Mike put up a piece on Sunday commenting on an article in the Sunday Telegraph that our lawbreaking, lawless Prime Minister and his gang intend to withdraw Britain from the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. This has been a goal of the Tories for nearly a decade. Mike was warning about this as long ago as 2013. Cameron was trying mollify us by saying that they’d replace it with a Bill of Rights. Presumably the title of this proposed Tory replacement was chosen to remind everyone of the Bill of Rights that was issued after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This was a piece of revolutionary, progressive legislation in its time. However, any Bill of Rights the Tories pass is going to be a highly-diluted replacement for the Human Rights legislation they’ve repealed. If we see such a bill at all. Mike states that the Torygraph article was behind a paywall, so he couldn’t see it. But what he could made no mention of it.
Don’t be fooled. The Tories are an authoritarian party with a dangerous, Stalin-like cult of personality under Generalissimo Boris. Boris has shown us he’s more than willing to break the law to get what he wants, such as illegally proroguing parliament and deceiving the Queen, and now getting his loyal minions to troop into the lobbies to pass a law breaking our international agreements with the EU. He, and they, are a real, present danger to democracy.
The Tory faithful are no doubt welcoming this as some kind of move that will enable them to deport the illegal immigrants – meaning desperate asylum seekers – they tell us are invading this country. There’s also the long-standing complaint that human rights legislation protects the guilty at the expense of their victims. But Conservative commenters on the British constitution have also quoted the 18th century British constitutional scholar, Lord Blackstone, who said that it was better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man wrongly punished. The Tories do not want to repeal this legislation because they somehow wish to defend Britain from invasion by illegal immigrants, nor because they wish to protect people by making it easier to jail criminals. They want to repeal this legislation because it protects the public and working people.
One of the reasons the Tories hate the EU is because of the social charter written into its constitution. This guarantees employees certain basic rights. Way back when Thatcher was a power in the land, I remember watching an edition of Wogan when the Irish wit of British broadcasting was interviewing a Tory MP. The Tory made it clear he had no problem with the EU predecessor, the EEC or Common Market. This would have been because, as the European Economic Community, it offered Britain a trading area for our goods and services. What he made clear he didn’t like was the Social Charter. He and the rest of the Tories want to get rid of it in order to make it even easier to sack workers at will, and keep them on exploitative contracts that will deny them sick pay, maternity leave and annual holidays. They want more zero hours contracts and job insecurity. As well as the right, as Mike also points out in his article, to persecute the disabled, for which the Tory government has also been criticised by the EU and United Nations.
The Tories have also shown their extreme authoritarianism, like Blair before them, in passing legislation providing for secret courts. If the government considers it necessary because of national security, an accused person may be tried in a closed court, from which the public and the media are excluded, using evidence which is not disclosed to the accused. This breaks the fundamental principles of democratic, impartial justice. This is that justice should not only be done, it should be seen to be done. Hence the traditional practice of making sure people are tried with the public present. The secret courts are far more like the grotesque, perverted judicial systems of Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle, and which became a horrific reality in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
The Tories are also keen to undermine British liberty in another way as well, by reintroducing identity cards. These were carried during the War, when Britain was in real danger from Nazi invasion and Fascist spies and saboteurs. But afterwards, as Zelo Street has reminded us, the government withdrew them because they were seen as a threat to traditional British freedom. Now Dominic Cummings wants to bring them back. So did Thatcher when I was at school in the 1980s. She didn’t get very far. It was rejected then, it should be rejected now.
Apparently the new identity cards will be online or something like that. But this won’t make counterfeiting them any more difficult. Way back in the 1990s the Indonesia government, hardly a bastion of liberal democracy, introduced a computerised identity card. This was supposed to be impossible to hack and and fake. Within a week there were fake cards being sold in the country’s markets.
This looks like a step towards the biometric identity cards Blair was also keen on in the late 90s. These were also condemned by privacy campaigners and opponents of state surveillance, and which eventually seem to have petered out. But it seems that the forces that were pressing for them then have now resurfaced to repeat their demands. And if they’re being made by a government determined to ‘get Brexit done’, then these cards cannot be blamed on the EU, as they were when I was at school.
The Tories have also shown themselves intolerant of demonstrations and protests. When Cameron was in power, he sought to stop or limit public demonstrations through legislation that would allow local authorities to ban them if they caused a nuisance. Mass gatherings and protest marches frequently can be a nuisance to those stuck behind them. But they’re tolerated because freedom of conscience and assembly are fundamental democratic rights. Cameron wished to place severe curbs on these rights, all in the name of protecting communities from unwelcome disturbance. And, in the wake of the Extinction Rebellion blockade of Murdoch’s printing works, Priti Patel wishes to have the press redefined as part of Britain’s fundamental infrastructure in order to prevent it from disruption from similar protests in future. Now that newspapers sales are plummeting thanks to the lockdown to the point where right-wing hacks are imploring you to buy their wretched rags, you wonder if she’s considering legislation making their purchase and reading compulsory.
Don’t be deceived. The repeal of the human rights act is an outright attack on traditional British freedoms by an authoritarian government intolerant of criticism and which casually violates the fundamental principles of justice and democracy. It may be dressed up as protecting decent, law-abiding Brits from crims and illegal immigrants, but this is just another pretext, another lie to get the sheeple to accept it. Tony Benn once warned that the way the government behaves to refugees is the way it would like to behave to its own citizens. He was right, and we shall it when the Tories withdraw from the European legislation currently protecting us.
I’ve no doubt the Tories will try to disguise this through retaining a sham, hollowed out semblance of justice, free speech and democracy. Just like the Soviet Union drew up constitutions guaranteeing similar freedoms to disguise its vicious intolerance. On paper communist East Germany was a liberal state and multiparty liberal democracy when the reality was the complete opposite. Even Mussolini made speeches claiming that that Fascist Italy was not a state that denied the individual their liberty.
The Tory withdrawal from EU Human Rights law is an outright attack on our British freedoms, not a gesture of defiance against European interference. It’s another move towards unBritish, but very Tory, despotism and dictatorship.
Zelo Street has put up an article today further exposing the Tories’ proposed legislation breaking our previous agreements with EU. It quotes from the FT’s article about this, noting that the new law goes much further than has been commonly reported and enters a world of such official contradiction that not even Orwell predicted it. Zelo Street writes
‘Take, for instance, the last line of Paragraph 44, which says simply “Certain provisions to have effect notwithstanding inconsistency or incompatibility with international or other domestic law”. So it’s illegal? No problem – it’s now legal.
‘The scope of the proposed legislation should also give concern: it defines “relevant international or domestic law” very broadly indeed. Included here are “any provision of the Northern Ireland Protocol … any other provision of the EU withdrawal agreement … any other EU law or international law … any provision of the European Communities Act 1972 … any provision of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 … any retained EU law or relevant separation agreement law”. And then it goes further. Much further.
Here we proceed through the looking glass: “any other legislation, convention or rule of international or domestic law whatsoever, including any order, judgment or decision of the European Court or of any court or tribunal”. It is possible that even the Enabling Act passed by the Nazis in 1933 was less blatant in its disregard of democracy.’
This a fair comment. One of the accusations used against Jeremy Corbyn, if I remember rightly, was that he approved the quote ‘everything Hitler did was legal’. But the quote was correct: Hitler’s rise to power was entirely constitutional. As was his passage of the Enabling Act, the law which granted him absolutely power as dictator. The German constitution provided the head of state to take absolute power and rule by decree during a period of emergency, which could last up to four years before expiring. Then the law would have to be renewed. Hindenberg, the last German president, was already ruling by decree thanks to a deadlocked Reichstag in which none of the parties had a majority and the pillars of the German Weimar coalition were now no longer working with each other. After the Reichstag fire, the Nazis were able to declare a state of emergency. And so Hitler became constitutionally Germany’s absolutely dictator. And every four years, he recalled the Reichstag, packed full of Nazis who were the only permitted party, and got it to renew the declaration of the state of emergency.
Even the massacre of the SA during the Knight of the Long Knives had a legal justification. It was formulated by the brilliant, radical right lawyer Carl Schmitt, who later became disenchanted with Hitler and his murderers. He published a piece ‘The Fuhrer Protects Justice’. Roughly summed up, the argument was that Germany had entered a state of lawlessness. In order to restore law and order, any actions by the authorities were justified, even if they in turn broke the law.
The Tories didn’t get their ideas about passing legislation allowing the violation of existing laws and international treaties from the Nazis. I believe a more immediate inspiration was George W. Bush’s odious Tort Reform law over in the Land of the Free. The Smirking Chimp wanted to help firms get round laws guaranteeing certain workers’ rights. Instead of repealing the legislation, his way of circumventing them was to pass another law, which banned anyone from using them to sue their employers.
Passing one law to make another illegal. That’s what Shrub did, and what the Tories have done now.
This comes on top of Priti Patel continuing her attacks on ‘activist lawyers’ trying to protect the rights of asylum seekers crossing the channel in flimsy, dangerous boats. Even after her department was told that such language was illegal.
Zelo Street’s article quotes lawyer and commenter David Allen Green on the Tories’ move to illegality:
‘“The Conservatives, once the part of law and order, are going to deliberately break the law … on the issue of State Aid, a legal cornerstone of Thatcherite economics … because they agreed a border in the Irish sea, even though they are nominally a ‘unionist’ party. Weird”.’
He also quotes Thatcher herself, who told her party at their 1975
‘The first duty of Government is to uphold the law. If it tries to bob and weave and duck around that duty when it is inconvenient, if Government does that, then so will the governed, and then nothing is safe – not home, not liberty, not life itself”.’
He then dryly remarks that they used to revere her every world, and concludes:
Any MP who votes in favour of this Bill is not only not a democrat, but is unfit to serve. We have arrived at a dangerous moment. Britain is close to becoming a very dark place.
Absolutely. This is a real step towards the creation of a lawless, authoritarian state where legislation can be invoked or violated at whim like Putin’s Russia.
To mangle one of Orwell’s metaphors from 1984, the Tories are taking out the jackboot ready to stamp on our faces forever.
Mike put up another excellent article yesterday about the news that Johnson’s government had spent £120 million over the past two years fighting appeals against rulings by the DWP and Maximus against disabled benefit claimants. These are people, whom have been ruled ‘fit for work’ under the Fitness for Work tests. As Mike and others have reported for a very long time, three-quarters of these rulings are overturned on appeal. This means that the Tories have spent something like £100 million on trying to get people, who have every right to benefit, thrown off them.
Mike also states in his article that under the internal regulations of the DWP, each new claim is subject to ‘mandatory reconsideration’ during which time the claimant receives no benefit for a period of four weeks. It is only recently that this policy has been overturned by the courts. Any claim that this is fighting benefit fraud is spurious. The actual number of fraudulent claims is less than 1 or 2 per cent, whatever bilge rags like the Daily Mail tell you. And the increase in expenditure against appeals by the disabled is far greater than the 13 per cent rise in new claims. Which means, as Mike points out, the Tories have been spending this money and trying to stop people with real needs claiming benefits simply out of a vindictive hatred of the sick and disabled. He concludes
So the huge proportion that the Tories refuse – and the amount of time and money wasted in the appeal process – can only mean one thing:
The Tories hate disabled people and want them to die.
Why isn’t this a national – if not international – scandal?
This isn’t about saving money. I’ve got a feeling the amount of government expenditure on ordinary welfare claims is trivial. Especially compared to the handouts the Tories have given, even before the Coronavirus, to big business through tax breaks, the bloated contracts awarded to the private outsourcing companies, and subsidies to the banks and other industries, like the railways. And the situation in America is even worse, thanks to the greater advance of corporatism in the American system and the massive expenditure on the military-industrial complex and armaments. It’s why there are books like Take the Rich Off Welfare attacking it.
Left-wing critics and activists have pointed out that Thatcherism has represented nothing less than a massive transfer of wealth upwards, away from the poor, the sick, the disabled and the rest of the working class. As a result, the 1 per cent have become massively richer.
This is all about persecuting the poor for the benefit of the bloated rich. And I would like it to be a national scandal. I would like the same kind of mass demonstrations that spontaneously erupted with the Black Lives Matter movement to occur and be organised against this horrendous persecution of the disabled. I would like people to march, holding placards denouncing the Tories – and New Labour, for their part in creation of this disgusting policy – showing the faces of the people, who’ve died after being found fit for work, and starved to death or took their own lives after being thrown off benefit.
Because, dear Lord, there have been more than enough of them. I lost count of the number who’d starved to death after it hit five hundred. And the number of disabled people, who’ve died from their conditions after being found fit for work is 113,000. Or more. One of the last victims was a Black man, Errol Graham, a diabetic who also died of starvation after he was declared fit to go back to work. Black Lives Matter have protested – rightly – against the shooting of unarmed Blacks by lawless cops in America. They’ve held protests here about institutional racism, and pulled down statues of slavers. But why aren’t they marching against the institutional murder – ’cause that’s what is – of disabled Black people. Because Blacks and Asians have been especially hard hit by austerity because of their general poverty and lack of opportunities compared to Whites.
The Tory persecution of the disabled is a real scandal. And it’s not going away. We need mass demonstrations against it until the message gets through.
There was outrage at the end of last month when Jake Hepple, an employee at Paradigm Precision, an aerospace engineering firm took exception to the Black Live Matter movement. Hepple flew a light aircraft over the Etihad stadium shortly after a matched had kicked off between Burnley and Manchester City, incensed at players from the two sides wearing shirts with the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ to support the movement, and so. The aircraft flew a banner across the sky declaring ‘White Lives Matter Burnley’. Despite initial statements by the police that no crime had been committed, this was seen very much as an example of hate speech. Hepple’s partner, Megan Rambadt, was sacked by her employer for making comments such as “I love Burnley but I must admit it’s pretty grim, that town centre is like a foreign country. Needs sorting” and “They need sending back on banana boats, stinkin bastards”. Hepple was also dismissed from his job soon after, with Paradigm Precision declaring that it did not condone or tolerate racism in any form. Apart from the stunt, it was revealed that Hepple had strong racist views of his own. Unite Against Fascism went through his Facebook page and found that he supported the EDL and had been photoed standing with its former fuhrer, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson. He had also posted these racist comments “Why would anyone in their right mind pay £90 for the new England shirt when it probably cost a company full of tree swinging spear throwers about 80p to make? Not a chance I’m paying that” and “I’m not even going to go into detail of how fucked up Sharia Law is, which is what some ‘people’ want in this country, absolutely mental this government”.
Burnley’s captain Ben Mee condemned Hepple’s stunt, saying “Fans like that don’t deserve to be around football … We’re ashamed, we’re embarrassed. It’s a minority of our supporters – I know I speak for a massive part of our support who distance ourselves from anything like that”. The Mirror also reported that those responsible for the stunt would face a lifetime ban from the Burnley ground. The club said “We wish to make it clear that those responsible are not welcome at Turf Moor”. Hepple himself was defiant, tweeting “Thanks a lot, no apology will be coming out as I’m not apologising for stating that white peoples lives matter as well”.
Unfortunately, Hepple has a point. The police and the authorities all too often have a needlessly aggressive attitude to Blacks and have shown apathy and indifference to their murder. This was also shown a week or so ago when the Met police stopped Black British athlete Bianca Williams and her family, dragging her and her husband out their car and seizing their baby on the suspicion that they were carrying drugs. They weren’t, and the rozzers’ behaviour served to stir up even further resentment against the police and the stop and search policy following the killing of George Floyd in America.
On Thursday at 9.00 pm, ITV are showing again the 1999 drama, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, about Lawrence’s parents, Neville’s and Doreen’s battle to get justice for their son after he was killed by a White gang in a racist attack back in 1993. At 8.00 pm, before the drama begins, the commercial broadcaster is showing a programme Stephen Lawrence: Has Britain Changed? hosted by Rageh Omaar ande Anushka Asthana and with a panel of experts debating this question following Floyd’s death in Minnesota and the corresponding wave of protests around the world.
Older readers of this blog will remember the murder, and the scandal of the Met’s own racism and incompetence in failing to prosecute the youths responsible despite the overwhelming evidence against. Part of the problem may also have been police corruption, as the young perps were the sons of leading London gangsters. The scandal was front page news for weeks, months and years afterwards and there was rightly a major outcry against it. Private Eye, however, published a couple of separate articles revealing that a young White and an Asian man had been also been murdered into two different unprovoked racial attacks. And the Met had behaved in exactly the same way, steadfastly refusing to do anything to investigate the murders and prosecute the perps responsible.
Unlike Stephen Lawrence, these murders garnered no coverage and no media or public outrage. They were forgotten.
And the real elephant in the room here is the Rotherham Asian grooming gang scandal. For well over a decade, a gang of taxi drivers of mostly Pakistani origin had been grooming, raping and exploiting as prostitutes White girls from a care home. The police and local authority had been repeatedly told about it, but had refused to take action. Instead, at least one of the girls had been offered Urdu lessons to somehow help her. One of the cops responsible for this debacle stated that they didn’t act because they didn’t want to start a riot. This scandal has naturally provoked even more outrage, and since then more grooming gangs have been uncovered. It’s been a gift to the racist right, and Tommy Robinson was running up and down the country exploiting the trials by posting his own highly prejudiced take on them on the internet, thus risking a mistrial. He was thus hauled up before the beak himself on contempt of court charges after he filmed himself commenting on the trial of one of these gangs outside the court, and trying to interview them as they were being ushered in.
Academics and anti-racists have stressed that these gangs are not representative of the Asian community. One academic specialising in these issues posted a piece on the Net showing that Asians are no more likely to be predatory paedophiles than Whites. The point has also been made that Islam was not a motive in the crimes. They were simply a case of sick people abusing messed-up, vulnerable children. One Asian journo or celebrity was also outraged by the cops’ attitude in fearing that their arrest would spark riots. He maintained that British Asians wouldn’t have objected to the arrest of the offenders and would not have rioted. He may well be right, but as quoted by the papers, the cop in question made no mention of who would be doing the rioting. He just said they would start. He might have felt it would give White bigots an excuse to attack Asians.
The point here is that the police and authorities refused to take action because they feared a breakdown in what may be described as ‘community cohesion’ because of the races of the attackers and the victims. The girls didn’t matter, because they were White.
Although these crimes have been revealed and other similar gangs uncovered, arrested and tried since then, the Rotherham scandal remains. According to right-wing commenters, there is supposed to be a report on the grooming gang that has not been published. I don’t know if that is the case, but if so, it’s a scandal in itself. I doubt such a report would show that racial and religious motives were behind the assaults, as the islamophobes claim. They suggest that the decision not to prosecute or take action went all the way up to Blair’s or Gordon Brown’s government. If that’s the case, then its suppression – if that has happened – is almost certainly due to the authorities trying to protect their rear ends.
Now I certainly don’t begrudge the Lawrences the attention they managed to focus on their son’s murder and the disgusting conduct of the Met police. I am simply trying to make the point that sometimes the police and authorities also won’t take action against the abusers and killers of people of other ethnicities. The Black Lives Matter protests in some areas, like Cheltenham, have extended to include other ethnic minorities. But they all seem to believe that crimes against Whites are universally and automatically investigated to a higher standard than those against people of ethnic minorities. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
There should be outrage when the police fail to prosecute perps in crimes where race is a factor, regardless of the ethnic background of the victim. It shouldn’t matter if the victim is Black, White, Brown or whatever, no-one should die from racist attacks and their murderers go Scot free, or young people repeatedly abused and assaulted with impunity.
If the victim of a racist attack is White or Asian, then people should unite across the racial divide to condemn the attacks, just as they should if the victim were Black. As the Black Lives Matter protesters stress, the movement does not mean that White lives don’t matter.
But unfortunately, sometimes White lives are ignored because of their race. And that should cause every bit of outrage as the culpably negligent attitude towards Black.
Mike’s article about the government’s privatisation and centralisation of the purchasing of PPE and other essential medical equipment for combating the Coronavirus follows a report in last fortnight’s Private Eye for 21st April – 7th May 2020 about the problems besetting the state-owned company the Tories had set up to do this. Centralising the purchase of PPE was supposed to lead to massive NHS savings. However, according to the Eye it has led instead only to its chiefs awarding themselves massive salaries, and staff shortages and poor pay at the bottom. The article on page 10, ‘SKIMPING OUTFITS’ runs
The government-owned company struggling to supply masks, gloves, aprons and eye protection to hospitals and GPS was set up explicitly to reduce spending on NHS supplies.
Supply Chain Coordination LTD (SCCL) has been in charge of procuring NHS supplies and the warehouses and lorries getting PPE out to the NHS since April 2018. The government argued that one centralised buying system would “generate savings of £2.4bn over a five-year period” through “efficiency”. In fact it has led to big salaries at the top and lower pay and staff shortages at the bottom.
SCCL was set up as a government-owned company in response to the Carter review of NHS productivity. Lord (Patrick) Carter argued that too many NHS trusts buying their own kit was inefficient and the government could “rationalise the procurement landscape, reduce spend and consolidate purchasing power”. Jin Sahota was brought in as SCCL chief executive from French media firm Technicolor on £230,000 a year, after the government allowed higher salaries for “commercial staff”. I’ll be absolutely blunt”, he told Civil Service World last year, “If the salary levels were somewhat different, maybe it wouldn’t have attracted me.”
In May 2019, Rob Houghton, former Post Office chief information officer, was made SCCL’s “IT focused” director. As the last Eye’s special report on the Post Office’s Horizon IT scandal noted, in 2016 Houghton launched a review into the malfunctioning system, which was mysteriously abandoned. The courts later found that a matter of “great concern”.
SCCL manages procurement of NHS bulk supplies and contracts distribution of NHS essentials through a five-year, £730m deal signed in 2018 with UK logistics firm Unipart, which runs the NHS warehouses and lorry deliveries. In September 2018, Steve Barclay (then a health minister, now at the Treasury) said the SCCL/ Unipart deal was “streamlining” the NHS.
Meanwhile, £500m is being taken from NHS trusts to fund the new system and “incentivise” trusts to use it. However, any “savings” delivered look more like penny-pinching than efficiency: in December, HGV and 7.5 tonne drivers on the SCCL/ Unipart contract had to threaten strike action to get decent sick pay and push their rate above an industry low of £10.24 an hour.
At the start of April, union Unite said warehouse staff were exhausted and struggling to keep up with demand. In a cuts-driven system, there was no slack to deal with the extra burden of a pandemic. The government’s solution was to send in the army to help in the warehouses. This has provided some relief – but once the immediate crisis passes, will it return to its ill-conceived “savings” plan?
It looks like Boris’ decision to privatise the purchasing process is a result of this company’s embarrassing failure. But Deloitte and co. aren’t going to fare much better, if at all. What’s at fault is the whole notion of centralisation itself. This was used to destroy local DHSS and inland revenue offices in the 1980s and 1990s, all in the name of efficiency. I don’t believe it made the process any more efficient. In fact, given the delays benefit claimants experienced in the processing of their claims, even before IDS’ stupid and murderously destructive Universal Credit was rolled out, it made it much, much worse.
It also won’t solve the problem of a poorly paid, overworked and demoralised staff working flat out for a grossly overpaid senior management. This is now general throughout business and what used to be the civil service. It’s how the outsourcing companies were able to generate their profits in the first place – they laid off staff in order to give their shareholders nice fat dividends and senior management nice fat salaries and bonuses.
What is causing the problems is the Tories’ decimation of the NHS across its services. As Mike and others have reported, other countries like Germany were able to respond more effectively to the pandemic because they had spare capacity in beds. But the Tories had removed that in the NHS in the name of efficiency.
It’s time these false economies were wound up. Purchasing should be handed back to NHS trusts, and the NHS and the rest of the civil service properly funded.
And the Tories and their obsession with centralisation, rationalisation, privatisation and rewarding overpaid, greedy managers and board chairmen thrown out of government.
These are grim, scary times, but for Rupert Murdoch and his alleged cable news channel over the other side of the Pond, Fox News, things just might have become just that little scarier. Fox, Murdoch, AT&T and COMCAST are being sued by a group in the state of Washington, WASHLITE, over its coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic. Zelo Street has reported that the Republicans initially denied that the virus was a real threat, even denouncing it as a fake cooked up by the Democrats. Fox News is very firmly Republican and its statement that it is ‘fair and balanced reporting’ is very far from the truth, whatever the network thinks of itself. Its coverage of the former president, Obama, was hostile that he declared it to be an opposition group, rather than a normal news service. It seems that Fox dutifully followed the Republican line about the disease presenting no threat. And now, as the country endures lockdown, its hospitals are filling up with the disease’s victims and many of its enterprising people wondering if their businesses will survive, that coverage is coming back to bite ’em.
Zelo Street quotes a report from the Times of San Diego, that WASHLITE has asked the Washington state court to rule against Fox broadcasting any more fake information about the pandemic. It claims that the network violated the Consumer Protection Act by ‘falsely and deceptively disseminating “News” via cable news contracts that the coronavirus was a “hoax,” and that it was otherwise not a danger to public health and safety’. It specifically refers to broadcasts made by Sean Hannity and Trish Regan on March 9, in which ‘defendants acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel Coronavirus, or COVID-19, which is now recognized as an international pandemic’.
Fox have tried claiming that the suit is a violation of the First Amendment, the right to free speech. But a spokesman for the group said that defence didn’t apply, using the old metaphor about now shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. You have the right to free speech, but that right is transcended when what someone is saying endangers the whole community. Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman remarked that there was real fear in the network that their early downplaying of the threat posed by the virus could leave them vulnerable to potential legal action by people, who were misled and may even have died due to the channel’s falsehoods. He stated that Murdoch and his family had taken personal steps to protect themselves at the same time Hannity and Regan were telling everyone that the disease was a hoax.
Zelo Street also suggests that the WASHLITE suit could be the acorn from which a massive oak grows as it becomes a class action, an action that could make the damages to the Murdoch’s empire from the phone hacking scandal small beer.
Fox has been broadcasting propaganda and fake news for years. One academic study of the factual content of its broadcasting found that it was so low, people who took no news at all were actually better informed. The network also has the problem in that the majority of its viewers are in one of the groups most vulnerable to the disease – the elderly. Most of its viewers are in their 70s, which means that there are very many people, who may have been killed by taking the network’s denials seriously. I hope no one has died because of Fox, but the lawsuit does have a very good point. I’ve no doubt that Fox will throw whatever they can at the suit to get it thrown out of court or a ruling in their favour. But this could still be one to watch.
Okay, we’re in the middle of an unprecedented public health emergency, a global pandemic that is forcing country after country across the world to go into lockdown. The French passed legislation a week or so ago stipulating that citizens had to have documented permission in order to leave the homes. Earlier this week our clown of a Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, appeared on television to tell us that he was ordering us, with certain exception, to stay in our homes. The exceptions are key workers and people caring for the sick. You are allowed to leave home to get food and other necessary visits. But that’s it. Shops, businesses and libraries are closing, and there are to be no public gatherings of more than two people.
The crisis has brought out the very best and worse of people. People are going round to check on and run errands for neighbours in high-risk categories, such as those over 70, and those with pre-existing conditions that make them more vulnerable, like cancer patients. On the other hand, we’ve also seen mobs clearing the shelves of food and toilet paper in supermarkets and stores, hoarding them and so preventing others, like the elderly, sick and healthcare workers, from acquiring them. One of my neighbours was so upset when she personally saw this happening when she went shopping that she burst into tears in her car.
But one person the crisis hasn’t affected is Rachel Riley. She appears to be as squalid, mean-spirited, spiteful and bigoted as ever. She, Oberman and a female hack had tried to get Ken Loach and Michael Rosen dropped from judging a competition organised by the anti-racist organisation, Show Racism the Red Card, because she decided they were anti-Semites. The accusation’s risible. Ken Loach is a left-wing film auteur, who is passionately anti-racist. And that includes fighting anti-Semitism. Of course the Thatcherites inside and outside the Labour party and the Israel lobby tried to smear him as anti-Semite a year or so ago because he has directed a film attacking Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. But he enjoys the support of very many anti-racist, self-respecting Jews in the Labour Party. When he appeared at a meeting of Jewish Voice for Labour, he was given a standing ovation.
As for Michael Rosen, not only is the accusation risible, it’s also personally offensive. Rosen’s Jewish, though this doesn’t bother the smear merchants. They seem to especially delight in smearing Jews, who dare to have the temerity to demonstrate that Judaism does not equal Zionism. Indeed, there is, or was, a bit of graffiti on a wall in Jerusalem stating ‘Judaism and Zionism are diametrically opposed’. This is an attitude completely alien to the Jewish establishment. As Tony Greenstein has pointed out time and again, the current Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis grew up in apartheid South Africa and a right-wing settlement on land stolen from the Palestinians, and led a British contingent on the March of the Flags. This is the annual event when Israeli bovver-boys goose step through the Muslim sector of Jerusalem, vandalising property and trying to intimidate the locals. Rosen is an author, poet and broadcaster. He was the Children’s Poet Laureate. I believe he has, like so many other Jewish Brits, lost relatives in the Shoah. He is a Holocaust educator, and appeared before parliament to testify about it. Like Loach, he is very, very definitely no kind of anti-Semite or Nazi. But because he dared to support Jeremy Corbyn, Riley and the other smear merchants attacked him.
Show Racism the Red Card defied the smear campaign of Riley and her fans. The organisation had received statements from people from all walks of life supporting Loach and Rosen. It therefore announced that they were delighted to have them as judges. That should have been it. But it wasn’t. Riley issued another Tweet claiming that Loach is a Holocaust denier. This was because Loach had initially supported another person, whom he believed had been unfairly accused of anti-Semitism. When he found out that the woman really was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, he cut off all further communication. Riley deleted this Tweet, but the damage was done. Her fans and others, who had been taken in by her lie bombarded Loach and his family with abuse and threats. He has now been forced to withdraw as a judge.
Mike put up a piece commenting on this vile behaviour. He pointed out that Riley will continue bullying and smearing people until she’s stopped. He’s currently fighting a libel case brought by her, despite Riley not challenging the facts on which Mike based his statement that Riley had bullied a schoolgirl for being anti-Semitic, simply because she supported Corbyn. Mike appealed once again for donations, as justice is expensive. If he wins his case, it just might stop her trying to use the law to smear, bully and silence others. See his article at: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/18/sickening-bullying-of-innocents-shows-riley-wont-stop-until-she-is-made-to/
Riley’s tactic of posting and then deleting a Tweet that could be considered libelous and an incitement to intimidation is shared by another noxious character: Tommy Robinson. The arch-islamophobe with convictions for assault and contempt of court has a habit of turning up on the doorsteps of his critics, or their elderly parents, with a couple of mates, demanding a word at all hours of the day and night. He’s also handy at dishing out smears. Mike Stuchbery, one of his most persistent critics, has been forced out of his job as a teacher and live abroad, after Robinson and his crew turned up late one night at his house, banging on the walls and windows and accusing him of being paedophile. It wasn’t remotely true, but then, as Boy George sang so long ago, ‘truth means nothing in some strange quarters’. Robinson also gets his followers to persecute and intimidate his critics, and then also denies he has deliberately provoked them. He denounces and doxes them on the Net, posting details of their home addresses, which he then deletes. No, he wasn’t sending his followers round to threaten them. It was all a mistake, and he took the offending Tweet or post off the Net as soon as possible. It’s all ‘plausible deniability’.
And Riley seems to have adopted the same tactic.
Which shouldn’t surprise anybody, considering how closely linked the Israel lobby is with the EDL. Tony Greenstein, in particularly, has documented and photographed various occasions in which pro-Israel, anti-Palestine protesters have turned up virtually arm in arm with the EDL’s squadristi. I am not accusing Riley of being an islamophobe, but she’s adopting their tactics.
She’s disgusting, and it’s long past time when anyone stopped believing her lies and abuse. I hope Mike will be able to do this when he finally has his day against her in court. Not just for Mike, but for everyone else she’s threatened, bullied and smeared.
A week or so ago, Zelo Street put up a piece reporting that Audrey White, a Labour activist from Liverpool, had successfully sued the Jewish Chronicle for libel. The paper had smeared her as an anti-Semite, and accused her of a number of things, none of which were true, such as undermining the Jewish Labour MP Louise Ellman. Private Eye have also covered the case in their latest issue, for 6th to 19th March 2020. And that’s interesting, not just for what it says about the case itself, but about the Eye’s own attitude to the anti-Semitism witch hunt, in which the Eye has itself been an enthusiastic participant. The item, in the magazine’s ‘Street of Shame’ column, reads
Whatever the true level of anti-Semitism within the Labour party, there has been no shortage of media interest in the subject. Foremost among publications to have taken up the cudgels against labour over the issue has been the Jewish Chronicle (JC).
Curiously, though, the media appear to have ignored the recent settlement of a libel case involving the JC and Audrey White, a Labour party activist in Liverpool. White successfully complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) that the JC had breached the editors’ code of practice in four articles it published in February and March last year.
The JC alleged that White had actively undermined Louise Ellman, the former Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, who quit the party in October last year. Finding in favour of White, the IPSO ruled the JC articles to be “significantly misleading” and castigated the paper for having resorted to “unacceptable” obstruction during IPSO’s investigation. The JC agreed to apologise to White, and pay her substantial libel damages and costs.
What is a mystery is why the JC didn’t realise its treatment of White, which could be construed as a witch-hunt, was akin to the very type of behaviour in the Labour Party it would rightly condemn.
Firstly, while it’s great the Eye is reporting this when the rest of the media isn’t, it isn’t innocent of pushing the anti-Semitism smears itself. Like the rest of the press and broadcasting, it accepted uncritically the claims of the Zionist Jewish establishment and the Blairites in the Labour party that Labour was a seething cauldron of Jew hatred. In fact, while anti-Semitism unfortunately does exist, it’s at a much lower level than in the parties further to the right. And as left-wing bloggers and Israel-critical Jewish bloggers and activists have pointed out, the vast majority of anti-Semitism comes from the far right. People have written letters to the Eye trying to point this out, but the smears continued. And the Eye’s response to one such letter was to cite Jon Lansman, the founder of Momentum, who certainly believed the allegations. The article begins with a note of doubt about the true extent of anti-Semitism in Labour – you’ll note the phrase ‘Whatever the true level of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party’ – but at the time the magazine made it clear that it had no doubt that the claims were true. This seems more than a bit contradictory, even hypocritical. But then, the election has come and gone, and Boris is in with a huge majority, Corbyn is stepping down as leader and all the candidates for the leadership have signed the Board of Deputies wretched pledges. So the smears aren’t needed any more. But don’t worry, I’m sure that they’ll be revived the moment the Tory establishment gets frightened and the Israel lobby finds it expedient.
And Audrey White isn’t the only person by any means the Jewish Chronicle and others have libeled as anti-Semites. It did it to Mike, along with the Sunset Times, the Depress and the Scum, if I remember correctly, when these rags told the world Mike was an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. Mike complained to IPSO, and the rags were forced to issue retractions. It was settled before Mike could begin libel proceedings, and so these, ahem, alleged newspapers, were spared the humiliation of a court judgement.
I’ve blogged several times complaining that, while the Eye and the rest of the press must know that the majority of anti-Semitism accusations are false – one Labour insider recently told the Canary or Novara Media that a third of them all came from the same person – the press, including the Eye, has resolutely refused to interview or profile any of the victims. It’s been a true witch hunt in that, like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the mere accusation is taken as proof, an assumption that the Board of Deputies has malignly incorporated into their wretched pledges. No-one in the establishment media has interviewed or defended victims like Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein, Cyril Chilson, Martin Odoni, Mike, Asa Winstanley or any of the others. That would be going too far, as it would effectively disprove the anti-Semitism smears. And as the left-wing critics of Israel like Greenstein, Odoni, Walker and Winstanley are well able to show that is the Israeli state that is profoundly and aggressively racist, any interview or defence of them would also not only undermine the position of the Israel lobby and the Zionist Jewish establishment, it could also embarrass Britain’s own foreign policy in the Middle East. Greenstein and historians like Ilan Pappe and John Newsinger have shown just how deeply entwined Zionism and Israel have been with British colonial goals since the British Mandate.
As for the Eye’s statement at the end that the Jewish Chronicle would otherwise be against any form of witch hunt, this is the complete opposite of the truth. The Jewish Chronicle has been one of the main instigators of the witch hunt in and against the Labour Party. Possibly the Eye means that it would be against any anti-Semitic witch-hunt, but even this is highly doubtful. Many of the victims – Tony, Jackie, Cyril, Martin and others – are self-respecting, decent Jews. But they’re vilified and smeared as anti-Semitic and self-hating simply because they’re anti-Zionist, or have otherwise criticised Israel. And the abuse they have consequently suffered would be unequivocally condemned as anti-Semitic if it came from gentiles.
And the Jewish Chronicle gives every sign or wishing to continue its persecution. A week or so ago, Tony Greenstein on his blog reported that the Chronicle’s gentile editor, goysplainer Stephen Pollard, had sent one of its contributors, Geoffrey Alderman, a letter giving him the heave-ho. Alderman’s a very respected historian of the British Jewish community, and a true-blue Tory. The letter didn’t explain why Pollard was letting him go, but the reason seems obvious: Alderman committed the unforgivable sin of writing a piece in the Spectator declaring that Corbyn wasn’t an anti-Semite. And this show of integrity against lies and smears couldn’t be tolerated.
It’s very welcome that the Eye has finally decided to report White’s victory against the lies and smears of the Israel lobby. But this is just one incident a long line which the magazine, like the rest of the media, has very conveniently chose to ignore.
But this may well change. Mike is taking the Labour Party to court for breach of contract over the wrongful decision to expel and smear him as an anti-Semite. His case is solid. When I went to court to support him the other month, the judge express surprise that, given the importance of the case, the press wasn’t present.
I don’t doubt it will be there next time. And that will be very embarrassing for those responsible for the smears.
Robin Aitken, Can We Trust the BBC (London: Continuum 2007).
Robin Aitken is a former BBC journalist, and this book published 13 years ago argues that the BBC, rather than being unbiased, is really stuffed full of lefties and the broadcaster and its news and politics programmes have a very strong left-wing, anti-Conservative bias. Under Lord Reith, the BBC upheld certain core British values. Its news was genuinely unbiased, giving equal time to the government and opposition. It also stood for essential institutions and such as the monarchy, the constitution, the British Empire and Christianity at home, and peace through the League of Nations abroad.
This changed radically between 1960 and 1980 as the BBC joined those wishing to attack and demolish the old class-bound institutions. Now the BBC stands for passionate anti-racism, ‘human rights’, internationalism and is suspicious of traditional British national identity and strongly pro-EU. It is also feminist, secular and ‘allergic to established authority whether in the form of the Crown, the courts, the police or the churches.’ This has jeopardised the ideal at the heart of the Corporation, that it should be fair-minded and non-partisan.
Aitken does marshal an array of evidence to support his contention. This includes his own experience working for BBC Scotland, which he claims was very left-wing with a staff and management that bitterly hated Margaret Thatcher and made sure that the dismantlement of the old, nationalised industries like shipbuilding was properly lamented, but did not promote it as ‘creative destruction’ as it should, nor the emergence of the wonderful new information industry north of the border. A later chapter, ‘Testimonies’, consists of quotations from other, anonymous rightists, describing how the Beeb is biased and bewailing their isolated position as the few Conservative voices in the Corporation. He is particularly critical of the former director-general, John Birt. Birt was recruited in the 1990s from ITV. He was a member of the Labour Party, who brought with him many of his colleagues from the commercial channel, who also shared his politics and hatred of the Tories. He goes on to list the leading figures from the Left, who he claims are responsible for this bias. These include Andrew Marr, the former editor of the Independent, and the left-wing, atheist journo and activist, Polly Toynbee.
Aitken also tackles individual topics and cases of biased reporting. This includes how the BBC promoted the Labour Party and the EU before Labour’s landslide victory in the 1997 general election. The Conservatives were presented as deeply split on the issue and largely hostile to EU membership. The EU itself was presented positively, and the Labour Party as being united in favour of membership, even though it was as split as the Tories on the issue. Another chapter argues that the Beeb was wrong in challenging the government’s case for the Iraq Invasion. He claims that in a poll the overwhelming majority of Iraqis supported the invasion. The government did not ‘sex up’ the ‘dodgy dossier’ in order to present a false case for war, and it was wrong for the Beeb to claim that Blair’s government had.
The chapter ‘The Despised Tribes’ argues that there are certain ethnic or religious groups, who were outside the range of sympathy extended to other, more favoured groups. These include White South Africans, the Israeli Likud Party, Serb Nationalists under Milosevic, the Italian Northern League, Le Pen and the Front National in France, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, American ‘Christian Fundamentalists’, conservative Roman Catholics, UKIP ‘and other groups who have failed to enlist the sympathies of media progressives’. These include the Orange Order and Ulster Protestants. He then claims that the Beeb is biased towards Irish Republicans, who have successfully exploited left-wing British guilt over historic wrongs against the Roman Catholic population. He then goes on to claim that Pat Finucane, a lawyer killed in the Troubles, was no mere ‘human rights’ lawyer but a senior figure in the IRA.
The chapter, ‘The Moral Maze’ is an extensive critique of a Panorama documentary claiming that the Roman Catholic condemnation of premarital sex and contraception was causing needless suffering in the Developing World through the procreation of unwanted children and the spread of AIDs by unprotected sex. This is contradicted by UN evidence, which shows that the African countries with the lowest incidence of AIDS are those with the highest Catholic populations. The Catholic doctrine of abstinence, he argues, works because reliance on condoms gives the mistaken impression that they offer total protection against disease and pregnancy, and only encourages sexual activity. Condoms cannot offer complete protection, and are only effective in preventing 85 per cent of pregnancies. The programme was deliberately biased against the Roman Catholic church and the papacy because it was made from the viewpoint of various groups with an explicit bias against the Church and its teaching on sexuality.
Aitken’s evidence is impressive, and I do accept part of his argument. I believe that the Beeb is indeed in favour of feminism, multiculturalism and human rights. I also believe that, the few remaining examples of the Beeb’s religious programming notwithstanding, the Corporation is largely hostile to Christianity in ways that would be unthinkable if applied to other religions, such as Islam. However, I don’t believe that the promotion of anti-racism and anti-sexism is wrong. And groups like the Northern League, Front National and other extreme right-wing political and religious groups, including UKIP, really are unacceptable because of their racism and should not be given a sympathetic platform. Their exclusion from the range of acceptable political and religious views is no bad thing.
But the book also ignores the copious documentation from the various media study units at Cardiff, Glasgow and Edinburgh universities of massive BBC Conservative bias. Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis have a chapter in their book on the gradual, slo-mo privatisation of the NHS, NHS – SOS, on the way the media has promoted the Tories’ and New Labour’s project of selling off the health service. And this includes the Beeb. The Corporation was hostile to Labour after Thatcher’s victory, promoting the SDP splinter group against the parent party in the 1983 election, as well as the Tories. This pro-Tory bias returned with a vengeance after the 2010 Tory victory and the establishment of austerity. Barry and Savile Kushner show in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, how the Beeb excludes or shouts down anyone who dares to question the need for cuts to welfare spending. Tories, economists and financiers are also favoured as guests on news shows. They are twice as likely to appear to comment on the news as Labour politicians and trade unionists.
And we have seen how the Beeb has pushed the anti-Labour agenda particularly vigorously over the past five years, as it sought to smear Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party as institutionally anti-Semitic at every opportunity. Quite apart from less sensational sneering and bias. The guests on Question Time have, for example, been packed with Tories and Kippers, to whom presenter Fiona Bruce has shown particular favour. This has got worse under Johnson, with the Beeb now making it official policy not to have equal representation of the supporters of the various political parties in the programme’s audience. Instead, the majority of the audience will consist of supporters of the party that holds power in that country. Which means that in England they will be stuffed with Tories. Numerous members of the BBC news teams are or were members of the Tory party, like Nick Robinson, and a number have left to pursue careers at No 10 helping Cameron, Tweezer and Boris.
The evidence of contemporary bias in favour of the Tories today is massive and overwhelming.
With the exception of particular issues, such as multiculturalism, feminism, a critical and sometimes hostile attitude towards the monarchy, and atheism/ secularism, the BBC is, and always has been, strongly pro-Tory. The Birt era represents only a brief interval between these periods of Tory bias, and I believe it is questionable how left-wing Birt was. Aitken admits that while he certainly was no Tory, he was in favour of free market economics.
This book is therefore very dated, and overtaken by the Beeb’s massive return to the Right.
One of Tommy Robinson’s grotty Fascist tactics is to try to intimidate his critics and opponents into silence by turning up at their doorstep unannounced, mob-handed, and demanding a word. The crusader against Islam has done it to Mike Stuchbery, a teacher and academic, and to an unnamed lad in Luton. This was a student, who had angered the self-professed defender of truth and free speech, by putting clips out on the web showing instances where Robinson contradicted himself or was otherwise made to look stupid. He also made the point that, whatever he claimed to the contrary, Robinson was no longer quite the working class hero he claimed to be. He was living in a very expensive house, thank you very much, paid for by his followers’ donations. The lad showed the type of house Robinson was living in, but did not show Robinson’s own. Nevertheless, the islamophobic thug and jailbird decided to drive 300 miles up to the lad’s parents’ house in Cumbria in the company of two of his storm troopers. One of these was an Australian-Israeli bruiser, who claims to have shot an unarmed Palestinian when he was in the IDF. They turned up on the couple’s doorstep in the middle of the night, where they demanded to see them and generally behaved in a threatening manner. They also did this to Tim Fenton, the Sage of Crewe, who runs the excellent Zelo Street blog. And now that Robinson is banged up on a charge of contempt of court, many people are starting to wonder where Robinson got his information. Including Tim, who has posted an article about it.
He notes that when Robinson began his ‘Troll Watch’ programme for the Canadian far-right outfit, Rebel Media, he was usually assisted by Caolan Robertson and George Llewellyn John. In one edition, he turned up at the address of a paper, which had run a story about him. As Tim says, it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to get the address of the paper. But he then turned up at Tim’s own because of a piece Tim had put on Zelo Street about the Spectator endorsing Robinson. And it would have been difficult for Robinson to get Tim’s address. Zelo Street doesn’t give out phone contact details, doesn’t appear on the electoral roll and doesn’t have a landline phone number look up. Someone would have had to have given Robinson Tim’s address. Tim believes that the prime suspect at the moment is Robertson, who might like to tell all about how Robinson selected his target now that he’s parted ways with the infamous bigot. Other suspects include Fraser Nelson, the Speccie’s editor, and the author of the article Tim blogged about, James Delingpole. Tim asks
So now that Caolan Robertson has split from Lennon, perhaps he would care to let everyone know how his former boss got hold of peoples’ addresses? Did Lennon, as I concluded at the time, get mine from a discredited former tabloid journalist who had managed to gain access to my NHS records? Or did the information come via those nice and highly principled people at the Spectator magazine?
He goes on to state that Robinson is right in one regard when he claims to be a journalist – he does use the same Dark Arts they do. It’s just a pity that his connection with our free and fearless press is an illegal one.
If the Spectator, or someone associated with it, did give Tim’s details to Tommy Robinson, it shows how even more of a low rag it has become. And perhaps it wouldn’t be surprising if it did give Robinson Tim’s address. It does, after all, have a very strong racist, Alt Right slant, as shown by its continuing publication of articles by the horrendous anti-Semite, Taki.
