You may well have seen the adverts telling us on TV that the laws have been changed so that photo IDs will be demanded as proof of identity before you can vote at elections. This is supposedly to prevent electoral fraud, and was introduced by the Tories on the back of similar legislation in America. That was criticised by the American Left, including The Young Turks, because the most likely sections of society not to have photographic IDs are the poor, Blacks, the young and students, precisely the sort of people that vote for the left. And one Republican politico even admitted that it was done to keep the Dems out.
The pro-democracy group, Open Britain, have issued this message to their supporters informing them that they are staring a campaign to make sure everyone is aware of the changes and has such identity documents so that they can vote.
‘Dear David,
Did you know that millions of eligible voters may be turned away from the ballot box at May’s local elections? The government rushed through new voter ID requirements ahead of this year’s May 4th local elections – and it’s going to impact you.
For the first time in England, voters will be required to present photo ID to vote—and not all photo IDs will be accepted. If you show up to the polls with an 18+ Oyster card or a student ID, for example, you may be denied your ballot, while IDs like 60+ Oyster cards will be accepted.
It doesn’t seem very fair does it?
While the Electoral Commission has launched a public awareness campaign, many fear that the new law will harm our democracy with voters unaware of the requirements. The [rushed] enactment of these restrictions is meant to target voter fraud (with very little evidence that this is an issue in the UK ) and will cost millions in taxpayer funds, while the public still faces an urgent cost-of-living crisis.
Similar laws have been enacted in the American South to suppress votes, particularly those of society’s most disadvantaged. We cannot go down this undemocratic path in the UK. Any eligible voter denied this May is unacceptable, so we must act to ensure that everyone is able to plan to vote ahead of time.
The Electoral Commission simply can’t do enough on its own, so we must take direct action to spread the word to our family, friends, and communities. The most effective thing we can do is to ask those around us if they know about the new rules, have proper ID, or if they need help applying for a Voter Authority Certificate.
Everyone deserves a fair shot at having their voices heard, and Open Britain remains committed to ensuring that this is the case. This May, you, your loved ones, or your communities could be unjustly disenfranchised, so we all need to set out a plan to vote. Open Britain has launched a Plan to Vote campaign, and the hard work begins now.
I got this email from the pro-democracy organisation, Open Britain, on the Tories’ continued campaign against democracy in our fair country. It runs
Dear David,
Over the last four years, we have witnessed a rapid reduction in the fairness and inclusivity of UK politics. Rishi Sunak seems determined to continue Boris Johnson’s all-out assault on the rights, institutions, and norms designed to hold the government to account. Academics have a term for this process: “democratic backsliding”.
It’s worth reflecting on recent years through the lens of backsliding to understand where Johnson, Truss, and Sunak are taking us – and how low we’ve already sunk. Researchers at University College London have identified the following critical elements of backsliding:
Breakdown in the norms and standards of political behaviour
Disempowerment of the legislature, the courts, and independent regulators
The reduction of civil liberties and press freedoms; and/or
Harm to the integrity of the electoral system
On the first element, it’d be nearly impossible to deny that norms and standards in UK politics have become warped beyond recognition, largely thanks to Boris Johnson.
The sheer quantity of Johnson’s absurd lies to the public. The blatant PPE contract corruption. The unlawful attempt to prorogue Parliament. The repeated partying throughout the pandemic. Truss’ appointment of Mark Fullbrook as chief of staff. Rishi Sunak’s refusal to sack Suella Braverman amid egregious security violations. Take your pick.
But norms have also been eroded at a deeper level. The government now appears comfortable with breaking international law whenever it suits their needs.
The Internal Markets Bill (2020), the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill (2022), the planned Bill of Rights Bill, and the plans to offshore asylum seekers to Rwanda all undermine the UK’s long-held reputation for upholding international agreements on human rights and trade agreements (many of which UK ministers and officials helped to draft). Our government is clearly quite comfortable ignoring its citizens and the international community. It’s safe to say that the first box on that list is checked.
On the second element, backsliding may not be as apparent, but close inspection reveals some seriously concerning changes here too.
The government has attracted robust criticism from the Hansard Society for rushing bills through Parliament and abusing the ‘statutory instruments’ mechanism to limit Parliament’s ability to scrutinise bills properly.
They have also drawn widespread criticism for taking steps that inevitably undermined the powers and independence of the Electoral Commission. Boris Johnson removed the Commission’s powers to prosecute and attempted to give a (then) Tory-dominated committee control over its operations, and a number of Conservative MPs even called for its abolition.
It’s not just the Electoral Commission either. Former Commissioner for Public Appointments Peter Riddell also accused the government of “packing” appointment panels to blatantly place political allies in the House of Lords.
On the third element,we’ve also seen that this government is willing to toss aside fundamental rights and freedoms when they become politically inconvenient. The Policing Act (2022) was a significant affront to our right to protest, including giving police the right to shut down “noisy” protests.
That is now followed by the Public Order Bill (2023), currently in the Lords, which seeks to expand these measures further, giving police the right to pre-emptively crackdown on protests before they happen and keep registers of known activists based on facial recognition data. If that’s not an infringement of civil liberties, then nothing is.
And let’s not forget Dominic Raab’s grubby plans to overturn the Human Rights Act.
We’ve also recently seen the press and the labour movement under fire from the government. Several journalists were arrested while covering climate protests last November, despite showing valid press IDs. And the government’s plans to privatise Channel 4 last year – finally abandoned under public pressure this January – and their continued hostility towards the BBC betray an instinct for threatening vital public news services when they are perceived to be getting in the way.
The Sunak government’s latest priority is to crack down on the right to strike by introducing government-set minimum service standards, once again choosing authoritarian mandates over dialogue or compromise. It’s hard to deny backsliding is also occurring in this area.
On the final element, it has been clear for some time that the integrity of the voting system used for general elections is in jeopardy. The Elections Act (2022) now requires voters to show ID at polling stations, something that creates a barrier to legitimate electors being able to exercise their democratic right to vote. Worse, the government’s choice of valid ID seems to disadvantage people from demographics less likely to vote Conservative. That bill also mandated the use of FPTP for Mayoral and Police Commissioner elections, entrenching a broken system that does not accurately reflect the true will of the electorate.
It’s clear that the UK is indeed in a phase of democratic backsliding. But that doesn’t mean we have to continue on this path.
As we move forward in 2023, OB will continue to work, alone and with partners who share our ambitions and values, to ensure UK democracy is striding forwards, not sliding backwards.
The Open Britain team
P.S. We and a number of partners in the democracy sector are working to put pressure on Labour to commit to making the changes we need to renew our political system. You can help right now by signing our joint petition here to get Keir Starmer to support proportional representation.‘
Add to this the secret courts that Dodgy Dave Cameron pushed through, in which you can be tried in secret, without you or your defence knowing the identity of your accusers and evidence withheld from you if the authorities deem it necessary for reasons of national security, and we really are heading towards what some commenters call ‘a democratic deficit’.
I didn’t realise this, but the tribune was the Roman magistrate charged with defending the rights of the plebs and the army. Hence the phrase, ‘a tribune of the people’. The late 18th century French revolutionary communist, Gracchus Babeuf, also recommended a panel of officials charged with making sure local politicos performed their duties. If they didn’t, their constituents had the right of recall and out they would go. I like this idea, and the fact that the Romans knew that you needed officials to protect democratic rights and freedoms shows, in my opinion, just how wise they were. Not wise enough not to be ruled by a bunch of raving psychopaths, but you can’t expect too much from past ages.
Boris claims to be a great admirer of ancient Rome. It’s a pity the tribunes aren’t one of them. Instead from the Tories we get a lot of bluster about democracy and free speech right when they trying to undermine all of it.
Some of the great commenters on this blog have been discussing the danger that Keir Starmer, once in power, will push through even more privatisation of the NHS like his Thatcherite predecessor, Tony Blair. In June last year, Left Horizons published an article reposted from the Skwawkbox reporting that his noxious Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, had received a £15,000 donation from a hedge fund which owns one of the giant American private healthcare firms, which is involved in the privatisation of the NHS. The article, ‘Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, takes donation from Tory donor with private health interests’, begins
‘Keir Starmer’s Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting accepted £15,000 from a donor with huge interests in privatised health care. The Electoral Commission’s register of donations shows that Streeting reported the receipt in January 2022 of the donation from John Armitage, a hedge fund founder and manager who has given over £3 million to the Tories.
Armitage, ranked number 138 on the 2021 Times ‘rich list’, is co-founder and director of the Egerton Capital hedge fund. According to the HedgeFollow site, among its almost £19bn of investments, Armitage’s fund owns shares worth almost £834m in UnitedHealth (UH), a vast US private health corporation that has spent millions lobbying US politicians for its interests. NHS campaigners told Skwawkbox that UH has played a key role in the ‘americanisation’ of the NHS that began under New Labour and continued apace under the Tories:
*the Health and Care Bill has just put into law an American scheme reducing state-funded services to profitable standards and pushing patients to pay for the rest, by rewarding providers who cut ‘unprofitable’ care (known as ACOs or ICSs) *UnitedHealth was among the companies who developed this system with New Labour. Blair advisor Simon Stevens even became UnitedHealth CEO, before being appointed by the Tories to run the NHS to push through their ‘reforms’ *UnitedHealth subsidiary Optum is ’embedded in the whole process’. Optum was accused in a 2019 Science Magazine study of racial bias in its systems that result in less money being allocated for the care of black patients. Optum responded that its systems help “clinicians provide more effective patient care every day“’
The article states that the donation has raised concerns among NHS supporters trying to protect the service’s mission to provide medical care free at the point of delivery.
It also notes that Streeting was approached for comment, but didn’t reply.
Open Britain is a pro-democracy organisation, because the democracy we’ve got is increasingly limited and under attack from the Conservatives. I got this email from them yesterday warning of another plan in Boris Johnson’s sordid pipeline to decrease it even further. Apparently he plans to strip the Electoral Commission of the power to prosecute corrupt MPs.
“We have learned today that Boris Johnson is planning to remove the Electoral Commission’s power to prosecute corrupt politicians.
If he succeeds, our elections regulator will no longer be able to hold to account those politicians found to have taken back-handers or lied to the public during election / referendum campaigns.
Removing these powers from the guardians of electoral integrity would be the most outrageous attack on democracy since the lies told by the Vote Leave campaign in 2016.
We cannot allow a Prime Minister who was carried to power by a campaign so full of lies and deceit to neuter the official body responsible for protecting us from such lies and deceit.
Our democracy can’t stand much more of this. Enough is enough.
Over the weekend, we’ll be kicking off a campaign to ensure every voter knows what this outrageous Vote Leave Government is up to.”
This is in addition to his criminal justice bill, which severely limits the right to protest and his scrapping of the fixed term parliaments act, so that he put off elections as long as he likes so that we get an indefinite Tory dictatorship. Plus the proposed constituency boundary changes, another piece of Tory gerrymandering to go with the one they put through parliament under Thatcher in the 1980s. This will result in the Tories getting a further 26 MPs, according to the information given at my local Labour party constituency meeting Thursday night.
This is also the type of legislation Burlesconi, the former Italian president, used to put through their parliament. Burlesconi was the leader of the right-wing Forza Italia party, which ruled through a coalition with the separatist Liga Nord and the ‘post-Fascist’ Alleanza Nazionale. His own media monopoly meant that Italians were fed a diet of his propaganda while it excluded those of his electoral rivals. He was also notoriously corrupt to the point that many of the bills he pushed through parliament repealed legislation he had broken so that he could avoid prosecution. It looks like Johnson, whose administration is coming under increasing criticism because of numerous breaches of proper ministerial conduct and the way commercial contracts have been given to firms run by Tory MPs and donors, is trying to do the same thing here.
British democracy is being hollowed out, reduced to a sham, a democracy in name only, in order to provide a veneer of respectability to hide the reality.
That Britain is being ruled by and for the corrupt, corporate rich.
I’m sorry for posting it, but this video by the mad right-wing YouTuber and internet radio host Alex Belfield is interesting for what it says about the murky state of certain sections of Black politics and activism in the UK. The video dates from February last year, 2020, and shows Belfield celebrating the rejection by the Electoral Commission of an application by a group of anonymous individuals wishing to found a Black Lives Matter political party. This was made five months prior to the Electoral Commission’s final decision, following the death of George Floyd. The Commission turned the application down because it was likely to mislead voters. The official BLM organisation, now the Black Liberation Movement, denied that it was associated with the applicants. The manifesto did not describe the party’s structure or organisation and the party’s application left its structure and financial organisation incomplete. The application was also made by anonymous individuals, which also raises justifiable suspicions.
The application to establish a BLM party allowed Tory backbenchers to accuse Black Lives Matter of being a party political organisation with left-wing objectives. One was the destruction of the traditional family, the other was to have the police defunded.
Belfield also notes that this comes after various individuals in America have been sent down for embezzling donations to BLM across the Pond. The UK branch have also been denounced by smirking abomination Priti Patel and Sajid Javid. They also caused riots that have left hundreds of police officers injured. Belfield states, in my view absolutely correctly, that if they were White they’d be compared to the BNP, EDL or other Fascist organisation. But they are considered acceptable to the media because they are Black. Belfield says of all this that ‘there are shenanigans afoot’ that make him very afraid.
Belfield is an arch-Tory with a very toxic political bias. He wants the NHS privatised, or at least handed over wholesale to private management despite all the evidence showing that the health service’s problems are the result of privatisation and underfunding by the Tories. He believes that Colston’s statue shouldn’t have been torn down, and condemns other moves to removes or rename other monuments and institutions with connections to the slave trade or the British Empire. He hates Sadiq Khan and has instead promoted Laurence Fox and other right-wing rivals. His videos are full of sneers and invective against ‘left-wing oyster-eating, Guardian-reading, ambivalecious Naga Manchushy types’. Because he’s in some kind of very nasty dispute with the Beeb, which he’d like to defund, and obviously hates those presenters he views as left-wing, like Naga Manchetty.
But unfortunately here has a point. I think there are some very nasty shenanigans and corruption within certain parts of Black politics. And that this is not confined to the left.
The book Back from the Brink, published a decade ago, describes how the Tory party was brought back from the edge of political extinction by David ‘Dodgy Dave’ Cameron and the mass murderer of the disabled and unemployed, Iain Duncan Smith. Apparently, it describes how the Tories tried to build up a constituency within the Black community by recruiting certain ‘community leaders. Many of these turned out to be criminals, who ended up being sent to the slammer rather than parliament.
On the other side of the political spectrum, I’ve heard of members of anarchist groups leaving the movement after they noticed members of various drug gangs appearing at meetings. I also remember how there was so much corruption in Brent and Lambeth councils in the 1980s that they were hardly out of the pages of Private Eye’s ‘Rotten Boroughs’ column. The magazine even gave Brent the nickname ‘Bent’, just as it called Merseyside ‘Murkyside’ for the same reasons. And some of the organisations involved in the corruption were Black.
Now I am certainly not claiming that corruption and embezzlement is confined to the Black community, or that it is even prevalent within it.
You can see simply by opening the papers that isn’t the case. But where there is poverty, despair and marginalisation, whatever the colour or ethnicity of the community, you will also find crime. And criminals will seek an entrance into politics for legitimation and also to allow their activities to expand and continue without interference by the law. Hence the scandals way back in the ’70s or ’80 about corruption in the Met, and allegations since then that certain coppers have been taking bribes from criminal gangs to look the other way. And an organisation like Black Lives Matter, which has received considerable amounts of money from donations and has a radical antipathy towards the police, will be an attractive target for criminals.
It must, however, be noted that the group that wanted to found the Black Lives Matter political party weren’t connected to the proper, official Black Lives Matter movement. They are also not connected to Sasha Johnson’s wretched Taking the Initiative Party.
The Groan has published a piece about Sasha Johnson’s shooting. Apparently it was when she was coming back from a party at 3 AM Sunday morning. At the moment they’re working on the assumption that she may have been shot in mistake for someone else and that her political activism was not a motive. They also urge people not to speculate about the motives for her murder.
I dare say they’re right, though hanging over their request for people to refrain from speculating is the spectre of terrible race riots if someone comes to the unfounded conclusion that the attacker was racially motivated.
But it does seem to me that if her political organisations and activism is investigated, it might turn up some very unsavoury dealings or connections.
Another article Mike put up a few days ago, which reveals very clearly the Tory contempt for people of colour, is a piece about the massively disproportionate effect the Tories’ demand for Voter identification at polling stations has had on Black people. The Tories declared a year or so ago that they were seriously concerned about voter fraud, and so rolled out schemes demanding that voters should have proof of their identities when casting their votes. There was absolutely no need for it. This kind of voter fraud is absolutely negligible. I think Mike put up the stats for it in another of his articles, and hardly anyone has been caught doing it. I think there have literally only been one or two cases. But nevertheless, the Tories decided that it was a serious problem and a threat to democracy. Critics of the scheme also warned that their plans would actually be anti-democratic, as certain groups are far less likely to possess the necessary documentation to confirm their identities. Blacks would be particularly affected, and would be turned away and prevented from exercising their legal, democratic civil rights.
This was, of course, denied by the Tories. But it’s happened. Despite Cabinet Office Minister Chloe Smith telling us all in June that ““the evidence shows there is no impact on any particular demographic group … the evidence of our pilots shows that there is no impact on any particular demographic group from this policy”, the Electoral Commission has found evidence to the contrary. Findings from the 2018 and 2019 findings in Watford and Derby, two of the pilot areas, found that there was a strong correlation between Asians from each of the city’s wards not receiving a ballot paper. The Commission also reported that polling staff were not asked to collect demographic data about the people, who didn’t come back. This was due to the practical challenges of the data collection exercise. There wasn’t enough evidence yet to come to a conclusion about the scheme in any direction, and advised against doing so. But Mike accordingly reached the following :
If the Tories had wanted to know who would be deprived of the vote, and how badly it affected particular groups, they would have carried out the research. They didn’t.
They then went on to tell falsehoods that the research had been carried out when it hadn’t and that it showed no impact on any demographic group.
You don’t lie about something like this unless you are deliberately trying to harm people from ethnic minorities.
We can only conclude that the Tory voter ID plan is intended to stop black people and those from other ethnic minorities from voting:
And includes this tweet from Labour MP Cat Smith
The Government claim plans to require ID to vote doesn’t discriminate, but there’s no data to back this up.
Voter ID requirements come straight from the US-style voter suppression play book, and must be opposed by all who value inclusive democracy.
Smith’s absolutely right. The scheme was taken over from the Republicans in America, who have used to it to suppress the votes of certain groups – those that are most likely to vote Democrat. These are the poor, students and Blacks. There have been a number of videos about this produced by The Young Turks and other left-wing or liberal internet news sites. One particularly repulsive Republican politico actually let the cat out of the bag and admitted that it really was all about preventing Blacks from voting.
Which is just more evidence of how institutionally racist the Tories are, despite ostentatiously giving cabinet seats to BAME politicians like Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak. They’re really don’t want a less racist, more inclusive or simply more democratic society.
They are actively trying to increase discrimination all while keeping it carefully hidden through specious verbiage about protecting democracy. And that’s a threat to everyone’s right to vote.
I’ve found a few more little snippets from Private Eye about how Boris is being funded by hedge funds, the financial speculators looking forward to a no deal Brexit, as they’ll clean up when the country and its businesses go bust. In their issue for 14th-27th June 2019, the Eye ran an article, ‘Backing Boris’, about how Boris’ campaign to be selected leader of the Tory party was being funded by Jon Wood, another hedge fund manager. The article, on page 7 of the magazine, ran
The launch video for Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign was full of soft “Cameroon” social messages, fretting that “too many people feel left behind” and excluded from “opportunity and success”. Odd, then, that his largest financial backer seems keener for the government to look out for the big guy.
Hedge-fund manager Jon Wood gave Johnson £25,000 in May, according to the latest register of MPs’ interests. (He had already given the former foreign secretary a £50,000 donation for “office and staffing costs” in October). His hedge fund, SRM Global, was a major investor in Northern Rock, the bank that collapsed in the financial crisis and was nationalised by the Labour government in 2008. Shareholders like Wood’s firm got nothing: the government judged it had made a bad bet.
Wood’s company argued, however, that it had a human right to compensation for its bad investment, and took the government to the high court and then to the European court of human rights. In 2012, the latter rejected the laughable claim brought by SRM Global and other investors, calling it “manifestly ill-founded and therefore inadmissible”.
The court said the government was quite right to take over the bank but not to compensate the big investors. There was “no duty owed by the State to the shareholders to protect their investments in Northern Rock”. That Johnson’s biggest backer is a man with experience of “manifestly ill-founded claims” is perhaps, er, no surprise.
The edition for the 26th July – 8th August carried another such story on page 7, ‘Fine By Them’, reporting how Johnson was being funded by a private equity boss, who had been an officer in the Vote Leave campaign. The article ran
Why should breaching electoral law stand in the way of becoming key backer to the favourite in the prime ministerial race?
Boris Johnson certainly saw no problem as he accepted £100,000 for his leadership bid, declared last week, from private equity boss Jon Moynihan. The hard Brexit-favouring businessman also happens to have been finance director of the official Vote Leave 2016 referendum campaign. That’s the same Vote Leave that was fined £61,000 by the Electoral Commission for breaching campaign spending limits by channelling large sums to young Darren Grimes’ BeLeave youth group (Eyes passim).
The 25-year-old “BeLeaver”, meanwhile, was jubilant last week after he successfully challenged his £20,000 fine from the commission, incurred for acting as a funnel for the over-spend. The judge, who upheld Grimes’ appeal said that even if the wee scamp had committed an offence, it wouldn’t have justified fining him £20,000, the maximum allowed.
While Darren basks in congratulations from Vote Leave pals, less attention has been paid to the main Vote Leave appeal against its £61,0000 fine. This appeal has been quietly dropped, with Vote Leave admitting defeat and covering the Electoral Commission’s legal costs, footing a £200,000 bill.
The Electoral Commission itself now looks embattled on all sides, with both Leavers and Remainers furious over its handling of the 2016 referendum, and with all major parties irate at past fines for election spending irregularities. Defenders of the agency argue that if it’s annoying everyone, it must be doing something right.
Our boorish, anti-democratic joke of a prime minister is being funded by financial speculators, who are determined to have Brexit, and have not been above breaking the law to make sure they get it. And they stand to make millions from the misery it will cause if their puppet, Johnson, does manage to deliver it.
Well UKIP and Farage’s equally noxious Brexit party, both stuffed with racists and bigots, have announced their candidates for the European elections. And they’ve now been joined by that other long-term fixture of the populist extreme right, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson. Robinson’s past in the EDL and the BNP mean that he’s actually forbidden by their constitution to become a member of UKIP, which is why Gerard Batten has taken him on as the party’s special adviser on Islam and prisons. Because Robinson despises Islam and has spent quite a bit of time at her majesty’s pleasure on various charges, like assault, contempt of court likely to prejudice trials, that kind of thing. As he can’t be a member of UKIP, Robinson is trying to get himself elected to the European parliament as an independent.
Last week he announced that he was planning to buy his own political battle bus, equipped with screens outside and inside, so he could bring his message of hate to the British public directly without being banned by the authorities or having his videos taken down by YouTube and the other social media companies. And he’s appealed to his followers to send him their hard-earned cash so he can buy it. On Thursday he began his campaign to become the MEP for England’s north-west region in Wythenshawe, a suburb of Manchester. He chose the place because it’s where many of the support workers for Manchester airport live. He claimed that the local people had been forgotten and betrayed at every level, and the Labour party no longer represented ‘who we are’, and called for people to stop supporting them and turn to him instead. He was introduced by Ann-Marie Waters, the struggling Fuhrerin of For Britain, another far right, Islamophobic party. For Britain’s members, according to Hope Not Hate, are former BNP and EDL storm troopers, who are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Water’s leadership.
Robinson began his campaign with a barbecue on Brownley Green, opposite the local Methodist church. And the locals really didn’t want him to turn up. He was asked not to come by the local Christian, Jewish and Muslim community leaders. Wythenshawe Community Housing Group told Robinson that the green is their land, and they were refusing him permission to use it. Madeleine Monaghan stated that the area was unsuitable for large gatherings as it was in an area of family homes, with narrow streets, children and old people. Nevertheless, Robinson ignored them and went ahead anyway.
In the event only 300 local people turned up. And the cops, who informed Robinson he may have broken electoral law. This forbids politicians from offering money or other gifts to induce people to vote for them. It’s a law which was passed in the 19th century to stamp out the corruption of 18th century politics, including the rotten and pocket boroughs controlled by a single landlord. Politicalite also issued a tweet stating that the event was hosted by the Australian News Network, aka Avi Yemini. Yemini is an unindicted Australian-Israeli war criminal. He boasts of having shot unarmed Arabs when he was a soldier in the IDF. He is also not a British national. It is also against electoral law for political parties and candidates to be sponsored by foreign individuals and organisations. As there was a complaint against UKIP for handing out free sausage rolls at one of their electoral rallies a few years ago, Robinson may well find himself up before the Electoral Commission trying to explain himself.
A vote for Robinson is a vote for Fascist thuggery, no exaggeration. He’s campaigned with the Football Lads’ Alliance, an organisation of football hooligans. And his method of dealing with his opponents on social media is to turn up mob-handed with his storm troopers at all hours of the day and night at the homes of his detractors and their families. He’s done it to the good blogger at Zelo Street, to historian and anti-racist YouTuber Mike Stuchbery, and to an unnamed blogger in Luton. In the latter case, Robinson drove all the way from his own home in Luton to the man’s parents’ home in Cumbria, arriving in the early hours of the morning.
This isn’t how proper, democratic politicians behave. It’s how the squadristi of Mussolini’s Fascists behaved in Italy, and Hitler’s Nazi thugs. It’s the tactics of the secret police of totalitarian states, like Stalin’s KGB, the Nazis’ Gestapo and Mussolini’s OVRA. Quite apart from Robinson’s own message of hatred against innocent, law-abiding Muslims, simply for being Muslims.
He is, along with Batten’s UKIP and Farage’s Brexit Party, a threat to democracy and the peace and safety of ordinary British citizens. In the event, only 300 local people actually turned up. Let’s hope the next time he invades an area looking for votes, local people also recognise him for what he is. And support British democracy by staying away or protesting against him.
Terry Davies, one of the commenters on this blog, wondered what happened to some of the corporate fat cats listed in George Monbiot’s chapter, ‘The Fat Cats Directory’ in his book Captive State. Florence, another commenter, added a few details to the subsequent roles in government of some of the corporatist politicos in her comments on my article on the corrupting influence of the supermarket chains in politics, from the same book. She wrote:
Sainsbury, an old Etonian, stopped funding the Labour party when Ed Miliband became leader, but has handsomely funded Progress, the Blairite party within the party since then. Progress supports those attacking Jeremy Corbyn and lobby against the democratically elected leader. They have placed many “true Blairite” New Labour supporters (neo libs) throughout the party. The electoral commission fined two Blairite groups in 2014 – Progress and Movement for Change – for failing to register political donations from Sainsbury who was not at the time on the UK electoral register, although the fines, totaling £11000, were small beer against Sainsbury’s donations of an average of £260,00 PER YEAR. The Progress group also declared donations from the others in the retail sector including the British Retail Consortium. None of this funding is actually available to the Labour Party.
She also cited a piece in the Guardian on how Britain’s health policy under Andrew Lansley was written with the assistance of the junk food manufacturers.
From Nov 2010 in the Guardian – “McDonalds and Pepsi Co helped write UK Health Policy”. These plus Diagio, Kellogs, and other manufacturers of junk food were at the heart of the writing of policy on obesity, alcohol and diet -related diseases, along with strong presence from the supermarkets, through the board chaired by Andrew Lansley (Con). Medical professionals were “concerned”.
So the corporatists are still there. They’ve simply jumped ship and are now subsidising and sponsoring the Tories. Or else they’re doing exactly David Sainsbury is doing, and giving money to the Blairite faction in order to turn the Labour party away from anything resembling Socialism into another clone of the Tory party.
Big corporations in parliament: your poverty and disease is their profit.
This is further to my last on the collapse of the BNP as a political party, thanks to them not actually bothering to register with the Electoral Commission. Hope Not Hate has an interesting and, in places, funny piece about how the BNP has very effectively managed to destroy itself through its leaders’ factionalism, venality, stupidity and massive incompetence. It’s at http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider/the-bnp-a-history-of-believable-incompetence-4695.
It begins
At the end of 2014 we remarked that our highlight of the year was the “total collapse of the BNP.” Nick Griffin had been booted out of the European Parliament, forced out as Chairman and then, humiliatingly, expelled from the party he had built into a once serious electoral proposition.
Between 2001 and 2009, the British National Party had an unstoppable feel about them. The party was full to burst with nazis, cranks, conspiracy theorists and even rapists and murderers. But they persisted with pushing ahead with a rebranding of an old nazi party into something that would at least look like it did not smell quite as bad as it once did.
They were picking up the odd council seat here and there, quite incredibly got a member elected onto the London Assembly in 2008, and by 2009 the party held over sixty council seats and had two MEPs. Close to one million people voted for them in the European Elections.
The BNP wanted to be seen as a serious political party; but in becoming a serious political party, Griffin had to make enemies. In November 2008 the party’s membership list was leaked by a disgruntled official. A proper party they wanted to be, but few people actually seemed to want to be on the dreaded list. Still, despite the humiliation, they forged ahead from that disaster in time to win those near one million votes. It was clear that the BNP was often its own enemy and Nick Griffin perhaps both their greatest and their worst asset.
One of the most interesting internal documents I have ever seen from the BNP was a secret letter that Griffin wrote to BNP officials after his election to Brussels in 2009- begging them to not take advantage of the European Parliament’s generosity. So aware of the likelihood of this happening was Griffin, he only entrusted party employee timesheets and expense claims to his wife Jackie (a midwife). The party’s treasurer, by all accounts a “great bloke”, was addicted to internet pornography so they had removed his office computer and given him an old ledger to work on instead.
The far right, like the far left, has a history of factionalism and in-fighting, with groups continually splitting and reforming. It’s beset with wannabe Fuehrers, Duces and Caudillos, all jockeying for power in their ambition to be the next Hitler. And their character and general behaviour is less than inspiring. I can remember way back in the early 1970s, when one of the leaders of the National Front was banged up in jail for about two weeks for stealing women’s underwear from a department store. And when they began to make electoral inroads about a decade ago, they couldn’t hold back their deep instincts to make a mess of things. Private Eye in its pages ran a number of pieces chronicling their truly impressive displays of crass ignorance and sheer inability to organise anything, or behave in anything like a reasonable or competent manner. High lights of this long career of idiocy include:
The seven BNP councillors on Tower Hamlet’s borough council not bothering to vote for a motion that the rest of the council had accepted should be put to the vote, on the grounds that they didn’t know you had to do it. As a result, the proposal failed.
A press meeting, in which various BNP members in pig masks were supposed to leap out and start slobbering over a trough to symbolise the greed of the other, mainstream parties. This also went spectacularly wrong, and thing’s didn’t quite work out.
A fight between a Labour councillor and his BNP colleague in a pub, when Dagenham and Barking council adjourned there. The Labour local politician called the stormtrooper a ‘poof’, so the squadristi responded by calling him a ‘Fascist’. Then fisticuffs broke out.
There was also much schoolboy sniggering and speculation over the sexuality of the BNP’s spokesman for the arts. He styled himself a ‘conceptual film-maker’. He was mostly known for making a art film entitled ‘HMS Venus: A Voyage into Love’ or some such, which featured naked young men frolicking in a river. This is an unusual piece, considering how totalitarian movements, like Fascism, are generally hostile to experimental art, and the far right’s own bitter homophobia.
The leak of the party’s membership lists produced yet another Downfall parody. In this one, an exasperated Hitler rants about Griffin’s incompetence.
And satire and mockery is an effective weapon against the far right. The Eye also chortled when they got hold of documents from the BNP from former members explaining why they weren’t renewing their subscriptions. One ex-member forthrightly stated it was because he was tired of the paper being a joke in Private Eye.
Well, they’ve continued being a joke, but this time, hopefully, it’ll be the democrats and anti-Fascists who have the last laugh.
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