appears, except waves hello and nods when he’s asked if they can go campaigning with him.
It does, however, bring back happy memories of Trumpton, Camberwick Green, Chigley and the awesome Brian Cant. And it is fun imagining what Trump would do electioneering in Camberwick Green. Or would he incite the crowd to try storming the town hall, like he did Congress in America?
Right before our eyes, the UK is becoming a place where dissent is not permitted. We’ve been warning of this creeping trend for years now, as various new laws (the Policing Act, the Public Order Act, the Online Safety Bill, etc) have broadened the government’s crackdown on democratic debate and increased the state’s power to spy and censor. Ideological adversaries of the government – those who voice dissent on everything from public sector pay to climate action to foreign policy to social issues – are being silenced by draconian laws and authoritarian decrees.
The latest rowover the definition of “extremism” appears to be yet another example. While it’s obviously right to tackle genuine extremism and target real threats to national security, Communities Secretary Michael Gove is weaponising the definition to silence some well-intentioned and well-known civil society organisations. And, ironically, his announcement may well define his own government as radical extremists.
Gove’s new definition refers to extremism as the “promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to:
negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or
undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or
intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve the results in (1) or (2).”
At first, that might sound perfectly reasonable. But two problems quickly emerge.
Firstly, the list of condemned organisations that fall under that definition published today is a hodge-podge of different groups that do not belong in the same category. White supremacist Neo-Nazi groups like Patriotic Alternative and the British National Socialist Movement – which quite literally endorse ethnic cleansing – were placed alongside advocacy organisations like MEND (a civic engagement NGO focused on tackling islamophobia) and CAGE (which campaigns against the illegal incarceration and torture of terror suspects). This announcement was more political than practical.
Secondly, by its own definition, this government is itself extremist. Was Boris Johnson not “undermining liberal Parliamentary democracy” when he illegally prorogued Parliament in 2019? What about when Dominic Raab tried to take away fundamental human rights in 2022 by ditching the HRA – or when Conservatives routinely slag off the ECHR? All of the exclusionary and anti-democratic policies blocking certain voters from the polls and neutering the Electoral Commission? What about former Conservative PMs endorsing Donald Trump, who just three years ago tried to illegally overturn an election when he didn’t win it? I could go on.
When extremists gain power, they force their radical minority beliefs on everyone else, cracking down on anyone who dares voice opposition. They resort to cruel and oppressive measures to ensure that no one else gets to have their voice heard. Michael Gove isn’t protecting us from extremism – he is showing us what happens when extremism gets the upper hand.
Despite all of us in the democracy and civil liberties sectors raising the alarm, the British public continues to sleepwalk into a terrifying Orwellian future. We’re running out of time to stop it. This country needs democratic renewal right now, and we’ve got a plan to get it done. Please help us fight back before it’s too late.
Doug Stokes, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West (Cambridge: Polity Press 2023)
The murder of George Floyd by a White police officer three years ago sparked a wave of protests across America and then Britain under the banner of the Black Lives Matter organisation. It was loudly trumpeted that western civilisation is institutionally racist and that it was based on ‘Whiteness’, the underlying racist ideology by which Whites maintained the social, economic and educational advantages against Blacks and people of colour. This ‘White privilege’ extended to all Whites, even if they were not personally racist. There have since been demands to dismantle this perceived systemic racism. This has entered the university, where, according to Stokes, it has set off a moral panic. There is supposed to be a gap between the number of Whites and ethnic minorities enrolling at university and the numbers of Whites achieving top grades and Blacks and other people of colour. This is ascribed to personal racism on campus and the content of the university curriculum. This is held to be Eurocentric and too White. Blacks and other ethnic minorities, it is argued, do not enrol in uni because they are marginalised and put off by the overwhelmingly White content and the personal racism they experience, including microaggressions. At the same time, modern science and Enlightenment rationality are attacked as merely western forms of knowledge that are alien to people of colour from outside Europe. This needs to be removed from the centre of European teaching so that proper space can be made for non-White cultures and their ways of knowing.
Decolonisation and the Advancement of Privileged Members of Ethnic Minorities
Stokes is, according to the brief personal bio on the back cover, a director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter, a fellow of the Legatum Institute and a member of the advisory council for the Free Speech Union. He’s also written for a number of right-wing journals like the Times, Torygraph, Spectator and The Critic. Most of the attacks on ‘wokeness’ come from the right, but elements of the left are also turning against it. A few weeks ago the Free Speech Union put up a panel of left-wing writers and academics, who were also very much against it and its malign cancel culture. And there are certainly important points people on the left can take away from this book. Stokes argues that the determination to appoint people to prominent positions in the university and elsewhere is very much a class issue. It allows rich and privileged people of colour like Priyamvada Gopal, a history professor at Cambridge, to present themselves as somehow more marginalised than the Whites underneath. For example, Gopal declared that she was less advantaged because of her colour than the porters at Cambridge. The Beeb’s senior journo is an Asian woman, who declared that she wouldn’t have got her position without the Corporation’s diversity scheme. This is questionable, as her father is billionaire owning one of Britain’s football clubs, and her mother is millionaire in her own right.
The Professional Managerial Class and the Neglect of the Working Class
Stokes also argues that the decolonisation movement is strongly linked with the emergence of the Professional Managerial Class. This is a class of mostly White technocrats, who appeared after the dismantling of the Post-War consensus. As the trade unions were neutered and the welfare state and NHS cut and privatised, the functions of the nation state were increasingly subordinated to the authority of multinational bodies, staffed by ‘anywheres’ – officials with no particular connection to any country, who looked down on the ‘somewheres’ who still retained their loyalty to their particular location or country. And this highly privileged elite particularly despised the White working class. Stokes presents statistics that show, contrary to the image promoted by the intersectional left, it’s the White working class, and particularly boys, who are now marginalised and excluded from the academy, but this is ignored by the university sector. Bristol university set up a bursary worth millions to support 30 more Black students. By contrast, there were only two bursaries set up for people from a generally disadvantaged background. These were only worth £2 million each, compared to the tens given out under the Black bursary scheme. But even one of these two was reserved solely for Blacks. Such schemes proliferate, but only a tiny minority of universities have schemes to support people from a working class background. But Stokes goes through the statistics to show that there are a number of complex factors preventing people from going to uni which have nothing to do with class. The most important is class. Another factor is education. Most Blacks go to state comprehensive schools, which are far less successful at sending their pupils to university than the elite private schools.
Ethnic Racial Oppression Challenged by Statistics
As for the supposed gap between the number of BME pupils going on to university and Whites, the opposite of what is claimed is true: Blacks and ethnic minorities comprise 18 per cent of the population, but 30 per cent of the students enrolling at university. Many ethnic minorities are as successful and some more so than the White population. Indians and other ethnic minorities are as successful as Whites, but people of Chinese origin 30 per cent more. White working class pupils on free school meals are the least successful apart from Travellers.
Stokes cites statistics to show again and again that the Black Lives Matter narrative of racial oppression is wrong, drawn from EU and EHRC reports that claim the opposite. In America, more cops are shot by Blacks than Blacks are shot by Whites. Where there is a statically higher chance of Blacks being shot by the cops than the general population, it’s because Blacks are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes. As for racial offences, while most of these are committed by Whites, 24 per cent of them are so are also committed by Blacks, despite the fact that they only constitute around 13 per cent of the American population.
The stats also show that Britain is a far less racist country than others. 89 per cent of people are comfortable with someone of a different colour being prime minister. Other stats show that most people have no objections with their children marrying people of another colour and with working with people of different ethnicities. The incidence of racist crime is much lower than claimed. Most people from ethnic backgrounds are proud to be British at 65 per cent, slightly higher than Whites, and the police is actually more trusted by Blacks and ethnic minorities than by Whites. As for the university sector, while there are fewer ethnic minority professors than Whites, this is not true of certain subjects. 53 per cent of the students and staff in chemical and electrical engineering departments are Black or Asian. Similarly, the degree attainment gap is closing and for some groups it’s statistically insignificant.
There’s also a gender aspect to this. Increasingly more women are entering university than men. 53 per cent of university students are women, and this proportion is increasing so that it has been predicted that in a few decades’ time women will comprise 73 per cent of all students. They are enrolling in all the professional subjects except the mathematical sciences. This implies that in the coming decades the professions, and particularly medicine, will be female dominated.
Needless to say, these stats attacking the narrative that Britain is racist are not what the intersectional left wants to hear. The book quotes the automatic denunciations of a government report published a year or so ago, which concluded that Britain was not a racist society, by prominent members of the Labour party like Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.
Intellectual Origins
As well as attacking it at the level of statistics, Stokes dissects the history of the movement. It emerged in the early 20th century in the thinking of the Marxist Frankfurt school and the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci. They felt that in order to radicalise the working class it would be necessary to change the culture. This effectively stands Marx on its head, as Marx claimed that the economic substructure created and influenced ideology. This was then taken up in its turn by the American Marxist Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was concerned by the failure of the western working class to adopt revolutionary socialism. Instead, he and other radical decided to appeal to the new marginalised groups, such as gays and the ‘people of the ghetto’ – Blacks. This occurred roughly at the same time that similarly disappointed western radicals adopted the ideology of ‘Third Worldism’. They looked to the new national liberation movements of the colonised peoples around the world as an attack on western capitalism which would eventually result in its destruction. These radicals took over as their texts works like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. And their attitudes show a mixture of White self-hatred and sheer bloodlust. Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s book, declared that if you shot a European, you killed two people: the European and the man he oppressed. Michel Foucault, despite being an openly gay man, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Islamic Revolution in Iran because it was a revolt against ‘western rationalism’. This included the mass purges, including that of homosexuals, by the revolutionary regime.
Foucault and similar thinkers were also responsible for the attack on science and rationality. According to Foucault and the structural and post-structural linguists that preceded him, no objective knowledge about the world is possible due to the all pervasive influence of language. Language structures people’s thinking in binaries – man/woman, Black/White and so on, one of which is always in inferior. Thus language ensures that men enjoy a more privileged position than women, and Blacks and other ethnic minorities are inferior to Whites. At the same time, knowledge is not objective but serves the interest of those in power. It does not advance. Instead, there is merely a change in viewpoint between one historical epoch and another.
Capitalism, Not Science and Rationality, Responsible for Rise of the West
Similarly, the role of the rise of science and the industrial revolution in producing Britain and the West’s global supremacy is also denied. Instead it is argued that a crisis in feudalism in the late Middle Ages led to the rise of capitalism and its institution which created the conditions for European dominance and the enslavement and destruction of indigenous peoples.
Readers of this blog will now that I am particularly concerned about the focus on British and European involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the way this obscures the existence of slavery across cultures from antiquity onwards. Stokes tackles this issue, exposing its existence in China. Arab merchants to China took with them Black African slaves as their personal servants. This started a craze for African slaves amongst the Chinese, but this has been erased from history. Chinese children are not taught about it in schools, nor is it discussed either officially or in popular culture. At the same time, the slave trade within Africa was very firmly in African hands. The largest collection of documents on the slave trade comes from the Dutch East India Company comprising 100,000 volumes. But these documents hardly anywhere mention the Dutch doing the actual business of capturing slaves. It was done instead by Black Africans, who then sold them on to Europeans. And some Black slavers did extremely well, such as Tippoo Tipp, who enslaved Black Africans to provide labour for his plantations on Zanzibar.
As for the supposed role the slave trade played in enriching Britain, historians have said that in fact it played the same role in stimulating the economy as sugar. The real driver of the industrial revolution and Britain’s wealth was textiles. In fact, it may even have been a disadvantage. One historian has estimated that the country would have been £500,000 better off if we didn’t have the West Indies.
Working Class Whites Did Not Benefit from Slave Trade
He also rebuts the assertion that all Whites somehow benefited from the slave trade. This is again untrue on several levels. Imperialism and colonialism were policies devised by the upper classes. Democracy was only established in 1928 when the vote was granted to all adult men and women without property qualifications. Before then, in the 18th and early 19th century, the franchise was severely restricted to only a tiny percentage of the electorate. And most White people’s lives in 19th century Britain was one of desperate poverty and misery. The average life expectancy in the early 19th century was forty. Child labour was the norm, with small children working down the mines. He gives examples of the long hours one seven or eight year old child worked in total darkness operating the ventilation shutters in the pits, and of a mine disaster where flooding killed both adults and children. But the anti-slavery movement was strong amongst the British people as a whole and particularly among the working class. He also points out that almost all civilisations accepted the existence of slavery, and that the anomaly isn’t British and European slavery, but how the British and the West abolished it.
Geopolitical Dangers
He also argues that the decolonisation movement is dangerous on a geopolitical level. The book presents statistics that show that 47 per cent of Africans believe that colonialism benefited their countries, a higher percentage than westerners. However, slavery and colonialism are used by extremely corrupt African politicians to explain their countries poor performance rather than in the massive greed of the kleptocrats running them. One of these was James Ibori, the governor of one of the Nigerian states, who stole over $100 million but was lauded by his admirers as a great patriot. But other states, such as Russia and China, are weaponising Western guilt as part of their own foreign policies against the West. China has particularly attacked the West as racist and White supremacist for opposing the Great Chinese Dream. This includes further commercial penetration into Africa, which has alarmed some observers as a new form of colonialism.
Nations are bound together by their common histories, and the attack on the West’s history as one of shameful exploitation is designed to stop America and its allies exercising any kind of global dominance. But this retreat from a unipolar world will make international politics much more cut-throat. The state of international relations before the rise of America following the Second World War was one of competing empires which attacked and preyed on the weak. Following the Second World War, America set up a number of international bodies to protect and extend the liberal international order. This included western Europe against the Soviet bloc and Japan in Asia. The result has been that the percentage of the world’s population in desperate poverty has declined from 40 per cent to 10 per cent. He recognises that America’s position as the world’s policeman hasn’t been free from terrible mistakes, but argues that without the security afforded by America international affairs will revert to what they were before as nations compete ruthlessly for resources. He also criticises the various anti-colonialist intellectuals who were all too ready to attack the west, but said nothing about rival empires that were just as brutal or even worse. Like Edward Said, who didn’t criticise Russia, China or the Ottoman Empire, whose Barbary pirates also enslaved White Europeans. Said claimed he didn’t have to. As a Palestinian he was quite comfortable in an eastern milieu, which means that there is a shocking bias and one-sidedness in his critique of imperialism.
Decolonisation Mandatory University Policy
Despite these objections, decolonisation has become a mandatory policy across the university sector. It is demanded and enforced by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Universities UK and the Race Equality Charter as well as the Universities and Colleges Union. And it’s extremely authoritarian. Students in some universities are required to attend compulsory courses on anti-racism. This is not the kind of anti-racism which most people grew up with in the 1970s, when Dr Luther King called on us to judge men by their character, not their colour. If a student responds to the questions presented to him or her on questionnaires devised by the activists with slogans like ‘I believe in one race – the human race’, she or he will get a lecture on how this is itself racist and people of different races need to be treated differently according to their culture and background. Ditto if you’re a believer in meritocracy, in which the best people for a job should get it regardless of their colour. In fact Thomas Sowell has shown that sheer commercial necessity has frequently acted against institutional racism. Despite legislation in apartheid South Africa banning Blacks from certain jobs, some employers nevertheless sought to circumvent it to employ Black workers, simply because it made commercial sense. The activists are also vindictive and highly authoritarian. These course will also ask their White students how guilty they are and openly encourage such feelings as part of an indoctrination campaign to turn them into ‘allies’ concerned to make a fairer Britain for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Microaggressions are a part of this programme in some universities. These are gestures or body language that suggest hostility on someone’s part, even if no such hostility is openly expressed. Not sharing a lift with a personal of colour is one such microaggression, as is lifting your eyebrows if a Black person enters the room. These gestures are deemed racist if they are perceived as such by another, regardless of what was meant by whoever performed them. One university department set up a group of seven young spies to monitor and report on students and staff committing such microaggressions. It’s been said before, but this is totalitarian with a distinctly Maoist tinge. You are under authoritarian surveillance with people spying on you, and you must confess your guilt, just as Mao forced ordinary Chinese to do during his wretched struggle sessions.
Stokes has no time for racism, but sees the decolonisation movement as dangerous, not least because it attacks the principles of equality, rationality and the rule of law that have been at the heart of Western society and its success since the Enlightenment. These are values that need to be defended, especially given the global threat of Russia and China. The movement is also causing social division in the West. Polls show that the upper middle classes in America are far more optimistic about the values of diversity than most Blacks, and have an increasing contempt for the White working class. These last are especially the people who voted for Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain, which Stokes denies was primarily racist. They are the people one American politico called ‘semi-fascists’. This attack on the working class also affects Stokes himself, as he states that he grew up in urban poverty in London after his father’s suicide in Canada. But Stokes doubts that the decolonisation movement will get very far outside circles like the BBC and the universities.
Woke Capitalism
As for woke capitalism, the book argues that this is an attempt to prevent criticisms that a corporation is racist or otherwise exploitative, and so a form of virtue signalling and political Danegeld. Even when that corporation is otherwise so, as in the case of those multinational companies that have been accused of using slave labour in China. There is also a political aspect to it. Woke capitalism does not challenge the class structure of society or the nature of capitalism itself. It merely wants better representation of Blacks and people of colour through affirmative action, but does not want to challenge more concrete factors that are holding people from working class backgrounds back. And affirmative action may be a real danger in promoting people because of their colour rather than their ability. If this is done, then it could mean a loss of efficiency and performance in industry, and is actually dangerous in medicine. This aspect of woke capitalism, as something that seems left but actually isn’t, sounds correct. It certainly seems like the reason Starmer has loudly embraced a new set of policies that will supposedly attack British institutional racism and make sure Blacks and Asians get high positions. While not doing anything for the working class as such.
Criticisms
The book’s certainly thorough in its attack on the academic decolonisation movements and its allied campaigns in industry and geopolitics. It’s also going to be controversial. Some may take issue with the reliability of the statistics used, such as the Labour politicos who howled loudly at the last government report. It also has a rosy-eyed view of America as the world’s policeman. America was responsible for some horrific atrocities through supporting genuinely fascist regimes in countries like South America. And the regimes it overthrew as part of its campaign to promote international capitalism were often just left-wing, not Marxist. President Benitez of Guatemala was a democratic socialist, not a commie as he was painted, when he was overthrown in the 1950s. Similarly, the president of Guyana who was also overthrown in an American led coup was a liberal. The Iraq invasion wasn’t launched primarily to give the Iraqi people their freedom from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, but to loot their oil and state industries, as Greg Palast shows in his book Armed Madhouse. And Henry Kissinger, who died a few days ago, was a monster responsible for death, torture and suffering on a global scale.
And while it has to be admitted that capitalism has been successful in raising the world’s people out of poverty, globalisation and neoliberalism have had the opposite effect. Ordinary working people across the world have become poorer as elites have become richer, resulting in social unrest and a destabilisation of international relations.
Conclusion
But this doesn’t alter the fact that Critical Race Theory, the ideology at the heart of the Black Lives Matter and decolonisation movements is a malign, racist, anti-White ideology which ignores the material reasons for poverty and inequality in its pursuit of systemic White racism and has a very skewed, bias view of history. If we are to build a genuinely fair and non-racist society, then it needs to be tackled at every level. Including the universities, where it is actively preventing White working class students from having access to a mechanism that has historically allowed the poor social and economic advancement.
I’ve come across a number of videos on YouTube by Iranian creators showing a different side to their country – its ancient history, great monuments and architecture and the friendliness of its people. Some of these are to encourage westerners to go to the country, others to show a completely different side to it. One that is very different from the images of angry protestors chanting ‘Death to the big and little Satan’ as they used to call America and Britain during the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. This is just a walk through what I imagine is one of the very prosperous districts of one Iran’s big cities, possibly Tehran. It shows people in western clothing, including women without hijabs! – walking amongst the city’s shops and cafes. There are buskers playing music on the streets, the sound of western pop, including rap, dads with their families pushing prams. There are a group dressed as the characters from the Pixar film Toy Story. Many of the shops have their names in the western, Roman alphabet and there’s even a shop selling Italian ice cream. The image is of a very modern, sophisticated, and westernised town. I think that if you went to other, more working class areas and the countryside you’d probably find that life and conduct was more conservative and traditional.
I’m putting this up, not just because it is interesting seeing this other side of Iran, but because I am afraid there are terrible forces in both Iran and the West who would love to see a war break out between us. The hardliners in Iran want to challenge the west and its dominance in the region, including Israel. And the Neocons on their part would love to invade Iran too, for pretty much the same reasons they invaded Iraq. Back in 1953 we organised a coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq, because he dared to nationalise the oil industry. He was toppled, and the oil went back to being owned by BP. Then it was nationalised by revolutionary regime in 1979. I think the western oil companies would very much like to get their mitts back on it. The Neocons compiled a list of seven countries whose regimes they wanted to change, which included Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Of course, the consequence of such a war would be devastating, not just for Iran but for the entire Middle East. So I’ve put this up to show this side of Iran, of ordinary people going about their business in a modern city very much like those of the west. And let’s all hope for peace.
Just caught this headline – I’m afraid I can’t remember the source – on my newsfeed tonight. Okay, I’m acting like a zoomer, who’re worrying the press and punditry ’cause they get most of their news from social media, and only read the headlines. I didn’t read any more than the headline, because it appeared to tell me all I need to know: Blair is now far more right-wing than Rishi Sunak, who’s being accused of Communism and ‘consocialism’ from the mad, Brexiteer right. This is the man, who headed off to a Republican convention in America with his best bud and fellow war criminal George Dubya Bush. The man whose financial affairs are an impenetrable maze of holding companies owning other holding companies to legally avoid paying tax. A man whose administration was, in the words of Peter Mandelson, extremely relaxed about getting rich, and which slithered up to embrace every celebrity and billionaire it could. A man who believed the state should serve big corporations, not society as a whole and not ordinary people. A man, who raised his head a few days ago to say that the NHS should make greater use of private healthcare.
Peter Hitchens, who is definitely a man of the right and who himself has some very strange ideas, has always had a principled objection to the war in the Iraq because of its illegality and cost in the lives of courageous, patriotic men and women. He calls him ‘the Blair creature’. I think it’s a fair description. Blair is doctrinaire in his stupid, inflexible Thatcherism, and his administration became notorious for lies and spin. So much so that people started calling him ‘Bliar’. He did some good tackling poverty, for which he should receive credit, and under him the NHS was properly funded. But it also had a poisonous attitude towards Labour members and politicians who were not ‘on message’, like Claire Short. If you were out of Tony’s favour, you could expect to be attacked by ‘negative briefing’ against you. Cherie Blair was a lawyer with Matrix chambers, which boasted of its human rights work. But this was ditched when profit called. The traditional chiefs of Fiji staged a military coup that overthrew the Indian prime minister, who had been democratically elected. The new dictatorship then hired Matrix chambers as their lawyers.
I’m fed up with him kibitzing, a good Yiddish word meaning to offer unwanted advice. His economic and political views are just trite, outmoded free trade nonsense. He was also rather keen, if I remember, on secret courts and biometric IDs, both real threats to British democracy that have been picked up in their turn by the Tories. He started the work capabilities tests, which have thrown genuinely deserving disabled people off the benefits they need, and contributed to the humiliating treatment of benefit claimants. And he went much further in privatising the NHS than the Tories ever dared.
He cannot let go of power, and so keep treating us to his nasty opinions. Just like Thatcher couldn’t stop interfering after she was ousted and replaced by John Major.
He deserves to be utterly ignored. Unfortunately, Starmer is his political child, with the same noxious policies and attitudes. A little while ago the Labour store was even selling Blair merchandise. Yeah, like I want to buy that and remember him.
But now that Starmer looks like winning, it seems that Tory Tone thinks he can make a political comeback. After all, the Labour leadership in the southwest were charging members £120 quid for a dinner with Peter Mandelson.
This fortnight’s Private Eye for 14th-27th July has a couple of interesting articles in it. One of these is about the interim government inquiry into the conduct of the undercover people. This has revealed that the cops were more than happy to infiltrate left-wing organisations, but ignored the much more dangerous groups on the extreme right. And equally revealingly, the head of the inquiry seems to think that this was not due to political bias. The article, on page 39 on Ian Hislop’s mighty organ, runs:
‘Sir John Mitting’s interim inquiry report into the spy cops scandal rightly condemned the Metropolitan Police’s undercover unit, whose officers stole the identities of dead children and tricked women into sexual relationships to infiltrate left-wing organisations. To gather intelligence on adults and teenagers who posed a criminal, terrorist or state safety threat was unjustified and should have been ended rapidly, he said.
Quite so. But the former high court judge then added, bizarrely, that “political bias” played no part in the decisions of the disgraced covert Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) to target only left-leaning activists during the 1970s and early 1980s, and none from the right or the extreme right who did present a threat.
The SDS, far from being an obscure rogue outfit, reported to Special Branch and the security services, from which it took instructions, particularly about which individuals to target. The Home Office agreed its budget. As well as left-wing groups, the SDS infiltrated trade unions to gather intelligence on disputes involving the dockers, miners and building industry at the time.
Hundreds of documents disclosed during the inquiry as part of the police’s own internal investigation revealed how police, Special Branch and the security services had provided “intelligence” to industrialists and employers – some with close links to the Tory government. Information passed via the notorious blacklisting organisations the Economic League and the Consulting Association; the aim being to keep “troublesome” left-wing activists out of the workforce.
None of this, according to Mitting, was politically driven. He preferred evidence from the former SDS squad officers who said they didn’t need to infiltrate the extreme right, because they already had “excellent sources”, and it might carry “an unacceptable risk of violence”. But Barry Moss, the head of the SDS in 1980, appeared to blame left-wing groups for disorder when he told the inquiry: “If the National Front had just been allowed to demonstrate and the left-wing hadn’t turned up, there probably wouldn’t have been any disorder”.
Dave Smith of the Blacklist Support Group, himself a blacklisted construction worker, told the Eye: “Over 1,000 left-wing campaigns were infiltrated, from trade unions to women’s groups and environmentalists, because the higher echelons of Special Branch & MI5 deemed us as dangerous subversives. But not a single far-right fascist group was spied on. Even though the National Front, BNP, Combat 18 members were terrorising communities, carrying out organised attacks and planting bombs. How is that not political?”
The inquiry, which has so far taken eight years and cost £65m, continues with Mitting due to report next on the spy cops’ later activities.’
I haven’t heard of the Consulting Association, but the Economic League, full name ‘The Economic League against Industrial Subversion’ is notorious. They were included in a list of far-right British organisation by the conspiracy/parapolitical magazine, Lobster, back in the 1980s. They were also the subject of an investigation by one of the television documentaries, either Panorama or World In Action. This documentary interviewed some of their victims, men who’d been denied employment for years thanks to being blacklisted. In the 1990s they either morphed or were superseded by a similar organisation, Hakluyt.
I’m well aware that not all left-wing organisations are innocent. The Groan’s Francis Wheen describes the violent radicalism and thuggish mentality of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and its leader in his book on ’70s paranoia. The WRP ran a youth camp in the early 1970s to prepare its members for revolutionary activism. A young Black man was stabbed to death and a woman raped. Despite this, it’s leader shrugged this off as toughening his cadres up for the revolutionary struggle. There was also the Angry Brigade, a bunch of anarchists, who had started a bombing campaign culminating in blowing the front door off a Tory MP’s house. I’ve also come across claims that in many cases the violence associated with the NF and other fascists actually came from the left, and that the Nazis were simply responding in kind. That wouldn’t surprise me. But the fascist groups like the NF, BNP, British Movement and Combat 18 had a deliberate policy of recruiting football hooligans and were themselves extremely violent. In the 1960s they bombed two synagogues in London and there were countless attacks on Jews, people of colour, and trade unionists and leftists. They were also running training sessions to prepare them for the struggle against communism. This seems to have included armed combat and terrorism. Like when some weed killer was found in their garden shed with ‘weed killer’ crossed out and replaced with ‘Jew Killer’.
But the 1970s were also a time when the authorities really feared the overthrow of democracy from the extreme left. The Times published editorials calling for a coup and the minority Labour government of 1975 to be replaced by a junta composed of politicians from both sides of the House. Private armies were supposedly being recruited to fight the forces of the left. And Ken Livingstone has described, in his 1987 book Livingstone’s Labour, how the authorities had drawn up lists of trade unionists, radicals and journalists to be rounded up and interned as a threat to order. Lobster has published a number of articles over the decades about MI5 and how its senior members and directors have had extreme right-wing sympathies. And let’s not forget the scandal in the 1980s when it was revealed that several members of the police belonged to the League of St. George, a Nazi organisation that had been founded during the War as an SS auxiliary organisation for British traitors fighting for Germany.
There’s a very murky background, it seems to me, of official sympathy and participation in the far-right behind the SDS’ infiltration of left-wing organisations and its complete absence of interest in the Nazi right. Their refusal to investigate these organisations, it seems to me, was very political.
I got this piece earlier this morning, and it’s well worth reading. The pro-democracy organisation show how the social media giants, like Cambridge Analytica, harvest our data so that they can target us specifically with material that matches our own opinions. This is making politics more polarised as people retreat into isolated communities of like-minded fellows. But a whistle blower also revealed that the company was targeting those with a conspiracy-based view of the world. The same tech giants are also publishing state disinformation, such as Putin’s propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine. The organisation states that the internet needs regulating, but it should be after the EU’s methods, not the Tories. Their proposed law would criminalise the publishing of views they don’t like, such as presenting a positive view of the Channel Migrants.
‘Dear David,
In recent weeks, we’ve been discussing the real threats to British sovereignty that you won’t hear about from fuming Brexiters or apathetic politicians. Opaque think-tanks lobby for unpopular and unworkable policies, celebrating when their proposals crash the economy; dark-money infiltrates UK political channels, warping our leaders’ priorities. These forces did more to prevent the UK from forging its own path than EU bureaucrats ever did.
This week, we want to bring another phenomenon into the equation: Silicon Valley, social media, and disinformation. It’s a complicated topic, capable of filling many books (I’d recommend friend of OB Kyle Taylor’s Little Black Book of Social Media as a good starting place). This ‘Long Read’ Series newsletter will get to the core of why tech platforms threaten our democratic sovereignty, putting the business priorities of California Tech bros over the needs of regular people and undermining the very social fabric of Britain.
If you don’t want to read all of it – here’s the takeaway: the social media business model is inherently harmful to democracy. It generates disinformation on an industrial scale because that is what is profitable. For those seeking to manipulate public opinion for their own benefit, spreading disinformation is a worthwhile investment. This process means that we can no longer engage in good-faith debates, siloed away in our own micro-communities and becoming increasingly polarised politically. It’s completely changed the nature of politics – and regular people are paying the price. These companies need to be regulated, democratically and transparently. We can’t keep playing by their rules.
This newsletter starts with some context, explaining how these issues came to light. Then we’ll cover the scale of the threat democracy faces, which is only increasing due to pending government legislation. Finally, we’ll get to how we can fight back and create a political system fit for tackling 21st century challenges.
Background – Cambridge Analytica and Facebook:
Throughout the 2010s, the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) collected data on tens of millions of Facebook users, building psychological profiles designed for political advertising. Using this data, the company was hired by the 2016 Trump Campaign, the Vote Leave campaign, and many other right-wing political organisations around the world to use this data for political advertising.
According to CA whistleblower Christopher Wylie, the firm targeted its ads towards users that they identified as “more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens”. Our partners at Fair Vote UK launched their organisation by publishing whistleblower evidence from CA’s Christopher Wylie and Vote Leave’s Shahmir Sanni, exposing the scandal and demanding more campaign transparency alongside strong digital regulation.
In 2019, Facebook paid fines of $5 billion in the US and notably much lower £500k in the UK for exposing user’s data to “serious risk of harm”. Cambridge Analytica has now been shuttered, but the scale of the problem – our data being used to warp our opinions – has increased exponentially. What the scandal showed is that anyone can pay for political influence, and modern technology allows us to target people’s insecurities, vulnerabilities, and emotional states with terrifying precision. And things have only gotten worse since 2019.
The Disinformation Factory:
The fundamental problem, many argue, is the intrinsic business model of big tech. The vast majority of revenue for these companies, from Google to Youtube to Facebook to Twitter comes from this kind of “surveillance advertising”. A core problem is that harmful content spreads faster, giving platforms an incentive to attach ads to it and allow it to spread rapidly. There’s also a huge concern around the surveillance aspect, with giant companies monitoring every swipe and scroll on their platforms to better understand what kind of content to push in your direction. We never got to agree to this kind of data collection – or the ways in which it’s used.
There are countless examples of this process in action, and the consequences have often been immense. State-backed disinformation campaigns from the Russian government have churned out pro-Kremlin propaganda related to the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine; Fossil fuel companies pay to convince us that the climate isn’t really changing or that it’s not really so bad if it is; The lie that the 2020 US Election was stolen was circulated on social media and the ensuing attempted coup was orchestrated on Facebook (and was copycatted in Brazil). The list goes on and on.
The threat, then, to our democracy and our sovereignty is that we are no longer in control of our information environment. Anyone with enough cash can churn out content targeted directly at us to change our opinions and undermine the integrity of democratic debate. Moreover, that lack of control stems from the fact that we have no right to control our own personal data. This was all part of an unspoken deal that we were never given the chance to consent to – and now we’re forced to pay the price.
Privacy Under Fire:
The Online Safety Bill (OSB) emerged in response to these very real problems and others. Tragic cases, such as the untimely death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, further showed how social media platforms “monetise misery” with tragic real-world implications. However, after many revisions, postponements, and much Conservative in-fighting, the bill is now an absolute trainwreck.
We won’t bore you with everything in this bill, but here’s a summary from our blog last November if you’re interested. Essentially, the OSB grants giant exceptions and exemptions to some of the most harmful actors, is immensely complicated to the point of being borderline incoherent, and fails to meaningfully address any of the problems we mentioned above. It causes more problems than it solves.
For example, the bill would make it illegal to share videos showing migrant crossings in a “positive-light”. It undermines end-to-end encryption, meaning the government could be looking over your WhatsApp messages and private conversations. Not only does it not protect us from corporate surveillance, it adds in state surveillance as well.
In addition, a new government bill – the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill – could make things even worse. It looks to expand the government’s control over our data instead of protecting it and create new barriers to exercising the rights we already have.
How We Fight Back:
We fight back by pushing for functional legislation that will give us control over our data and force tech platforms to be transparent and accountable for their actions. We know it’s possible, because the EU has already done it.
The EU’s Digital Services Act, effective from 2024, does what the OSB always should have done:
Legally binding transparency requirements for platforms, showing how they moderate content and how their algorithms work
Consumer protection rules around “deceptive design” and “dark patterns”, preventing platforms from manipulating people into buying things or clicking links
A ban on targeting people and content amplification using certain types of sensitive data (ie sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc). This goes a long way in addressing the fundamental harms ingrained in the business model of social media
Requires social media platforms to tell people why they’re being targeted with certain kinds of content
Requires large social media platforms to subject themselves to independent audits and rigorous risk assessments.
If we want to build a political system where we can not only exercise all of our rights effectively but engage in democratic debate freely and fairly, we need serious action on social media platforms. We’re working with our partners at Fair Vote, as well as international partners to not only oppose the Online Safety Bill and Data Bill, but to champion a new paradigm for digital rights that ensures we’re no longer at the whim of Silicon Valley tech barons.
It’s just one more reason that we need a government which is on our side, to set in motion the policies that will keep democracy functioning well into the digital era. Right now, this administration’s actions only make us less safe online and further undermine our fundamental right to privacy.
It’s a huge challenge but with your support and by working with partners across the tech and democracy sectors, we can keep the pressure on as part of our overall mission to defend, strengthen and renew democracy.
I’ve blogged about Mahyar Tousi before. He’s a British Asian YouTuber with very right-wing views, a true-blue Tory Brexiteer of pretty much the same hard right views as the Lotus Eaters. But today he said something interesting about Iran. The country’s been rocked for several months now by protests and demonstrations celebrating women and freedom against the theocracy. This was spurred after the appalling death in police custody of a young woman, who’d been arrested for not wearing a hijab, or not wearing one properly. Iran’s a great, ancient and highly civilised country, and its young people have taken to the streets. According to Tousi, the protesters are demanding the the republication of its constitution before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the installation of the Crown Prince, the son of the last Shah, as the head of state. I think Tousi himself is Iranian, as he talks about how the country was a constitutional monarchy and had a bill of rights thousands of years ago. Well, the Shah was a tyrant who tortured, imprisoned and murdered his political enemies, but yes, ancient Persia did boast of its justice. In one of his monuments, Cyrus the Great or perhaps Xerxes wrote, ‘It is not my will that the strong oppress the weak. It is not my will that the weak oppress the strong.’ I’ve also come across papers on the web arguing that Persian women had full equality with men and citing instances where ladies led armies into battle.
And the democrats seem to be winning. Or at least have got the mullahs seriously rattled. So rattled that the head of state transferred $4 billion to his bank account in Venezuela. It looks like the mullahs are preparing to scarper over there if they get toppled, just as the remaining Nazis fled to Argentina and South America following the defeat of the Third Reich.
But he also mixes this up with conspiracy theory. Like Alex Jones and people like Godfrey Bloom, he spouts about the secret machinations of the globalists. In this instance, he claims that Iran’s protests are anti-globalist. The late Ayatollah Khomeini was installed by the CIA and other American secret agencies because the Shah was becoming an equal player and threatening their dominance. They also wanted to support the Islamic Revolutionaries in order to prevent them being supported by the Soviets, and so the Russians gaining the new regime’s support and goodwill. This lasted all of a day until the Revolutionaries turned very firmly against the West. Tousi talks about the possibility that others will try and interfere in the ongoing revolution and that any western interference will be seized upon as evidence of hostility and malign intent by the mullahs. He therefore urges his viewers not to interfere and let the Iranian people free themselves.
I don’t know where Tousi got the idea that the Shah was toppled by the CIA. We studied the Iranian Revolution in Islam when I was at college in the 1980s. The evidence then was that the Americans and the rest of the world were completely unprepared for the Islamic Revolution until nearly the very last moment. The only people who knew that a revolution was coming was the Tudeh, the Iranian Communist party, and they deluded themselves that it would be a communist revolution. When it did break out, the CIA issued a report saying that the Ayatollah Khomeini would govern Iran as a peaceful, nonviolent spiritual leader like Gandhi.
If only.
My reaction is to doubt Tousi on this, as Iran is full of conspiracy theories. One of these even holds that Khomeini was in reality British and his true surname was Williams, and there are even slightly blasphemous jokes about it. But it might be right. In any case, I strongly feel that Tousi is also right when he says that the Iranians should be left free to make their own revolution and destiny. Other Iranian dissidents, such as Shirin Ebadi, who has radically different views to Tousi, have said the same. She has attacked the Iranian regime for its oppression of Iranian workers. I’m sure both of them are right, as it was western interference in Iranian affairs – the overthrow of the last democratic Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, by Britain and the CIA, that led to the Shah’s brutal autocracy against whom the Iranians understandably revolted.
Tousi is also looking forward to the Mullah’s overthrow, because of their support for the Palestinians and Hamas. He thinks that if they go, there could be peace in the Middle East. Well, there might, but it looks like the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians would then go unchecked.
I’m reposting this because some of the great contributors on this blog have reported that it’s vanishing from their computers. I honestly can’t think why this should be the case, but here it is again.
‘Trev, one of the many great commenters on this blog, alerted me yesterday to the news that the Americans have claimed to have shot down several UFOs, including one over Alaska. He linked this to a news report that said they were probably balloons. Since then I’ve come across various accounts that contradict this. CNN reported on the incident, stating that the air force pilots said they did not know what they were looking at. One also said that he was unable to work out how it flew. Other details have also emerged. The pilots said it was not like the Chinese spy balloon. One was the size of a car, and another, or perhaps the same one, was cylindrical.
I was reading the comments on one of the YouTubers, who covered this and most of them were sceptical. The obvious question was raised of how an alien spaceship, which was so far ahead of us technologically that it could cross the vast gulfs of interstellar space, could be shot down by us using our limited technology. The majority of commenters smelled a rat. They considered that it was a hoax intended to prepare the way for some kind of totalitarian takeover. One religious individual went further and suggested that it was a disguise for the appearance of the fallen angels and the reign of Lucifer. There was a similar conspiracy theory put forward in the ’90s by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in their book The Stargate Conspiracy. They claimed that the US government was plotting a totalitarian coup by staging the descent of alien space gods, and connected this with the Nine, a group of discarnate entities contacted by American scientists and psychical researchers, including Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, in the 1970s. I can’t remember all the details, but the book somehow took in the Egyptian pyramids and Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which argued that the Dogon of Mali had been contacted in prehistory by extraterrestrials from the star Sirius. The last thing I heard about their book, it was being claimed that they had intended it as a joke, but that this had been so convincing it went over most people’s heads. I read it, and I have to say that there was nothing in it which suggested it was a spoof.
I do think, however, we have to be very careful with this one. UFO stands for a ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. Although it has entered popular culture as meaning a visiting alien spacecraft, I wonder if, in this case, it means precisely that: a flying object that cannot be identified, but which may not be extraterrestrial. I’ve noticed that recently UFOs have been renamed UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and wondered why that new term wasn’t used instead. Of course it could just be that phenomena can include a purely natural explanation for UFOs. One possible explanation is that they are poorly understood meteorological phenomena like ball lightning. But what the Americans claim to have shot down was structured craft. On the other hand, it could well be some kind of unidentified terrestrial aircraft, and the Americans have described it as UFO in order to play on the ambiguity of the term and suggest it was an alien vehicle when it may well not have been.
Way back in the 90s a book was published claiming that UFO sightings and reports were actually those of drones. The author was a nasty individual with a background in various Fascist groups. It obviously can’t be applied to all UFO sightings, but it’s quite possible that it may explain some. Mark Pilkington in his book Mirage Men describes his interviews with a number of American air force personnel and experts on military aviation, who tell him that top secret aircraft developed by the American military do have the ability to fake a UFO encounter. This includes interfering with airplane’s radar, which can be done using two separate radar beams and has been known about since the 1950s. If the Americans have such technology, then it’s very likely indeed that Russia and China also has it, or something similar. It’s also been clear from Bill Rose’s Flying Saucer Technology (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing 2011) that countries around the world, including Britain, Germany, America and Russia, have been experimenting with disc-shaped aircraft almost since the invention of powered flight, and some of them look very exotic.
Artist’s rendition of a high-altitude VTOL ramjet developed by Lockheed for the US military for nuclear bombing and reconnaissance missions. from Rose, p. 104.
It’s possible that what was shot down was an terrestrial aircraft of this type, rather than anything from space.
On the other hand, perhaps it really is an alien spacecraft, and the American authorities have decided to hide it in plain sight by calling it as UFO on the understanding that this will cause the sceptics to discount it immediately.
It’ll be very interesting to see what else emerges about these encounters, though it won’t surprise me at all if the story is left to vanish so that we’ll be none the wiser.
Trev, one of the many great commenters on this blog, alerted me yesterday to the news that the Americans have claimed to have shot down several UFOs, including one over Alaska. He linked this to a news report that said they were probably balloons. Since then I’ve come across various accounts that contradict this. CNN reported on the incident, stating that the air force pilots said they did not know what they were looking at. One also said that he was unable to work out how it flew. Other details have also emerged. The pilots said it was not like the Chinese spy balloon. One was the size of a car, and another, or perhaps the same one, was cylindrical.
I was reading the comments on one of the YouTubers, who covered this and most of them were sceptical. The obvious question was raised of how an alien spaceship, which was so far ahead of us technologically that it could cross the vast gulfs of interstellar space, could be shot down by us using our limited technology. The majority of commenters smelled a rat. They considered that it was a hoax intended to prepare the way for some kind of totalitarian takeover. One religious individual went further and suggested that it was a disguise for the appearance of the fallen angels and the reign of Lucifer. There was a similar conspiracy theory put forward in the ’90s by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince in their book The Stargate Conspiracy. They claimed that the US government was plotting a totalitarian coup by staging the descent of alien space gods, and connected this with the Nine, a group of discarnate entities contacted by American scientists and psychical researchers, including Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, in the 1970s. I can’t remember all the details, but the book somehow took in the Egyptian pyramids and Robert K.G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which argued that the Dogon of Mali had been contacted in prehistory by extraterrestrials from the star Sirius. The last thing I heard about their book, it was being claimed that they had intended it as a joke, but that this had been so convincing it went over most people’s heads. I read it, and I have to say that there was nothing in it which suggested it was a spoof.
I do think, however, we have to be very careful with this one. UFO stands for a ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. Although it has entered popular culture as meaning a visiting alien spacecraft, I wonder if, in this case, it means precisely that: a flying object that cannot be identified, but which may not be extraterrestrial. I’ve noticed that recently UFOs have been renamed UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and wondered why that new term wasn’t used instead. Of course it could just be that phenomena can include a purely natural explanation for UFOs. One possible explanation is that they are poorly understood meteorological phenomena like ball lightning. But what the Americans claim to have shot down was structured craft. On the other hand, it could well be some kind of unidentified terrestrial aircraft, and the Americans have described it as UFO in order to play on the ambiguity of the term and suggest it was an alien vehicle when it may well not have been.
Way back in the 90s a book was published claiming that UFO sightings and reports were actually those of drones. The author was a nasty individual with a background in various Fascist groups. It obviously can’t be applied to all UFO sightings, but it’s quite possible that it may explain some. Mark Pilkington in his book Mirage Men describes his interviews with a number of American air force personnel and experts on military aviation, who tell him that top secret aircraft developed by the American military do have the ability to fake a UFO encounter. This includes interfering with airplane’s radar, which can be done using two separate radar beams and has been known about since the 1950s. If the Americans have such technology, then it’s very likely indeed that Russia and China also has it, or something similar. It’s also been clear from Bill Rose’s Flying Saucer Technology (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing 2011) that countries around the world, including Britain, Germany, America and Russia, have been experimenting with disc-shaped aircraft almost since the invention of powered flight, and some of them look very exotic.
Artist’s rendition of a high-altitude VTOL ramjet developed by Lockheed for the US military for nuclear bombing and reconnaissance missions. from Rose, p. 104.
It’s possible that what was shot down was an terrestrial aircraft of this type, rather than anything from space.
On the other hand, perhaps it really is an alien spacecraft, and the American authorities have decided to hide it in plain sight by calling it as UFO on the understanding that this will cause the sceptics to discount it immediately.
It’ll be very interesting to see what else emerges about these encounters, though it won’t surprise me at all if the story is left to vanish so that we’ll be none the wiser.
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