‘I’ Report on Petition to End MPs’ Free Meals

Yesterday I put up a YouTube video by Carl Vernon, in which he criticised MPs for voting against free school meals for children while having their own meals subsidised in parliament’s restaurants. It seems that he wasn’t the only person incensed at this hypocrisy. Others are too. One of them, Portia Lawrie, has organised a petition calling for the subsidised meals to end. And nearly 900,000 people have signed it.

Yesterday’s I for 26th October 2020 carried an article about it by Sam Hall, entitled ‘Petition calls for end to MPs ‘free lunches”. This runs

More than 865,000 people have signed a petition demanding an end to “subsidized” meals for MPs after Parliament voted against extending free school meals for underprivileged children.

MPs are currently allowed to eat and drink in restaurants and bars on the parliamentary estate which, while not directly subsidized, run at a loss.

This means that public money is effectively spent subsidizing the overall catering operation.

The petition, started by Portia Lawrie, stated: “MPs have voted against extending free school meals into the holidays for the poorest children in teh UK in the middle of a pandemic.

“They should under no circumstances benefit from free subsidized meals out of public funds themselves.”

The public are furious, and the longer Johnson and his gang of crooks and murders continue to deny hungry children free meals, that anger will only increase. If the Tories aren’t careful, this could become another expenses scandal. That, however, affected all MPs.

This will just affect the Tories. No wonder they’re trying to deflect blame and criticism with mendacious accusations of abuse and racism.

The Tory Attitude to Mass Starvation: Let Them Eat Cake

Mike’s put up this evening on his blog a piece wondering if the reason the Tories launched their ‘Help Out To Eat Out’ scheme to encourage people to start going out to restaurants again wasn’t because they wanted to restart the economy, but simply stuff their faces at public expense. He’s put up a couple of pieces about the Tory MPs Nadhim Zahawi and the abomination formerly in charge of the NHS, Jeremy Hunt, both talking about how they used to scheme to get a free lunch. There’s a meme about Zahawi stating just how much he’s raked in on expenses and for working for an oil company, in addition to his generous salary as an MP. But he doesn’t feel that such largesse should be awarded to the disabled, and voted for a £30 cut in their benefits.

Mike’s blogged about this issue before. The scheme was never going to tackle the real problem of starvation, or ‘food poverty’ in this country, because the people afflicted by it can’t afford to go to restaurants. Many of them can’t afford to buy food, which is why there’s been such a massive expansion in food banks.

But the middle classes, and the rich Tories who represent them, can.

This all reminds of the expenses scandal back in 2004, when large sections of parliament were caught claiming as much as they could get their hands on in expenses, far beyond what was being awarded in pay for the rest of us mere mortals. They had also voted to cut the salaries of their staff. That blew up in their faces when it was exposed by the Torygraph, which may well have been the last time that wretched newspaper ever did anything right.

And now they’re doing it again while millions starve.

It all reminds me of the famous reply Marie Antoinette supposedly gave to the news that the French peasantry were starving because they had no bread.

‘Well, let them eat cake’.

That’s come to symbolise the grotesque self-indulgence and absolute complacency of the French aristocracy, an attitude that led to the Revolution, the execution of the monarchy and the mass murder of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety.

This seems to be the modern, Tory British version. People don’t have food on the table, but blow them! Let them go to a restaurant instead, like the Tories and their rich friends from the Bullingdon Club and other centres of the self-indulgent, callous rich.

Was ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ really meant to help super-rich Tories get cheap meals at the taxpayer’s expense?

Private Eye: Despite Denials, Dawn Butler Did Conspire Against Corbyn

This fortnight’s Private Eye for 7th – 20th February 2020 has a piece about Dawn Butler, the Shadow Equalities Minister, who is one of the candidates for the Labour Party deputy leadership. Butler has been claiming very loudly that she never took part in any coup to unseat Jeremy Corbyn, in a bid to gain support from the party’s left. Or rather, to old Labour types like myself, the real Labour centre and mainstream. However, Private Eye has contradicted this and said that it simply isn’t true. The article on page 9 runs

Labour politicians who thought they had seen it all have been left gasping in goggle-eyed astonishment at the shameless brass neck of “Red” Dawn Butler. She is prepared to say or do anything in her quest for party’s deputy leadership.

Butler has decided the route to victory lies in feeding the belief of left-wing members that Corbyn would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling MPs. “We have some real selfish MPs,” she said as she outlined her plan colleagues’ treachery at the deputy leadership hustings at the end of January. After “Jeremy” was elected as leader, they thought it was OK to “join a coup” and deselect him. They “lost us” the 2017 election.

Butler’s own loyalty stood in stark contrast to their backstabbing. “I supported Jeremy the first time and I supported him the second time but I was more angry the second time because it should never have happened.”

The Eye apologises for baffling readers with the arcane jargon of academia, but Butler was talking what political scientists call “total bollocks”. As a matter of record, leading the MPs who resigned from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet was the “False” Dawn herself. Her colleagues have also noted the effectiveness of Butler’s fight against what she described in the Mirror on 24 January as the “disgrace” of poverty in “one of the wealthiest countries in the world.”

She almost certainly has no intention of allowing poverty to disgrace her. The expenses scandal revealed that, even though she was a London MP and did not appear to need a publicly funded second home, she still had one house in Wembley and another in Stratford, and claimed for a jacuzzi-style bath to be fitted. “Labour must put aspiration at the heart of the class struggle,” Butler told the Mirror. This contest is revealing that nothing is closer to Butler’s heart than her aspirations for herself.

Now I assume this is all correct, but it should be noted that over the past five years or so that Corbyn has been head of the party, Private Eye has been consistently attacking him. He’s head of the Labour Party, so it’s natural that the magazine would attack him simply as a matter of course, same as it would the other political leaders. However, part of the Eye’s campaign against him was pushing the anti-Semitism smears against both himself and his supporters. The Eye was founded by former public schoolboys, and is still very much establishment. Possibly far more so now than when it started out, as it did initially support the Labour party. Or at least right up until the time the Tories fell and they entered government. The Eye showed that it feared and hated Corbyn as someone who took socialism and working class aspirations and needs seriously, as well as his internationalism and very open support for the Palestinians. This means that it will definitely have a bias against Butler, at least now that she is positioning herself as from the Party’s Left. Butler also has a point that part of the reason Corbyn never succeeded in taking Number 10 was because he was always being undermined by plotting and intrigue from the Blairite right, even if she was a part of it at the time.

I’ve posted up a piece already, split into two parts, criticising her plans for Black and Asian only shortlists and her determination to fight misogyny. Praiseworthy as these ideals are, in the current political climate there are real questions and drawbacks to both. If they aren’t carefully handled, they could increase and create new forms of racism and sexism, rather than combat them.

I therefore leave it up to the reader to decide for him- or herself whether Private Eye is right about her, and whether they are publishing this as a genuine exposure of her mendacity, duplicity and greed. Or whether they’re simply doing it because they want to discredit her as someone now claiming to represent the Labour left.

 

Internet Petition to Revoke Charitable Status of Zionist Front Group Campaign Against Anti-Semitism

Mike put up a piece yesterday explaining how he had been suspended by the national Labour party because of libels spread by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism that he was an anti-Semite. These libels were repeated by the local Welsh press and then echoed by the local Conservative MP. As I’ve blogged many times before, Mike is very definitely not anti-Semitic in the slightest. He has friends of different races, and does not judge people on their ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

He is proud to have been invited by one of his female friends to be a reader in a performance for Holocaust Memorial Day when he was at College. I remember his obvious pride in telling me how the girl, who was Jewish, told him that his performance reading some of the names of those butchered by the Nazis had left her profoundly moved.

Mike’s crime is simply that he stood up for the very many other decent, anti-racist women and men, who have been falsely defamed as anti-Semites, simply because they have criticised the state of Israel for its discrimination and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. Those smeared have, as I have said, included both gentiles and Jews, many of whom have suffered abuse and violence themselves because of their Jewish heritage or, if they are non-Jews, because of their friendship and solidarity with Jews.

In his article Mike linked to a petition on Change.org by Tony Greenstein. This is to get the Charity Commission to deregister the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism because it does not do what it claims to. The organisation isn’t interested in genuinely defending Jewish people against prejudice and discrimination. Instead it is a Zionist front organisation, which exists solely to exploit the Jewish people’s history of persecution as a weapon to smear Israel’s critics. Mr Greenstein’s explanation of his petition runs:

The so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is a McCarthyite Zionist propaganda organisation whose aim is to smear and libel opponents of Israel’s apartheid regime.

Ever since its formation during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, when over 2,000 Palestinians, including 551 children were murdered by Israeli missile attacks and shelling of civilian areas, it has sought to tarnish supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists with the label ‘anti-Semitism’.

The fact that the CAA is officially a registered charity is outrageous. It provides no Public Benefit, the test of any charity nor are its activities remotely charitable. It is a nakedly right-wing political Zionist organisation.

Last Friday it attacked a member of Hove Labour Party and a Momentum supporter Rebecca Massey. She has since received death threats. Yesterday it smeared the veteran Israeli Jewish anti-Zionist Emeritus 80 year old Professor Moshe Machover as ‘anti-Semitic’. With its attack on Machover, the CAA has reached a new low.

A cursory search of its archives reveals almost nothing on fascist groups, who are anti-Semitic holocaust deniers. There are however 21 entries for Jewish Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, who supports the Palestinians, 70 entries for Jeremy Corbyn and 29 for Shami Chakrabarti – all of them hostile. There were 8 for Theresa May, but only to congratulate her!

The CAA’s purpose is to limit freedom of speech by attacking as ‘anti-Semitic’ opponents of the Israeli state. Please support this petition.

I’ve signed the petition, stating that I have done so because of its libels against Mike and other decent, anti-racist people.

And the other people mentioned in Mr Greenstein’s introduction, who have also been falsely smeared as anti-Semites, certainly shows the malign nature of this organisation. I think Gerald Kaufman was one of those MPs, who were caught fiddling their expenses a few years ago. However, I have never seen anything to doubt his integrity as a genuine voice for peace and justice in the Middle East, to which he has been a frequent visitor.

Like Gerald Kaufman, Jeremy Corbyn has also been smeared because he too supports the Palestinians.

As for accusing Shami Chakrabarti, the civil liberties campaigner, this shows how deeply politicised the organisation is. The very accusation is farcical.

I am also horrified and revolted that they have smeared the Hove Labour party member, and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn Rebecca Massey, and that the lady has received death threats as a result.

Just as I am by their smear of Prof. emeritus Moshe Machover. Professor Machover has been referenced several times by organisations campaigning against the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I believe I have seen him mentioned several times in articles in Counterpunch. The fact that they have so smeared such a distinguished scholar, not sparing his years, tellingly shows how utterly bereft of genuine integrity these people have.

They are moral pygmies trying to support a brutal, racist regime through libels and intimidation against people who are their moral superiors in every way. The fact that they can only use libels also shows that they have no real arguments to support them, and can only attack their critics using twisted lies.

There has been a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in recent years, just as there has been an increase in racism generally. But these people are not interested in
combating genuine abuse and violence, and their failure to do so gives the lie to their claim that they are.

It’s high time this bullying stopped, and the organisation was brought to account for its foul smears.

If you would like to sign the petition, it’s at https://www.change.org/p/the-charity-commission-to-get-the-charity-commission-to-deregister-the-zionist-campaign-against-anti-semitism?utm_source=embedded_petition_view

Or you can go to Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/06/no-council-seat-for-vox-political-writer-because-of-politically-motivated-interference/ and use the link there.

Vox Political on Jess Phillips Offer of Drinks to Anti-Corbynites

Mike over at Vox Political has also put up a story reporting Jess Phillips offer on Twitter to buy people a drink if they vote against Corbyn. This is illegal under British electoral law, which states that you cannot offer someone food, drink or entertainment to influence how they vote. Mike states that he’s aware some people will say it’s just a joke, but it won’t be, if she goes ahead with her promise. And so it’s best to nip this in the bud now.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/07/21/anti-corbyn-labour-mp-offers-to-commit-electoral-offence-in-return-for-a-vote-against-him/

I think she’s probably joking, but it is an offence, and similar gestures have brought down Labour politicians before. In an election in Glasgow, one of the Labour party candidates was a Muslim. When his opponent withdrew, the remaining candidate went round to his former rival to thank him for his action by giving him a sum of money. This is expressly against British anti-corruption rules, and the winning candidate was duly punished. The man probably didn’t believe he was acting corruptly, as this is a common practice in at least some Muslim cultures. Gerald Kaufman, the Labour MP, who was sent down for fiddling his expenses, complained about the gentleman’s punishment, saying that he was being punished for being a Muslim. He wasn’t. He was being punished for contravening British electoral law. And Phillips should be similarly reprimanded here.

Danielle La Verite on George Osborne

In this video, Danielle La Verite asks some real posers about the chancellor. She points out what so many other people have noticed, that his real name’s Gideon Oliver, and he’s a baron. He also can’t do maths. This was very obviously when a child asked him what 7 x 8 was, and he ducked the questioned. He does indeed have a good degree, but it’s in history, not economics. So she asks the further question about how it is that this incompetent now occupies the position of chancellor. Is it because he’s a member of the Bilderberg group, and is great mates with Nathan Rothschild? She also talks about how he was also caught fiddling his expenses for the trivial amount of £47, how he flipped his house to make savings on the mortgage at the taxpayers expense. She also raises the issue of his connection to the dominatrix, Miss Whiplash, and asks what he’s done to get her to remain silent. And she fiercely criticises him for the extreme poverty he’s inflicted on Britain’s working classes. At one point she asks if he called one of his children ‘Liberty’ as a joke, because pretty soon that girl would be the only one in Britain with any freedom.

Caution: As I said before, La Verite’s language is extremely strong, so please be advised.

Vox Political: Cameron Rejects Labour’s Anti-Corruption Measures

Mike over at Vox Political reports that Ed Miliband is placing a ban on Labour MPs and parliamentary candidates from holding directorships. This is in order to improve the parliamentary standards and public’s estimation of MPs after recent lobbying scandals, including that which has just broken out over Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw. They are also considering legislation to cap the amount of money MPs may earn from second jobs.

The article is entitled Cameron cold-shoulders calls to limit commercial corruption of MPs and begins

The Labour Party is banning its MPs from holding paid directorships and consultancies, to ensure that their only interest is their duty to their constituents.

Labour MPs and Prospective Parliamentary Candidates have been put on notice that, from the coming General Election, the party’s standing orders will be changed to prevent them holding such second jobs.

The measure, which Ed Miliband has confirmed will be included in the party’s manifesto, would ensure no Labour MP holds a paid directorship or consultancy.

Labour is also consulting on legislative measures including placing a strict cap – similar to one that exists for members of the US Congress – on any additional money they can earn beyond their salary as representatives of the people.

Mr Miliband’s actions follow a series of allegations over recent years, about how MPs from both sides of the House of Commons have risked a conflict of interest by seeking or taking paid work from outside organisations.

Most recently, former Foreign Secretaries Jack Straw (Labour) and Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Conservative) were secretly filmed apparently offering their services to a private company for cash.

He also reports that Ed Miliband has written to Cameron outlining Labour’s views on these issues. Cameron’s response to the scandal has simply been to remove the party whip from Rifkind.

He has also moaned about how Labour would allow trade unionists to be MPs, but not shopkeepers. As Mike points out, this is gross distortion what the legislation is about. In fact, as Mike says, Cameron approves of MPs having second jobs.

The article’s at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/02/23/cameron-cold-shoulders-calls-to-limit-commercial-corruption-of-mps/.

Cameron’s comment about trade unions was almost predictable. It is the standard Tory response whenever anyone has raised the issue of excessive corporate power and influence in parliament. But the Labour party was set up by and with the trade unions to represent the interests of working people.

The Tories, on the contrary, seem to see a parliamentary career as an opportunity to enrich themselves and their companies as the expensive of the state and the working class, the poor and the unemployed.

Public opinion of MPs reached a nadir under Gordon Brown with the expenses scandal. Cameron must be aware how badly MPs reputations and that of parliament itself has been damaged by lobbying scandals. Yet Tory greed and opportunism prevents him from doing anything to correct it.

Ed Miliband should be celebrated for taking such a bold and necessary step.

And for Cameron? He should be kicked out of power as venal and irresponsible as quickly as possible.

The Russian Revolutionaries on the Democratic Right to Recall Politicians

Russian Revolutionary poster showing the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!’

One of the promises the Tories and Tory Democrats have also gone back on was that they would give people the right to have their MP suspended or dismissed if they were guilty of misconduct. The promise was made during the expenses scandal, and was obviously far too radical for the Coalition. In the words of Sir Humphrey in BBC’s political comedy, Yes Minister, it was very ‘courageous’. This meant that it might lose them the next election. After all, what would happen if even more Tory or Liberal MPs were caught fiddling their expenses or some other, worse activity, like sexual assault? And so it was announced the other week that the policy had been dropped.

The Russian revolutionaries also initially demanded the right to recall unsatisfactory delegates to their national assembly. On the 7th December the All-Russian Executive Committee of Soviets issued the following resolution, stating clearly their demands for such a right:

However a body of elected representatives may be constituted, it can only be considered truly democratic and representative of the will of the people when the right of the voters to recall their representatives is recognised and implemented. This founding precept of democracy applies to the Constituent Assembly as to all other representative bodies … The Congress of the Councils of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ delegates, which is constituted on the basis of parity, has the right to call for new elections to all bodies representative of citizens, peasants or any other groups, and this includes the Constituent Assembly. At the request of more than half the electors in the constituency in questions, the Councils must order new elections.

Karl Kautsky: ‘Dictatorship and Democracy’, in Patrick Goode, ed. and trans. Karl Kautsky: Selected Political Writings (London: Macmillan 1983) 124.

at the time the All-Russian Executive Committee of Soviets issued the demand, Russia was still in a state of turmoil. The Bolsheviks hadn’t yet seized power, although the Tsar had been overthrown. There were thus demands for the formation of a constituent assembly to decide the constitution and political form of the new Russia. In the event, this demand was also much too radical for the Bolsheviks. The provisional government and its elected ministers were overthrown, and the Bolsheviks installed as the only permitted political party. Nevertheless, the idea that citizens should have the right to recall their political representatives would be a powerful democratic right.

It will not, of course, ever be implemented in Britain, and especially not by the Tories or Tory Democrats. As has been shown by the government’s attitude to parliament, where demands for a cumulative impact assessment in to the terrible effect the government’s cuts to disability benefit was having on disable people and their careers, and Ian Duncan Smith’s refusal to explain his department’s conduct and policies before the Work and Pensions Committee, Cameron and the rest do not see themselves as responsible to the honourable gentlemen and ladies of parliament, let alone the British electorate. Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and IDS are all aristos who assume, they have a natural right to govern. They need to be shown that they do not, and that they are responsible to the people.

Nixon’s Political Heirs: Convicted Tory Peer Now Campaigns for Prison Reform

I just heard this little bit on the One Show, and it seemed a very telling sign of the post-Nixon state of British and American politics. There’s a bit in the film Whoops Apocalypse where the first female president of the USA goes in search of her predecessor to ask his advice on the current international crisis. The film shows the presidential limousine going up to a grand mansion. It then passes it, to stop at a group of convicts working on the road nearby. ‘Hi, Mr President’, the President calls from her car, ‘how’s life?’. ‘Still doing it’, replies one of the convicts. Nixon’s impeachment clearly influenced Douglas Adams’ when he was writing The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (still better selling than Celestial Homecare Almanac). In it, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the extremely laid-back and highly weird President of the Galaxy has spent one of his two presidential terms in jail for fraud. In the TV series, there was an advert for one of Beeblebrox’s products, running ‘Vogon Firelighters Never Go Out’. Now here’s another case of reality following art.

Ben Miller was on the One Show to talk about his latest play, The Duck House. It’s based on the MPs’ expenses scandal of a few years ago. It’s hero is an MP, who flips his houses so that he can claim expenses, and employs his wife as his secretary and his son as his researcher so that he claim for them as well. The One Show then produced a few cases of what some of the real MPs got up to. This included a Labour MP, who fraudulently claimed £30,000 worth of expenses, and was jailed, and a Tory Peer, who was also imprisoned for falsely claiming £14,000. The former Labour MP has now disappeared from view, but the Tory Peer is now campaigning for prisoners’ rights and prison reform. Well, there’s nothing like personal experience. Clearly this has stopped one Tory claiming that jails are too soft on criminals.

It also shows just how far political corruption and jailing of MPs is now almost commonplace, after Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken and the Hamiltons, not to mention the Libdem couple, have been sent down. ‘How’s life, Mr President?’ ‘Still doing it’ seems to sum exactly this state of affairs. Unfortunately, none of those jailed have been Blair or Cameron, at least, just yet.