Okay, there are reports now that Starmer might be ready to ditch another set of policies and attitudes. Yesterday That Preston Journalist reported that Starmer had supposedly told his top team that woke didn’t interest the British public, and condemned the Tory party for supporting it. The Tory Journalist correctly pointed out that this was a bit rich coming from Starmer. The Tories weren’t much better than Labour when it came to these policies, but they had done more to oppose them. And Starmer had still been photographed taking the knee for BLM. The only Labour MP who had stuck up for women against the gender ideology was Rosie Duffield, who had been given no support from her leader and the rest of the party whatsoever. He then quoted Sir John Hayes, a Tory, who said that Labour was totally out of touch with the public on these issues.
In fact, not only has Rosie Duffield received no support for his opposition to the transgender ideology and its detrimental impact on women, but she has been isolated and vilified. Last week Starmer paid a visit to her constituency of Medway in order to boost morale among the Labour activists there. Duffield is the local MP, but was not invited.
I will definitely not be sorry if the Labour party ditches the woke ideologies entirely. I consider them entirely destructive, doing little except to increase grievance and resentment rather than promote real policies to resolve them. Black Lives Matter has become somewhat passe following the revelations about the way Patrice Cullors and the leadership of the parent organisation in America used the donations to enrich themselves and their families, Conservatives have also cited statistics that show that more American cops are killed by Blacks than the other way round, and that more Whites are killed by the police than Blacks. The gender ideology behind the trans rights movement is profoundly dangerous. Apart from its effects in allowing trans identified biological men into women’s spaces, it demands that gender nonconforming young people should only be treated as members of the sex they imitate or identify with, even though this may not be appropriate. It therefore sets them on a path to surgical transition that may severely damage their health and require them to receive additional medical care and support for the rest of their lives. Gender critical gays, like the LGB Alliance, reject the notion that trans rights are merely an extension or continuation of gay rights. Instead, they see them as a continuation of gay conversion therapy, in which society treats gay young people by transitioning them into members of the opposite sex, just as previous medical treatment included castration. But trans activists have denounced the LGB Alliance as a hate group. They were not allowed to attend last year’s Labour party conference while trans activists not only did, but were allowed to speak.
Starmer’s support for wokeness always was conditional. When the BLM protests broke out, he declared that it was ‘a moment’ and it took considerable time for him to be seen showing his support for it. And his remarks now don’t change the fact that he still said that 99.99 per cent of women don’t have a penis, meaning that he thought some do, and his panicked reaction when asked if women have cervixes. His response was that it was a question that shouldn’t be asked. The Journalist says that, whatever he’s said, he still relies on the support of the students and activists who support these policies.
He does, but it looks like he’s prepared to do what he’s done to so many other groups, and ditch them if he thinks they’re a liability. The trans lobby is very loud in its criticism of those who don’t follow their demands, and so if he reneges on his support for them completely, I think he’s going to face some very loud opposition and denunciations from the activists within his party, like LGBT Labour.
GB News and the Depress have reported that London mayor Sadiq Khan is facing calls to sack his advisor on Black culture, Kemi Olivia Alemoru. Alemoru’s the former editor of Gal-Dem, and now folded magazine for women and non-binary people of colour. So what were these terribly tweets that she made that have caused such offence? Well, she called Johnson ‘the Grim Reaper’ and wondered why he hadn’t been attacked as others had got a slap for less. She also called the Tory government ‘murderers’ and said “They have stood by idly and let people’s families die taking too much time to make decisions that could save lives, using money to make their friends rich rather than make our pandemic infrastructure robust or useful.” The GB News article about this quotes a Conservative member of the London Assembly, Neil Garratt, as saying “It is quite wrong for Sadiq Khan to appoint someone with extreme and hateful views to a role meant to bring Londoners together”.
Really? ‘Cause I don’t see anything factually incorrect in what she has said. Johnson dithered about imposing the Covid lockdown, listening to stupid eugenicist wibblings about herd immunity instead of what real epidemiologists were telling him. As a result, people caught Covid and died. On other issues, Johnson showed himself far less interested in the actual business of government and more in publicity shots and campaigning. He seemed to be going off to Checkers every weekend during the Covid crisis. And unlike other PMs during national emergencies, he never attended the COBRA meeting about it.
But why stop with Covid? The work capability tests and benefit sanctions have led to untold deaths of the disabled and unemployed, who were thrown off benefits for trivial or utterly fabricated reasons. I remember that c. 2015 people were putting up on their blogs faces of the hundreds who had died, some of them in appalling deprivation and hunger. This included a mentally ill young Black man, who I think had been unable to get himself the insulin he needed for his diabetes. There was also a case of a young woman, who committed suicide with her baby, out of despair after she had her benefit cut off, and an elderly couple who starved to death. As for that vaunted privatisation, that Sunak thinks has done so much for the NHS, a study found that instead it had caused 350+ unnecessary deaths. Quite apart from the chaos caused by massive funding cuts, that left us unable to cope with the pandemic unlike our continental cousins. And Black Brits have been particularly hit by the Tories’ wretched austerity, so Alemoru has undoubtedly seen the greater harm Tories policies have had on the Black community. I despise Critical Race Theory, but Alemoru has a particular right to be angry as a woman of colour.
But could there be anything else that riles the Tories? Well, yes. She’s an admirer of Jeremy Corbyn. She’s supposed to have tweets: A vocal supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, who is rumoured to be pondering throwing his hat in the ring for the London mayor role, Alemoru once tweeted at 1am in November 2019: “I love Corbyn so much”, followed by a post in April 2020 that read: “CORBYN CAN NEVER GO HE LIVES IN MA HEART”. She isn’t alone. Corbyn is an inspiring speaker and people wanted and supported his socialist political agenda. Which is why he was smeared as a Commie, Trotskyite and anti-Semite, and his supporters purged from the Labour party.
And she also committed the heinous sin of dissing Keir Starmer, calling him a scab.
GB News states that she tweeted ‘No one can tell me that @Keir Starmer is not a Tory plant. He’s too s*** to be trying! He’s not trying to be anything to anyone for any reason. I wish he broke the law with that curry.”
She later referred to Starmer as a “SCAB” for sacking Labour MP Sam Tarry from the Shadow Cabinet for joining a strike picket line.’
I’ve thought exactly the same thing about Starmer. He and the Blairites are Thatcherite infiltrators. Various right-wing members of the NEC were on Conservative forums. One of them was even more vitriolic about Corbyn and the left than the Tories. And yes, I do question his support for the strikers. I’ve heard various explanations that, of course the Labour front bench supports the pickets and Sam Tarry shouldn’t have joined the line for various reasons. But Tarry’s sacking still looks like the actions of a Tory scab trying to ingratiate himself with the right.
Back to her comments about killing Johnson, she made it clear that she wasn’t calling for anyone to do it, just wondering why they hadn’t. So she was inciting people to commit a crime, merely expressing an opinion about our massively incompetent, corrupt and egotistical PM.
When reading, remember that GB News is effectively becoming a mouthpiece of the Tory party. It now employs a number of Tory MPs as presenters, including Jacob Reet Snob, as well as Nigel Farage, former UKIP caudillo. I think I’ve also heard rumours that they want to give a post as presenter to Anne Widdecombe and Liz Truss.
When it comes to GB News, the remarks of a Labour MP while grilling the head of Ofcom is right: they offer a choice of opinions – right or far right.’
I got this from the pro-nationalisation, pro-NHS organisation yesterday.
‘Dear David,
The government wants to use the huge NHS waiting list as an excuse to bring in more NHS privatisation.
You can make sure they know that we won’t let them normalise NHS privatisation. They need to know that there’ll be a public uproar if they push for more NHS privatisation.
We can create a big uproar if thousands of us write to our MPs now. Can you push back against Rishi Sunak’s lie about NHS privatisation?
*We have not prepared a template email for you to send to your MP. Writing a short email to your MP in your own words, straight from your heart, based on your own experiences or those of your family and friends will be incredibly powerful and make your MP sit up and listen.
Speaking to Tory press outlet, Conservative Home, Rishi Sunak said NHS privatisation has “worked in the past and we are going to do more of that going forward”.
It will come as no surprise to you that Rishi Sunak is absolutely wrong. NHS privatisation has never worked.
Not unless “working” means stuffing public money into the pockets of private healthcare shareholders.
Open Democracy reported last week that despite private hospitals being paid over half a billion pounds to help with NHS waiting lists, fewer patients are being seen overall.
We know that NHS privatisation is causing deaths. A recent Oxford study linked NHS privatisation to the preventable deaths of 557 people.
We also know that private cleaning companies contracted to clean our hospitals are leaving our hospitals full of germs, leading the NHS to spend an extra £1 billion to deal with the health fallout of privatisation.
Private companies with NHS contracts made £831 million in profits between 2011 and 2017 from just one form of NHS outsourcing. What a waste! We could have used that money to treat more people.
NHS privatisation might be working for greedy private companies like Centene and Virgin. It’s just not working for our communities.
Rishi Sunak wants to normalise NHS privatisation, using the crisis as his excuse because he knows that NHS privatisation is massively unpopular – even among those who voted for the Conservatives in the last election.
Over 68% of Conservative voters in our polling want private companies out of our NHS, with just 18% wanting more privatisation in the NHS.
Labour (77%), LibDem (75%) and other voters (73%) also massively support an NHS run for people, not profit.
Millions of us are waiting for healthcare and can’t see our GP, so it might seem like common sense to use the private sector so that people can get help immediately.
But we already know it doesn’t work. The government has already been doing that. It’s just not working.
Politicians need to face the facts. The real and popular solution is to invest directly into NHS capacity and pay our NHS staff.
Can you make sure your MPs know that you saw what Sunak said and that you are absolutely against it?
Regardless of your MP’s party, it is really important that you make your voice heard.
If your MP is Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Independent, email them and tell them to write to Rishi Sunak and let him know you oppose his plans to invest public money in private companies instead of directly into the NHS.
If your MP is Labour, email them and tell them to write to Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting asking them to confirm that Labour does not agree with Rishi Sunak that NHS privatisation has worked well.
If you live in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, email your MP and ask them to contact the Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish government to make sure that they are NOT following Rishi Sunak’s lead.
You can have a big impact in showing that it’s a choice between investing in the NHS and investing in the private sector.
Making this choice clear is really important as we approach the next election. Your MP needs to know this is an issue people in your constituency really care about.
We can create a public outcry against Rishi Sunak’s lie about NHS privatisation. Please write to your MP now and share this action with friends and family too.
Thank you so much for all you do to protect our NHS from privatisation and for being a part of this key fight as we approach the next general election.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team
PS: We would usually provide you with a ready-made letter to send to your MP, but your MP hearing from you, in your own words, will really make them sit up and listen. Your letter can be very short. What matters most are your experiences with the NHS and those of your family and/or friends. Speak from the heart. Make sure they know you want Labour to commit to investing directly in our NHS and not in private companies.‘
I have indeed written to my MP about this, and requested her to write to Streeting and Starmer to confirm that they won’t support Sunak’s privatisation plans. I’ll let you know if I get a reply. If you feel as I do about this issue, please also write to your MPs as well.
I hope this isn’t too controversial a post, because I know many of the great commenters here are strong supporters of trans rights. But I hope that whatever our differences, we can agree on this issue: the fear going around the trans community that there is a holocaust either underway or about to come is a toxic myth that may have played a role in the tragic shooting of six people at a Presbyterian school in America on Monday. Audrey Hale, the perpetrator, was a trans-identified woman, who believed she was a transman. She walked into the school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot the children and staff before she was shot in the head by the cops. It’s not really known what her motives were, and she is unusual in that while I’ve heard and seen YouTube footage of violence by transwomen, transmen have not, as far as I know, been personally violent. Hale did, however, leave a manifesto, the contents of which have not been disclosed to the public. Right-wing American commenters have claimed that the authorities won’t because they don’t fit the narrative of transpeople being an oppressed minority.
Several YouTubers and other commenters on the Net have made the point that part of the cause of the tragedy lies in the very militant, violent rhetoric among trans militants. I am not going to deny that there is prejudice against transpeople, but there is a real culture of violence amongst the trans militants. Gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan, who was herself assaulted by an angry transwoman, have posted a number of videos showing the very aggressive counter demonstrations by trans activists. There is also footage on YouTube of feminist campaigners being beaten to the ground by trans activists in Spain. There is also a feminist site on the Net which regularly posts examples of such violence. Kelly-Jay Keen, a leading trans activist, was mobbed and feared for her life when she spoke in Auckland, New Zealand. Maria MacLachlan has posted video footage of the various aggressive militant trans who greeted her when she spoke in Bristol. The militants were also supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. They tried to storm the police cordon around the demonstration. Wheeen n she spoke in Bristol the trans militants were supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. There were similar scenes when she spoke in Brighton, when the counterprotesters let off smoke bombs and one of them, a young guy, was dragged off because Brighton’s finest had found 12 knives in his bag. Similar, highly aggressive displays have been staged by trans rights protesters over the other side of the Pond. In one such instance, a young woman speaking at university was ushered by a cop into a cupboard to hide her from the angry mob chasing her.
And trans militant rhetoric is similarly violent. There are any number of posts on Twitter where the activists display guns with slogans like ‘I Kill TERFs’. Nicola Sturgeon caught flak the other week because, when she was trying to pass the Gender Recognition Bill in Scotland, she stood in front of a flag saying ‘Behead TERFS’ or some such. In their discussion of the recent shooting, the Lotus Eaters have used as their thumbnail a picture of someone standing next to a sign saying ‘Trans Right… Or Else’ with multiple pictures of AK47s.
Many trans activists seem to sincerely believe that gender critical feminists and their supporters are real fascists. This is nonsense, which MacLachlan has also disposed of in another of her videos. My own experience of simply reading their blogs and watching their videos is that far from being any kind of allies of Stormfront and the rest of the jackbooted horrors, real ‘TERFs’ tend instead to be respectable, middle-aged ladies, and that they largely come from the political left. That’s the direction MacLachlan comes from, and KJK started out as a left-wing socialist before she got censured from her Labour feminist group simply for asking why transwomen were women. They seem to be largely women, who marched against real fascism in the shape of the BNP, NF and apartheid South Africa. And they have not, to my certain knowledge, posted anything demanding the murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. Not MacLachlan, not the feminists at Redux, not gender critical gays like Clive Simpson, Dennis Kavanagh or the EDIjester, Barry Wall. Not even J.K. Rowling, for whom I have a fair degree of contempt because of her support for the libellous accusations that Mike was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, simply because he supported Jeremy Corbyn.
Part of the problem is, I believe, the myth of the trans holocaust. There have been trans days of remembrance held in Britain and Scotland, but the numbers of trans people killed over here has been low. In Scotland they were about three, and no-one was killed last year. This should obviously be a source of pride. The figures are higher in America, but as a section of the population they’re still low. The stats the activists use to show that there is a trans holocaust underway come from Latin America. These are desperately poor countries, and some of them, like Brazil, have horrifically high murder rates anyway. And it’s unclear whether the murdered transpeople were killed because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.
But despite the lack of death camps or paramilitary mobs going from house to house looking for trans people, as happened to the Jews during the real Holocaust, this myth is spreading. The right-wing, anti-trans YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, who is herself a lesbian, put up a piece in which she reported many trans people are joining the Pink Pistols. This is a network of gun clubs set up by the gay community in America and Canada to teach gay men and women how to shoot in order to defend themselves. I sympathise with the reason for them. There has been a violent hatred of gays in America and Britain, and in a culture like America which supports gun ownership as the citizen’s right to defend him- or herself, it’s natural that gays should also want to own them for their defence. Just like the Black Panthers decided that if the White man had guns, they wanted theirs too. But it means we’ve entered a very dangerous climate where scared, volatile people, afraid of Nazi-style persecution, are taking up arms amid angry rhetoric that calls for and legitimises the killing of their opponents. One internet commenter has even said that, given the circumstances, the shooting was entirely predictable.
This is where I hope genuinely liberal people, people concerned about the deteriorating state of social discourse over this matter can help, and particularly academics. Because we’ve been here before, folks, but from the other political extreme. I have a strong interest in folklore, and was for a time a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. This was set up by academic folklorists to investigate contemporary urban folklore. You know, vanishing hitch-hikers, UFOs, and other weirdness. But this was in the 1990s when the was another spike in American and western paranoia. It was when anyone and seemingly almost everyone with a computer was producing small press magazines or pamphlets ranting about THEM. President George Bush Senior sparked some of it after the Gulf War by talking about his New Order, which harked back to the Nazis’ rhetoric about their new European order, and even further back to the 18th century and the Illuminati and the words printed on dollar bills: Novo Ordo Saecularum – ‘New World Order’. Looking for an underlying explanation for the Gulf War, people found it in the old conspiracy theories about Satanist freemasons. And there were real fears of a resurgence of the militant extreme right following the rise of the Militia movement and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris Dees, one of the major figures in the Southern Poverty Law Centre, published a book about their threat and links to the wider American Nazi movement. It’s been widely criticised, not least because one of the captains of one of the militias was actually Black. There were calls from someone who styled herself a militia commander for them to march on Washington DC. But the other militia members smelt an agent provocateur, and wisely kept to running around training in the hills.
The Society also covered some of the weird conspiracy theories going around America. The American far right at that time hadn’t taken in the fact that real, existing state communism in eastern Europe had collapsed. There was a paranoid fringe that believed it was all a ruse. Thus there were bonkers theories that held that the Russians had established secret bases in Canada and Mexico, from which the tanks would roll into America at the given signal. And God-fearing American Christians believed that they would be targeted for extermination under the One World Satanic state. There was a rumour going around Christians in Pennsylvania that the coloured dots on the state’s road signs indicated the sites of the concentration camps in which they were to be interned. It was all false. The dots were part of a code telling state highway workers when the signs had last been painted, so that they knew when they needed another coat. It had nothing to do with concentration camps for anyone.
And then, with 9/11 came the stories about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the rise of Alex Jones. Jones has become infamous for his wild conspiracy theories. In one of them he claimed that Barack Obama was going to use an environmental emergency to force Americans into refugee camps and seize power to become an eco-communist dictator. And there were other weird attacks on the former president, in which it was claimed that he was secret atheist/Muslim/Communist/Nazi filled with a hatred of White America and planning its extinction. In fact, Obama was in many ways a bog-standard conventional American politician. He saw himself, as he’s said recently, as a moderate Republican. And there’s a very strong continuity between his bombing of Libya and continuation of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with Neo-Con foreign policy.
Well, Obama’s been and gone. he was succeeded by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden. There are no concentration camps for anyone. But the ideas of a trans holocaust are merely an extreme left-wing version of the right-wing American fears about a holocaust of Whites and Christians. And it needs people to point this out. During the ’90s and after there were a number of academic books published about the paranoid fringe in America, sometimes as part of wider examinations of conspiracy theories like the infamous Jewish banking myth that inspired Hitler and the Nazis. This new myth of the trans holocaust needs putting in the same context. The fact that it comes from the left, and a minority group that sees itself as vicious marginalised and oppressed, should make no difference. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth, that does seem to be inspiring militant trans activists to violence. And the internet platforms should be helping as well. Nobody should be allowed to post material genuinely calling for the murder of others. It should be immediately struck down. Protests that it’s all a joke should not be tolerated. Since the rise of political correctness in the 1980s people find racist jokes genuinely distasteful. I cannot imagine decent people finding anything funny in jokes about killing Blacks and Jews. And the so-called jokes about killing TERFS shouldn’t be tolerated either. As for masked individuals turning up in black bloc threatening violence, that could be solved by invoking the legislation passed in the 1930s that outlawed paramilitary uniforms. It was aimed at Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I think it may have become a dead-letter because of the paramilitary violence in Ulster. But there’s a strong case for enforcing it over here.
We have to fight the poisonous myths and paranoia in the militant trans community.
Before someone else with serious mental issues and anger against society because they fear they’re going to be put into a concentration camp because of their gender identity goes on another killing spree.
As I’m sure you all have seen, the big news today is that comedian, actor and broadcaster Paul O’Grady has passed on. The obituaries for him have, naturally, talked about his career and its highlights, starting with his most notorious creation, Lily Savage. Savage, complete with her massive bouffant blonde hairdo, long eyelashes, high heels and razor-sharp tongue, hit our screens in the 1990s. She was a character O’Grady had developed in the gay clubs. I also got the impression that she was based on women he’d known in childhood. But O’Grady didn’t stop there. He also hosted chat shows and one series, in which he went through south-east Asia on a quest to find a particularly glamorous Chinese starlet of the 1930s. Among the series more notable incidents was one in which O’Grady appeared in matching black turban and sarong in Thailand or one of the neighbouring countries. But he also visited the cemetery to the British and imperial soldiers worked to death by the Japanese on the Burma railway. O’Grady naturally became upset, looking at the terribly young age of some of these fine men inscribed on their tombstones. He also got annoyed with the official recommendation not to say to much about the Japanese, ‘Why not? They started it!’ Quite. It was a deeply moving piece of television that showed O’Grady at his best. And from there he went on to present a long-running series on ITV about Battersea Dogs’ Home, For the Love of Dogs. O’Grady was a massive dog-lover, and as they’ve been saying on the TV tributes to him, he had a natural rapport with his canine friends, several of whom he took home. During one episode, repeated today, he met the Queen Consort, Camilla. He’d had problems with his heart, and underwent an operation on it some time ago. I think the news has said that he passed away in his sleep, which is a blessing. He was also appearing in a play. The eulogies have also said that he was a staunch supporter of gay rights.
Savage was a little bit racy, but looking back on it, she seems to me to be very much in the traditional spirit of British drag: outrageous, but driven by character and family friendly, and there was real wit involved. The modern drag shows seems to be more in the style of American drag and much more sexualised.
It’s a sad day for British TV entertainment. As well as being a versatile entertainer, O’Grady came across as a genuinely nice bloke. Commiserations to his friends and family. He will be missed on our screens.
Here’s another petition against the privatisation of the NHS, this time from pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation We Own It. They are naturally outraged that privatisation, according to a study by Cambridge university, has resulted in 500+ preventable deaths. They believe the Labour party is moving in the right direction, as Wes Streeting last week in an interview with New Statesman, said the party was considering moving more services back in house. But they want to press the point home, and so wish to present a petition to the party’s policy organisation demanding its complete renationalisation. They are also planning a major campaign next year against the health service’s privatisation.
I’ve signed the petition, and if you feel like me about this issue, please do so as well.
‘Dear David,
Last week Wes Streeting made his strongest case yet against NHS outsourcing.
He only did this after you took action to say NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
Now we want to push Labour to go even further and make reinstating the NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE their official policy.
We are making a submission to Labour’s policy-making body this Friday, 17th March. We want you to add your voice to it so they know thousands of us want this.
For the next 18 months, our message on the NHS is going to be really simple: NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
As you know, a recent Oxford University study has linked the preventable deaths of 557 people to the outsourcing of NHS services.
We want to hammer that message into every home in the country so that at the next election pro-privatisation politicians are forced to explain to voters why they are happy to put up with deaths just so private companies make a profit.
We will push all parties to reinstate our NHS as a fully public service. We are independent of all political parties and we lobby all of them.
But it is really important to focus on Labour because they currently have the best chance of winning the next election.
So we are going to ramp up the pressure on them month by month not just to make sure they sign up to this policy before the next election, but also to make sure they actually implement it if they win.
The public is on your side on this. Two-thirds of them, according to our latest polling, are concerned about NHS outsourcing and want our NHS reinstated as a fully public service.
Going by Wes Streeting’s tune last week, Labour has come a long way on this issue. And they look like they are now going in the right direction.
But they still have a long way to go to pledging to reinstate our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE.
That is why we are making a submission to their policy-making body – the National Policy Forum – to outline the evidence and demand they make kicking greedy private companies out of our NHS their policy.
If thousands of people add their voices to our submission, they will know that this is not just one organisation’s demand – reinstating our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE is backed by so many people.
The NHS is a devolved matter, which means that our submission is only about the NHS in England. But we all know that Labour in England has a strong influence on Labour in all the other nations.
If Labour in England pledges to reinstate our NHS as a fully public service, Labour in the other nations will likely follow.
So your voice is really important whether you live in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
We know that England is not alone in seeing the effects of private companies making profits from our healthcare.
Just today, we’ve seen a report by the Scotland Herald showing that private healthcare companies with links to UK politicians are charging Scots £250 to see a doctor for 15 minutes.
We know the situations in Wales and Northern Ireland are very similar.
The Labour Party taking a strong stance and pledging to reinstate our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE would send a strong message to all the nations.
I got this message earlier this morning from anti-privatisation, pro-NHS group We Own It, requesting me and their other supporters to send a form letter to our local MPs calling for an end to the privatisation of the NHS. I’ve had absolutely no problem doing so, and it’s actually very easy. The letter is already written and all you need to do is add your name, address and a ‘Yours sincerely’ at the end. As I’ve said before, my local MP is Karin Smyth, who became a Labour politician because she so despised what the Tories are doing to the Health Service. However, she is also a Starmerite and I honestly don’t know what she will do if he continues the Blairite privatisation of the NHS. I sent her an email a little while ago offering her one of my self-published books against NHS privatisation, and haven’t received a reply. I don’t know if that’s significant. If you’re as worried and angry at the destruction of the Health Service as I am, please respond to We Own It’s message and send a letter of your own.
Here’s their email, giving their very strong reasons for opposing privatisation. Not least is the fact that it kills.
‘Dear David,
What an incredible action on Saturday!
Hundreds of people like you sent a powerful message in the heart of Westminster: NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
Now you can increase the impact of that message all around the UK by sending a message to your MP.
Regardless of which party your MP is from, or whether they support or oppose NHS privatisation – they need to know you that you are saying “NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS”.
You’ve already had an impact in your fight against NHS privatisation:
Pictures and videos from Saturday’s action as well as your pictures of taking action at home with the hashtag #NHSPrivatisationKills have been seen almost a million times across social media
Your action made it onto the front pages of the Morning Star
We went on GB News and LBC Radio to talk about your action and make the case to an audience who would normally not hear that message
Stephen Fry’s message in support of your action received coverage in over 100 local and national press outlets before Saturday.
Our new polling has shown that two-thirds of the public are WITH YOU in being concerned by NHS privatisation and wanting the NHS reinstated as a fully public service
Because of your action, we have now established an open line of communication with the office of the Shadow Health Secretary, which will allow us to put the case to him that opposing NHS privatisation is popular with voters, cheaper and safer for patients
Now let’s take that impact even further by making sure our MPs get the message.
It doesn’t matter whether your MP is Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid or independent. They need to hear about this action and know that you are saying that NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
Saturday’s powerful action was only the first step in our game plan.
We’ve known for years that NHS privatisation is wasteful, costly, inefficient and bad for patients.
But now with the Oxford University study that links NHS privatisation to 557 preventable deaths between 2013 and 2020, you’re raising the stakes and showing that NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
Getting the message that NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS out there will put politicians that support NHS privatisation on the defensive.
They will have to explain to the public why they continue to push for privatisation when they know that it leads to deaths.
And we all know that there are no good reasons to privatise services in our NHS.
The key is to make sure your MP – whatever their party and wherever you are in the UK – knows that you are saying NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
I’ve also had this email from the pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation, We Own It about a planned demonstration they’re holding against the privatisation of the NHS in February. They’re appealing for people to go to it. I can’t, due to expense and illness, but I’m putting it up here in case there are people interested in it, who may be able to attend.
‘Dear David,
BREAKING: private health companies donated £800,000 to the Conservative Party over the last decade. Now we know why the government is doing nothing about NHS privatisation!
A recent Oxford study linked NHS privatisation to the preventable deaths of 557 people.
It is time to make the government feel the power of organised people over organised money.
Can you sign up to become one of 557 people in Parliament Square from 2 – 4pm on Saturday, 25th February demanding an end to NHS privatisation?
So far, 541 people have signed up. We need 89 people to reach our final goal of 630 (that is, 557 people representing the victims of NHS privatisation, 43 people to help carry signs and banners and 30 stewards to help manage the event).
You are involved in our NHS campaign because you believe that our NHS should work for people, not the greedy private companies that donate to the government.
Unite the Union, Just Treatment, Doctors for the NHS and Socialist Health Association fully agree with you. That is why they are now supporting our action.
It is time we make the government feel the power of organised people over organised money.
We want to bring together 557 people representing the 557 people whose deaths are linked to NHS privatisation to put on a powerful display that can get into the papers.
More press coverage means more pressure on the government. The more of us there are at the action, the more likely the action is to get press coverage.
We need 89 more people to reach our goal. Can you sign up now to join us?
Because of the incredible efforts of our NHS nurses and ambulance workers who are fighting to save our NHS, the government is already feeling pressure.
With the recent study that links NHS privatisation to 557 preventable deaths, there is no better time than now to pile onto that pressure they are feeling.
The government already knows that over 75% of the public, according to our last poll, want to end NHS privatisation. But they don’t feel that people will fight to see that happen.
You can show them from 2 – 4pm on Saturday 25th February in Parliament Square that you will.
The more people join this action, the more powerful it will be. The more powerful it is, the more likely it is to receive coverage from the press.
This coverage will pile on the pressure on the government and start forcing them to take action.
We need 557 people to represent the 557 people whose deaths are linked to NHS privatisation, according to a recent Oxford study.
But we need even more people to make sure the action is big and effective. So after signing up, please send the link to your friends and family, especially those who live in London and ask them to sign up too.
Thank you so much for always standing up against NHS privatisation.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate – the We Own It team
PS: 30 years ago today the British Coal and British Rail (Transfer Proposals) Act 1993 was passed, paving the way for privatisation of our railway. We’ve put together a list of 30 top failures of rail privatisation from the last 30 years. Take a read and share with friends and family.’
My discipline, archaeology, has been massively going after Graham Hancock this week. Hancock’s ah, um,, ‘maverick thinker’, I suppose you’d say, who’s been presenting a series on Netflix arguing that thousands of years ago there was a highly advanced civilisation that perished in a cataclysm, but passed on its secrets to other ancient civilisations around the world. This has understandably annoyed archaeologists and a number have put up videos, some of them lengthy and quite detailed, disproving him. Hancock’s been promoting this idea for some time now. Going back two decades and more, he had a series on Channel 4 with the title ‘Water World’ or something like it, also arguing that there was a global advanced civilisation, whose monuments have been covered up by a flood, as recorded in the Bible and other ancient religions. Now I’m sure that Hancock is wrong, and the criticisms of his dodgy history and archaeology are right. But I take exception to one of the other accusations levelled at him, which is that he is racist.
This accusation is partly based on his false ascription of the achievements of indigenous cultures around the world to this putative prehistoric civilisation. It denies those people the credit for their achievements. But the accusation is also that it’s similar to the ideas of some bonkers White supremacist groups, who are using Hancock’s ideas to promote themselves. One archaeologist posted a video saying that Hancock should have disavowed the use of his ideas by these fascists. It also criticised him for being friends with Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. There are fair criticisms to be made of both of these men. Peterson’s an arch-conservative and anti-feminist, but hardly a Nazi. Rogan was pushing anti-vax nonsense and is an advocate for some mind-expanding drugs. A few years ago people were accusing him of being a ‘gateway to the Alt-Right’. Possibly, but he also talks to people from the left, who are otherwise denied a platform by the lamestream media. Journalists like Abbie Martin, who talked about Israeli propaganda against the Palestinians and how she found, when she visited the beleaguered Arab nation, that the reality was nothing like the picture painted by the Israeli state. He’s also talked to biologists and journalists exposing the lies of the trans ideology. This is not Alt-Right, no matter what groups like Mermaids, Stonewall, Antifa and the rest say. The people criticising the gender ideology tend to be radical feminists, many from the socialist left. Part of their opposition against it is that it reduces masculinity and femininity to traditional, stereotypical sex roles. One of the feminist vloggers interviewed one of the leading activists against the trans ideology, who was furious that people like her were being presented as right-wing. Another feminist activist criticised Matt Walsh for misrepresenting feminists as uniformly in favour of trans ideology, and then criticising them for it. Rogan gives a voice to people outside the mainstream. Sometimes it’s rubbish, and sometimes it’s immensely valuable. He has also interviewed a number of Black celebs, so again, not a Nazi.
The White supremacist ideas being referred to seem to me to be the Traditionalist ideology of Giulio Evola. Evola was an Italian Fascist and occultist, who was a major ideological influence on the scumbuckets behind the Bologna railway bombing in the 1970s. A fascist group bombed the station, killing and maiming over a hundred people. Evola believed that there was a strongly hierarchical, ‘Aryan’ civilisation in Hyperborea in the arctic, which was responsible for all the subsequent cultural achievements of the civilisations around the world. This is twaddle. But Hancock’s ideas are also similar to those of others, which don’t come from people in the fascist fringe. A couple of years ago I picked up an old book, Colony Earth, which had been published in the 1970s. This claimed that Earth may have been an extraterrestrial colony, whose advanced civilisation was destroyed in a nuclear war. The pyramids may have been fall-out shelters, as were the megalithic tumuli in Britain. It’s an interesting read, but certainly wrong. I think Charles Berlitz, who started the Bermuda Triangle myth, also believed in this, supporting it in one of his books with artefacts from Aztec tombs that look like aircraft. Berlitz is someone else, who I’m fairly certain has absolutely no connection to fascism whatsoever.
And I don’t believe Hancock is either.
When he was travelling the world on his Channel 4 series he was accompanied by his wife, who is Sri Lankan. Now, White supremacists do not, as a rule, marry dark-skinned people from outside Europe. If they do, they’re angrily denounced as ‘race traitors’. In one edition of this earlier series, Hancock reported on the mysterious ruins of ancient city found off the coast of the Bay of Bengal. He was shown talking respectfully to an Indian gent, who told him how such findings tie in with Hindu ideas of the antiquity of civilisation and ancient Indian legends of flooded cities. Again, this isn’t quite behaviour you’d expect from a genuine White supremacist. He also travelled to South and Central America, where he proposed the old theory that the Mayans, Aztecs and other ancient Amerindian civilisations must have learned how to build their pyramids from someone else. I think this was once again ancient Egypt. But who brought that knowledge to the New World? Black Africans. He pointed to an Olmec bas relief of a warrior’s head, and declared its features to be ‘proudly African’. If this is racism, then its Afrocentrism rather than White supremacy. As for the ancient race behind these monuments, Hancock doesn’t say what colour they are. In this, he breaks with some of his predecessors, who say they must have been White because the legends of numerous Amerindian peoples state that vital parts of their culture were brought to them by White gods. Hancock is therefore less racialised in what he says than his predecessors.
I disagree profoundly with Hancock’s ideas, but he has a right to say them like everyone else. And if it piques people interest in these ancient cultures so that they want to find out what they were really like, that’s all to the good. But I do think it’s profoundly wrong to accuse him of racism. That just further cheapens the word and weakens it as a weapon against the real thing.
I got this email from Labour and Palestine asking people to sign their call to the Labour party to speak up for the Palestinians against their continued oppression and dispossession by the Israeli state, in stark contravention of international law. The email runs
‘Labour Must Speak up for Palestine – add your name!
UPDATED FOR #PALESTINEDAY 2022: Sign here // Share here // Read our article here // Retweet here
“To be an internationalist and democratic socialist party, it is the responsibility of the Labour Party to speak up for Palestine and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their fundamental rights, including to self-determination.
Recent actions by the Israeli Government have illustrated the continuing nature of Israel’s illegal occupation and the denial of the rights of Palestinian peoples with the use of militarised violence and forced displacements. The attacks on Gaza in August 2022 killed 44 Palestinians, including 15 children, and were described by the UN Special rapporteur as an act contrary to international law. The Israeli army’s killing of the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh; the attacks on the Al Aqsa mosque and the outlawing of 7 NGOs who spoke up for Palestinian rights being just some examples.
The seriousness of the situation facing the people of Palestine is confirmed by the fact the International Criminal Court is holding an inquiry into abuses committed in the occupied Palestinian Territories since 2014.
The continuing de facto annexation of Palestinian land by accelerated settlement building alongside statements of Israel’s continuing intention to proceed with annexation, show it is clearer than ever that the Israeli State is intent on eliminating any prospects of Palestinian self-determination, including by trying to annex Jerusalem as its sole capital.
Major reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem have concluded that Israel is practising the crime of apartheid as defined by the UN.
Labour must build on – not step back from – its commitments to immediate recognition of the state of Palestine and an end to the blockade, occupation and settlements as outlined in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos, and in the motions overwhelmingly passed by the Party’s annual conferences in 2018, 2019 and 2021, the last of which stated “that the Labour Party must stand on the right side of history and abide by these resolutions in its policy, communications and political strategy.”
We must support “effective measures” including sanctions, as called for by Palestinian civil society, against actions by the Israeli state that are illegal according to international law. This must include action to ensure that Israel stops the building of settlements, reverses any annexation, ends the occupation of the West Bank, ceases the blockade of Gaza, brings down the Wall and respects the right of refugees to return to their homes under international law.
We oppose measures designed to stop civil society using non-violent actions, including ethical investment policies, to try to ensure Israel complies with international law.”
* Sign here // Share here // Read our article here // Retweet here‘
I’ve signed it, as it is clearly a matter of simply justice to defend the victims of persecution regardless of the state doing it. I fear that it will probably do little good, as Starmer is ‘100 per cent Zionist’ and backs the Israeli state to the hilt, even employing a former Israeli spook to hunt down the emails and social media posts of people he can smear as anti-Semitic. But if you are a member of the Labour party or a Labour supporter and feel the same way about it I do, please consider signing this as well.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 