IEA Now Promoting Anarcho-Capitalism

How much further can the IEA go in its desire to end government interference? From what I’ve just come across on YouTube, all the way to Rothbard and anarcho-capitalism. I came across a video this afternoon from IEA London in which they interview someone about this form of anarcho-individualism.

The IEA are a hard right, Thatcherite bunch who’ve been advocating extreme free market economics since the 1970s. They believe in complete privatisation, including that of the NHS and the reduction of the welfare state, if not its complete abolition. Usually people who hold this ideology call themselves Libertarians or, more recently, Classical Liberals. They’re fans of von Hayek and Milton Friedman and believe that by going back to the complete laissez-faire capitalism of the early 19th century business will become more efficient and people freer and more prosperous. Which is why Friedman used to go on trips to Chile to see how his ideas were working out under that notorious advocate for personal freedom, General Pinochet. Because people wouldn’t democratically vote for the destruction of the welfare state, and so this could only be done by a dictator. The American Libertarians also weren’t averse to collaborating with real fascists and Nazis. One issue of their wretched magazine in the ’70s contained a number of articles by them and real anti-Semites denying the Holocaust. It was part of their campaign to discredit F.D. Roosevelt and his legacy. Roosevelt’s New Deal created the American welfare state. He was also the president that brought American into World War II. World War II is regarded as a just war. In order to discredit Roosevelt and thus the American welfare state, they wanted to destroy the notion of the battle against Nazism as a noble conflict. And so the goose-steppers were given their free hand to publish their malign nonsense in their pages. Then, when Reagan was elected in 1980s, they got a president who believed what they did, and so didn’t need the Nazis anymore. That infamous episode in their history was quietly forgotten.

And now the IEA are going from minarchism – the belief in a minimal state – to outright anarchism. Anarcho-capitalism wants the abolition of the state and its replacement by corporations. This includes police and the courts. The police would be replaced by private security guards, while the courts would also operate as private corporations. This, of course, causes problems. In a society without the state to enforce justice, why would any criminal submit themselves to the judgement of private courts with no power to enforce their decisions? They argue that competition by the courts to give the fairest decisions would result in criminals submitting to the same courts in the understand that they, and the other criminals, would all receive fair and just treatment and so order would be preserved. Which is real, wishful thinking.

Ordinary, Thatcherite free-market economics don’t work. Privatisation has not increased investment in the utilities, but left them in a worse mess. The gradual erosion of the welfare state has just increased poverty, not made people more entrepreneurial and self-reliant. Nor has led to a revival of charity in quite the manner Thatcher expected, although I’d guess that she, like Jacob Reet Snob, would point to food banks as a sign of its success. Liz Truss’ and her cabinet were all true-blue followers of Tufton Street free market ideas, with very many of them members of various right-wing think tanks, including the IEA. The result was that she nearly destroyed the British economy and had to be given the heave-ho. Despite this, she still thinks she was right. A week or so ago she was giving a talk in America in which she blamed her defenestration on ‘left-wing activists’. This is the rest of the Tory party she’s talking about. As Frankie Howerd used to say, ‘Oh, she’s off again. Oh, don’t mock. It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’ But it seems that ordinary libertarianism isn’t enough for some in the IEA, and that some of them have an interest in privatising the state itself.

If this was ever put into practice, it would result in a dystopia straight from 90s era science fiction, like the decaying Detroit of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop but without the cyborg policeman to fight crime and bring down the corporate bad guys.

Complacent Spectator Supporting Bank of England on Low Wages

More proof of the Tories’ complete indifference to ordinary’s people’s suffering. The Trussel Trust, which runs the majority of Britain’s food banks, reported yesterday that there had been a steep rise in the number of people using them. They reported that last year they had served 1.3 million emergency food parcels. This is an absolutely disgrace in a country as rich as Britain. They recommended that benefits should be pegged to keep pace with the price of food.

Brilliant idea!

The response from the Tories was predictable, however. You got a statement saying that they were determined to eradicate poverty or something, and that they had raised benefits already by 10 per cent. My guess is that however much they raised it, it’s still below the rate of the inflation, so that food is still unaffordable for some people. Also, it doesn’t address the issue of the vicious and sadistic sanctions system, nor the poverty wages being paid by some businesses which means that many of those claiming benefits are actually working people.

The Beeb on their breakfast news this morning put up a series of graphs showing wages compared with the rate of inflation. The railway workers average wages were above, but those for teachers and nurses were below. Well below. If teachers’ wages had kept pace with inflation, they’d be on £44,000 by now.

But wage rises in line with inflation is too much for the Bank of England and the Spectator.

Yesterday an article from the Spectacularlyboring appeared stating that the Bank of England was right to demand that wages be kept low. This comes from very well paid Tory journalists repeating the ideas of exceptionally well paid Bank of England executives. I think the attitude is that if wages are raised, this will increase inflation.

Except that it’s not ordinary wages driving inflation. Robert Reich has said that it’s driven by profits, and although he was referring to America I dare say it applies over here.

What we need is a return to a prices and wages policy, but as this went out with Maggie Thatcher, it would be admitting that part of Thatcherism is a massive failure. And once that’s admitted, the rest is vulnerable too. And we can’t have the masses questioning the absolute truth of Thatcherite economic orthodoxy.

It’s long past time that Thatcherism fell. And the Trussell Trust is right:

Make benefits rise in line with food prices!

No, I Don’t Want to Meet Peter Mandelson in Swindon

I got an invitation the other day from the Labour party to buy tickets so that I could meet Peter Mandelson at a special dinner in Swindon. It was a repeat of a similar dinner a little while ago, in which they Labour faithful were asked to buy tickets to a similar event to meet certain members of the party’s front bench. I didn’t want to go then. Not just because I couldn’t afford it, and am too sick to travel to Swindon anyway, but also because I objected to it in principle. The Labour party was set up by the trade unions and socialist parties to fight for working people. It should be funded from their subscriptions, not from corporate donations and dinners set up in emulation of the Tories.

And principle says I don’t want to meet Mandelson anyway. He was very clever as the party’s spin doctor and electoral strategist, but he and Blair prolonged Thatcherism well past its proper lifetime. It was Blair’s government that cut of benefits for asylum seekers and pushed them into detention centres, pushed NHS privatisation into high gear, and went about cheerfully outsourcing more state business, introduced the work capability tests, carried on with benefit sanctions, and was very enthusiastic about private management of prisons. Blair also took money from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen, thus ensuring his silence over that country’s flagrant human rights abuses. And then there was a little matter like the illegal war in Iraq. It was under Blair that the party turned away from its working class roots to appeal to middle class swing voters. They condescendingly expected Labour voters to go with it, as they had nowhere else to go. Hence the shock and outrage when Jeremy Corbyn started packing them out at halls, parks and sports grounds up and down Britain. Hence also the rise of UKIP, as White working class voters who felt they’d been abandoned by the both parties turned to Farage’s xenophobia and populism.

If I want to go and see someone from the Labour party, it’d be Richard Burgon, Jeremy Corbyn or that other dissident, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone. I’d go and see Rosina Allin-Khan, a woman of mixed Polish and Asian heritage, who’s a doctor working in the NHS and concerned, as so many are, about the state the Conservatives have reduced it to. I’d want to hear Black Activists Rising Against Cuts. I dare say they have takes on racism and White privilege that might annoy me, but austerity is hitting the Black community hardest, as is clear from a paper in the collection The Violence of Austerity. I’d go to see the head of Young Labour as she defies the leadership on issues like socialism and Israel.

I want proper, working people back leading the Labour party. I want to see a working mother tell her story about struggling to keep her family fed and their home heated on her and her partner’s wages. I want to hear former students tell how, despite their degree, their now mired in £40,000 worth of debt and are flipping burgers at McDonald’s for a living. I want to hear the people who volunteer at food banks about the starvation and privation they see. I want to see someone from Disabled People Against Cuts talk about how austerity, low wages and welfare cuts is affecting ordinary disabled folk. I want to see Jews like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker talk about Israeli atrocities and the sectarian anti-Semitic persecution to which they’ve been subjected. I want to see Alexei Sayle, shouty, foul-mouthed Sayle, make jokes about Communism and the Conservatives, celebrating and supporting real anti-racist activists like Marc Wadsworth.

I want to hear the voices of ordinary men and women stuck in dead-end jobs and zero hours contracts talking about their lives and how they can be improved. People on supermarket checkouts, cleaners, white-collar office workers, now being depressed into the rest of the proletariat. As for business, I only want to hear from the small business people, the Arkwrights, who run local stores and corner shops, who are being driven into the ground as the Tories and corporatist New Labour support big business and the supermarkets.

I want to hear from the elderly as they worry about pensions and issues like mobility, as well as the problems they experience as everything goes on line. Many of them don’t have a computer and don’t understand them. They have to rely on their children to sort some of this out for them. What if they haven’t had any, and don’t have younger friends and neighbours to help them?

I want the victims of the benefit agencies humiliations and sanctions regime to tear into that and the cruelty and self-interest of the clerks administering it.

These are the people, I’d pay to see. Not someone like Mandelson, Blair or Starmer, who seem to have only a nodding acquaintance with working people, and see them through the prism of voting and demographic documents with the cool, detached eye of the ad man. Not someone who patronises them with management-speak, who expects Labour grassroots activists and supporters to act as drones reading from specially prepared scripts.

I want that to end. I want it to have ended long ago, when Brown lost the election.

I want to see local MPs for local people, not right-wingers parachuted in against the wishes of ordinary voters.

Those are the real Labour party. Not Mandelson, Blair and Starmer. I want to see proper Labour activists at protests, picket lines and church halls. I don’t want to see corporate closet Tories across a dinner table.

Buddyhell Shows How Blair Has Contributed to the Rise of Anti-Migrant Racism

Apart from banning Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP and telling Welsh Labour party members that they may not watch a documentary disproving the charges against him, Starmer has also been highly mendacious about the Forde report about racism in the party. Martyn Forde, KC, documented a significant amount of general racism in the party against Blacks and ethnic minorities. His report contained a list of something like 139 recommendations for changing this. Starmer has said that he’s implementing all of them.

Except that, according to Kernow Damo, he isn’t. And he’s also forbidden members of the NEC from meeting Forde.

So, once again, we see Starmer lying. Unfortunately, this is no surprise. As Hunter S. Thompson said of Richard Nixon, this is a man so crooked he has his aides screw him into his pants in the morning. At least in my opinion. I can see why Starmer would be highly wary of the Forde Inquiry, because many of those responsible for the racism and bullying are going to the be the right-wing Labour apparatchiks who supported him against Corbyn.

But it seems that this kind of institutional racism could go back much further, right back to Tony Blair. The left-wing blogger Buddyhell put up a piece back in a January about Tony Blair’s treatment of asylum seekers. which does much to explain the current climate of hate against the channel migrants. He notes that when Bliar enter power in 1997, the number of asylum seekers was low, about 40,000. Most applications for asylum were turned down, so that only just over 1. per cent were approved. And polls showed that only 3 per cent of the British public were worried about immigration.

So there was no mass immigration, and the vast majority of this country’s people weren’t threatened by migrants. But rather than adopting a reasonable approach, Blair seems to have taken his cue instead from the Heil. He stopped migrants from being eligible for welfare payments and introduced detention centres for them. Buddyhell’s article quotes one of the critics of this policy, who attacks the unfairness of preventing migrants from looking for work while awaiting the decision on their application. The critic also pointed out that by doing this, it was going to create the impression that migrants were only coming over here to sponge off the welfare state.

All of which has happened.

As for stopping their eligibility for welfare support, this was what spurred charities and campaigners to set up food banks. Which the Tories have expanded into the majority, settled population – Black, White and Asian – as they’ve cut back the welfare state.

As a result, we are seeing angry demonstrations against asylum seekers and the channel migrants. Some of these are by people who genuinely fear for their women and children because of the authorities’ utter ineptitude and active complicity with the Pakistani grooming gangs. But the rage against them also has its basis in attitudes created by Blair’s reforms.

And Starmer is a Blairite, so we can’t expect him to be any better.

For more information, see Buddyhell’s excellent article, ‘Tony Blair, New Labour and Selective Memorialisation’ at: https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/

More Lies: Tories Claim They Value the Workers

I can’t remember where I saw it, but I came across a video today quoting one of the Tory MPs – I think it may have been the egregious Lee Anderson – as saying that the Conservatives value the workers. What! The Tories have never valued ordinary working people. Maggie Thatcher personally didn’t know anyone from the working classes and she certainly didn’t know or want to know anyone who was in a trades union. A friend of mine told me that when she was campaigning, she once said to the people around her before going up someone’s drive, ‘And now to put the working man in his place’. He didn’t know himself whether she’d actually said it, but it certainly encapsulated her attitude. But let’s itemise how well the Tories value working people.

The Tories value working people so well that

• They have kept wages at starvation level for a decade or more, so that many households now have a choice between eating and keeping the heat on.
• Thanks also to the Tories low wage policy the majority of people using food banks are actually working.
• They have not increased funding for schools in line with rising costs, and so children in the state sector must work in undermaintained buildings short of needed educational materials.
• They are running down the NHS, which has kept working people healthy since 1948, in favour of the private sector. As a result, waiting times have lengthened and the performance of the NHS, once a world leaders, has fallen dramatically. All this is to prepare for its privatisation, when people will have to pay for their own care at costs that will drive them into debt and bankruptcy.
• They value working people so much, that they have raised university tuition fees to exorbitant costs, burdening young people with enormous debt.
• Unemployed and disabled people are harassed and thrown off the benefits they need on the slightest excuse. These people are willing to work, but treated by the Tories and scumbag rags like the Heil as welfare scroungers and fraudsters despite the fact that the amount of welfare fraud is infinitesimal.
• They value ordinary people so much, that they have pursued economic policies that have disastrously raised people’s mortgages and rents. A generation of young Brits now have to live with their parents because they can’t afford their own homes.
• Thanks also to the Tories, the nation’s health is declining and for the first time life expectancy has fallen.

So: disease, starvation, poverty, homelessness and debt.

That’s how much the Tories value working people.

Open Britain on Lee Anderson, Sunak and the Further Decline of Democracy in Britain

‘Dear David,

If you listen carefully, you can hear the Conservatives scraping the bottom of the barrel. Through all of the corruption, scandals, and resignations over the years, Rishi Sunak’s government is facing a serious dilemma: they’ve got no one normal left to serve in key positions. 

That’s why Lee Anderson MP was just made deputy chair of the Conservative party. Not because he was the best candidate but because there are simply no decent people left who are willing to go down with this sinking Tory ship.

Anyone who’s familiar with “30p Lee” will not be surprised to see him immediately cause a scandal. After all, this is the man who condemned food bank users for being “bad at budgeting”, refused to watch England play because they took the knee to stand against racism, and expressed delight at being named the “worst man in Britain” 

A core part of Anderson’s new role is promoting the government in the media and generally garnering public support. It’s not an enviable position for anyone to be in, but they genuinely seem to have found the worst possible person for the job. 

Anderson is, of course, off to a roaring start as deputy chair. He very publicly called for the return of the death penalty just before his appointment, forcing Rishi Sunak to awkwardly clarify that that was not the government’s official position. He also advocated for a “naval standoff” in the channel over small boats and got himself into a petty row with a BBC reporter who brought up his past. That’s just in his first week. 

The real story here is not just that Lee Anderson is the worst kind of politician and person (though that’s hard to deny). It’s that Rishi Sunak is too weak to fight off the extreme and incompetent wing of his own party. He’d rather bring them into the fold than take any kind of principled stand.

Rishi’s lame-duck government is an opportunity for far-right ideologues like Lee Anderson. Since Johnson, they’ve made a comfortable home in the Conservative party and advanced an anti-democratic, xenophobic, economically illiterate agenda that has had real repercussions for the public. Sunak, despite his promises for change, is only letting them dig their heels in even further. 

The most frustrating part of all this is that, despite what he may say, Lee Anderson and his ilk are nowhere near being representative of ordinary British people. Yes, there are some people who share Andreson’s extreme, pigheaded views, but they are a tiny minority and should never be allowed to dominate the political debate, let alone occupy positions of power and influence over our lives.

Nigel Farage plays that game too. He claims to be an ordinary bloke, someone you might have a pint with in your local pub, but he isn’t. He’s a multimillionaire TV show host with a global network of rich and influential friends. Remember that the next time you hear him dishing out questionable advice about the direction we should be taking our country in.

All this shows why our mission to fight for proper democracy is so important and why we MUST succeed. If we don’t, our broken democracy will continue to allow people like Lee Anderson to exercise power and influence over our lives. What a terrible thought that is.

All the best,

The Open Britain team

SUPPORT THE MOVEMENT‘

I haven’t donated to Open Britain, but I’m putting this message up because it is an accurate statement of the dire state of politics under Sunak and the Tories.

Sturgeon’s Not Responsible for Kids Queuing for Soup: The Tories Are

That Preston Journalist, whose real name, I am assured by the great people who comment here, is Ashley Kaminski, put up a genuinely heart-breaking video last night. People had been queuing outside a soup kitchen in Glasgow. Among the adults were ten children, including a babe in arms. Kaminski thought that this was terrible, as he should. He’s an avowed opponent of Nicola Sturgeon and all her works, dubbing her ‘McKrankie’ after her supposed resemblance to one half of a double act back in the 1980s. From the tone of his piece, he clearly wanted to blame her, but couldn’t quite. It was wrong, he said, whoever was responsible.

Okay, I don’t know what powers the devolved Scots parliament has, especially regarding welfare policies. I am sure that many Scots voted SNP, not because they wanted independence, but simply because they wanted a proper welfare state, something that wasn’t being offered by Jim Murphy’s Scottish Labour party. But this scandalous situation has been around far longer than the SNP’s administration, and it afflicts communities right across Britain. In Scotland there was a parliamentary inquiry into food banks a few years ago. One of those speaking before the committee was a volunteer, who described the intensely dispiriting deprivation and poverty he saw as he did his job. And I can remember putting up a 19th-early 20th century poem about children queuing outside a food kitchen. It’s disgusting that Britain has returned to such levels of poverty.

But Krankie isn’t responsible. The Tories are. They’ve insisted on wages so low working families can’t make ends meet, and cut welfare payments again and again, all with mantra of encouraging ‘welfare scroungers’ to look for work, making work pay and all the other nonsense. They’ve also introduced benefit sanction after benefit sanction, all with the same intention. It also helps to fiddle the unemployment statistics, as if they’re off the DHSS’ books, they aren’t counted as unemployed.

It’s possible that Sturgeon’s policies aren’t helping the situation north of the border. But the ultimate blame lies with the Tories, and it started when Ruth Davidson, the head of the Conservatives up there, was in power. And Sturgeon definitely isn’t responsible for it down south in England and Wales.

The Tories are. It started under Cameron.

They’re starving children.

Get them out!

Reform Party Promising to Protect British Freedoms against the Government, the EU and Unelected Organisations

Okay, I just found a brief video on YouTube, posted eight days ago, on Nick Buckley’s channel. Buckley’s a former police officer and campaigner against knife crime, who’s appeared a couple of times on the Lotus Eater’s channel. I wasn’t surprised then, when he posted this video interviewing Richard Tice about Reform’s ‘Eight Principles’. In the video, however, he only talks about four of them. These are largely about protecting British democratic rights against the threat of the state and unelected organisations and quangos. According to Tice, Brits are aware that they’re born free and have inalienable rights unlike in the EU. Thus, Brits are able to whatever they like unless prohibited, while in the EU they can only do whatever the EU tells them to.

The irony about this is that the idea that humans are born free comes from a continental philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau has been condemned as one of the founders of totalitarianism. One Conservative American group made Rousseau’s The Social Contract one of the most evil books of all time alongside Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin included him among his Six Enemies of Freedom and the Lotus Eaters have also put out videos attacking him. But Rousseau’s book begins with the words, ‘Man was born free yet everywhere he is chains.’ The idea that you should be free to do whatever you want unless the law says otherwise, I think comes from John Locke a century before, and is the foundation of modern liberal ideas of freedom. However, other European philosophers also had views similar to Locke’s, that the state should be limited to the role of a night watchman, in the sense say that it should protect its citizens’ lives and property, but otherwise not interfere. This is the view expressed by the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt in his Grenzen Der Wirksamkeit der Staat – ‘Limits of the Effectiveness of the State’. I don’t know what the underlying philosophy of government of the European Union is. I suspect there isn’t one beyond harmonising various trade and other regulations between member states and allowing for the movement of labour and capital. The original intention was to create a united trading bloc to preserve western European economic independence from America or communist eastern Europe. The Eurosceptic right has frequently ranted about the EU being some kind of totalitarian state with comparisons to Nazi Germany and communism, but I’ve seen no evidence to support it. And rather than limiting freedom, I think the EU believes it is actively creating and nurturing freedom in its member states. Such as when it condemns Poland and Hungary for their legislation banning homosexuality and gay rights.

Now let’s go through the principles as explained by Tice and Buckley in the video.

1. The state is our servant not our master.

I don’t believe any believer in liberal democracy, whether of the left or right, would challenge this. The only people who would are either Fascists, following Mussolini’s pronouncements that the individual is nothing before the state, followers of Hegel’s dictum that ‘the state is the divine idea as it exists on Earth. We must therefore worship the state’ and supporters of Soviet Communism before Gorby’s brief reforms. However, in the context of Reform, a party of the right, it seems to me that this is yet another bland statement intended to justify further privatisation and the expansion of the power of private industry and the destruction of the welfare state against working people, the poor, the unemployed and disabled.

2. Lend us your power and we’ll give you back your freedom.

This could be said by just about any political party, even those which were real enemies of freedom. Hitler, in one of his rants at Nuremberg, declared ‘Everything I am, I am through you. Everything you are, you are through me’. The Nazi party anthem, the Horst Wessel song, also has lines about German freedom. Hitler also talked about preserving freedom through separating the different spheres of party and state and preserving private industry, though in practice under the Nazi regime the party and state apparatus were intermeshed and private industry ruthlessly subordinated to the state. Mussolini also made speeches about how the freedom of the individual wasn’t limited under fascism, except in certain ways, all of which was equally rubbish.

3. People are free.

This means, as he explains, that people naturally hold certain rights and liberties that should always be protected and defended. These include freedom of speech, religion and conscience. This does not mean that certain types of speech have no consequences. I interpret this as meaning that he feels that people can say what they want, but people are also free to express outrage and take action against others for offensive or dangerous speech that is not otherwise banned by law. Tice goes on to say that in practice, while people believe in this principle, they negotiate to give up a certain amount of this freedom with the state.

I think here he means particularly the legislation on hate speech, which in his view prevents proper criticism of certain protected groups in order to combat racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and so on. He has a point, as opponents of gay rights, who have made their opposition very clear in speeches, often quoting the Biblical prohibition against it, have been arrested. In Scotland Maria Miller, a gender critical woman, was arrested for hate speech simply for putting up stickers with the slogan ‘Scots Women Won’t Wheesht’, meaning that they wouldn’t be silent, in her campaign against the proposed gender recognition legislation north of the border. In my opinion, arresting someone for saying that goes beyond a concern about stirring up hatred against trans people into active attempts to police thoughts and opinions about trans rights.

But there are good reasons behind the legislation banning hate speech. In the case of racism, it’s to prevent Nazi groups stirring up hatred against vulnerable minorities like the Jews, people of colour and gays, all of whom have been or are targets of abuse and physical assault.

4. National Sovereignty

This means protecting British traditions, institutions and culture from enemies both external and internal. The external foes include the EU. The internal threats to British tradition and democracy are unelected pressure groups and organisations. These include big tech and companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook. This is a fair point. These organisations can and do censor material posted on their platforms. The right have been complaining about their posts disappearing or the algorithms governing their availability in searches being altered so that they become invisible, but the same censorship is also inflicted on the left. If Tice and his crew get the chance, I’ve no doubt they’ll demand greater freedom of speech for their supporters while maintaining or even strengthening the censorship against their opponents on the left.

Other threats, unsurprisingly, are the European Union, while among the unelected organisations wielding power he puts the environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and the gay rights organisation Stonewall. Tice states that a few years ago Greenpeace published their manifesto for Yorkshire, which was a diatribe against the car, and therefore, in his view, an attack on the automobile industry in west Yorkshire. One of the accusations the extreme right is throwing at environmental groups is that they wish to ban cars and private transport as part of their plan to establish Green Communism. He also includes Stonewall and the massive influence it wields, although no-one has elected it. There is a problem with Stonewall in that the advice it has been giving to companies, the government and the civil service has been wrong. They deliberately gave a wrongful interpretation of the legislation covering trans issues which was very much what they wanted it to say, not what the law actually did. As a result, a number of groups cut their connections to the organisation.

But unelected groups like Greenpeace, Stonewall and so on acquire their power through possessing, or being perceived to express, expertise and competence in particular issues. In the case of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, it’s the environment. Amnesty International is respected because of its thorough investigation and documentation of human rights abuses, even though governments may pay no attention to its findings. Stonewall is taken notice of because it speaks, or claims to speak, for Britain’s gays and articulates their concerns and recommendations to combat prejudice.

Even in the 19th century governments had to pay attention to popular protest organisations, such as the massive abolitionist campaign against slavery, the Anti-Corn Law League set up by Cobden and Bright to have the corn laws repealed so that the price of grain would fall and working people able to feed themselves. There was also the anti-war protests against the Crimean War led by John Bright and others. There are problems with unelected groups exercising power beyond their competence or suitability, but modern governments have always had to deal with organised groups. Tice’s singling out of the environmental groups and Stonewall seems to me to be as much to do with a hatred of their views – the Brexiteers are full-scale behind the right of private industry to trash this country’s green and pleasant land – than with their supposed power outside of the formal sphere of elections. I doubt that Reform would ever go as far if they were in power, but it reminds me more than a little bit of Mussolini’s statement that there should be ‘nothing outside the state, nothing against the state’, and similar bans on private quasi-political organisations in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

But what you’ll also notice is that these principles tell you absolutely nothing about how Reform as a party intends to act on them, except by reading the lines. What does Reform intend to do about the health service? Not said. I suspect, in fact, that as a party of the right they’ll want to privatise even more of it. What about the welfare state and the scandal of millions of people using food banks? No answers there, either. I suspect, however, that in practice you’d get more mantras of encouraging people to be independent, find work and so on, coupled with rants about welfare scroungers. What about industry? Again, the reality is almost certainly that they want more deregulation. Well, we’ve had four decades of Thatcherite privatisation and deregulation, and the result is the mass poverty and failing economy we’re now experiencing. Industry should be acting for the good of society and its employees and not just shareholders and senior management. This means limiting economic freedom, but as the Liberal journalist J.A. Hobson said, in order for the mass of people to be free you need to limit the freedom of the rich. Which is obviously toxic to the Conservatives and other parties of the right.

To sum up, what Reform seems to be doing with these principles is to try to position themselves as defenders of traditional British liberties against the threat of the evil EU and pesky Green and gay groups. But this hides an illiberal ideology that views such groups as somehow subversive, would probably remove the obstacles against real, dangerous expressions of racial and other prejudice, and which would promote the interests of private industry against ordinary Brits.

We can’t afford to be taken in by sweet words hiding their true intentions.

Simon Webb Attacks Secret Magistrate Courts

Webb also put up another piece yesterday, which also looks remarkably left-wing. He was attacking the secret magistrates’ courts, which according to him now handle half the country’s court cases. These deal with minor offences like speeding and parking fines. However, they meet in secret, and journalists, the defendant and their defence counsel are not present. The accused simply gets a form through the post asking them how they plead. Webb makes the point that this is against the British tradition of open justice, that not only must justice be done, it must be seen to be done. It’s why there are public galleries in courts and their doors were flung open in court cases. These courts date from 2015, and Webb fears that although they only deal with minor cases at the moment, they will expand to include more serious cases later on.

This is interesting. I had no idea these courts existed though I was aware that Cameron had set up a system of secret courts, at which the defendant may not know the identity of his accuser or hear the evidence against him, and from which journalists are also barred, if it was deemed necessary for reasons of national security. I blogged against this, as did many other left-wing bloggers, because it is too much like the travesties of justice described by Franz Kafka in his novels The Trial and The Castle, and which became a terrifying reality in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. My guess is that Cameron probably set them up in order to clear a backlog of minor, civil offences that had been building up. But I do agree with Webb that there is a danger that this system will expand and become a serious threat to British justice. After all, the food banks were originally set up to cater to illegal immigrants after Blair passed legislation stating they were no longer eligible for benefit. These have now massively expanded due to the Tories’ attack on the welfare state and determination to keep workers’ wages well below the level of inflation at literally starvation level. For all the right’s boasts about defending liberty and democracy, they hate independent, impartial justice and I can easily see this system expanding to cover criminal cases under some pretext or other.

Richard Tice Claiming that Immigration Responsible for Low Wages, Not Thatcherism

I just caught the headline of a video on YouTube, which I think was posted by GB News. They’ve been plugging Reform’s head honcho, Richard Tice, who has been claiming his party would beat the Tories and Keir Starmer at the next election. I’m doubtful of that, as no matter how Tice may talk the party up, Reform is basically the reheated leftovers of UKIP. And despite the way Farage and his party were hailed by the media as a threat to the mainstream, traditional parties, like the SDP in the 1980s it significantly failed to break the mould of modern politics. Indeed, UKIP imploded when Farage bailed out and he was replaced by Gerard Batten, who invited far-right YouTubers Mark Meacham and Carl Benjamin to join. All the genuinely anti-racist members left, the Swindon branch protested against Benjamin being appointed their candidate for the parliamentary elections and the Gloucestershire branch broke away altogether.

From the headline it appears that Tice is now blaming low wage immigration for keeping wages low. He may have a point, in that plentiful unskilled labour means that employers don’t have to worry about offering high wages to attract workers for those jobs. But this seems to be part of a general Brexiteer, right-wing accusation that elite liberals are in favour of mass immigration as it provides them with a source of low paid labour. You find this attitude stated every so often, but there’s never any evidence cited for it, and I’ve never come across it from the left. I have come across the assertion, stated in a book published nearly 20 years ago attacking the Neo-Cons, Confronting the New Conservatism, that the Neo-Cons of both the left and the right are in favour of affirmative action programmes, so long as they don’t affect their children. I’ve also seen the argument that immigration is good for the country because on average immigrant workers pay more in tax than they take in benefits – contrary to what you’d hear from the right – and so support the state and welfare system with their taxes. Also, they do the jobs White British tend not to want to do.

So if immigrants aren’t responsible for low wages, who is? Easy – Margaret Thatcher and the Tories. Thatcher preached wage restraint and freezes in order to keep inflation low. This is leading to millions of working Brits, of all colours, now earning literal starvation wages, well below the rate of inflation. Many families are only keeping their heads above water through food and warm banks, where they have a choice between eating, heating their homes or paying the rent or mortgage. The Tories in particular have offered pay rises well below the inflation rate, so that they are in fact cuts. Hence the current wave of strikes as workers are fed up with it. Also, the 19th century classical economists from whom the Tories take their ideas recommended that the government should keep ‘a reserve army of the unemployed’ in order to keep wages low by providing a ready source of labour. I’ve got a feeling Blair and Gordon Brown had much the same idea when they talked about the need to keep the labour market fluid.

It is Thatcherism that’s really responsible for the mass impoverishment of this country’s working people. Tice is merely trying to divert attention away from this by playing the race card against immigrants. Don’t vote for him, and don’t vote for the Tories.