Chagos Islanders Next for Deportation?

Following the exposure this week of the Tories’ policy of expelling British citizens of the Windrush generation as illegal immigrants, there’s been speculation which group of British citizens of lawful immigrant origins will be next. Mike mentioned in one of his piece that in 2019-20 it may be the Ugandan Asians. These were the Asian population of Uganda, who were expelled in the 1970s by the dictator, torturer and mass-murderer Idi Amin. Their plea for asylum was turned down by a number of countries, including India. But they were taken in by Britain under Ted Heath. it’s to Heath’s credit, just as the clandestine removal of the citizenship laws protecting the Windrush people and their forcible removal from this country shows how vile and racist David Cameron, Theresa May and the rest of the Tories are. I’ve already posted up a piece making it very clear how despicable it would be if Tweezer’s government then turns on the Ugandan Asians.

But there was a piece in the I last week suggesting that she may also be about to target the Chagos Islanders. The Chagos Islands are in the Indian Ocean, and have been a continuing imperial scandal since the mid-70s. The Islanders were forcibly removed from their homes after Britain gave the islands to America to build a massive military base. Because Cold War, need to stop global Communism and all the rest of the horrific reasons Britain and America have given for treating ordinary people in the Developing World as dirt.

Of course, the British Empire has been taking over indigenous peoples’ land and removing them since it first started to appear in the 16th century. When the British and other European nations arrived in the Caribbean to challenge Spain’s possession of the New World, they embarked on a campaign to cleanse their newly conquered territories of the indigenous Caribs.

In the early 20th century, in a close parallel to this, the British also removed a South Sea island people from their home to Fiji, so that it could be mined. This trashed the island, making it uninhabitable. The islanders have been trying to sue the British government since in order to get compensation and a recognition of wrongdoing, but they’ve had no success.

The Chagos Islanders have also been trying to sue the British government, and they also have received zero justice. There have been a series of articles about the British government’s maltreatment of them in Private Eye. The minister responsible for the decision to grant the island to the Americans was Denis Healey. The Eye contacted him to question him about it, but as far as I can recall they received the usual ministerial non-answers. I’ve got a feeling that they might also have been a bit tetchy as well.

According to the I, after the decision was made, the Islanders were deported to Mauritius and other countries, from whence some of them migrated to Britain. And so they’re now left vulnerable to being deported from this country, which owes them justice, under the same squalid and racist policies that have seen the expulsion of over 7,000 children of Windrush immigrants. This is despite the fact that, as David Lammy showed in his tweet, the Windrush migrants were British citizens under the terms of the 1948 British Citizenship Act.

It’s not hard to see the ministerial logic which came down in favour of their removal from their homeland. There are only a few thousand Chagos Islanders, and so under the utilitarian logic of the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’ the government clearly decided it could easily sacrifice them to keep the Americans happy, preserve the Special Relationship, and keep global communism at bay.

It’s still a global injustice, and one that will be compounded if Tweezer and his minions decided to deport them from Britain.

May, Rudd and the rest of the Tories have shown themselves to be utterly racist in passing and supporting this legislation. Get rid of them, before they attack anyone else.

Democratic Socialist on Liberalism, Classical Liberalism and Fascism

I’ve blogged several times about the connections between the Libertarianism of Von Mises and Von Hayek and Fascism, and the 1970s Fascist coup in Chile led by General Pinochet, which overthrew the democratically elected Communist president, Salvador Allende. I reblogged a video the other day by Democratic Socialist, in which he showed that Pinochet, contrary to the claims made by the Von Mises Institute, was indeed a brutal dictator, and that his rescue of Chilean capitalism, threatened by Allende’s entirely democratic regime, was very similar to Hitler’s seizure of power in Nazi Germany.

In the video below, Democratic Socialist explains the difference between the Liberalism of the Enlightenment, and the ‘Classical Liberalism’ of Von Mises and Von Hayek, both of whom supported Fascist regimes against Socialism and Democracy. In Von Mises case, he served in Dollfuss’ ‘Austro-Fascist’ government, while his pupil, Von Hayek, bitterly denounced democracy, supporting the regimes of the Portuguese Fascist dictator Salazar and then Pinochet’s grotty dictatorship in Chile. Von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, claimed that a planned socialist economy was also a threat to freedom, and influenced both Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher. And the latter was a good friend and admirer of Pinochet.

The video begins with Democratic Socialist drawing a distinction between Enlightenment Liberalism, and ‘Classical Liberalism’. Enlightenment Liberalism was a revolutionary force which challenged the power of the feudal aristocracy and the clergy. It championed freedom of belief, the right to free speech and assembly, freedom of the press and the right to a fair trial. It also stated that people had a right to private property.

Von Mises, the founder of ‘Austrian economics’ and ‘Classical Liberalism’, declared that the essence of his political and economic system was private property, and was hostile towards both democracy and socialism because both appeared to him to challenge the rights of the owners of the means of production. Thus he supported Dollfuss during the Austrian Civil War, when Dollfuss suppressed the socialists and Communists with army. The video includes a clip from a British newsreel showing Austrian soldiers shooting at the houses in the working class suburb of Vienna, into which the Schutzbund – the ‘Protection League’ formed by the Socialists and Communists – had retreated following Dollfuss’ attempt to suppress them by force. The voiceover describes Dollfuss as ‘diminutive’, and a still from the footage shows an extremely short man in uniform surrounded by various uniformed officers. Which seems to add him to the list of other dictators of shorter than average height – Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco. The Nazis themselves were profoundly hostile to the Enlightenment. After the 1933 seizure of power, Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis’ chief ideologist, declared that the legacy of 1789 – the year of the French Revolution – had been ended by the Nazi coup.

After the War, Von Hayek’s attacks on socialist planning in The Road to Serfdom led Churchill to make a scaremongering speech about Labour in the 1945 election. Socialist planning, the great war leader declared, was abhorrent to the British people, and could only be imposed through a ‘Gestapo’, which he had no doubt, would be very humanely carried out. The video shows two senior members of the Labour party, one of which was the former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Callaghan, Denis Healey, describing how horrified they were by this slur against people Churchill had worked so closely with during the War.

In fact, Churchill’s lurid rhetoric had the opposite effect, and encouraged more people to vote for the Labour party so that they won with a landslide.

The video goes on to cite the texts, which document how Von Hayek declared his support for Salazar in Portugal, stating that he would preserve private property against the abuses of democracy, and how he claimed that the only totalitarian state in Latin America was that of Salvador Allende. Who was elected entirely democratically, and did not close any opposition newspapers or radio stations. Democratic Socialist also shows that Thatcher herself was a profound admirer of Pinochet, putting up a quote from her raving about his dictatorship. He also states that Thatcher, like Pinochet, also used the power of the state to suppress working class opposition. In this case, it was using the police to break up the miner’s strike.

Democratic Socialist is right in general about Enlightenment Liberalism being a revolutionary force, but many of its leaders were by no means democrats. The French Revolutionary was also keen to preserve private property, and the suffrage was based on property qualifications. Citizens were divided into ‘active’ and ‘passive’ – that is, those who possessed enough money to qualify for voting, and those who did not. This was also true of the American Founding Fathers, who were also keen to preserve the wealth and privileges of the moneyed elite against the poor masses. The fight to extend the franchise so that everyone had the vote, including women, was a long one. Britain only became a truly democratic country in the 1920s, after women had gained the vote and the property qualification for the franchise had been repealed. This last meant that all working class men had the vote, whereas previously only the wealthiest section of the working class – the aristocracy of labour – had enjoyed the franchise following Disraeli’s reforms of 1872.

The British historian of Fascism, Martin Pugh, in his book on British Fascism Between the Wars makes this point to show that, rather than having a long tradition of democracy, it was in fact only a recent political innovation, against which sections of the traditional social hierarchy were strongly opposed. This was the aristocracy and the business elites. He states that in Britain the right to vote was connected to how much tax a man paid, and that the principle that everyone had an innate right to vote was rejected as too abstract and French. This distrust of democracy, and hatred of the forces of organised labour, that now possessed it, was shown most clearly in the upper classes’ reaction to the General Strike.

As for the other constitutional liberties, such as a free press, right to a fair trial and freedom of assembly, Pugh also states that the 19th and early 20th century British ‘Liberal’ state was quite prepared to suppress these when it suited them, and could be extremely ruthless, such as when it dealt with the Suffragettes. Hence he argues that the Fascists’ own claim to represent the true nature of traditional British government and values needs to be taken seriously by historians when explaining the rise of Mosley and similar Fascist movements in the ’20s and ’30s.

Democratic Socialist is right when he states that the Classical Liberalism of Von Mises and Von Hayek is Conservative, and supports the traditional feudal hierarchy of the aristocracy and church as opposed to the revolutionary Liberalism of the new middle classes as they arose in the late 18th and 19th centuries. But I don’t think there was a clear division between the two. British political historians have pointed out that during the 19th century, the Liberal middle classes slowly joined forces with the aristocracy as the working class emerged to challenge them in turn. The modern Conservative party, with its ideology of free trade, has also been influenced by one aspect of 19th century Liberalism, just as the Labour party has been influenced by other aspects, such as popular working class activism and a concern for democracy. Von Mises’ and Von Hayek’s ‘Classical Liberalism’ can be seen as an extreme form of this process, whereby the free enterprise component of Enlightenment Liberalism is emphasised to the exclusion of any concern with personal freedom and democracy.

Vox Political: Tories Turn on BoJo

Mike over at Vox Political has also put up another story, reporting how the Conservatives have finally got fed up with Boris Johnson. Matthew Parris, who was formerly one of Thatcher’s aides, attacked the Mayor of London in his column in the Times, writing

Somebody has to call a halt to the gathering pretence that if only you’re sufficiently comical in politics you can laugh everything off.

Incompetence is not funny. Policy vacuum is not funny. A careless disregard for the truth is not funny. Advising old mates planning to beat someone up is not funny. Abortions and gagging orders are not funny. Creeping ambition in a jester’s cap is not funny. Vacuity posing as merriment, cynicism posing as savviness, a wink and a smile covering for betrayal … these things are not funny.

Some of these issues are decades old. The reference to Boris advising his old mates on beating people up is about a scandal that occurred over ten years ago now, when Boris told his old chum Darius Guppy how he could go about beating up another man Guppy felt had double-crossed him. Ian Hislop took Johnson to task for it, when the Blonde Buffoon appeared on Have I Got News For You all that time ago. I think it was so long ago, that Angus Deayton might actually have been in the chair. Johnson also got his mistress pregnant, then forced her to have an abortion. In America, this would have effectively ended many a politicians career, as it would have over here at one time. But definitely not in today’s more liberal, and also more cynical, attitude towards sex and politics.

None of this, not even Boris’ reputation as a bumbling oaf, has ever cause the Tories any problems before. Far from it. For all his inane public persona – the apparent physical clumsiness, that has seen him amongst other things lock himself out of his house when confronting the press in the morning, the strange archaic mannerisms of speech and attitude that hark back more to the Victorian and Edwardian periods than the slick politics of today – the venality and cavalier attitude to sexual morality – have never presented any problems to the Tory party up to now. Boris was the editor of the Spectator, appeared as the good-natured butt of the joke of Have I Got News For You, and, despite having to apologise to Liverpool for something one of his columnists wrote, was genuinely popular – at least to that part of the British public that didn’t wish to peek beyond the bluff, apparently affable exterior.

In private, the man is allegedly not so affable. He’s supposed to have a vicious temper. He is also very obviously keenly ambitious. That in itself really isn’t remarkable, nor is his political rivalry with Cameron. Denis Healey has said that in politics, you have to remember that your opponents are on the opposite benches, but your enemies are in your own party. And lies and cynicism aren’t remotely confined to BoJo. They run all the way down through the Tory party, as well as the Blairite faction of Labour.

What’s really behind Parris’ attack on Boris is the fact that BoJo’s a loose cannon. The statement that about ‘policy vacuum’ looks like it really means that he won’t toe a consistent party line, and certainly not that of David Cameron. As for the cynicism, this seems to me to be motivated by BoJo throwing his lot in with the Brexit campaign, despite having said that he was against it, and for Britain remaining in Europe. The Tories are deeply divided on the issue of the European Union, and Boris is making this worse by exploiting it for his own political advantage. He wants to topple Cameron and be the next PM. And he’s ready to tear the Tory party apart if it suits him.

Which is fine by me, and a lot of people, if the infighting help to stop the Tories winning elections, and inflicting more pain and suffering on the poor and working people of this country.

Mike’s article is at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/03/27/the-tide-of-tory-thinking-turns-against-johnson/. Go and read it for his view of this latest clash of personalities.