Candace Owens Destroys Turning Point UK with Stupid Comment about Hitler

Turning Point are an American Conservative youth group founded to promote the wretched ideology to college students. In December last year, 2018, it launched a British subsidiary, Turning Point UK. This declared that it was showing that students and young people weren’t the property of the Left, and were showing that free markets and small government equals bigger freedom. This is clearly rubbish. As the experience of the last forty years of Thatcherism/Reaganomics have shown very clearly, where you have small government and free markets, the result is considerably less freedom for ordinary working people, who are exploited and denied opportunities by the rich at the top. As the New Liberals of the late 19th century realized – philosophers like T.H. Green – you need state action and interference to expand the range of freedoms for the people at the bottom. But Turning Point is a Conservative movement, so it represents the rich, privileged and powerful once again trying to deceive the hoi polloi into voting against their interests.

Unsurprising, the group’s launch over here was endorsed by a range of right-wing Tories, including Priti Patel, Bernard Jenkin, Douglas Murray, Steve Baker and the walking anachronism that is Jacob Rees-Mogg. At their launch were Republican mouthpieces Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk. Kirk caused a bit of amusement a little while ago when he exploded at a question Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks had asked him at some kind of press meeting or debate. Uygur simply asked him how much he made. At which point Kirk got up screaming that he ‘LIVED AS A CAPITALIST EVERY DAY!’ and apparently challenging Uygur to fight him before he was calmed down. Owens is a young Black woman, who subsequently showed herself completely ignorant of what the Nazis stood for. Somebody asked her about nationalism. Owens and the others in their wretched organization apparently define themselves as nationalists, but are a bit confused about its relationship with Hitler and the Nazis. She declared that Hitler wasn’t a nationalist but a globalist. He would have been fine if he’d simply wanted to make things better for Germany. She said:

I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word ‘nationalism’. I think that actually, yeah, the definition gets poisoned by leaders that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want, so when you think about whenever we say ‘nationalism’ the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. He was a National Socialist. But if Hitler wanted to make Germany great and run things well, then fine. Problems is that he has dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize, he wanted everyone to be German, he wanted everyone to be speaking German, everyone to be a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism. So, I’m thinking about how we could go back down the line, I don’t really have an issue with nationalism, I really don’t. It’s okay, it’s important to retain your nationality’s identity and make sure that what’s happening here, which is incredibly worrisome, just the decrease in the birthrate that we’re seeing in the UK is what we want to avoid. So I have no problems with nationalism. it’s globalism I try to avoid.

The good peeps on social media were already laying into and sending up Turning Point UK before she made those idiotic comments. After she made them, they really tore her and wretched organization apart. Here’s Sam Seder and his crew at Sam Seder’s Minority Report having a few very good, well observed laughs at her expense. They rightly ridicule her for apparently suggesting that Hitler’s murder of the Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals would have been already if it was just confined to Germany. They also point out that she could have made her point about nationalism without mentioning Hitler, but looking instead at the African and Indian independence movements. They also joke about the organization’s support for free market economics, saying in spoof German voices that the Nazis had to murder the Jews outside Germany because of supply-chain economics caused by the world flattening.

Please note: Seder’s Jewish, and his co-host, Michael Brooks, is also of part German Jewish heritage. They are definitely not Nazis in any way, shape or form and are only making those joke to send up Owens for her massively crass ignorance.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59Q_o2ufR1s

Owens was forced to make a clarification, in which she said, according to Zelo Street, quoting USA Today, that her comments were meant to show that Hitler was not a nationalist, he did not put the Germans first, and was putting German Jews in concentration camps and murdering them. He was a mass murderer.

Which is true. Others, like Kevin Logan, who has devoted part of a very long hang-out to Owens, Kirk and their nonsense, pointed out that Hitler killed the Jews because he was a nationalist, who didn’t see Jews as being part of the German nation. Hitler also didn’t want everyone to be German either. He wanted to create a new German empire – the Third Reich – in which Germany would rule over all the other countries and territories it had conquered. In his Table Talk he says at one point that he wants to stop the Slav peoples from speaking their languages, but he still wanted to preserve them as separate, slave peoples, who were there to provide agricultural products to their German overlords. I’ve also no doubt that Hitler would have seen himself as an anti-globalist. He identified the Jews as the secret controllers of the world through Communism and capitalism, and aimed to destroy them in order to free Germany from their supposed grip. It was absolute, poisonous nonsense which resulted in the murder of six million Jews and 5 1/2 million assorted non-Jews in the camps.

Mehdi Hassan and LBC’s James O’Brien both remarked on how these people were promoted by the Tories, like Douglas Murray and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Zelo Street concluded that the Nazis were indeed nationalists, and reinventing history using terms like globalism was not Owens’ finest hour, and predicted more Tories repenting at leisure for their endorsement of this bunch of right-wing nutters on the way.

See: http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/02/tory-mps-endorse-hitler-gaffe.html

Novara Media’s redoubtable chief, Ash Sarkar, had a few very interesting things to say about Turning Point UK in her video on ‘Why Are Young Conservatives So Weird?’ She pointed out that it didn’t take long before the organization turned into a mass of parody accounts, mutual recriminations and Hitler apologia. She reminded everyone how, 18 months ago, another Tory youth group, Activate, collapsed after two weeks when they were caught talking about gassing and experimenting on chavs on social media. This started her wondering about why young Conservatives were so weird. She described how, in the 1990s the very right-wing Union of Conservative Students considered themselves the bulwark against socialism in universities. The union, whose past heads included David Davies and John Bercow, was a vocal supporter of right-wing guerillas in Nicaragua and Latin America, and printed the notorious posters demanding that Nelson Mandela should be hanged. Norman Tebbit banned them in 1987 as their antics saw them branded as the right-wing equivalent of Labour’s Militant Tendency.

Sarkar states that it is tempting to see Turning Point UK as just another incident in a long line of right-wing youth movements taking things a bit too far, but there’s a difference. The Federation of Conservative Students had little overlap with their counterparts in America. But Turning Point UK are very tightly connected to the American Alt Right. Their meetings are swanky transatlantic affairs, like the one in which Owens made her fantastically stupid comments. They’re also supported by Trump donor, John Mappin, who has remained resolutely silent about Turning Point UK’s sources of funding.

She also notes that while the organization claims to be energizing Conservative students across the UK, their advertising is very much skewed towards the States. A single Facebook for their launch wasn’t seen by anyone in the UK, but instead was targeted at people in Texas, Ohio and ‘the London borough of California’. And Turning Point USA don’t seem to be interested in recruiting students either. None of their adverts on Facebook are directed at anyone under 24 years of age, but aimed at people 45+. All that stuff about ‘cultural Marxism’ isn’t for a millennial audience. They’re not trying to be the new Momentum. They’re trying to rile up economically secure but ‘culturally anxious’ baby-boomers, to normalize reactionary attitudes. They’re establishment astroturfers dressed up as a youth movement. And most of them graduated ages ago anyway. She makes the point that they aren’t a counterculture, but classic counterrevolutionary strategy. Only now, with memes.

This is a very effective demolition job, and tells you exactly why they aren’t to be taken seriously. As for Owens, Logan in his hangout pointed out that the Alt Right is quite content to use people from minorities and disadvantaged groups – people of colour, women, gays – but they will turn their back on them and discard them the moment they have served their purpose. They’re there to provide the Alt Right with a bit of camouflage for their reactionary views and intolerance. And they’ll treat Owens exactly the same way once they’re done with her.

John Quiggin on the Failure of Thatcher’s New Classical Economics

Very many Libertarians describe themselves as ‘classical liberals’, meaning they support the theories of the classical economists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This rejects state intervention and the welfare state in favour of free markets and privatization. This theory was the basis of Thatcher’s economic policy before the Falklands War, as well as those of other countries like Australia and New Zealand. In all of these countries where it was adopted it was a massive failure, like trickle-down economics and austerity.

Quiggin describes how Thatcher’s New Classical Economic policy was a failure, but she was saved from electoral defeat, partly by the Falkland War on page 113. He writes

The only requirement for the New Classical prescription to work was the credibility of the government’s commitment. Thatcher had credible commitment in bucketloads: indeed, even more than an ideological commitment to free-market ideas, credible commitment was the defining feature of her approach to politics. Aphorisms like “the lady’s not for turning” and “there is no alternative” (which produced the acronymic nickname TINA) were characteristics of Thatcher’s “conviction” politics. The slogan “No U-turns” could be regarded as independent of the particular direction in which she was driving. In a real sense, Thatcher’s ultimate political commitment was to commitment itself.

So, if New Classical economics was ever going to work it should have done so in Thatcher’s Britain. In fact, however, unemployment rose sharply, reaching 3 million and remained high for years, just as both Keynesians and monetarists expected. New Classical economics, having failed its first big policy test, dropped out of sight, reviving only in opposition to the stimulus proposals of the Obama administration.

However, Thatcher did not pay a political price for this policy failure, either at the time of (the Falklands war diverted attention from the economy) or, so far in retrospective assessments. The only alternative to the “short sharp Shock” was a long, grinding process of reducing inflation rates slowly through years of restrictive fiscal and monetary policy. While it can be argued that the resulting social and economic costs would have been significantly lower, political perceptions were very different. The mass unemployment of Thatcher’s early years was either blamed directly on her predecessors or seen as the necessary price of reversing chronic decline.

New Classical Economics was a colossal failure. In fact Thatcherism, whether implemented by the Tories or New Labour, has been a failure, though New Labour was better at managing the economy than the Tories. The only reason it has not been abandoned is because of the charisma surrounding Thatcher herself and the fact that it gives even more wealth and power to the upper classes and the business elite while keeping working people poor and unable to resist the exploitative demands of their employers. And its given a spurious credibility to ordinary people through its promotion by the media.

John Quiggin on the Absolute Failure of Austerity

One of the other massively failing right-wing economic policies the Australian economist John Quibbin tackles in his book Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2010) is expansionary austerity. This is the full name for the theory of economic austerity foisted upon Europeans and Americans since the collapse of the banks in 2008. It’s also the term used to describe the policy generally of cutting government expenditure in order to reduce inflation. Quiggin shows how, whenever this policy was adopted by governments like the American, British, European and Japanese from the 1920s onwards, the result has always been recession, massive unemployment and poverty.

He notes that after the big bank bail-out of 2008, most economists returned to Keynesianism. However, the present system of austerity was introduced in Europe due to need to bail out the big European banks following the economic collapse of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, and the consequent fall in government tax revenue. Quiggin then goes on to comment on how austerity was then presented to the public as being ultimately beneficial to the public, despite its obvious social injustice, before going on to describe how it was implemented, and its failure. He writes

The injustice of making hospital workers, police, and old age pensioners pay for the crisis, while the bankers who caused it are receiving even bigger bonuses than before, is glaringly obvious. So, just as with trickle-down economics, it was necessary to claim that everyone would be better off in the long run.

It was here that the Zombie idea of expansionary austerity emerged from the grave. Alesina and Ardagna, citing their dubious work from the 1990s, argued that the path to recovery lay in reducing public spending. They attracted the support of central bankers, ratings agencies, and financial markets, all of whom wanted to disclaim responsibility for the crisis they had created and get back to a system where they ruled the roost and profited handsomely as a result.

The shift to austerity was politically convenient for market liberals. Despite the fact that it was their own policies of financial deregulation that had produced the crisis, they used the pretext of austerity to push these policies even further. The Conservative government of David Cameron in Britain has been particularly active in this respect. Cameron has advanced the idea of a “Big Society”, meaning that voluntary groups are expected to take over core functions of the social welfare system. The Big Society has been a failure and has been largely laughed off the stage, but it has not stopped the government from pursuing a radical market liberal agenda, symbolized by measures such as the imposition of minimum income requirements on people seeking immigrant visas for their spouses.

Although the term expansionary austerity has not been much used in the United States, the swing to austerity policies began even earlier than elsewhere. After introducing a substantial, but still inadequate fiscal stimulus early in 2009, the Obama administration withdrew from the economic policy debate, preferring to focus on health policy and wait for the economy to recover.

Meanwhile the Republican Party, and particularly the Tea Party faction that emerged in 2009, embraced the idea, though not the terminology, of expansionary austerity and in particular the claim that reducing government spending is the way to prosperity. In the absence of any effective pushback from the Obama administration, the Tea Party was successful in discrediting Keynesian economic ideas.

Following Republican victories in the 2010 congressional elections, the administration accepted the case for austerity and sought a “grand bargain” with the Republicans. It was only after the Republicans brought the government to the brink of default on its debt in mid-2011 that Obama returned to the economic debate with his proposed American Jobs Act. While rhetorically effective, Obama’s proposals were, predictably, rejected by the Republicans in Congress.

At the state and local government level, austerity policies were in force from the beginning of the crisis. Because they are subject to balanced-budged requirements, state and local governments were forced to respond to declining tax revenues with cuts in expenditure. Initially, they received some support from the stimulus package, but as this source of funding ran out, they were forced to make cuts across the board, including scaling back vital services such as police, schools, and social welfare.

The theory of expansionary austerity has faced the test of experience and has failed. Wherever austerity policies have been applied, recovery from the crisis has been halted. At the end of 2011, the unemployment rate was above 8 percent in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the eurozone. In Britain, where the switch from stimulus to austerity began with the election of the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government in 2010, unemployment rose rapidly to its highest rate in seventeen years. In Europe, the risk of a new recession, or worse, remains severe at the time of writing.

Although the U.S. economy currently shows some superficial signs of recovery, the underlying reality is arguably even worse than it now is in Europe. Unemployment rates have fallen somewhat, but this mainly reflects the fact that millions of workers have given up the search for work altogether. The most important measure of labour market performance, the unemployment-population ration (that is, the proportion of the adult population who have jobs) fell sharply at the beginning of the cris and has never recovered. On the other hand, the forecast for Europe in the future looks even bleaker as the consequences of austerity begins to bite.

The reanimation of expansionary austerity represents zombie economics at its worst. Having failed utterly to deliver the promised benefits, the financial and political elite raised to power by market liberalism has pushed ahead with even greater intensity. In the wake of a crisis caused entirely by financial markets and the central banks and regulators that were supposed to control them, the burden of fixing the problem has been placed on ordinary workers, public services, the old, and the sick.

With their main theoretical claims, such as the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and Real Business Cycle in ruins, the advocates of market liberalism have fallen back on long-exploded claims, backed by shoddy research. Yet, in the absence of a coherent alternative, the policy program of expansionary austerity is being implemented, with disastrous results. (pp. 229-32, emphasis mine).

As for Alesina and Ardagna, the two economists responsible for contemporary expansionary austerity, Quiggin shows how their research was seriously flawed, giving some of their biggest factual mistakes and accuracies on pages 225 and 226.

Earlier in the chapter he discusses the reasons why Keynes was ignored in the decades before the Second World War. The British treasury was terrified that adoption of government intervention in some areas would lead to further interventions in others. He also quotes the Polish economist, Michal Kalecki, who stated that market liberals were afraid of Keynsianism because it allowed governments to ignore the financial sector and empowered working people. He writes

Underlying the Treasury’s opposition to fiscal stimulus, however, was a fear, entirely justified in terms of the consequences for market liberal ideology, that a successful interventionist macroeconomic policy would pave the way for intervening in other areas and for the end of the liberal economic order based on the gold standard, unregulated financial markets, and a minimal state.

As the great Polish economist Michal Kalecki observed in 1943, market liberal fear the success of stimulatory fiscal policy more than its failure. If governments can maintain full employment through appropriate macroeconomic policies, they no longer need to worry about “business confidence” and can undertake policies without regard to the fluctuations of the financial markets. Moreover, workers cannot be kept in line if they are confident they can always find a new job. As far as the advocates of austerity are concerned, chronic, or at least periodic, high unemployment is a necessary part of a liberal economic order.

The fears of the Treasury were to be realized in the decades after 1945, when the combination of full employment and Keynsian macro-economic management provided support for the expansion of the welfare state, right control of the financial sector, and extensive government intervention in the economy, which produced the most broadly distributed prosperity of any period in economic history. (p. 14).

So the welfare state is being dismantled, the health service privatized and a high unemployment and mass poverty created simply to maintain the importance and power of the financial sector and private industry, and create a cowed workforce for industry. As an economic theory, austerity is thoroughly discredited, but is maintained as it was not by a right-wing media and political establishment. Robin Ramsay, the editor of Lobster, said in one of his columns that when he studied economics in the 1970s, monetarism was so discredited that it was regarded as a joke by his lecturers. He then suggested that the reason it was supported and implemented by Thatcher and her successors was simply because it offered a pretext for their real aims: to attack state intervention and the welfare state. It looks like he was right.

Vox Political: Tories Lying About Full Employment

Mike yesterday put up a very necessary piece critically examining the Tories’ claims that Britain now has ‘full employment’, meaning that the unemployment rate is 4.5 per cent, and three million more people are in work since this time last year. Mike states very clearly that if you’re confused by your inability to get a decent job or a proper, living wage, despite this news, you’re quite right. It’s because the figures are a lie.

He cites the figures included in two critical reports of the Tory claims, one by The Canary and the other by the UK Business Insider. The Canary states that in order to reach this figure of 3 million more in work, the Tories have had to include 10,000 unpaid family workers and 35,000 on temporary training contracts.

As for wages, these have fallen by 0.5 per cent year on year, so that you’re actually £6 worse off now than when the Tories took power.

The Canary article concludes

“Since the Tories came to power in 2010, more people are in precarious self employment; the public sector has been decimated; young people have been abandoned and we’ve all seen our wages plummet. So, far from being “all in this together”, the UK is becoming a dustbin for employment opportunities. ”

And the UK Business Insider states that the official stats are lies, and the true unemployment rate is higher. Much higher. So high, it will shock you.

“The statistical definition of ‘unemployment’ relies on a fiction that economists tell themselves about the nature of work,” the article states. “The official definition of unemployment disguises the true rate. In reality, about 21.5% of all working-age people (defined as ages 16 to 64) are without jobs, or 8.83 million people, according to the Office for National Statistics.

They also state that this is proved by the fact that wages have not risen. Economics states that if there is low unemployment, then wages should rise as firms compete to attract more workers by offering higher wages, because labour is so scarce.

But instead, public sector wages are capped at 1 per cent, and wages generally are stagnant.

The article goes on

“More important, wages are not keeping pace with inflation… Workers’ real incomes are actually in decline, which is weird because so-called full employment ought to be spurring wages upward. Overall inflation ought to be driven by wage inflation. Yet wage inflation isn’t happening.

“The answer is that unemployment is not really that low. In reality, about 21.5% of British workers are either officially unemployed, inactive, or employed part time even though they really want full-time work. (The ONS has a chapter on that here.) Some of those people — parents with newborns, university students — may not want jobs right now, but they will want jobs soon.”

Mike concludes

Now, you could argue that nobody is saying that 21.5 per cent of working-age people aren’t out of work – the employment rate is only said to be 75 per cent, after all.

But the unemployment rate is said to be only 4.5 per cent. That’s why we’re being told the UK has full employment and it isn’t true.

That’s why you can’t get a job that pays well – even though the Tories claim there are 768,000 vacancies; there are still so many people out of work that they can continue pushing wages down.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/08/17/still-cant-get-a-job-even-though-weve-reached-full-employment-its-because-the-figures-are-a-lie/

This is important, as these fiddled and highly unreliable figures are being touted by the Tories to show that they’ve been successful in tackling unemployment. And as Mike’s shown, they’re a grotesque falsification.

Mike’s piece has also confirmed what I’ve suspected for a very, very long time: that the official statistics for unemployment have been doctored and adjusted by successive governments to disguise the real rate, that they’re completely unreliable.

I can remember how Margaret Thatcher’s administration altered the official unemployment rate when she came to power way back in 1979. And every government since then has done the same thing.

The latest trick done by the Tories was by making the figures count only those who were signing on as jobseekers. As the whole benefits system is designed to humiliate benefit claimants into either getting a job, or not signing on, with sanctions imposed for even the most trivial reasons, many people don’t sign on for jobseeker’s allowance because of the stress of being harangued and bullied by the jobcentre staff.

Thus the unemployment figures are a conscious lie here, based on a spurious method of counting the unemployed.

Then there’s the actual percentage of people really unemployed in Britain – 21 per cent. This makes a complete lie out of the Tory claim that we’re much better than the other EU states, which may have an unemployment rate of 25 per cent. I’ve read that this is Spain’s unemployment rate, along with some of the other EU countries. The argument is that these nations’ more generous welfare systems and highly regulated economies are causing high unemployment by stifling the free market and the beneficial effects of private enterprise.

This becomes extremely questionable if the true British unemployment rate is only 4 per cent behind that of states like Spain. Moreover, economists such as Ha-Joon Chang have shown that free market economics simply don’t work, and that the older, ‘Keynsian’ system of protectionism and a mixed economy with a welfare state actually works far better in promoting economic growth and prosperity.

My guess is that the drive of successive European government to have 50 per cent of all school leavers enter higher education is also, in part, an attempt to disguise an otherwise high unemployment rate. There probably simply isn’t the jobs for all the school leavers, if only 2 to 20 per cent of young people entered university as they used to before the expansion of higher education back in the 1990s.

In short, the unemployment figures May and her cronies are proudly boasting are complete fabrications, designed to deceive the public into believing the economy and job opportunities are far better than they are.

Don’t be fooled. Get May out before she make the situation worse, and already desperately poor people even poorer.

Tories’ IRA Smear on Corbyn Shows Even Greater Desperation

The Tories must be getting very desperate indeed with this one. After Labour jumped in the polls last week to close the gap between themselves and the Tories down to 9 points, their lapdogs in the media decided that it was time once again to raise the spectre of Jeremy Corbyn’s support for fairer conditions for the Roman Catholic people of Northern Ireland and negotiations with the IRA.

Yesterday, Sophie Ridge of Sky News asked Corbyn about his membership of the editorial board of a magazine, which published an article praising the IRA bombing of the Tory conference in a Brighton hotel in 1984.

If she was hoping to catch him out, she was severely disappointed. Corbyn replied quietly and clearly that he didn’t write the article, and wasn’t on the editorial board. He admitted reading the magazine, and contributing articles. When she tried pressing him on how he could possibly write for such a magazine, he states that he didn’t agree with that article or many others, but there were others, which he did. He then expressed his wholehearted support for the 1994 peace agreement. He also made the point that there were many things on Sky, which he didn’t agree with, and which Ridge herself probably didn’t either. But that doesn’t mean not engaging with these issues. He stated that it’s sometimes good to read articles with which you don’t agree. ‘Sometimes’ he said, ‘you might learn something.’

To watch the video, see Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/21/latest-bid-to-smear-jeremy-corbyn-fails-dismally/

Now today both the Torygraph and the Daily Heil lead with the same accusation that Corbyn supports on the IRA on their front page. That they should do so is not even remotely surprising. Both newspapers have the creeping horrors of the Labour leader. The Torygraph was one of the newspapers that tried to make the most out of the smear that he was a Trotskyite, while the Daily Mail can always be relied on for bug-eyed anti-Labour propaganda, especially if you can squeeze in a mention of the IRA.

Mike in his article also points out the immense hypocrisy in these very feeble smears. He states, quite correctly

For the record, Mr Corbyn had well-publicised talks with members of the IRA over several decades – while successive UK governments were doing the same, but in secret, while publicly claiming they never negotiated with terrorists. Who was more honest?

Maggie Thatcher initiated talks with the IRA soon after the bombing of Canary Wharf, I believe. And Mike’s quite right – the talks were extremely secret. All the while she and her government were talking to the IRA and Sinn Fein, the Leaderene was screaming at the top of her lungs that she wouldn’t negotiate with them.

Which proves the old age: ‘the Conservative party is an organised hypocrisy.’

In fact, Ted Heath had also tried negotiating with the terrorist groups in Northern Ireland back in the early 1970s when the bloodshed was just beginning. These collapsed through the intransigence of the Unionists. Heath was an awful prime minister, who tried to break the unions, and there have been allegations of paedophilia made against him since his death. But it’s a pity here that he didn’t succeed, as this would have prevented nearly three decades of murder and mutilation.

Counterpunch this morning published an article by Jamie Davidson about the allegations, and what they show about the Tory desperation to rubbish Corbyn. Davidson does not agree with Corbyn’s stance towards the IRA in the 1980s. He recognises the terrible injustices which the Roman Catholic population of the Six Counties suffered, and the way the Unionist domination of the province was secured through massive gerrymandering. But he believes Corbyn conceded too much to the IRA through supporting their goal of a united Ireland and his association with Sinn Fein. He also states that Corbyn supported the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence. I don’t know if the latter’s true.

But he states that these allegations surfaced yesterday when MI5 leaked a report to the Sunday Torygraph showing that they had kept a file on him because of his pro-IRA sympathies. Davidson states that this hardly singles Corbyn out as anything special, as vast numbers of people on the rest were under surveillance and harassment by the secret state and its allies. He makes the point that what has moved the Torygraph and the rest of the right-wing media to start making these accusations is the massive support large number of voters, even Tory voters, have for Labour’s polices, even if they don’t like the party’s leader. He writes

It’s also in this context that I found myself convinced to wholeheartedly back Corbyn as well as Labour today. It’s simply no longer practical to try to stay above the fray. What pushed me over the edge was yesterday’s report in the Daily Telegraph, leaked to them by an MI5 source, that the intelligence agency kept a file on Corbyn in the 1980s due to his IRA links. These links are, as mentioned, a matter of public record. There is no new information, besides the fact that Corbyn was under surveillance, which anybody who knows anything about British left-wing organisations and the scandalous level of harrassment they received from the state in the 1980s would have expected anyway. What is interesting and important here is the fact that an MI5 source felt the need to say this to the press at all. The Labour Party has trailed the Conservatives by double digits in every serious poll conducted since Corbyn became leader. The entire weight of the British media, both conservative and “liberal”, has been thrown behind the campaign to discredit not just Corbyn but the policies he supports, with great success. Though Labour has seen a bounce in the polls since the Prime Minister called a snap general election, as Corbyn has come into his own, campaigning amongst the public, while Theresa May has revealed herself to be by turns awkward, inept, vicious and deceitful, it is still inconceivable that the Conservatives won’t win and increase their majority on election day. So it is worth asking why anyone would consider it necessary to warn the public, again, about Corbyn’s past. The answer, I think, lies in that bounce in the polls.

He also talks about another piece of massive hypocrisy about which you’ll rarely hear the Tories reproached. Also in the 1980s, Maggie Thatcher supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to the point of sending the SAS in to aid them.

That this kind of state power is never directed against conservative politicians probably scarcely needs to be said, but let’s explore it anyway. When Corbyn became an MP in 1983, at which point he already supported the IRA’s political aims, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. Around this time, Thatcher was sending SAS squads to camps on the Thailand-Cambodia border, where they trained the exiled Khmer Rouge forces in laying mines and booby-traps in civilian areas. She insisted that the Khmer Rouge keep its seat at the UN as the official, internationally recognised government of Cambodia. By this point, the extent of the Khmer Rouge’s actions when they controlled Cambodia was widely known. Around a million people are thought to have been executed by the regime and another million killed by famine. I expect that I could stop 100 British people on the streets of London and tell them about the time that a Conservative Prime Minister supported a supposedly communist regime, thought to have killed two million people, and if I could count the number of people who knew about it on more than one hand I would be astonished. It simply isn’t part of the wider national discourse. Nor is her support for Saddam Hussein. Nor is the fact that the current Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, has admitted that “the vast majority of these opposition groups [which Britain supports in Syria] are Islamist”.4

The very real anti-imperialist credentials of the Vietnamese communists constituted a potential disaster for western hegemony. Why Thatcher favoured the Khmer Rouge over the Vietnamese liberators of Cambodia should be obvious to anybody; given a choice between the two, a capitalist will always side with the worse of two “socialists”, in the hope of spreading news of the system’s inherent horrors as widely as possible. Readers must ask themselves why right-wing figures are permitted to take this stance without damage to their reputation, even after the true horrors committed by their chosen ally are known, while left-wing figures who gave the same ally the benefit of the doubt before the truth was known are condemned to eternal criticism. The truth is that the left is never permitted the defence of pragmatism when it comes to working with unsavoury characters towards a particular political end. The right always is. This disparity is accepted more or less wholesale in Britain, for reasons that aren’t necessarily to do gullibility. I think that the British people implicitly recognise that the hypocrisy at the centre of our political life is absurd, it’s simply that they quite reasonably expect better from Labour. The next step is convincing them to expect nothing from the Conservatives. (My emphasis).

See http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/22/red-terror-anti-corbynism-and-double-standards/

So the Telegraph and Heil are quite outraged at the thought that Corbyn might have supported negotiations with the Republican paramilitaries in Ulster, while quite unconcerned about Maggie’s real, material support of brutal organisation that murdered two million people.

This not only shows their hypocrisy, it also shows their willingness to support regimes responsible for death and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, if this support is organised by a Tory heroine of free markets and destroying the welfare state.

From 2003: IMF Admits Policies Don’t Work

I also found this little piece in Lobster 45 for Summer 2003, reporting on a piece in the Independent for the 20th March that year. According to the Indie, the IMF had just published a report concluding that their policies mostly didn’t work. Instead of helping countries with failing economies, the IMF actually made the situation much worse. The article stated

In a paper that will be seized on by IMF critics across the political spectrum, leading officials reveal they can find little evidence of the their own success. Countries that follow IMF suggestions often suffer a ‘collapse in growth rates and significant financial crises’, with open currency markets merely serving to ‘amplify the effects of various shocks.’ Kenneth Rogoff, the IMF chief economist who is one of the report’s authors, called the findings ‘sobering’.

A recent study by the United Nations reported that the 47 poorest countries in the world – the biggest recipients of loans from the IMF and the World Bank – are poorer now than they were when the IMF was founded in 1944. The report says that ‘financial integration’ has often led to an ‘increased vulnerability in crises’ because foreign speculators pull out as soon as trouble emerges.

‘Mea Maxima Culpa?’, p. 25.

The IMF’s policies generally seem to consist of recommending the countries receiving their loans to privatise their economies, savagely cut back on any welfare expenditure, and rationalise the remaining industry, leading to massive unemployment. They also force the countries to open up to private investors from the rest of the world. In the case of at least one Central American country, this consisted of a stipulation to sell their state industries to American companies. Ramsay thus commented that

On the other hand might we not say that the report demonstrates in spades that the IMF’s policies are working splendidly? For is the American-dominated financial system not intended to enable America in particular and the ‘the West’ in general to bleed the Third World dry?

This piece demonstrates that the free trade policies of international financial capitalism really don’t work, except in the respect that they’re intended to make the lenders of the Developed World richer.