Daily Mail Estimates Libel Trial Against Mike Could Cost Riley £1 Million

As well as the I, the Heil also wrote a piece about Mike’s appeal court victory yesterday. It was briefly on the net, but I haven’t been able to find it today. So I’m afraid you’ll have to rely on what I can remember about the piece.

As well as reporting the basic details of the case, the Heil’s article also featured the opinions of a lawyer specialising in libel cases. He guessed that Riley had already spent £60-70,000 on suing Mike, and if she took this to trial this could end up costing her £1 million. The lowest cost for such a trial is £500,000, according to the expert, and most start at £1 million.

Zelo Street has also put up a great article about Mike’s case and the latest victory. The Sage of Crewe notes that Riley’s case is undermined somewhat by the fact that she hasn’t gone after the author of the original articles Mike also drew on for his. Shaun Lawson, the author, lives in Uruguay, and Riley and her team estimated that he didn’t have enough assets to justify suing him as they would not recover their losses. This conflicts with a statement from Mark Lawson, Riley’s lawyer, that this wasn’t about money.

The article also notes that Riley’s case against the barrister, Jane Heybroek, for retweeting a comment by Shaun Lawson linked to one of his articles, collapsed after Riley had spent £80,000 on it and was unable to show that that the tweet had caused her any reputational damage. See Zelo Street: Rachel Riley’s Court Case Conundrum (zelo-street.blogspot.com).

It therefore looks like any further action Riley carries on against Mike could be extremely expensive for her.

‘I’ Reports Mike’s Appeal Case Victory

The I newspaper has published an article on Mike’s victory in the courts yesterday appealing against a judge’s decision to have his defence against Rachel Riley’s libel action struck out. The article’s on the net, and can be read at Rachel Riley loses latest round of libel case with blogger Mike Sivier over claims she ‘harassed’ a teenager (msn.com)

The article, entitled ‘Rachel Riley loses latest round of libel case with blogger Mike Sivier over claims she ‘harassed’ a teenager’ begins

TV presenter Rachel Riley has lost the latest round of a libel case with a political blogger over an article which claimed she engaged in a “campaign of online abuse and harassment” against a teenager on Twitter.

Ms Riley, 35, the numbers expert on Channel 4’s Countdown, sued political blogger Mike Sivier after he published an article on his website Vox Political in January 2019 with the headline: “Serial abuser Rachel Riley to receive ‘extra protection’ – on grounds that she is receiving abuse”.

Mr Sivier defended what he published, arguing that it was “substantially true”, honest opinion, and a matter of public interest.

In January, a High Court judge ruled in favour of Ms Riley and dismissed Mr Sivier’s defences; Mrs Justice Collins Rice said he had “no prospect” of succeeding at a trial.

But three judges at the Court of Appeal, in central London, overturned the ruling on Friday and said Mr Sivier’s public interest defence should be heard in court.

Looking at the article, it appears to me to be a fair report of the case, rather than explicitly pro-Riley, as many of the news reports of her various libel actions against her opponents have been. It’ll be interesting to see if other papers have also reported on Mike’s appeal victory, and the effect the unbiased reporting of Riley’s conduct has on her public perception.

Congratulations! Mike Wins Appeal against Rachel Riley

Hearty congratulations to Mike over at Vox Political – he’s won his appeal against Rachel Riley. Riley had demanded that his defence against her libel suit against him should be struck out of court. The previous judge agreed, effectively preventing him from presenting any defence against her. Mike naturally appealed, and won. The appeal court judges have not on ruled in his favour, they have also stated that the case must now go to trial.

This is not an overall victory – it’s very far from that. But it is a victory and a setback to Riley. Mike has many supporters and has received many tweets supporting him from people tired of Riley’s bullying and smearing socialists, anti-racists and critics of Israel as anti-Semites, simply because they dare to criticise the country’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians or wish to return to the social democratic consensus that gave working people dignity, jobs, a proper welfare state and the NHS.

Mike’s been fighting this case for four years now since 2017. It’s great to see him win this battle against Riley, and I hope this continues.

Wishing Mike All the Best for His Appeal Hearing Today

This is just to wish Mike over at Vox Political all the very best of luck for his appeal hearing against the court ruling in favour of Rachel Riley. The proceedings will be screened on YouTube sometime after 10.30 this morning. Mike has the details up on his blog, including the YouTube address. See Riley appeal hearing: at last, the details! | Vox Political (voxpoliticalonline.com) As a long time Star Trek fan, I say this: Qipla! (Klingon for ‘success’).

Shock Horror! Private Eye Gives Good Review to Book Attacking Transgender Craze for Children

This is actually great. I like Private Eye, but I also have grave criticisms of it. Such as the way it wholeheartedly backed the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, and which it’s still doing to a certain extent. But this time I think they’ve done something genuinely good. They’ve given a good, appreciative review to Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. Shrier is one of a growing number of medical professionals, feminist activists and ordinary peeps, who are deeply concerned about the march of trans rights and its excesses. Many of them, such as J.K. Rowling, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, Sheila Jeffries and their male supporters, like former Father Ted writer and comedy legend Graham Linehan, believe that transwomen really aren’t, and can never be, women, and that the acceptance of them as such has grave and detrimental implications for women’s safety and the nature of femininity itself. They are also concerned about the massive increase in children, and especially girls, who are being diagnosed as transgender. They are concerned that this is a profound mistake, and that the reality is that deeply psychological disturbed, vulnerable girls are being influenced and manipulated into believing that they are really boys trapped in the wrong body. This is leading them to possibly unnecessary, life-changing surgery which will leave them infertile and with a range of other, serious medical problems. Shrier and another American researcher, Dr. Debra Soh, share these concerns, though are supportive of older transsexuals.

Unfortunately, the trans lobby, of which gay activist group Stonewall is now a part, are determined to silence any criticism of transpeople and the whole issue of gender reassignment, no matter how polite and well supported by the scientific and medical evidence. Such critics have been reviled as ‘Terfs’ – Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. The Irish gender critical group, The Countess Didn’t Fight For This, have also been called ‘Tans’ – presumably a reference to the Black and Tans, the British military auxiliaries, who committed horrendous atrocities during the Irish Revolution, and even ‘British'(!). This is despite the fact that their name refers to the Countess Moskovitz, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who became a socialist, feminist and Irish patriot, serving as a general during the Revolution. Over on this side of the Irish Sea, Rowling was accused of wanting to murder transpeople simply because she said she didn’t believe they were women. The rest of her message was actually very supportive of them. She told them they should dress how they liked, have sex with whoever would have them and live the best life they could – hardly a vicious condemnation. But to the militant trans activists, her refusal to accept them as women meant she had a deep loathing for them and really did wish them harm. They reacted with abuse and have tried to silence her, as they have similar critics.

It’s in this context that Private Eye published its supportive review of Shrier’s book. It’s in the literary column of this fortnight’s issue for 22 January – 4th February 2021. Entitled ‘Agenda Wars’, it runs

Thalidomide for morning sickness. Transorbital lobotomies – an icepick to the eye socket – for unruly psychiatric patients. Agonising vaginal meshes for the incontinent. The history of medicine is littered with confidently prescribed treatments that had terrible side-effects.

According to Abigail Shrier, an American journalist, the pattern is repeating itself with the puberty blockers and testosterone given to teenage girls who declare themselves to be transgender. Yet her bestselling book, Irreversible Damage has been subjected to the liberal version of a fatwa: there were calls to ban or burn it, and it has not been reviewed by the Guardian or the New York Times.

Crack it open, then, and let the wrongthink begin! Except this book has nothing in common with Mein Kampf apart from the idea of a struggle. It is a folksy, anecdotal tour of a well-evidenced phenomenon: in the decade to 2018, the number of female teenagers seeking help from gender clinics in the UK rose by 4,400 per cent. The statistics are similar in other countries.

We know that today’s teenage girls report high rates of anxiety, that they spend hours online, and that, compared with previous generations, fewer drink or get pregnant. So where to these isolated, stressed, straightlaced kids channel their anguish? Shrier’s answer is that they come out as trans. Then, egged on by adult activists and even their schools, they see any parental scepticism – “you’re 14, Flora, perhaps it’s a phase” – as evidence of transphobic bigotry.

Until recently, “transexuality” largely meant people born male who wanted to have surgery and live as women. As a psychological condition, being trans could happen to anyone, regardless of their personal politics. Kellie Maloney was a Ukip candidate and Caitlyn Jenner was a life-long Republican. But its links with fetishism made this model of transness seem grubby; too many women had found lingerie in their house and discovered their husband was having an affair with himself. So left-wing activists, inspired by the gay movement’s successful “born this way” rhetoric, championed the idea of “gender identity”, an inner sense of self. Being trans was now nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with living your life. Happily for commercial medicine in the US, surgery and hormones could help with that.

Shrier is very clear that adult transition, which she supports, is very different from “rapid onset gender dysphoria”(ROGD) among teenagers. It is an important distinction: trans adults should be entitled to free, safe, empathetic medical care. (In 1972, Jan Morris had to have her surgery in Morocco.) There are also a handful of children whose gender distress is “insistent, consistent and persistent”.

But girls with ROGD are a distinct group. The tend to announce their transness suddenly, along with others in their peer group, and regurgitate the language of forums where being non-binary or something more exotic (lumigender, anyone?) brings great social cachet. They are anxious and unhappy: they don’t want to be degraded like the “teen sluts ” on Pornhub and they can’t imagine being as flawlessly feminine as an Instagram influencer. The answer to these feelings used to be feminism. Now it’s gender identity: they’re not like the other girls, because they’re not girls at all. Shrier argues that ROGD is closer to anorexia than to, say, being a goth – and we don’t treat eating disorders with liposuction.

In Britain the tide is turning against the snap diagnosis of unhappy girls as happy-boys-in-waiting. An English court ruled that under-16s are unlikely to be able to give informed consent to puberty blockers, since these drugs almost always lead to cross-sex hormones (and therefore infertility and impaired sexual function). Fox-bothering QC Jolyon Maugham is trying to get this overturned, but the ruling has emboldened activists – who have faced threats, harassment and career penalties – to demand evidence for the frequent claim that teenage transition “saves lives”. So far, England’s only child gender clinic, the Tavistock, has been unable to produce such evidence.

What comes across from Shrier’s book is the real unhappiness of too many teenage girls – and the mix of groupthink and arrogance which suggests that the answer must be today’s equivalent of an icepick to the eye socket.

Critics of ROGD have also pointed out that, if left to themselves, 80 per cent of child transgender cases sort themselves out naturally. The child becomes a normal member of his or her natural sex. But almost all children put on puberty blockers go on to have surgery. If that’s the case, then the majority of such kids are being horribly mutilated, primarily for ideological rather than medical reasons.

Furthermore, despite the liberal rejection of critics of the transgender movement, not all such critics are Conservatives. Kellie-Jay Keen and Graham Linehan are people of the left, as is the female Guardian journo who found herself sacked from the newspaper for not following the pro-trans line. They appear in right-wing media because it’s only these media that’s giving them space to air their views and concerns. That has to change.

I don’t wish to spread hate against transgender people, or see them suffer abuse or assault. But there is another side to this argument, and in my view that side is thoroughly based on scientific and medical fact and motivated by deep moral concerns. From what I’ve seen, the intolerance, including violent assault as well as abuse, comes from the trans side. I hope therefore more books like this will be published and people are made aware that there is also another view, which needs to be seriously considered.

For those wishing to see more from Abigail Shrier, She’s been interviewed on YouTube by Graham Linehan and Kellie-Jay Keen.

Shrier’s Interview with Keen is at

Abigail Shrier – Irreversible Damage. The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters – YouTube

Her interview with Graham ‘Glinner’ Linehan is at

A chat with Abigail Shrier – YouTube

She’s also been on the Joe Rogan Experience, which can be seen at

Abigail Shrier on the Transgender Craze Amongst Teenage Girls – YouTube

Best Wishes to Mike for His Court Appearance Today

This is to wish Mike all the best as he appears in a court hearing in cyberspace to defend himself from the outrageous and, in my view, malicious libel action brought by Rachel Riley.

Don’t Be Fooled – Boris Wants to Strip You of Your Human Rights

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.

As if we didn’t have enough to deal with, Boris Johnson is reviving plans to end your human rights

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/09/online-id-cards-polecat-megalomania.html

Tory Lawbreaking Mentality: The Fuhrer Protects Justice

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.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/09/tory-law-avoidance-law-revealed.html

Tories Waste £120 Million in Two Years Persecuting Disability Claimants

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?

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/09/01/tories-have-wasted-120m-in-two-years-trying-to-tell-people-theyre-not-disabled/

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.

Sometimes to the Authorities White Lives Don’t Matter Either

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”.

See Zelo Street: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/06/burnley-banner-man-will-be-banned.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/06/burnley-racists-employer-hard-choices.html

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.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/07/bianca-williams-and-tory-racism.html

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.