Michael Heaver is another hard-right YouTuber pushing Reform and praising Brexit to the rafters, despite the devastation this has wreaked on our economy and the lives and livelihood of British workers and businesses. If Brexit was a religion, his would be the blind faith of the true-blue Thatcherite fanatic. And this morning Heaver posted a video praising the latest effusion from Reform’s current fuehrer, Richard Tice. Tice is upset that 5.2 million people are in receipt of benefits. This, he declares, is one eighth of the working population. But at the same time, there are job vacancies going unfilled, which is why the government is importing foreigners. This is because some people on benefit are doing better than they would be if they were working, and so are leaving their jobs to live off benefits. The welfare state is properly there to support those genuinely in need, but people are using it as a lifestyle choice. We must therefore cut benefits in order to force people back to work so the government won’t import more foreigners as cheap labour.
There are so many falsehoods in this statement that it’s amazing in its own way. Firstly, most people on benefits in the UK are actually working. They’re forced to use state benefits as well because their pay is insufficient. As for people deliberately leaving work to live on benefits – presumably he means jobseekers’ allowance – does he know anybody who’s suffered that humiliating process? My guess is he doesn’t, because otherwise he’d know it was a lie. Actually, on second thoughts, it’s quite possible he knows it’s wrong, and is deliberately lying anyway. For a start, the Tories passed legislation years ago stopping people from receiving benefit immediately after resigning from work. The wait for a claim to come through is several weeks, so if your previous job paid so badly you didn’t have anything left over by the end of the month, the further wait would push you down to starvation level. As does the various sanctions imposed on the unemployed and disabled for the flimsiest of reasons. Welfare researchers and activists, like the excellent Disabled People Against Cuts, have shown that in the case of the Fitness to Work assessments, this is based on an assumption that a certain percentage of cases must be fraudulent. There is therefore pressure on the assessors to find the disabled well enough to work. Hence we have had assessors declaring that people in terminal comas were fit to work. They even asked amputees when they expected their limbs to grow back!
And then there is the humiliating process of claiming benefits itself. This takes its inspiration from the Victorian idea of ‘less eligibility’: receiving state aid must be made so humiliating that it will deter people from claiming it. It’s one of Thatcher’s disgusting ‘Victorian values’. And so you are required to spend so many hours a day looking for a job, keep a log of the jobs you’ve applied for, while the clerk dealing with you keeps asking why you’re still claiming and didn’t apply for that one yet. Claiming benefits is unpleasant, difficult and humiliating.
But this is ignored by Tice, who is simply spouting more of the ‘make work pay’ nonsense pushed by David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith when he was head of the DWP. And then there’s the stuff about immigration.
This is nonsense because Brexit has resulted in a loss of foreign labour. Many of the foreign workers in the NHS have left Britain, including skilled doctors and nurses. I think we also lost the foreign fruit pickers, who used to come here, which is probably the type of workers Tice is thinking of when he talks about cheap foreign labour. But when the issue of forcing unemployed Brits to work as fruit pickers came up a while ago and was being discussed, many of the commenters on YouTube had said they’d tried and been turned down as farmers preferred foreigners. Some of the farmers rejecting British labour said it was because Brits were lazy. Possibly. Or perhaps just not so easy to exploit.
As for immigration generally, I have the distinct impression that the type of foreign workers the government is keen to recruit are skilled workers, particularly in the STEM subjects. They are definitely not keen on importing unskilled labour to add to the number of domestic workers with a similar lack of skills. Though here again, unskilled immigrants do take the jobs Brits don’t want, like cleaners, as shown in Ken Loach’s film, Dirty, Pretty Things. But my guess is that when Tice and the other members of the anti-immigrant right start ranting about low-skilled foreign immigrants, much of their audience will automatically think of the Channel migrants. But these unfortunately haven’t been recruited. They’re asylum seekers, who have been excluded from the official ways of applying for sanctuary in Britain. Hence part of the hostility to them.
Tice’s spiel is pretty much the old Daily Mail directed at the unemployed and non-White immigration jammed together. It’s nonsense, but will appeal to the readers of the right-wing press, who’ve been subjected to the same bilge since before the welfare state was founded. It also bears out Tony Benn’s statement that when a government wants to persecute its working people, it begins with immigrants.
Don’t be fooled. Tice is not a friend of ordinary working Brits. The solution to the problem of making work pay is to raise wages. This is the solution in classical economics to the problem of a shortage of workers. But this would cut into the already bloated profits of the obscenely rich that Tice, the Tories and the other hard right parties are pandering to.
They want to keep working people poor, starving and desperate, whatever lip service they give to the welfare state. And they’re using the old spectre of foreign labour to do it.
Here’s a piece of interesting Black history. Back in October 2020, Aberdeen University celebrated the life and achievements of Dr. Christopher James Davis, a Black Barbadian, who studied medicine there, becoming a qualified doctor. The article, by Alison Campsie, ‘Scotland’s 19th-century ‘good black doctor’ remembered’, begins
He became known as the “Good Black Doctor” who used his 19th-century medical training at a Scots university to save hundreds of lives during war.
The little-known achievements of Dr Christopher James Davis are being celebrated during Black History Month by Aberdeen University, where he enrolled in 1869 and became the first Black graduate .
The life of Nathaniel King, the son of a West African slave who studied medicine at Aberdeen between 1873 and 1876, is also being remembered.
Originally from a family of cane and aloe farmers in Barbados, Davis arrived in the North East after a spell in London. A staunch Christian evangelist, there are accounts of him holding sermons at his kitchen table in a flat in the city’s Union Street with it also known he preached in Dunoon.
Davis excelled at his studies in Aberdeen, winning a watch for his efforts. It is known he sold the piece to buy food for the victims of the Franco Prussian war, with the doctor spending the last year of his life in Ardennes tending to the sick. It was here he contracted small pox and died in 1870, aged 28.
Rob Donelson, director for alumni relations, described Dr Davis as one of the university’s most “remarkable graduates.”
He added: “His achievements during his short life were astonishing for anyone but are all the more inspiring when we consider the additional barriers he must have faced because of his race.’
The article has this image of him:
He was clearly a fine man of great intelligence, initiative and humanitarianism, who deserves to be better known.
Well, the great British public showed Boris Johnson and his wife, Carrie, precisely what they thought of them when the two turned up for Her Maj’s jubilee celebrations today: they booed them. There have been a number of videos put up about this on YouTube by the press and other media outlets, like the Torygraph. This video put up by the Evening Standard is particularly interesting, as one of those who booed the Gruesome Twosome explains precisely why. The gentleman in the vid is a Frenchman, who’s lived in this country for 20 years and loves it here. He likes the monarchy, and wishes his country still had one as he feels it brings people together to have a head of state who’s above politics. But he hates Johnson because of the lies, partygate and Brexit, and feels that he’s dragging us down. And it’s thanks to Johnson that he’s having to return to France.
I think our French friend speaks for many people. I dare say Johnson will find some way to cling on to power. He might even manage to claw his way back into some semblance of popularity, such is the attention span of the British public. But at the moment are large part of the British public, and clearly long-time foreign citizens, who love this country, are sick of Johnson and his endless lies and hypocrisy. And they feel especially insulted by the countless parties he held while everyone else was told to isolate, even when it meant they couldn’t visit sick, elderly and dying friends and family. As for Brexit, whatever nonsense Rees-Mogg and Johnson are trying to sell us about it’s supposed benefits, it’s wrecking our economy and agriculture. It’s made it more difficult for Brits to go to the continent, it’s depriving us of some of the workers we need, such as the fruit pickers for the farms, and it’s forcing great people like the speaker, who enjoy living here and who no doubt have really contributed to our society out and back to their countries of origin,
I suppose that now we’ll be graced by a right-wing mouthpiece going on about how it was absolutely terrible that Bozo was booed, and that it’s all part of some kind of terrible anti-patriotic attitude fostered by cultural Marxists. But Johnson should consider himself lucky. In the Byzantine empire, the Greek-speaking part of the former Roman Empire that survived until Constantinople was finally conquered by the Turks in the fifteenth century, the citizens enjoyed the right to lynch an unpopular emperor at the races. The fifth century emperor, Justinian, was so disliked that he and his bodyguards fought a running battle with the mob right back to the imperial palace.
If all Johnson got was booing, he should consider that he got off lightly.
If this is correct, then it demonstrates that our Neanderthal ancestors were far more sophisticated than the Victorians thought, and millennia more advanced than the modern humans that replaced them In this video from the YouTube channel History With Kayleigh, the host, Kayleigh, discusses the recent excavation of Neanderthal activity at Neumark-Nord by a joint Dutch-German team of archaeologists from Leiden University in the Netherlands and the Johannes Gutenberg university in Germany. They found that the Neanderthals had been clearing the forest there, 125,000 years ago. This makes them the first hominid to do this. These generally To Kayleigh, this indicates that they were actually farming, although conventional archaeology considers that it only started 10,000 years ago. She is, however, careful to say that she isn’t saying the Neanderthals were definitely farming or engaged in other agricultural activities. But as this is the first step in the process of farming, she believes that the Neanderthals were the first farmers. The areas that weren’t occupied by Neanderthals were left covered with trees. Kayleigh points out that there considerable evidence indicated the Neanderthals were intelligent with their own culture. Far from being unintelligent apemen, the Neanderthals had death rituals and looked after their old and sick, as is shown by their skeletons. These generally have at least one fracture. They also used stalactites, which had they had broken off, to create six circulate structures in a cave in France. It’s believed that these also had walls before they collapsed. They also painted some of the Palaeolithic cave art.
Kayleigh considers that they were probably growing easy to cultivate plants and burning the wood for fuel as well as using it to build shelters. However, when this is usually done the remains of the rotted wood are left in the soil. She also suggests that the absence of such remains could be due to the immense age of the site, or to the Neanderthals simply using them for spears and as firewood. The archaeologists also found the remains of hundreds of slaughtered animals and a large amount of stone tools and charcoal. This included virtually complete skeletons of rhinos, straight-tusked elephants, fallow deer and aurochs, the huge primeval cattle. It was believed at one time that Neanderthals were simply and solely scavengers, but the finds from this site completely disprove that. They were the top predators, making spears, using fire to keep warm and perhaps cook their food, and lived in groups of about 10-20 people. She goes on to say that with more discoveries like this, the history books will have to be rewritten. Humans and Neanderthals existed for a considerably long time and interbred, so that there are a large number of northern Europeans with up to 4 per cent Neanderthal DNA. She believes that the Neanderthals taught humans everything they knew, including spear making and hunting skills and despite going extinct, the Neanderthal’s legacy continues in this genetic heritage. And she speculates that perhaps she’s one of them, and so is planning to take a DNA test. She intends to make further videos about Neanderthal intelligence and how their tools spread throughout the world. We therefore need to abandon our image of the Neanderthals as ‘ooga-booga’.
Kayleigh states that we can only know for sure if the Neanderthals were farming with further discoveries. I’m not sure that the deforestation necessarily means that the Neanderthals were growing plants. One of the commenters, Peter Schubert, wrote: ‘For the last 40K years, Australian Aborigines burnt the land to encourage grasslands that lured Kangaroos into graze and improve their chances of a successful hunt. They also cultivated a wide range of plants to make the ‘gathering’ part of their lifestyle a lot easier, too. I’m sure other indigenous groups around the globe would have done similarly. Still, Neanderthals be earlier.’ It’s possible that the Neanderthals were doing the same. I’ve also got a feeling that when modern humans started clearing the land before settling down to farm it, they cleared the areas around waterholes in order to hunt the animals that came there to drink better. I also don’t think the Neanderthals taught modern humans agriculture, as modern humanity, as Kayleigh says, only started farming about 10,000 years ago, which long after this period and the extinction of the Neanderthals themselves. But it does suggest to me that the Neanderthals may have been on the road to developing agriculture, and makes you wonder what more remains to be discovered about them.
More news about the rapidly approaching Science Fictional society on the horizon. Last Friday’s edition of the I for 20th November 2020 carried a piece by Madeleine Cuff, ‘Biofarm to fork: Lab-grown meat on supermarket shelf in two years’, which reported that an Israeli company has had such success growing meat in a lab, that it may be sufficiently commercially viable to compete with traditionally farmed meat. The article ran
Steak grown in a laboratory could be hitting dinner plates within two years, after an Israeli food start-up this week unveiled a “commercial prototype” of its cultured steak.
Aleph Farms’ steak slices are grown in a laboratory – they prefer the term biofarm – using cells extracted from a living cow. The firm claims its “slaughter-free” product has the taste, texture, aroma, and nutritional value of meat reared the traditional way.
It is not the first firm to produce lab-grown meat that mimics traditional meat, but it is the first to say it can produce lab-grown meat cheaply enough for the average shopper. Aleph claims its production system will soon be able to produce lab-grown steak slices as cheaply as conventional meat.
“One of the big challenges of cultivated meat is the ability to produce large quantities efficiently at a cost that can complete with conventional meat industry pricing, without compromising on quality,” said Didier Toubia, co-founder and CEO of Aleph Farms. “We have developed five technological building blocks unique to Aleph Farms that are put into a large-scale production process, all patented by the company.”
The slices are being unveiled today at an innovation conference in Singapore, ahead of a pilot launch at the end of 2022. The firm has raised $12m (£9m) in funding, including backing from the multinational Cargill, Swiss supermarket Migros and Israeli food manufacturer Strauss Group to fund its plans.
Aleph Farms says its system of meat production – which will take place in specially developed “Bio-Farms” – uses a fraction of the resources needed to rear livestock for meat. Beef is one of the most carbon-intensive foods, in part because it requires large amounts of land, food and water to rear cattle.
Switching to lab-grown meat would also curb the use of antibiotics in farm animals, one of the major drivers of antibiotic resistance around the world, Aleph Farms said.
But many consumers are still uncomfortable with the idea of eating so-called cultured meat, and farmers are expected to mount stiff opposition to its roll-out. In the US the beef lobby is already pressuring the US Department of Agriculture to define meat as a product that comes from the carcass of an animal.
This looks to me like it might be another industry puff-piece, like the glowing report a week or so ago that the rapid transit vacuum tube train system had been successfully tested. I’m starting to wonder if Lebedev or whoever owns the I now has shares in these companies.
SF writers and scientists have been predicting the development of lab-grown meat for decades now. I think it’s one of the targets the SF writers Pohl and Kornbluth take solid aim at in their 1950s satire of consumerism and advertising, The Space Merchants. It also appears in one of the Gregory Benford’s ‘Galactic Centre’ cycle of novels, where he describes the endless production of cloned turkey – lurkey- to feed an interstellar expedition sent to the centre of the Galaxy to find allies against an invading civilisation of intelligent machines. Outside SF, the late botanist David Bellamy gave an interview in the Sunday supplement for the Heil way back in the 1980s, in which he looked forward to the advent of lab-grown meat. This would end the cruelty of current farming, and cattle would then be reared as pets.
It’s an inspiring vision, and many people naturally have qualms about the way animals are reared and slaughtered. And there are plenty of veggies out there, who still want to enjoy the taste of meat. Hence the growth of vegetable substitutes.
But I’ve also got strong reservations about this. Firstly there’s the health aspect. What happens if you clone endlessly from a limited set of cells? I can see the nutritional value of such meat declining over time. I also don’t think it’s a good idea to get the meat from such a limited stock. One of the causes of the Great Potato Famine in Ireland was that the strains used by the Irish were too restricted. Other varieties of spud, which could have resisted the fungus which devastated the crop, weren’t available. And so when the fungus appeared, it destroyed such a high proportion that millions either starved to death or were forced to emigrate. And the British government was so unsympathetic, that immense bitterness was left that added a further spur to the Irish nationalists. I can see a similar problem devastating clone food.
I also worry about the potentially dehumanising effect this will have on us as well. One of the complaints we hear regularly from educators and agricultural/ nature programmes like Countryfile is that many children don’t know where their food comes from. Hence the schemes to take kids, especially from the inner city, to farms. For many people meat, and other foodstuffs, is simply what comes from the shops or supermarkets. But people aren’t robots or disembodied minds. As Priss says in the film Bladerunner, ‘We’re not computers. We’re biological’. And I’m afraid if we go down this route and begin the mass consumption of lab-grown meat, we’ll contact with that biology, to our own spiritual detriment.
And I’m not sure that it will be good for the animals either. Yes, I know the arguments. Cows need much space and vegetation, and their flatulence gives off such amounts of methane that it’s a major contributor to global warming. A little while ago a vegetarian organisation appeared on the Beeb local news programme for the Bristol area, Points West, to present their argument that if everyone in the Bristol, Somerset and Gloucestershire region turned veggie, the amount of land used for farming could be drastically reduced. The vast tracts of unused land could be rewilded, thus aiding the environment. But what humanity has no use for in the environment, it destroys or allows to become extinct. The wolf is extinct in Britain, and it’s been argued that the only reason the fox has survived is because there was precious little else left to hunt after the number of deer was reduced. And despite official protection, birds of prey are also under threat because they prey on grouse and so threatened that alleged sport and its profits in Scotland. Cattle continue to be farmed, but the previous varieties bred by our ancestors have become rare as their place has been taken by more profitable animals. If lab-grown meat takes off, then I’m afraid that cattle as a species will also become rare.
Whatever the environmental advantages, this looks like another step towards the kind of overly technological, dehumanizing dystopia SF writers have been warning us about. It’s an interesting idea, but it needs much more debate and caution.
The decisive factor which swung 14 million people to vote Tory in the general election two weeks was Brexit. Labour’s programme of reforms was popular, despite the predictable Tory attacks on it as impractical, costly, too radical, Marxist and so on. 60 to 70 per cent of the public in polls supported the manifesto, and the party received a slight boost in popularity in the polls after its public. The areas in Labour’s heartlands in the midlands and north that turned Tory were those which voted ‘Leave’. Craig Gent in his article for Novara Media on the lessons Labour must learn from this defeat lamented this. By backing Remain, Labour had ceded Brexit to the Conservatives, allowing them to shape the terms of the debate and the assumptions underlying it. But Gent also argued that it could easily have gone the other way.
Indeed it could. Labour’s policy, before the right-wing put pressure on Corbyn to back a second referendum, was that Labour would respect the Leave vote, and try for a deal with the EU that would serve Britain the best. Only if that failed would Labour consider a general election or second referendum. This is eminently sensible. The referendum was purely on whether Britain would leave the European Union. It was not on the terms under which Britain would leave. Despite Johnson’s promise to ‘get Brexit done’, he will have no more success than his predecessor, Tweezer. The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has stated that the negotiations are going to take far long than the eleven months Johnson claimed. The people who voted for him are going to be sorely disappointed.
The right-wing campaign for leaving the EU heavily exploited racism and xenophobia. Not only had Britain lost her sovereignty to Brussels, but it was because of the EU that Britain was being flooded with immigrants taking jobs and placing a burden on the social and economic infrastructure. In fact, the Black and Asian immigrants entering Britain were permitted, as Mike showed on his blog, through UN agreements covering asylum seekers. Moreover immigrants and foreign workers were a net benefit to Britain. They contributed more in taxes and took less in benefits. But with this was drowned out, along with other, vital Remain arguments in the Tory rhetoric of hate.
But there was always a part of the Labour movement that also distrusted the European Union for democratic, socialist reasons. The late Tony Benn devoted an entire chapter to it in his 1979 book, Arguments for Socialism. One of his primary objections to it, as he outlined in a 1963 article for Encounter magazine, was
that the Treaty of Rome which entrenches laissez-faire as its philosophy and chooses its bureaucracy as its administrative method will stultify effective national economic planning without creating the necessary supranational planning mechanisms for growth and social justice.
Like right-wing Eurosceptics, Benn also objected to Britain joining the EU because of loss of national sovereignty and democracy through inclusion into a European superstate. He was also worried about the threat from Brussels to British industry. The European Union hated Britain’s nationalised industries, and Benn said that he was told by Brussels bureaucrats that investment, mergers and prices in the former British steel industry would have to be controlled by them. Every issue of state aid to British manufacturing industry would have to be subject to the European commission. He was very much afraid that British manufacturing would be unable to compete against the better financed and equipped European firms, and so close. And he also argued that membership in the European Union would create higher unemployment through the EU’s economic policy, which was exactly the same as that tried by Conservative premier Ted Heath’s first government. He believed that EU membership would leave British workers with a choice of either being unemployed at home, or moving to Europe to seek work. Only the directors and shareholders in European companies would profit. He then gives the statistics showing how much Britain was paying to the EU for policies like the Common Agricultural Policy, that penalised Britain’s highly efficient farming system in favour of that of the continent, and the disastrous effect EU membership had had on British industry and jobs. The devastation caused to some sectors of British industry and agriculture also formed part of Conservative attacks on the EU. The former Mail, now Times journo, Quentin Letts, bitterly criticises the EU in his book, Bog Standard Britain, for the way the common fisheries policy drastically cut back our fishing fleet to a fraction of its former size.
It also seems that Ted Heath also used some very underhand, dirty tricks to rig the initial referendum to give the result he wanted: that the British people agreed with him and wanted to join Europe. This was the subject of an article in the parapolitical/ conspiracy magazine, Lobster some years ago.
I’m a Remainer. I was as shocked by the Tories’ victory as everyone else on the Left. I expected that they would win because of the vast propaganda and media resources they had poured in to attacking Labour and Corbyn personally. But I was astonished by how large the victory was. I believed that the continuing failure to secure a deal with Europe would have made Brexit less popular, not more. The result of the original referendum was so narrow that I believed a second would reverse the decision. How wrong I was.
Some of the Eurosceptic arguments against Europe are overstated or simply wrong. The EU was a threat to our nationalised industries, but it seemed nothing prevented the French, Germans and Dutch from retaining theirs and buying up ours, as the Dutch firm, Abellio, was awarded the contract for some of our rail services. Britain’s entry into the EU did not result in us losing our sovereignty. We retained it, and all law passed in Brussels had to become British law as well. And I believe very strongly that leaving Europe, especially under a no-deal Brexit, will badly damage our trade and economy.
But understanding Brexit and the arguments against EU membership from the Left from people like Tony Benn, may also provide a way of winning back some at least of the support Labour lost at the election. Labour can show that it understands the fear some people in those communities have about the loss of sovereignty, and the effect EU membership has had on trade, manufacturing and employment. But we can also point out that the Tories are using the same set of economic principles as the EU, and that this won’t change so long as Boris is Prime Minister. And any trade agreement he makes with the Orange Generalissimo will be worse than staying in the EU. It won’t secure British jobs or support British industry, manufacturing or otherwise. Indeed, it will cause further damage by placing them at a disadvantage against the Americans.
A proper Brexit, that respected British workers and created a fairer, better society, could only be brought in by Labour. But the Thursday before last, 14 million people were duped into rejecting that. But Labour is learning its lesson, and people are getting ready to fight back.
Labour can and will win again, on this and other issues. Brexit may have got Johnson in, but it may also be the issue that flings him out.
I just read this little bit by Mike over at his Vox Political blog. It seems that Ben Bradley, who was appointed by Tweezer as the vice-chair of Young People, put up a blog post in 2012 declaring that unless something was done, Britain would drown in a sea of ‘unemployed wasters’ due to unemployed people on benefits having too many children. He then argued that they should be forced to have vasectomies. The story was, apparently, uncovered by Buzzfeed, and when they came to Bradley for comment, he simply deleted the article.
Bradley’s a nasty piece of work anyway. He was four-square behind the benefit cap, and voted against scrapping tuition fees, against university maintenance grants, against nurses’ bursaries, against Education Maintenance Allowance, ending the public sector pay cap and increases to the minimum wage.
In other words, he’s a typical Tory, who thinks only of enriching himself and his class, and exploiting working people, who no doubt after Ayn Rand he also regards as ‘moochers’ and ‘looters’. His comments about sterilising the young unemployed are pure eugenics. In the early part of the 20th century, the chattering classes all over Europe and America were worried by the possibility that the ‘dysgenic’ poor would outbreed all the responsible, biologically superior middle and upper classes, and so demanded legislation to stop them breeding. This programme was then taken up by the Nazis, who sterilised the congenitally disabled and recidivist criminals, before launching the infamous Aktion T4, which saw the mentally retarded murdered by Nazi doctors in clinics, in an operation run by the SS.
One of those, who was impressed by the eugenics argument was Lord Beveridge, before he issued his report that laid the foundations for the NHS. Beveridge argued that the long-term unemployed should be granted state support, but in return they would have to be sterilised to prevent them producing more children like them, who would be a drain on the state’s resources.
It’s recently been revealed that amongst his other activities, Toby Young attended a eugenics conference at University College London, as well as writing an article supporting it. And way back in the 1970s, Thatcher’s mentor Sir Keith Joseph expressed similar sentiments when he claimed that unmarried mothers were a threat to ‘our stock’.
The Tory party, it seems, is full of borderline Nazis, who hate the poor and the disabled, and wish them nothing but harm. Because they consider them a positive threat, not just to their position in society, but also to their biological superiority and purity.
Here’s Chunky Mark’s perspective on Bradley’s comments, in which he states that Bradley’s comments about it aren’t really an apology. He merely says that ‘the language was wrong’. Chunky Mark states that we are just experiments to the Tories, with people dying in corridors, and hormones injected into our food animals, which contaminate the meat. The Tories really believe in eugenics, and we’re their dinner.
Mike’s also put up an excellent piece by Youssef El-Gingihy, ‘Business as Usual in Iraq’. I think Mr Gingihy is a medical doctor. He’s certainly a very firm opponent of the privatisation of the NHS, and has written a book against it, How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps, published by Zero Books. I found a copy of this in the Cheltenham branch of Waterstones.
El-Gingihy makes the point that the Iraq invasion was not an aberration, but merely the continuation of American and British global imperialism. This isn’t about making the world safe for democracy, but in the forcible acquisition of other nation’s industries and resources. He points out that Tony Blair wasn’t Bush’s poodle, but took part in the invasion of Iraq perfectly willingly as part of the Atlantic Alliance. George Bush senior and Maggie Thatcher armed Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and his gassing of the Kurds in 1988 aroused no condemnation from us. The US military-industrial complex was determined to invade Iraq, because its acquisition was estimated to be worth $100 billion to the American economy. This was only the latest in a series of coups that have overthrown popular elected leaders in countries around the world, so that America can get its hands on their countries’ valuable economic assets. This goes back to the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran in the 1953, who had the audacity to nationalise the Persian oil industry, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1975, who was ousted because he was a Marxist and wanted to break up the great estates to give land to the peasants.
He also sees Bush’s decision to disband the Ba’athist army, whose troops then joined the jihadists fighting against the occupation and the Shi’a and other factions, which supported or benefited from it, as part of the imperial tactics of divide et conquera. As a result of the invasion, Iraq has been transformed from a secular dictatorship into a breeding ground for terrorists. There were only a few thousand globally at the time of 9/11. Now that number has increased to about 100,000. The number of Iraqis, who’ve been killed may be as high as 600,000 +. America maintains its global dominance through a network of 800 bases worldwide. At the time of 9/11, the Americans drew up plans to invade seven countries, and El-Gingihy notes how the wars and destabilisation have spread to other countries, like Yemen. He makes the point that if we really wanted to stop terror, we should stop supporting countries that are funding and supporting it, like Saudi Arabia. But that isn’t going to happen, because Saudi Arabia is our ally.
He concludes
Tony Blair famously called on history to be his judge. That judgement will be one of eternal damnation. He has already attempted a spirited defence but, as with Lady Macbeth, not all the perfumes of Arabia can relieve the stench of blood on his hands.
Everything Dr El-Gingihy has said is correct. The Iraq invasion was all about stealing the country’s oil and state industries. Iraq has the largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia, and Aramco, the American-Saudi oil company, and the other oil magnates, desperately wanted to get their hands on it. The Americans also drafted legislation declaring that any rare crops still grown in Iraq were also automatically owned by American biotech companies. Iraq and the Fertile Crescent is the area where western agriculture started at the dawn of civilisation nearly 6,000 years ago. Then, Neolithic farmers began cultivating varieties of wheat, which have largely been superseded in the west, like emmer. These varieties may, however, have properties which have been lost in later varieties, and so are of intense interest to the biotechnology companies and agribusiness. A year or so ago there was even a feature about the renewed interest in emmer in farming in Britain on the Beeb’s farming interest show, Countryfile. The legislation cannot practically be enforced, but it means Iraqi peasant farmers in theory have to pay American biotech companies for the privilege of rearing crops they’ve been raising since literally the dawn of civilisation.
And the same goes with other parts of the economy, like industry. Halliburton and the rest of the big businesses pressing for war had Bush, who was deeply involved with them, pass legislation allowing them to acquire Iraqi businesses in recompense for possible damages they had sustained, even if, in fact, they had not suffered any damage. It’s a deeply iniquitous piece of legislation. Both of these laws were revealed in articles in Private Eye years ago. And it bears out what the Joseph Bronowski, the great scientist, broadcaster and Fabian Socialist said in The Descent of Man way back in the ’70s: War is theft by other means.
And the number of coups promoted by America is a long one, and getting longer all the time. William Blum in an edition of his Anti-Empire Report links to a complete list of them, since the 19th century, which stretches on and on. it includes the overthrow of Alfredo Benz’ regime in Guatemala in the 1950s, because Benz nationalised the estates of the American United Fruit Company, which, along with the other landlords, treated their peasant workers as slaves. Benz was a threat to American business, and dared pass legislation giving greater welfare rights and power to the peasants. So he had to go. And Shrillary Clinton has followed. A few years ago she made sure that the coup that toppled a democratically elected socialist president in Honduras was not called a ‘military coup’, so that Obama could keep funding the country’s new, military overlords. These are, as you can imagine, the usual right-wing tyrants ruling through terror, violence, assassination and imprisonment. But they have the support of Obama and Shrillary, who no doubt claim the coup was in America’s best interest.
And so we continue to see the agony of the world’s weaker nations, all for the profit of western, chiefly American, multinationals.
Remember the chanting of the anti-war protesters during Gulf War 1 back in 1990? ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go. We won’t die for Texaco’? It’s even more relevant now.
Hitler and Cameron: Both promote the power of elites and the subordination of the masses.
This is another highly relevant quote showing the stark similarities to the current government and Fascism, cited in Robert Brady’s book The Structure of German Fascism (Gollancz 1937). At the heart of Fascism is the doctrine that only an elite should rule. For the Nazis, this was biologically superior German Aryans, comprising members of the Nazi party and German business. American Fascists in the ’30s also argued against democracy, and for the power to rule to be confined only to a small, elite section of the population, as this quote from Brady’s book also shows:
There is great social significance in the fact that the elite of exceptional natural endowment, who, as a matter of course, become the elite of power and influence, actual or potential, are a fairly constant percentage of the total population. From this fact it follows that no social system can long survive, once it tends strongly to declass more and more of the elite … The elite may be defined roughly and arbitrarily as including capitalists deriving most of their income from property, business enterprisers and farmers, the professional classes, and, generally, the employed, whose salaries are considerably above the average, or say, above $3,000 a year for the entire country…
A wise social philosophy, such as that of fascism, strives to make a place for all the members of the elite”
(Dennis, The Coming American Fascism, pp. 229, 231, 237).
This also exactly describes the attitude of the current Coalition, led by the aristocratic Cameron, Clegg and Osborne, which is doing everything it can to reduce everyone else to poverty and despair in the interests of big business.
Last week I posted up a number of radical British folk songs and ballads, including the 19th century tune, ‘The Agitator’, from Roy Palmer’s A Ballad History of England. I’d only managed to note the music for this, and assumed that it dated from the Chartist agitation for the extension of the franchise to working men. I was wrong about this. The ever-informative Jess, put me right about it in her comment on the post. She pointed out that it actually came from the 1870s, and was part of a number of tunes composed to promote the Agricultural Labourers’ Union, composed by the radical journalist, Howard Evans. She wrote
‘The Agitator’ dates from the 1870’s
Roy Palmer probably garnered it from Howard Evans’ “Songs for singing at Agricultural Labourers’ meetings”, 1875
Evans, a Radical journalist;
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Evans_(journalist)]
later recalled;
“Early in the labourer’s movement I conceived the idea of bringing song into service by using popular tunes. I am no singer, but at a meeting in Sundridge, in Kent, I ventured a first experiment. It was heartily received and published in the ‘Labourer’s Chronicle’ others followed in quick succession, and before long was issued a Labourer’s Song Book, with a few songs by other writers, which from start to last reached a circulation of 120,000 copies” “Evans, Radical Fights of Forty Years 1913, p.42
But when the proprietors of the paper attempted to revive Feargus O’Connor’s Land Scheme (borrowed from the ideas of Thomas Spence [See Chase; The People’s Farm]);
“A violent quarrel broke out in our ranks. Ward and Vincent, the proprietor of the ‘Chronicle’, conceived the absurd idea of buying land with the twopences of the labourers. Of course most of them would be in their graves before they could get even a small piece of land…Ward and Vincent hoped to get [Joseph] Arch on their side, because he was at variance with Taylor, the secretary; but Arch was too level-headed a man to entertain such an absurd project. It became necessary to save the Union by starting another paper”
For a broader ‘portrait of the agricultural labourer in the nineteenth century’ I suggest Roy Palmer’s ‘The Painful Plough’
The linked essay on the folksinger, Walter Pardon, mentions a number of his songs, some sadly only now half-remember fragments. Many others have been recorded whole, with the article reproducing several of them: Come All Ye Swaggering Farmers, The Labourer’s Union, An Old Man’s Advice, and Sons of Labour.
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