One of the stories going around the right, and especially the Islamophobic right, is that Gordon Brown and the-then Home Secretary Jackie Smith not only knew about the Pakistani grooming gangs, but ordered the police not to investigate them. It’s alleged that in 2008 they sent out a circular to the police forces stating that the victims had made a lifestyle choice and that, in order to preserve the peace, they were not to investigate them. I tried to do a bit of investigation into this rumour just using Google yesterday. They allegation is supposed to have been made by Nafzir Ali, the heroic prosecutor, who was behind the campaign to get these gangs arrested for their heinous crimes and put away. Ali is supposed to have made the allegation during an interview on Radio 4, which was then edited out and never broadcast.
If this is true, this would be a damning indictment of Brown and Smith, and their critics and opponents would be entirely right in calling for them to be jailed for a very long time. I don’t find anything particularly incredible about the allegation. The governments can and do stop investigations that are felt not to be in the public interest. With a serious allegation like this, it may well be that the Beeb would edit it out of an interview fearing legal or political repercussions. Tory critics have claimed that there is a strong bias in the BBC against them. I don’t find this entirely credible, but they have been able to support it with evidence that some elements of the Beeb were connected to the Labour party at the time, whose reporting was unfairly biased towards Blair’s Labour party. But as Blair at the time was turning Labour into a neoliberal party of the right, this doesn’t mean that it was a socialist or pro-working class bias.
The problem with these allegations is that they were made by a woman at a Tommy Robinson rally. It’s possible that she was telling the truth, though I didn’t find out what her background was that allowed her to know about this supposed interview and its suppression. Not everything Robinson says is a lie, and he was interviewing the gangs’ victims and promoting their stories while the police were still trying to silence them. But Tommy ‘Ten Names’ Robinson, as one of the great commenters here has called him, does not inspire confidence. As I’ve said, he’s a violent thug, who was in the BNP before supposedly become non-racist and deciding instead to pick on Islam. He has convictions for assault and mortgage fraud, as well as contempt of court and attempting to sneak into America while banned. He lost a libel case against a Syrian lad, who he claimed was the real bully after the lad was the victim of a racist attack by other boys at school. He claims to be some kind of citizen journalist, but his reports made at the time of these gangs’ trial violated the rules of journalistic impartiality and threatened to cause a mistrial. In which case, the trial would have to have been abandoned and the gangs, if guilty, let off.
The fact is that unless there is a public inquiry, we don’t know if this really happened. 38 Degrees did post a petition calling for one, but it hasn’t happened yet and I doubt that it will.
One of the great commenters on this channel asked me this yesterday. I must say that I really don’t know much about Andrew Tate at all. He seems to be some kind of cult figure on the right, and there were a number of videos put up on YouTube by right-wingers shocked at his conversion to Islam, wondering if it was genuine. I gather also that he’s anti-feminist, but the only other thing I really know about him is that the Romanian police arrested him on charges of enslavement and people trafficking after he got into some kind of spat on Twitter with Greta Thunberg. The right-wing American activist and YouTuber Matt Walsh coincidentally put up a video about this question, ‘Why do young men support Andrew Tate’ on YouTube yesterday. I haven’t watched it, so really don’t know why some men do. My guess is that, to them, he represents traditional masculinity and conservative values against the woke left.
In the case of Tommy Robinson, I think the short answer is that the people that support him are thugs. Robinson used to be a BNP stormtrooper before founding the English Defence League and Pegida UK. He’s got convictions for assault, and his house is actually in his wife’s name because of another conviction for mortgage fraud. There’s a video up on YouTube showing what he’s really like. It’s of him punching and beating someone at a sports match. His method of dealing with critics is to dox them, telling his supporters not to bother that person, and then later taking the video down, so that it doesn’t look like he’s encouraging people to go round and harass them He’s also done this personally to his critics and their families. He turned up at the house of the parents of one of his critics in Cumbria with his horrible mate Avi Yemeni, demanding a word in the early hours of the morning. He also went round banging on the windows and doors of Australian anti-racist and teacher Mike Stuchbery, as well as slandering him as a paedophile. It ended with Stuchbery leaving his job to go to Germany. He also got hit with a heavy legal case after he libelled a Syrian immigrant kid who’d suffered racist bullying at school. Robinson claimed the lad was the bully while interviewing one of the boys responsible for the attack. Robinson got sued for libel, lost, and was ordered to pay substantial damages.
A fair number of his supporters seem to be football hooligans. A few years ago when he was running the English Defence League, their supporters included football casuals, so called because they wore casual clothing looted from the stores they trashed. When he turned up in Bristol, he was supported by the Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance, who might be genuine football fans, but I suspect otherwise. As for respectable Conservative support, I’m not so sure. The Lotus Eaters support him, but talk about him in coded language as ‘the bad man’ in case they get a YouTube ban for doing so. I don’t know if other right-wing web sites support him. I haven’t seen him interviewed by the New Culture Forum, even though they have interviewed History Debunked’s Simon Webb. Possibly this lack of obvious support is because of his violence and criminality, just as many Tories in the 1970s stopped supporting the NF because of it.
Unfortunately, the long official coverup of the grooming gangs has given him ammunition. He’s made a number of videos about them and spoken to their victims, in contrast to some of the police and local authorities that have tried to silence them. He’s thus able to present himself as a lone voice standing against official complicity in these terrible crimes.
I’ve covered Robinson and his wretched followers in a number of blog posts, and the anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation, Hope Not Hate, have published a book exposing him and his crimes. My guess is that some men support him for the same reason they support Tate, and that Robinson also represents to them traditional Britain against the Muslim threat. But how much support he has beyond his own milieu I really don’t know.
It seems that it’s not just Black Lives Matter in America that is being run by people credibly accused of financial chicanery and embezzlement. My local paper, the Bristol Post, has as its front page headline a story about one of the BLM’s local organisers, Xahra Saleem, appearing before the local magistrates court on fraud charges. The Post article, written by Tristan Cork, reports
‘A woman charged with fraud in relation to tens of thousands of pounds raised in connection with the protest, which saw the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol toppled in 2020, has denied two charges.
Xahra Saleem appeared at Bristol Magistrates Court today, Tuesday, January 3, 2023, and entered two ‘not guilty’ pleas to two charges of fraud.
The 22-year-old answered to two charges of fraud. The first is that between June 28, 2020 and September 22, 2021, she committed fraud in that, “while occupying a position, namely ‘organiser’, in which you were expected to safeguard, or not to act against, the financial interests of the ABL Bristol, she dishonestly abused that position intending thereby to make a gain, namely used the funds raised, for yourself”.
‘The second charge put to Ms Saleem, is that between June 23, 2020 and September 22, 2021, she committed fraud in that “while occupying a position, namely ‘director’, in which you were expected to safeguard, or not act against, the financial interests of Changing Your Mindset Ltd, she dishonestly abused that position intending thereby to make a gain, namely, used the funds raised, for herself”.
The charges stated that Ms Saleem allegedly committed the offences while at an address in Tadpole Garden Village in Swindon, ‘or elsewhere’. Ms Saleem gave her present address as Briars Walk, Romford, Essex.’
Saleem outside the magistrate’s court.
I’m sort of surprised, and sort-of not. For a long time it seemed that the British offshoot was more respectable and financially responsible than its American parent, whose head siphoned off something like $60 million for herself, her friends and relatives. Cullors, the American head, tried telling everyone that it was all racist slander, but the people demanding that she and her organisation be investigated included the organisation’s workers and the poor Black communities, who expected to receive help from her organisation but didn’t. Now it seems some of the same kind of light-fingered individuals may have found their way in the local branch over here. Part of the problem is that decent, anti-racist people, businesses and organisations in America gave Black Lives Matter plentiful donations without properly looking at how the organisation was going to spend it nor the procedures in place to prevent fraud and financial mismanagement. This left it open to such financial shenanigans. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of this trial, but for the meantime I note that Saleem is alleged to have committed the fraud while in Swindon, and that she now gives her address as Romford. So she has precious little connection to Bristol and its great people, whether White or Black.
More Alex Belfield. Well, he’s due to be sentenced tomorrow, and just to remind us how nasty he really is, the Truth Checkers channel on YouTube have created this video of his ten worst moments, which they subdivide into the following sections:
Belfield shows himself in these incidents to be callous, manipulative, bigoted and actually dangerous. He mocks people with genuine mental health issues, going on about how they’re weak and should pull themselves together and making the old mock crying actions about them. When it comes to the subject of suicide, he thinks it’s funny to cut off one woman who has reasonably objected to his sneering comments about it because her boyfriend took his own life. He then posts pictures of nooses. As regards racism, Black and the ‘dinghy divers’ are dangerous, feral savages. And he really is homophobic. He rants about transpeople and when a transman calls in to challenge him, he cuts him off. Now some of his views on some of the trans issues aren’t unreasonable. I think the gender-neutral toilets in the Barbican were installed to help trans identified people. And some of the criticisms of Drag Queen Story Hour are also quite valid, in my opinion. Modern drag is highly sexualised, and so it is highly questionable whether it is suitable for children. A few weeks ago, a video made by a drag queen, who said that it wasn’t suitable for kids, went viral among the right-wing YouTube channels. But Belfield here is extremely rude about it all. Helen Pluckrose, who’s a critic of postmodern theories like Queer Theory, which is behind some of Trans ideology, believes that there’s a middle ground on which Trans people and gender critical feminists can agree on. And many gender critical feminists complain that they have a problem debating the trans rights activists because they refuse to appear with them, sometimes making the excuse that they don’t feel safe. Well, Belfield had the opportunity to have a respectful dialogue with a transperson, and threw it away with snide remarks. Which makes the gender critical side look bad. Quite honestly, I can’t blame some transpeople not feeling safe if that’s the response they get from Belfield and people like him. The contempt he has for his audience is astonishing to behold. He shouts at them, tells them to hurry up with what they’re saying and generally insults them.
I dare say that Belfield probably sees himself as some kind of shock jock, provoking his listeners with his abrupt and outrageous behaviour. Well, he ain’t Howard Stern, who was genuinely shocking and outrageous, but wasn’t homophobic. Belfield, by contrast, is just rude and nasty. And watching his behaviour here, including the sneers about women’s football and his creepy behaviour towards his female fans, you can see why Radio Leeds sacked him after a year.
The collapse of Alex Belfield continues. I don’t mean this to sound homophobic, but I do find it funny considering the innuendo and sneers Belfield makes about various camp TV presenters and celebs. He describes them as being ‘light on their feet’, and the various remarks about his off-camera assistant, Tarquin. It seems to be based on some of the camp humour of the 1970s, and particularly Larry Grayson’s, and his jokes about Everard and Slack Alice and his punchline ‘seems like a nice boy’. There’s a big difference between him and Grayson though, quite apart from the fact that the humour itself is 40 or so years out of date. It’s that Grayson was genuinely funny and seemed to be a genuinely nice person. He never stalked or harassed anyone, did not con people out of money by claiming that he was going to sue the BBC or police, or that he needed it to pay a barrister and then defended himself. He was a gentlemanly host on the Generation Game, and my parents preferred him to his predecessor on the game show, Bruce Forsythe. And when Grayson made those camp jokes, it was genuinely meant in fun. Looking at Belfield’s sneers, it seems like a touch of real homophobia combined with jealousy that they have jobs with the Beeb and he doesn’t.
This is why this little snippet of news is quite ironic.
There is, apparently, a site on the net called ‘Gay or Straight’, where people go to vote about the sexuality of particular celebs. According to the utterly scurrilous Sir Jimmy Savile channel on YouTube, 77 people went on there to vote on the issue of Belfield’s sexual orientation. And they voted that Belfield, who will be sentenced tomorrow for his crimes, was 85 per cent gay. As the average percentage for people voted gay seems to be 69 per cent, this means that, by the standards of the site, he is very gay indeed.
And this is about a man who constantly criticised Pride parades and other gay stories, largely taken from the Daily Heil.
Well, as the genuinely nice and great Larry Grayson would say, ‘seems like a nice boy.’
Okay, folks, I’ve sent off the model motions that the Arise Festival of Left Labour Ideas suggested to their followers and supporters that they should propose them to their local Labour parties ready for the upcoming Labour conference to my local party in south Bristol. I put up a piece yesterday showing what they were: renationalising the public utilities, including education and the NHS; ending the deportations to Rwanda; raising the minimum wage to £15; and stopping the further Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. All excellent policies. I don’t know if they’ll be proposed at the meeting, as the email I got from them about the meeting said they had six already. But you have to try.
As for whether or not they’ll be accepted and passed by conference even if they are passed by the local party, well, unfortunately the ‘100 per cent Zionist’ Starmer is in charge, a true-Blue Labour Tory infiltrator. And there’s Jess Philips, who said that Labour would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories. Neither of them would welcome these policies, and neither would the rest of the Blairites now packed in the parliamentary Labour party. But there’s always hope.
Update
After sending them off I got a kind reply from the local party secretary stating that they’re only accepting one proposed motion per person. So which one would like I like to choose? It’s a hard one, as they’re all good and necessary. However, I chose the £15 minimum pay rise because people are starving and they need the money now. I really hope it goes through.
Other motions being proposed for the local meeting this Thursday include:
Green New Deal – Proportional Representation – Support for Striking Workers
Reproductive Rights – International Development – Industrial Strategy (End UK Childcare Crisis).
Reproductive rights obviously refers to abortion, which people are afraid is threatened after the repeal of Roe vs Wade in America.
Going through YouTube this past week I found a couple of videos tearing into Scientific American for publishing a piece of pseudo-science to support the trans ideology. Scientific American has been going for over a century now, and has been one of the major magazines popularising science and explaining scientific discoveries and speculation to the mass of ordinary folks. I used to read it, on and off, along with New Scientist until I went off both c. 2007. That was when Dawkins wretched book, The God Delusion was published, and the New Atheists appeared to try and convince the public that religion was incompatible and fundamentally opposed to science. Real historians of science rejected it long ago, although they recognise that there have been periods of tension. The view that science and religion are opposed comes from the works of three men, one an academic at Harvard in the late 19th century. Against them are all the scientific discoveries made by people of faith down the centuries. For Christianity, I suggest James Hannam’s excellent book on medieval science, God’s Philosophers. As for mathematics, I’ve got a collection of early mathematical texts which I picked up from a secondhand bookshop. These texts go from the ancient Egyptians through Babylonia, ancient Greece, Rome, Judaism, China, Japan and India, as well as some of the great Muslim mathematicians. Many of them begin with a dedication by their authors to their God or gods. Unfortunately, the editors at New Scientist and Scientific American don’t share this view, and the editorial line became very atheist. So I simply stopped reading them. Unfortunately Scientific American’s scepticism hasn’t prevented it from publishing what I believe can only be described as pseudo-science in the name of promoting trans rights.
Brett Weinstein and his wife, Heather, biologists who oppose the postmodern pseudery now being promoted throughout academia and society, put up a video in which they tear to pieces an article published by the magazine which declared that western civilisation only believed in a single sex, the male, until about 1880. I think Matt Walsh has also made a video about it. It’s clearly nonsense, as the Weinstein’s show simply by stating the number of times men and women both appear in the Bible as evidence that people that long ago knew full well about the gender binary. The Weinsteins also point out that something can exist in nature long before it’s recognised by science. For example, the coatimundi was long considered to be two different species. There were the coatis, who were solitary animals, and the mundis, who were social and surrounded by their infants. Then biologists came to realise that the two species were actually just the two sexes of the same creature. The solitary animals were the males, while the social creatures with infants were the females. Brett Weinstein also points out that at one time people thought that the two sexes of the elephant seal were different species, simply because they looked so different from each other.
I think I know where the nonsense that western science didn’t recognise the gender binary until the late 19th century comes from. Postmodernism rejects empiricism and scientific examination and research in favour of discourse, examining what others have said about a particular issue. In the case of Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory and so on, this is done through the ideological lens of Marcel Foucault, in which ideology and discourse are functions of power relationships. For Queer Theorists, or at least those supporting trans rights, the scientific view that there are two biological sexes is a western, patriarchal construct intended to exclude trans people and so support White, heterosexual male dominance.
It seems to me, and I confess that I haven’t read the article, that the author has done this by basing their view on Aristotle. Aristotle, or at least the ancient Greeks, believed that the female body was merely an imperfect form of the male. This has rightly and understandably annoyed feminists ever since. But Aristotle and the other philosophers never denied that their were two sexes, male and female. And I am absolutely sure that the Renaissance anatomist, Andrea Fallopi, who discovered the fallopian tubes and the clitoris, and who named the vagina, knew what a woman was and that women and men were physiologically different.
I think the purpose behind the article has been to provide a scientific justification for transpeople being true members of the sex with which they identify or have transitioned. If the sexes are not distinct, then someone who believes themselves to be a member of the opposite sex, contrary to their biology, can still be seen scientifically as a member of the opposite sex.
Now I don’t deny that there are people, who believe that they are in the wrong body, and wish to conform as far as possible to the opposite sex. I also believe that such people deserve appropriate medical care and should have the same respect and freedom from abuse and discrimination as everyone else. But the sexes are still distinct biologically, and the denial that this is so is ideology, not science.
As for the Postmodernists denying the historical existence of something simply because it wasn’t recognised historically, a prime example of such thinking is in the Sokal and Bricmont book, Intellectual Impostures. This is a case in 1974 or -5 when French Egyptologists and doctors unwrapped the mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh. Examining his remains, they concluded that the man had died from tuberculosis. The Postmodernists, however, disagreed, because no such disease was known to the ancient Egyptians. Of course the fact that a disease wasn’t recognise, doesn’t not mean it didn’t exist. It only means that the people of the time didn’t know what it was.
I find it worrying that this article claiming that biological sex differences are only a recent invention has been published. There have been too many occasions in the past when ideology has been allowed to corrupt science. Examples include the racial, ‘Aryan’ science of the Nazis, and Lysenkoism in the USSR, based on the ideas of Stalin’s favourite scientist, Lysenko. Other examples of bad science include lobotomy operations to treat mental illness and monkey glands to rejuvenate men. This last involved implanting slices of monkey testicles into those of human men in order to make them become younger and more virile. In fact it resulted in the men taking this treatment developing syphilis, as the disease is endemic in the type of monkey from whom they took the bits of implanted gonad.
I am afraid that articles like this, and the pseudoscience they promote, will cause great harm, albeit with the best of intentions. There are at the moment a number of detransitioners suing the doctors who treated them and who recommended transition. They believe that they were deceived by them. I’ve no doubt that for some people suffering from the condition, surgical intervention may well be appropriate and necessary. But this must be proper physical and psychological tests.
The publication of such ideologically based pseudoscience threaten the proper treatment of those who suffer from the very condition such articles aim to help. And so they must be strenuously rejected.
More on the continuing collapse of Alex Belfield’s popularity, courtesy of the YouTube channel, ‘Latest News on Alex Belfield Stalking Court Case’. And the latest news on Alex Belfield is not good, well, not from his point of view, but from the perspective of everyone who feels ripped off and insulted by him, it’s brilliant. After problems with YouTube over his content, Belfield announced he was off to Ustreme to host a secret VOR – Voice of Reason – club there. Of course, Alex Belfield as the voice of reason is, to use Spock’s description of Klingon justice, ‘a unique perspective’. Mostly it was just sub-Daily Mail rants against the channel migrants, immigration in general, the NHS, the BBC, diversity quotas, the trans cult, Guardian-reading, champagne-sipping Naga Manchushi types and people ‘who are light on their feet’. So, just a bit of homophobia then. Mixed in with this were jabs at Carol Vorderman, who he sent up as ‘Carol Vordernorks’, and Diane Abbott. This was all delivered with very ’70s jokes about ‘jellywobblers’. I do wonder what he had against Manchetti and Vorderman. Some of this was undoubtedly general Tory hatred. They started going after her because she did an advert in contravention of BBC rules. But I think the real reason was that Manchetti had been too good at humiliating Tories with awkward question during interviews. But the from the way Belfield carried on, you would think it, and whatever animus he had against Vorderman, was personal. Did they turn him down for a date?
Belfield was charging his viewers a pound a month or something to watch his Ustreme channel. This has irked an awful lot of his critics and detractors. Former fans of his have stopped watching, and are now posting YouTube videos instead stating very clearly why they no longer support him. One man explained that he doesn’t like the way Belfield insults and sneers at the viewers to his show, nor the way he’s constantly begging for money while boasting about his luxury holidays to places like Vegas. He pointed out that many of Belfield’s viewers are genuinely poor, and so Belfield was exploiting them to make himself richer. As for the humour, it got old. He originally liked it, but now has got sick and tired of it. And I think this fellow’s complaints are the same as many of Belfield’s former viewers.
The video below states that the viewing figures for Belfield’s Secret Vor Club were leaked. He only has 320 viewers, and some of them have cancelled watching him after his conviction for stalking. He suggests that the mad right-winger may go back to YouTube to post there in the time he has left before the Beak sentences him. Others have started speculating whether he’ll be allowed to do the voice of reason from his jail cell.
Whatever happens, Belfield’s popularity is collapsing. And there’s nothing he can do about it.
Here’s a bit of fun satire I found on the Screwed Politics channel on YouTube. As this blog reported earlier this week, mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield has been guilty of several counts of stalking, and may be looking at a custodial sentence. And a lot of people whom he scammed into giving him money so that he could live the high life, while pleading he needed it to produce his content, will not be sorry. One of these who is certainly not lamenting the verdict handed down on Belfield is Screwed Politics, who has celebrated it by producing this short video. It mixes the end titles of the hit 1980s BBC comedy programme, Hi-Di-Hi, with pictures of Belfield, his dog, and two of his supporters or production team replacing the cast. And it retains the phrase the writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft, used on all their comedies: ‘You have been watching’. Indeed you have been watching Alex Belfield and co. But possibly not for much longer.
Homosexuality and abortion have once again become vital, controversial issues following the outrage in America and in this country against Drag Queen Story Hour and trans issues, and the US supreme court overturning the landmark ruling of Roe vs. Wade, which demanded federal legalisation of abortion in America. Lloyd in his book Empire to Welfare State: English History 1906-1986, 3rd edition, (Oxford: OUP 1986) has a paragraph about the legalization of these two issues in Britain by the Labour government of the late 60s. He writes
‘Private Members introduced two Bills, also inspired by J.S. Mill’s type of liberalism, to legalize homosexual acts between consenting adults and to allow abortion when it was justified on medical, psychological or social grounds. These Bills were handled in the previous Parliament: the government did not commit itself officially to supporting them, and issued no party whip, but it allowed enough parliamentary time to make sure that both of them were passed despite attempts to ‘talk them out’. Outside Parliament the changes seem to have been welcomed by public opinion; surveys showed majorities in favour of both pieces of legislation, and the opponents of change seemed either to be apologetic about their position or to be unreasonable-the calm, commanding central position which in the past had been held by the supporters of a restrictive morality was now held by the advocates of a libertarian approach.’ (p. 413).
This states that the legalization of homosexuality, or rather, its decriminalization, and the legalisation of abortion were both popular. This suggests that the Tories are going to have a fight on their hands if they try to remove these rights.
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