There were reports last night of mass redundancies at the BBC newsroom. According to a story in today’s I by Adam Sherwin, ‘BBC staff in revolt as 450 news jobs are axed – but red button reprieved’, there was an angry confrontation between newsroom staff and the Beeb’s director of news and current affairs, Fran Unsworth over the proposed sackings. It was led by Victoria Derbyshire, whose award-winning show has also been axed. Here’s part of the article
Victoria Derbyshire led a furious staff revolt at the BBC yesterday after the corporation unveiled cuts to Newsnight, Radio 5Live and other news output, leading to 450 job losses.
The BBC said that presenters would be among those axed as resources are transferred from traditional broadcasting to digital platforms, in an attempt to make £80m of savings.
The number of original films produced on the flagship political programme Newsnight will be halved, with 12 staff under threat. A spokesman said that job losses at 5Live were being “driven by the changing listening habits of the audience and demand for digital content”.
There will be a review of the “the number of presenters we have and how they work” and a reduction in the number of stories covered each day, under a new centralised story commissioning structure.
The BBC is predicting 450 job losses, in addition to the 50 posts cut at the World Service before Christmas. Separately, it also suspended closure of its “red button” text service after protests that the move could adversely affect the elderly and people with disabilities.
An additional article by Sophie Morris reports that Johnson was asked yesterday whether the BBC was a ‘mortal enemy of the Conservative party or cherished British institution that will be funded by the license fee’ by the Labour MP for Weaver Vale, Mike Amesbury. Our current shambolic excuse for a prime minister replied ‘Well, Mr Speaker, I can certainly say that it is a cherished British institution and not a mortal enemy of the Conservative party.’
Yeah, I’ve heard that one before. Jeremy Hunt also said how the Tories ‘cherished’ the NHS, despite having authored a book demanding its privatisation, and as Health Secretary presiding over a process of cuts and privatisations. Sherwin’s article also quotes Amol Rajan, who seems far more closer to the mark by suggesting that the cuts are an attempt to appease the Beeb’s critics in government. They believe the corporation is outdated and may be replaced by a subscription-style streaming system. Rajan said
“The audience the BBC has in mind in making these changes isn’t just licence fee payers – it’s the inhabitants of 10 Downing Street.”
The Tories have hated the Beeb for a very long time. Some of that is ideological – they hate any kind of state industry. And some of it is very much self-interest. They resent the Beeb because it is required to be impartial, and their backers in the corporate media, like Rupert Murdoch, would like it abolished and its position as the country’s main broadcaster replaced by their own networks. A week ago Zelo Street reported that Boris’ adviser, Dominic Cummings, really did want to present the corporation as utterly biased against the Tories.
This is, of course, the complete opposite of the real truth, which is that Beeb has always been far more biased against the left, the Labour Party and the trade unions. And last month’s election campaign showed how extreme that bias was, with every opportunity taken to present Labour in an extremely bad light. In particular, the Beeb joined the rest of the lying corporate media in claiming that Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-Semite, and the entire party was seething with Jew-hatred. If the Beeb had hoped to fend off the Tories’ attack by obediently following their line on the Labour Party, they’re going to be sadly disappointed. BoJob and his polecat still want greater say over who becomes the new director-general now that Tony Hall has retired. They will want someone who is dutifully compliant with their demands. Someone who will further turn the broadcaster into their propaganda arm, while running it down prior to privatisation.
Okay, I know this is low and ad hominem, but I think we could do with a laugh after the election. I found this brief description of the plot of the 1927 film, The Wizard, in the Science Fiction Film Source Book, David Wingrove, ed., foreword by Brian W. Aldiss (Harlow: Longman 1985).
‘The misleading title aside, this is based on Gaston Leroux’s novel, Balaoo, and concerns itself with the obligatory mad scientist trying to graft human heads on to apes; to use the result to avenge himself on his enemies. Re-made in 1942 as Dr Renault’s Secret.’
A human head on an ape’s body sounds pretty much like the unfunny clown, who’s now been elected Prime Minister of the UK. But I fear describing himself as such is a slight to apes. They’re intelligent animals that are critically endangered and deserve to be left alone with their environment intact.
Boris Johnson and the other alleged humans in his party, on the other hand, deserve to be turfed out of government ASAP.
Which the American presenter pronounces as ‘Welch’ and ‘Welsh’, confusing the term for its people with the name of the country itself. But you can forgive him that because (1) he’s foreign, and (2) he loves the people of Welsh for standing up to Her Highness and telling her how it really was. And he also likes Matt Free of Channel 4 News for also asking Killary tough questions, which American pundits avoid.
As I’ve discussed in previous blog posts, Killary, who seems to think going around with a mass-murdering creature like Henry Kissinger is a badge of honour, has been going up and down on the Earth promoting her book like crazy. It’s called What Happened, and is basically her attempt to blame everyone but herself for her massive failure to win the election against a colossal moron like Donald Trump. She was Down Under a few weeks ago, giving the Aussies the benefit of her wisdom. Then she was over here, at the South Bank Centre, the Cheltenham Literary Festival and then Swansea University across the border, to receive an honorary degree. The Uni decided to grant her the honour for her work promoting women’s and children’s rights around the world. As the presenter here states, presumably they didn’t get the message that she voted for the Iraq War.
But all did not go smoothly for Kissinger’s fangirl. The students at Swansea actually booed her. And one young woman, a biochemistry student, Kirsty Lloyd, called out to her ‘Bernie would’ve won. He would’ve beaten Trump.’ Which he would have. He was in the lead against her in the polls, until she, Debbie Wasserman Schulz of the Democratic National Convention, and Donna Brasile, Clinton’s main woman in her team, managed to steal the presidential nomination from her.
Lloyd said afterwards
“Hillary Clinton cheated Bernie Sanders of his nomination. And all those drone strikes, which kill women and children are illegal contradict the reason she is being given a doctorate – which is for doing things for women and children all over the world. The main thing she’s done for women and children is kill them in drone strikes.”
And things didn’t get better when she was being interviewed by Matt Free. He reminded her that her share amongst women went down 1 per cent from 44 per cent under Obama to 43. Hillary then tried to rebut this by saying that it was only White women who became disillusioned with her. Overall she won amongst women. And she lost because gender is not yet a powerful factor in American elections as race is. The commenter on the Humanist Report states that this could only be the response of an American politician, who sees everything in terms of identity politics. He also points out that it’s also terribly insulting to Barack Obama, as it implies that he only won the election because he was Black.
Free goes on to make the point that she lost partly because of her background. She’d already been in office – sort of – as the First Lady with Bill Clinton, and so her membership of a political dynasty worked against her. And people didn’t like her as they saw her as an establishment candidate, in an age of revolution.
At which point Hillary goes off and drones on about how she led in all the debates, and was seen as the more intelligent, winning candidate. When he asks her, Clinton responds that she lost partly because of Steve Dromey and Russian ‘interference’.
The Report’s presenter again points out here how Killary has contradicted herself. She says she takes full responsibility for her failure, but then immediately blames other people. He also states that it’s great to see how people in the rest of the world don’t follow American pundits in fawning over their guests, asking easy questions. He liked the way Free made her squirm. He states that you don’t see politicians like Hillary pop up elsewhere in the world, because everywhere she’s seen as another sleazy, corrupt politician like all the others. Largely because of the dodgy dealings of the Clinton Foundation. But you do find politicians like Bernie Sanders appearing in other countries, like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain.
The presenter clearly makes some great points, though he and Free on Channel 4 could have challenged her about the so-called ‘interference’ from the Russians. They didn’t lose her the election. They were trying to interfere in the American election, but no more than they usually do. Crucially, they didn’t leak the incriminating emails to WikiLeaks. Those came from a Democratic insider disgruntled at her corruption.
As for her being the better candidate over Trump, he points out that Trump was trailing behind her and faced worse challenges than she did. In Utah a Mormon, Republican establishment candidate went independent to challenge Trump. And Trump faced another Republican challenger elsewhere, who took more votes away from him than Jill Stein did Hillary.
Hillary, her arrogance, corruption, and entitlement is responsible for her failings, not other people.
Except in one instance: the Electoral College. This swung overwhelmingly for Trump, despite the fact that Killary had three million votes more than he did at the popular level. And the College is an anti-democratic measure put into America’s bizarre and byzantine electoral system in the 19th century in order to give some political power to the southern, slave-holding states. If America was a genuine democracy, it would have vanished a long time ago. But it’s enshrined in America’s constitution, and so is preserved as part of the great wisdom of the patrician founders of the American political system. Who were all patricians with a real fear of power being grabbed by the White peasants and proles, let alone Blacks. They set up the Constitution to keep power in the hands of the monied, and so have built into the system the political paralysis that is stifling the forces for real change that America needs.
Okay, it wasn’t an outright victory for Jeremy Corbyn. But it wasn’t a defeat either.
Like many people, I was surprised and delighted by last week’s election result. I’d gone to bed early Thursday night, as I couldn’t bear to watch the election coverage. I was afraid that, despite the polls showing that Labour had cut the Tory lead down to only one per cent, there would still be a Tory landslide, or at least a workable majority.
I was, therefore, highly delighted to wake up to find that May had lost her overall majority, and was therefore looking around for anyone or anything that would shore up her government by going into coalition with her.
Unfortunately, she has found one in the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by Ian Paisley in 1986 to oppose the 1986 Anglo-Irish agreement. The DUP is socially Conservative and deeply sectarian. They back teaching Creationism in schools, denying climate change, keeping abortion banned in Ulster and violently denounce gay rights. This goes back to when Ian Paisley in the 1970s founded S.U.S. to oppose the legalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. The organisation’s name stood for ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’. This always struck me as an hysterical reaction. It’s as if he was afraid that Northern Irish people’s heterosexuality was so fragile, that the moment homosexuality was legalised every man and woman in the province would immediately turn gay. Or else he had some kind of nightmare that gays from across the world were massing at the Irish border or just across the Irish Sea, ready to charge in like an invading army.
Just as worrying is the party’s hatred of the Irish Republic and Roman Catholicism, and its links to a series of Loyalist paramilitary terrorist groups, most notably the UDA. It’s leaders have posed with Kalashnikovs in their mitts, and wearing the uniform of Loyalist terror groups. These links remain strong, despite the DUP’s official rhetoric condemning terrorism in Ulster.
In short, they’re the type of organisation, which several Protestant Ulster people I know came to Britain to get away from. Just as I know Irish Roman Catholics, who don’t want to go back to Ulster because of the same violent prejudice in their communities.
May hasn’t exactly gone into coalition with these clowns. She’s trying to hammer out a ‘supply and confidence’ agreement, in which the DUP will support the government on a bill-by-bill basis. And even that’s looking rocky, and she made the mistake of annoying her new partners in government by announcing the alliance before it was to be formally arrange on Tuesday.
May’s formation of government with these bigots is also something of a problem for many Conservative MPs. About 19, according to Mike, are openly gay, and so put in a very awkward position through this alliance with a rabidly homophobic party. Ruth Davidson, the gay head of the Conservative party, and who is going to marry an Irish Roman Catholic, has already Tweeted her displeasure. Not that this may make any difference. Despite Cameron’s attempts to make the Tories look nice and friendly to minorities – pro-gay, anti-racist, more women MPs – this alliance shows the real nature of much of the Tory party. They’re reverting to type. As for the 19 gay Tory MPs, given the entrenched hypocrisy of the Tories, where the say one thing and do another, it’s likely that they’ll swallow their principles and troop through the ‘Yes’ doors to support the government anyway.
Even with the DUP on board, the Tories only have a bare majority of two. That means that they’ll have to do as Labour did when they only had a majority of five in the mid-70s: cram every single one of their members into the chamber to support them. To the point where they sent the whips round to check no-one was in the toilets.
Far from being ‘strong and stable’, May’s position looks very, very precarious. The Bow group, a Tory think tank, are considering holding leadership elections and there are murmurings from the backbench 1922 Committee. Unfortunately for the Tories – but good for us – all the other contenders for the leadership are actually more unpopular than May. The leading figure is Boris Johnson, but while 23 per cent of people said that he was more likely to make them vote Tory, 33 per cent stated that he’d put them off.
People have started discussing the possibility that there might be another election in October. Mike has put this forward, and suggested that it could be as early as August. And May herself may not last the week.
As for Corbyn, he’s increasingly looking like a prime minister in waiting. This has been the biggest movement towards Labour for the past forty-five years. And it has roundly refuted the claims of his critics that he was ‘unelectable’. Instead, it has confirmed the worst nightmares of the neoliberal establishment – that he is only too electable. The Blairites now have absolutely no grounds for their intrigues against him. Indeed, if Corbyn can do so well despite their attempts to unseat him, it’s probably fair to say that if the Blairites had done the decent thing and supported their leader and the broad mass of the party’s members and supporters, he’d probably be in Number 10.
His success shows that a very large section of the British people are sick of austerity, sick of Thatcherism, sick of the privatisation of the NHS and private ownership of utilities, sick of exorbitant rents, the threat of homelessness, stagnant wagges and a harsh and callous attitude to the poor, the sick, disabled and the unemployed, which has seen them thrown off benefit, to die in misery and despair.
Tony Greenstein, one of the great people, who comments on Mike’s blog, has written on his own that the one thing that Corbyn should not do is water down his policies to make them more acceptable to those inclined to vote Tory. And he’s right. Not only would this leave some of the causes of Britain’s misery in place, it would weaken his own position electorally. People are heartily sick of a Labour party which does its best to emulate the Tories. This was the reason why New Labour lost five million of its supporters from 1997 to its fall, and why Ed Miliband lost the 2015 election.
Corbyn now needs to keep the pressure up – to continue his attack on the Tories. According to Survation, he’s now several points above them in the polls. Let’s hope and do what we can to maintain and increase this lead, until the government falls and we can have a real, Socialist, Labour leader in Downing Street.
For further informed comment, see the following blogs and posts:
And male feminist vlogger and general scourge of the far right, Kevin Logan, has produced this video showing precisely how deeply unpleasant the DUP are:
Mike today has put up a post citing a report that young people are far more left-wing than their elders. According to Guardian writer Alan Firth, if a third more young people vote, it would mean Labour would win handily on June 8th.
He makes the obvious point: that if you’re young and aren’t rich, you have NO future under the Tories. And if you don’t vote, you are effecting also giving your vote to them.
So register to vote.
The Tories have tried to make it more difficult, by changing the rules, but he gives the internet address which will allow you to register to vote. This is
In this clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, the host Michael Brooks urges British voters to support Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party against the Tories and their right-wing agenda. The Majority Report is an American progressive internet news programme. Brooks notes that May has called this snap election, despite lying that she wouldn’t. He also correctly says that she’s claiming its about getting enough support for her to win a strong Brexit. However, the real reason is that the Tories are decimating Labour in the polls. In Brooks’ opinion, this isn’t because Corbyn lacks a strong left-wing programme, but because of strategic mistakes by his campaign team and his own failures in trying to get his points across.
However, Brooks also says that in this speech in the House of Commons, Corbyn is precisely right. He plays a clip showing Jeremy Corbyn attacking the Tories for standing for the rich few against the many poor, for their massive mishandling of the economy, their deliberate incompetence in running down the NHS, and for creating a situation where millions are struggling to make ends meet. The Labour leader sums up their attitude, spearing May’s pretensions to be a strong leader: ‘They are strong against the weak, and weak against the strong’.
Brooks states that’s exactly right, and also mocks May’s wails that she’s ‘strong’, and her bizarre laugh. He also states that Brits should go in for damage limitation and vote Labour, as the Tories will bring in an even harsher austerity regime, which will leave millions much poorer, all for the benefit of the rich corporations. Just as the right has done over in his homeland, America. He also recommends that people in marginal constituencies should vote Green, SNP or Liberal to stop the Tories.
He’s right about Jeremy Corbyn’s analysis of the Tories’ attitude to the poor. They are bullies, who fear and hate the weak and vulnerable, and wish to create an impoverished working and lower middle class, who will be desperate to accept any kind of work, no matter how exploitative, from their lords and masters.
I don’t agree, however, with his analysis of Corbyn’s leadership. It has not been for want of trying that Corbyn trails in the polls. He has been consistently undermined and attacked by the Blairites in Labour, and the press. Corbyn has and is campaigning much harder than May, but you won’t know about this, because the press and the biased BBC won’t report it. Similarly, you won’t hear much about his policies either, in the same way that Tony Benn’s and Ken Livingstone’s policies weren’t properly reported in the 1980s. The press than simply attacked them as dangerous Commies from the ‘loony left’, despite the fact that both were highly rational men, who very carefully considered their policies. And unfortunately it was effective. One of the books I bought on media bias begins with the description from one woman how she was told by a friend that she wouldn’t vote for Tony Benn. This was despite the fact that she shared all of Benn’s beliefs, including getting British troops out of Northern Ireland. When the lady pointed this out, and asked her friend why she wasn’t voting for him after all this, the woman replied that it was because Benn ‘was mad’. The press said so, so it has to be correct.
The press lies, and the campaign against fake news is simply the mainstream press trying to stop their competitors in the new media from spoiling their lies by telling the truth.
Brooks is also wrong when he advises people to vote Lib Dem, SNP and Green in marginal constituencies. I don’t think the Greens are strong enough electorally to be able to get an MP into parliament, even with tactical Labour votes. As for the Lib Dems, I’ve seen no indication that, if people vote for them, they won’t do what they did last time and immediately jump in bed with the Tories. I also very strongly believe that if people return to voting Labour in Scotland, not only will it strengthen the left throughout the UK, it’ll also drive the Tories finally out of Scotland completely.
Mike’s also put up another piece commenting on an article in today’s Torygraph by Kate McCann. This reports the claim by the Tory MP, Andrew Bridgen, that he was approached by three Labour MPs, who support his demand for a snap general election. They hope that Labour will lose the election, and this will give them they excuse they need to oust Corbyn as leader. Mike reports that none of the MPs are named, so the article could well be the product of McCann’s fevered imagination. As for Bridgen, Mike’s article has a picture of him, which was clearly taken at some posh function. It shows him in a dinner suit with another, similarly dressed young man in the background, standing in the kind of pose politicians adopt when they’re trying to be a Churchillian ‘man of destiny’. It’s the kind of posture Jim Hacker used to adopt in Yes, Minister, when he was consciously trying to be a statesman of similar Churchillian proportions. It looks pompous, and Bridgen himself appears in the photo to be, er, ‘tired and emotional’, as Private Eye put it to avoid libel suits.
Mike states
The possibility that any Labour MP would stoop so low as to try to sabotage their own party – and doom the UK to another five long years under Conservative rule – to rid themselves of a leader who stands for Labour values is nothing short of an abomination.
Perhaps it would be best to try to kill it before it can be put into operation.
If you have a Labour MP, please contact them (preferably by Twitter so their answers are public) and ask if they would rather have Labour “wiped out” in an election than accept him as democratically-elected leader.
The rest of the article also claims that around 6,000 Labour party members have been reported to the NEC for on-line abuse, anti-Semitism and supporting other political parties. This quotes an unnamed ‘senior source’, claiming that the party is no longer safe for women or Jews. Mike notes that the source isn’t named, and the official investigation concluded that the Labour party was no better or worse in that regard than the Tories or even, for that matter, the Torygraph. He also makes the very good point that the article does not say from which section of the party these 6,000 come from. If they even exist. As the Eye might say, ‘Perhaps we should be told!’
This clearly comes after three Lambeth councillors were caught in the week writing emails to Tories and Lib Dems, trying to get them to join the party to oust Corbyn. This gives Bridgen’s claim some verisimilitude. Or it could simply be that it supplied the basis for a deliberately destabilising lie. This is, after all, the Torygraph, the newspaper that told its Tory readers to join the Labour party and vote for Corbyn, in order to render the party unelectable. Now they’re claiming that unnamed Labour MPs are approaching
Tories to make the party unelectable, and so oust Corbyn. There’s a variation on a theme here.
As for the anti-Semitism claims, so many of them have been made against Jews and avowed anti-racists – Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Red Ken Livingstone, Rachel Nesbitt, to name only a few, that many of them lack any validity. It’s just the boy crying ‘wolf!’ by the Israel lobby, in order to smear and destroy its opponents. Israel’s founders, Chaim Herzog, David Ben Gurion and others had absolute contempt for the Jews, who preferred to stay in their traditional European homelands, and adopt a highly racist policy of segregation against the Mizrahim, Arab Jews. They were European cultural supremacists, who were afraid that their superior western culture would be diluted by contact with these culturally inferior orientals. And so Arab Jews were kept away from European Jews, given the lowest, worst jobs. And there’s also a scandal currently unfolding in Israel about the theft of Mizrahi babies after Israel’s establishment, who were given to childless European Jewish couples to raise, in order to make sure the children had the approved cultural upbringing. As Counterpunch pointed out, this is exactly what was done to indigenous children in America, Canada and Australia. It was also done to the children of political prisoners during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, and to the Poles by the Nazis. The Israel lobby has absolutely no business accusing anyone of racism.
More of the sheer malice the Tories have towards the poor and needy. Mike has this report from the Independent on the way the DWP is continuing to charge premium rates of 45p per minute for mobiles, 12p per minute for landlines, on its helplines. With the long delays claimants can suffer when trying to telephone the Department for help, this means that, according to the head of the foodbank charity, the Trussell Trust, David McAuley, many claimants will be forced with a stark choice between eating and sorting out their claim. See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/19/how-much-dwps-helpline-will-break-the-bank-for-benefit-claimants/.
One of Mike’s comments, Spamlet, has pointed out that this violates equalities legislation as many claimants are disabled. He also has personal experience of being hit with an enormous phone bill for an afternoon’s call to the DWP. He writes
Under the Equality Act, the DWP is required to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ not to discriminate against disabled people. A large proportion of those forced to use this service will be disabled people. It is not reasonable to force them to use food money waiting for hours in the hope that they might eventually get through! I once had a £17 phone bill for one afternoon calling help lines, just trying to find the right person to complain to about lack of service.
This is more of the ‘less elibility’ Maggie hailed as one of her ‘Victorian virtues’: you make welfare and poor relief so tough that it deters all but the most desperate to take it. Mind you, the Tories aren’t the only people, who’ve done this trick with expensive phone lines. In the 1990s, the permatanned talk show, Robert Kilroy-Silk got into Private Eye for the exorbitant rates calls to his programmes charged when they decided to make an edition on homelessness. The Eye reasonably thundered against this, asking rhetorically home many homeless people could afford the charge. Now the Tories are trying the same stunt. It could even be cooked up by the same people, given the way BBC news personnel seem to shunt back and forth between the Conservative party and our supposedly impartial broadcaster.
Silk vanished from the public eye after becoming involved with anti-European Union, anti-immigrant politics. He first joined UKIP, then left and formed Veritas with Joan Collins. His career finally imploded after he went on a long rant against the Arabs in his newspaper column. One of the least offensive things he said there was that they hadn’t done anything constructive since the 12th century. This was about the same time the public was treated to the spectacle of him campaigning for UKIP. He was shown on live television asking a Frenchman working in this country why he didn’t go home tomorrow, and have ordure poured over him by Muslims. This was one violent attack in Britain by members of that faith that people of all faiths and none supported as a moral act.
Silk, fortunately, is gone, but less happily the Tories remain.
As you probably noticed, I had a short break from blogging over the past few days. The reason’s simple: the Tory victory left me so bitterly angry and depressed, that quite simply I couldn’t face writing about it. And I was afraid that if I did try to put fingers to keyboard, anything I did write would simply be an angry stream of coarse invective and obscenity against an obscene, exploitative and murderous government that had been returned yet again by a majority of the people of England and Wales.
Bristol was one of the places where the Labour candidates won. It’s a local victory, that has led to three new Labour MPs, all women entering parliament. But this seemed to be little comfort to the broader political picture. There were a few further, minor compensations in that the Lib Dems saw themselves virtually wiped out, reduced to about eight MPs, while the Fuhrage over in Thanet signally failed to get elected.
I was up visiting friends in Cheltenham Friday as the news of the Tories’ victory began to sink in. One of them showed me the tweets he was getting over the mobile from others, equally disgusted with the decision of the British electorate. Many of them were of the type asking if they should now go to Canada, or New Zealand, or Norway and Denmark – anywhere, in short, where the political elites still had some respect for the people in whose name they govern, and have humane, sensible welfare policies and are dead set on dismantling their state health service for personal profit and that of the multinationals.
One person on Twitter simply said that it was the English voting once again out of spite and cruelty towards the poor and unemployed. Another wrote simply ‘England – Burn it down’.
I talked to one of the local small businessmen, who was also depressed and disgusted at the Tory victory. He stated that in the coming years, he’d probably stop giving to overseas aid charities, because there would be real poverty and starvation here in Britain, which equally deserved his money and attention.
It was an opinion shared by one of my friends, who took immediate action. He went out and spent a tenner of his benefit money on food to give to the local food bank, ready for the next influx of the poor and genuinely starving, thrown off benefit to save corporate vultures like Murdoch, Rothermere, Lebedev and the Barclay twins from the indignity of having to pay tax like the ‘little people’.
The Tories definitely will not have it their own way over the next few years. They’ve got a wafer thin majority of about three or five. That’s about the same as Labour had during their minority government in the mid-1970s. My friend pointed out that there are about 23 – 30 bye-elections every parliamentary turn, so this majority could easily vanish. It won’t be easy. Things certainly will get harder, much harder, for the poor, the sick, disabled and unemployed. But he felt that it would prevent them from doing the really horrific stuff, like selling off the health service.
Let’s hope so. In the meantime, let’s keep the pressure up every step of the way. It’s been pointed out that the Tories owe their victory to only 20 per cent of the vote. Which is an argument for proportional representation. We need to fight them constantly if we are ever to keep them from destroying any more lives, and preserve anything of the welfare state.
I haven’t really been following the news about the election all that closely, as watching too much Cameron and Clegg tends to annoy me, as does the attitude of some of the BBC journos towards Miliband. There was a fine example of this yesterday, when one of the BBC’s journos on the 6 O’clock news interviewed Ed Miliband. He tried to challenge Miliband’s ability to govern by questioning him whether he had run, or worked in, a profit-making organisation.
This line was more or less a straight lift from the Republican rhetoric against Obama. They denounced Obama as unfit for government, as he had never run a business, and had only been a ‘community organisers’. Which shows you how far down in the order of priorities they give working to improve the community and conditions for the less well-off, compared to making a profit.
Miliband tried pointing out that you didn’t need to work in business, to know how to run the economy or know what conditions businesses need to grow.
The incident just shows how far the journalists take their cues from the Republicans across the Atlantic, whenever a politician even slightly left of raging Neo-Liberal raises their head.
But if they thought it was a good question to ask Miliband, it’s a pity they didn’t ask the Tories or Lib Dems, as the same question can be equally asked of them. Like the chancellor, George Osborne. His only real job has been as a towel-folder for Harrods. What does he actually know about running, or even starting up a business.
It’s the same with David Cameron. Cameron’s another aristo, whose position and fortune comes from inherited wealth. He was actually asked by the royal family if he’d like to work for them. He certainly has not worked hard to set up his own business, nor had to worry about its failure, or whether it will make enough money to support himself and his family. Most businesses fail within their first year. Cameron has never faced that prospect, nor the danger of having to declare bankruptcy, lose his home and business, and start signing on at the dole queue.
Which is another issue. Johnny Void has pointed out that the politicians never address the unemployed themselves. They make claims that they will raise employment, but never directly address them, their issues and concerns. Labour in their manifesto says they will make some reforms to benefit them. The Tories and Lib Dems don’t say anything about them at all.
Their silence speaks volumes. To give Andrew Marr due credit, he did ask Cameron if he knew how hard his policies were hitting ordinary people, and was finally rewarded by Cameron claiming that he thought it entirely right that people should be punished with sanctions if the didn’t comply with the DWP’s requirements.
Which showed he doesn’t care two hoots about people like David Clapson and the many others his reforms have killed.
But so far, I have not seen one journalist ask the politicos whether they themselves have ever had to sign on. It’s important. If Miliband can be challenged over his suitability for office on the grounds of an apparent lack of experience running a business, then Cameron, Clegg and the other ConDems should also be challenged about their ability to legislate for the poor, when they have no experience of poverty, and none of unemployment.
When was the last time Osborne, Cameron, Clegg, RTU or McVile signed on? Have they ever had to go through the humiliating chore of sending out application after application, and having to show they’ve done so to their ‘work coach’ or the clerk in the Jobcentre. Have they ever been threatened with sanctions, and faced with the prospect of going without food, or electricity, because they don’t have the wherewithal to pay?
Of course not. They have never had to suffer such indignities. And when asked to try to live like the unemployed, as IDS has been, they shrug it off as a ‘publicity stunt’. They know they can’t, but definitely don’t want to show it. They see themselves as the nation’s rightful leaders, with some kind of eugenically determined right to govern us, because of their position as aristocrats, or captains of industry. This makes them automatically fit to govern. The rest of us, those who have to struggle to make our daily bread, are just there to take our orders.
And we shouldn’t have the cheek to ask them how much they know, and by what knowledge or experience, they have the right to rule us.
Simply asking that question is seen as immensely impertinent. When Paxo asked Cameron this question, it reduced him, ion the word of Private Eye, ‘to silent, puce fury’. It was like his fag at Eton talking back.
They need to be asked those questions, however. And it’s a profound failing of the media that, with few exceptions, they aren’t.
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