Here’s another update on the Tory attack on democracy, this time using the pretext of Brexit to scrap up to 4,000 British laws protecting ordinary Brits and the environment against big business exploitation.
‘Dear David,
The Brexit campaign did not end when the UK left the EU. High priests of the cause, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, continue to influence government priorities and push damaging legislation such as the Retained EU Law Bill.
They say that the Retained EU Law Billis a simple administrative tool to tidy up UK law following our messy departure from the EU. But the truth is altogether more sinister.
What that Bill actually does is give government ministers powers to scrap up to 4000 perfectly sensible UK laws that enforce environmental standards, protect workers’ rights and help consumers hold big business to account…and all without any further reference to our elected representatives in Parliament.
This Bill is a blatant attempt to further entrench the interests of big business over those of ordinary people and the environment. No wonder they are attempting to rush it through at an indecent pace; it would never pass proper democratic scrutiny.
The fact of the matter is that the Brexit purists in this Sunak government don’t care about democracy. They are only interested in delivering for their wealthy paymasters (spoiler: that’s not you and me), and if that requires them to pass regressive legislation behind a smokescreen of anti-EU sentiment and dangerous xenophobia, then so be it.
They will do anything to perpetuate the illusion that Brexit is something other than a cruel ruse carried out on behalf of the elite beneficiaries of a harsh economic model that puts excessive profits first and people and the environment last.
The Retained EU Law Bill demonstrates the general recklessness of the ongoing Brexit project. Ministers are taking ‘Henry VIII’ powers for themselves and have imposed a deadline of December 2023, beyond which any of the laws on their list that have not been given a reprieve will simply fade into the ether.
Consumer protections…gone. Workers’ rights…gone. Environmental standards…gone. For the Brexit puritans, this would be a proud victory; for the British public, an abject and undemocratic disaster.
By taking this approach, government ministers are effectively cheating Parliament, and therefore the British people, out of our right to scrutinise the laws we must live by. Sunak is effectively placing critical elements of Britain’s future in the hands of a minority of Brexit radicals. No one voted for that, and we should not accept it.
It’s no secret why he’s doing it, either. This Sunak government is so weak that it cannot do anything without the agreement of their most radical faction: those who were never going to be satisfied with Brexit and who want to push this country further into the realm of right-wing extremism. (Just this week, the cranks in that faction forced the government to table an amendmentto the Online Safety Bill that would make it illegal to share videos of small-boat Channel crossings if they were presented in a “positive light”. Wow!)
It’s important to remember where all this started…in the poisonous Brexit referendum campaign. There is a direct line between the lies and fear-mongering of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in 2016 and the Conservative playbook in 2023. Unfortunately for us, neither of those two charlatans shows any sign of going away. Almost everything Farage says these days suggests he is planning to unleash another wave of Brexit-level political chaos in the coming elections. And just last week, we saw press reports that Johnson received a record-smashing £1,000,000 donation from a wealthy Brexiteer, which some have speculated could fund a campaign to retake Number 10 if/when the Conservatives take a kicking in May’s local elections.
All of this demonstrates why Open Britain’s fight against the “Farage-isation” of UK politics has never been more important or more urgent. We’re determined to ensure that these political wreckers can never exert their will over us again.
Despite their self-congratulation and the symbolic victories they claim, the Brexit campaign has achieved nothing positive for the people of this country, especially the most vulnerable, who endorsed it with the hope that it would improve their lot. As elections approach, we must all resolve to use our democratic power to put this dangerous ideology to bed once and for all.
The Open Britain team
PS – A quick reminder that we and a number of partners in the democracy sector are working to put pressure on Labour to commit to making the changes we need to renew our political system. You can help right now by signing our joint petition here to get Keir Starmer to support proportional representation.‘
This is all deeply alarming, though not entirely unexpected. We warned a few years ago that the Tories wished to replace EU, or EU inspired human rights legislation with a British Bill of Rights, which would be far weaker.
Going through this, I found the legislation banning people from sharing videos of the channel migrants particularly pernicious. I’d seen something about this in the titles of videos from various anti-immigrant groups and people on the web. The impression given was that the government was doing this to stop people knowing about the large numbers of migrants crossing the channel in order to protect the migrants themselves and the supposed official policies protecting and encouraging them. But according to Britain, this is absolutely not the case.
The Tories really are getting desperate. Sunak is flailing around with no new ideas against a wave of strikes which have popular support. Hence the attempts to make the right to strike all about illegal, and repeal EU legislation in order to appease the Brxiteers. People like Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
There’s been a new, serious development in the battle over women’s versus trans rights. Yesterday the Scottish parliament passed their gender recognition act, which lowers the age at which people can declare themselves trans to 16 and further limits the time required to live as a member of the opposite sex and the medical supervision also demanded to make it easier for trans identified people to be officially recognised as members of their declared sex. The issue is enormously controversial. Feminists and other people across the political spectrum have criticised the trans ideology because of the way it impinges on women’s sex based right. The ideology and legislation based on it demands that trans-identified men should be given comprehensive access to women’s spaces, which raises problems for women’s safety, privacy and dignity.
Already some men are claiming to be trans, according to the Scottish Daily Record to get transferred from men’s to women’s prison. According to the Record, these men do precious little to behave like women in jail and when they come out revert to identifying as men. There is also the problem that some of those men are violent sex offenders against women and girls. In Scotland this includes a hulking 6/3” brute who tried to indecently assault a 12 year old girl in a public toilet. Black American anti-trans YouTuber Karen Davis has pointed to 50 to 60 per cent of incarcerated transwomen being there for sex offences. She put up a post the day before yesterday commenting on a report that an American female prison officer is suffering from PTSD thanks to being ordered to monitor a trans-identified man on suicide watch, even when he relieved himself or masturbated. This brought back personal memories of sexual abuse. From the newspaper account, the woman was a conscientious officer serving in a women’s prison. She had absolutely no problem watching the female inmates at risk from suicide, self-harm or banging their heads. The prisoner in this case demanded that female officers were part of the team watching him.
I do feel that he did so deliberately to cause upset to the female officers. Way back in the 1980s I read a piece about the cons in male prisons, who masturbated in front of female officer. They were nicknamed ‘gunslingers’ and there seemed no way to stop them doing it. Not even making them wear pink prison uniformed helped. The laws allowing transwomen into the female estate was clearly passed with the best of intentions. I can easily imagine that men’s prisons, for unaggressive, feminine men, let alone those who genuinely identify as women, would be hell. But I feel that very evil, predatory male offenders are abusing it to gain access to vulnerable women.
There are similar questions over hospital care, particular women requiring intimate treatment and would naturally prefer that this is done by someone of their own sex. It is also a problem in sports and sports changing rooms. One of the complaints by Lia Thomas’ teammates was that he was persistently naked in front of them, leading to their obvious embarrassment and discomfiture. Some women are also required by their religion not to be seen by men in an undressed state. Kelly-Jay Keen and her people from Standing For Women held a rally at the open air swimming baths in Hampshire. There were three such baths. One was for men only, another for women only and a third that was mixed sex. The women’s baths had open up to transwomen and this posed a problem for Orthodox Jewish and Muslim women, who could not share it with men, even those who identified as women.
I gather that the passage of the law resulted in angry scenes at the Scots parliament. One irate feminist lifted her skirt to reveal her private parts. A petition has been started to repeal or amend the new act. There is also the question how it will be received by the Westminster parliament and whether Rishi Sunak will overrule it. And if he does, what will this do to the UK? There are theories that Sturgeon is using the act to widen the divide between Scotland and the rest of the UK as part of her independence campaign.
There are also deep implications for the political parties. It’s an issue that crosses the political divide, but conservative activists like the American YouTuber Matt Walsh consistently misrepresent opposition to gender ideology as coming solely from the right. The EDIJester, however, put up a video about it yesterday stating that he has no confidence in Sunak to combat the act and the advance of the trans ideology. He states that if Sunak doesn’t overrule it, then critics of the gender ideology will have to look to founding separate political parties.
Kelly-Jay Keen has already taken a step in that direction with her decision to stand against Keir Starmer under the Standing For Women banner at the next election. Starmer has fully embraced the trans ideology, which has led to several awkward scenes. When asked whether women have cervixes, he replied that it wasn’t a question that should be asked. Other senior MPs have dodged answering the simple question ‘What is a woman?’ Keen was originally going to stand against Eddie Izzard if he got selected as the Labour candidate for Sheffield, This didn’t happen, and so she’s decided to go after Starmer. She particularly feels that Labour under him has betrayed women. At the last Labour conference, trans activists were allowed a platform, but the LGB Alliance, which campaigns exclusively on gay issues but not trans, was excluded from having a place.
This is why I’m putting up this video of Labour policy-maker and gay rights activist Lachlan Stuart speaking at the 2020 ‘Expel Me’ rally. Stuart was a member of Corbyn’s team that included comprehensive support for trans rights in the manifesto. After the election, which he thinks gave people like him enough rope to hang themselves, he went back and reconsidered his opinions. He has now reversed them because of the above issues of women’s privacy, particularly regarding medical care. He states he is haunted by the idea of his mother being examined for cervical cancer by a man. He states that his research uncovered numerous cases where women were abused or disadvantaged by the policy. He was also very concerned at the way the treatment for people with problems with their gender identity only seemed to go in one direction – to transition. He also makes it clear that when he dug into the issue, he found a network of lobby groups and the persecution of doctors and other health professionals who dared to challenge the ideology.
Stuart was a member of the gay rights movement and the solidarity campaign between gays and miners back in the 1980s. He describes campaign against Thatcher’s Clause 28, which sought to ban the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Considering Thatcher’s own association with fascists like Chile’s General Pinochet and the outspoken hatred of gays by many Tory MPs, there was a real fear that this would lead to renewed persecution. He talks about the Solidarity with Miners campaign, and urges his audience to watch the British film, Pride. He states that they didn’t no-platform some of the extremely bigoted and homophobic miners, and speaks with real pride about the first cheque his organisation received from a Welsh miners’ union. He also talks about the way trans activists have distorted some of the policies in the manifesto. This was a clause which committed the party to age appropriate and respectful sex education. This is a real issue, as some schools have been pushing teaching children about gender identity at primary school. He also states that the policy was also meant to educate children that violence against women is unacceptable. But the clause has been taken and expanded by the trans rights activists to mean educating children about trans people at any age.
He also talks about the way his new criticism of the trans ideology has resulted him losing friends and support from other organisations and party members. Stonewall backed away, and Dawn Butler stopped taking his calls. But he remains determined to carry on. And if the party don’t like, they can expel him.
This could become an important issue for all parties at the next election. Kelly-Jay Keen intends to use her position as an aspiring MP to get round the ban that councils and other organisations have imposed on her campaigning. A few years ago she paid for the dictionary definition of woman as ‘adult human female’ to be displayed on a billboard in Liverpool. This was taken down on the orders of Liverpool council, which ruled that it was hateful.
Gender critical feminists are unfairly accused of being fascists by the supporters of the trans ideology. This is flat wrong, but there is a real danger that this issue is being exploited by the right and the extreme right. This includes the real fascist outfit Correct, Not Political. They stage counter demonstrations against Drag Queen Story Hour, gay rights marches and environmental, socialist and trade union rallies, along with anything they think is ‘commie’. Their livestreams begin with old footage of Mosley and his Black Shirts marching, in uniform and with the ‘Roman’ salute, all to the Adagio for Strings, as if it was a tragedy these ratbags were rejected by the British working public and rounded up by the government and interned on the Isle of Man. They’ve also posted discussions suggesting they believe in the stupid, noxious and murderous conspiracy theories about Jews and Masons. And unfortunately, one of the places they targeted for a protest was a library near me in south Bristol, which was staging a Drag Queen Story Time.
While I profoundly disagree with the trans ideology, I don’t want to see trans people persecuted. I’ve no doubt the majority are decent people who just want to get on with their lives. But there are fears that ordinary trans and gay people will suffer from a terrible backlash because of the very visible support for the ideology by intolerant activists. I don’t doubt that if they had their way, for example, Correct, Not Political would round up trans people and gays for imprisonment. There are signs that might be happening in America because of the controversy over Drag Queen Story Hour. I came across a report on YouTube that a Democrat politician in New York, who supports it and went to a drag show, had his offices and home vandalised with accusations that he was a ‘pedo’ and a ‘groomer’.
We need to keep this debate well out of the hands of the far right. And there is obviously a place in it for left-wing activists, because people like Stuart are serious when they state that they tried to reconcile their new opposition to trans ideology with support for them as a minority. Quite apart from the absolute need to protect ordinary, decent people from victimisation and prejudice because of their sexuality or gender identity or expression.
We are pleased to be inviting members in the South West to attend anti-semitism awareness training from the Jewish Labour Movement. It will take place over Zoom on Wednesday 6th July at 7pm.
Please email’ ————–‘to register and the meeting link will be sent closer to the date.
Best wishes,
Labour South West’
I should cocoa! The very cheek! Just in case you need reminding, the Jewish Labour Movement was one of the Jewish organisations deeply involved in the witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’. I put ‘anti-Semitism’ inverted commas because these organisations, including those outside the party like the Chief Rabbinate and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were not, in my opinion, genuinely concerned with anti-Semitism in its true and original sense. This is a hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, regardless of political or religious opinions on their part. I have made this point again and again on this blog, citing some of the 19th century founders and leaders of modern organised anti-Semitism in Wilhelm Marr’s Bund Antisemiten or League of Anti-Semites. The Jewish Labour Movement used to be Paole Zion, Workers of Zion, and was virtually moribund until a decade or so ago when in received an injection of cash from person or persons unknown. The Labour Party has always had Jewish members and the parliamentary party has, or used to have, slightly more than the Tories. There are a number of other Jewish organisations in the Labour party and on the left, such as Jewish Voice for Labour and the Jewish Socialist Group, not to mention Jewdas, with whom Jeremy Corbyn spent a Passover Seder. Corbyn also received strong backing from the Haredi Jews, who believe it is their duty to stay in galut, exile, until they are called back to Israel by the Messiah. In the meantime, they are to cooperate with the peoples in whose lands they reside to build better societies and to ‘pray for the health of the city’ as commanded by the Prophet in the Hebrew Bible. And I’ve no doubt there are many other Jews in the Labour party, who are not party of any Jewish organisation, because, like Dr. Jonathan Miller, they consider themselves Brits, who happen to be Jewish, and don’t want to be part of a minority.
But these Jews and their organisations are not recognised as properly Jewish and are actively opposed and maligned by the Jewish Labour Movement. The JLM’s focus, like the other organisations behind the witch-hunt, is to combat anti-Zionism and silence any criticism of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. And they do this by smearing their enemies as anti-Semites. And very many of their victims are Jews, which make their claims to be tackling anti-Semitism risible.
Mike was told by the Labour party that he would be allowed to remain in it after he was smeared as an anti-Semite if he attended anti-Semitism training by the JLM. Mike’s only crime was to point out that Ken Livingstone was entirely correct when he said that Adolf Hitler initially supported Zionism. He did. It was the Ha’avara Agreement, a shameful pact with the German Zionists to smuggle German Jews into British mandate Palestine. It was done as a way to cleanse Germany of Jews. The pact was short-lived, but it happened. Mike refused, as he is not and has never been and never will be an anti-Semite and attendance would have been taken as a tacit admission of guilt.
Jackie Walker is another of their victims. They secretly recorded her at workshop to discuss the best ways to commemorate the Holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Day not only commemorates the Jewish Holocaust, but also the many other genocides that have disfigured human history. Walker is a Jew by faith and blood. Her father was a Russian Jews, and so she knows from family experience more than most about real anti-Semitic persecution. Her mother was a Black American civil rights activist, and so was deeply concerned about another form of racial persecution against her people. Walker’s crime was to ask what the event would do about commemorating other holocausts, such as those against Black people. Since the great Black activist and scholar W.E.B. DuBois, many Blacks and White sympathisers have regarded the slave trade and slavery as a Black holocaust. Walker asked a decent question. But for some reason this was regarded as ‘anti-Semitic’ and she was smeared and purged.
I think most severely normal Brits are aware of the dangers of anti-Semitism. The documentaries about the Second World War and the Nazis shown on television necessarily include the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Shoah. There have been a number of award-winning Hollywood films about the Holocaust and the heroes who rescued Jews, like Schindler’s List, which came out in the ’90s. I also remember the outrage and campaigning on the left in the 70s and 80s against the NF and BNP when they were marching about trying to get votes, and similar fears and disgust when the BNP briefly revived and its noxious leader, Nick Griffin, was invited onto Question Time. There are very many excellent books about the Holocaust, and some of the late Clive James’ best TV criticism is from the 70s when Fascist and Nazi scumbags like Oswald Mosley, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were interviewed on British TV. James expertly took apart their lies and false protestations of innocence to reveal the real malignity underneath.
Part of my undergraduate course in history was on the rise of Fascist and Communist regimes in Europe, and I still have the books I bought during then. I’ve also done some reading on Fascism since then, including on its post-War varieties. I’m also interested in conspiracy theories, the most infamous of which are those about some secret Jewish conspiracy which controls both capitalism, socialism and communism to enslave the White race. These theories became prominent again in the ’90s when they were incorporated into the UFO mythology and the right-wing conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, another group who are supposed to be controlling world events, the economy and politics from behind the scenes. David Icke believed that the world is secretly run by Reptoid aliens. He caused alarm and outrage because he used quotations from the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery, to support his crank ideas. Icke isn’t an anti-Semite, and genuinely seemed to believe that the world was run by extraterrestrials rather than Jews. Other UFO researchers, like the late Bill English, did the same, though when they cited the Protocols they claimed they should be read as talking about the Illuminati, rather than the Jews. Nevertheless these quotations were in danger of making the Protocols seem respectable to the point where a branch of Waterstones in one of the northern towns stocked them.
I totally accept that respectable scholars and lay people have to be very careful when it comes to some of the material on topics like the Nazis and Holocaust. Real anti-Semites and Nazis try to disguise their awful views and attempts to deny or minimise the Holocaust by setting up respectable-sounding magazines. Often they use coded language. For example, a very respectable folklorist wrote a piece in one of the urban folklore magazines back in the ’90s to tell how he’d been taken in by such tactics and to warn other to be on the guard. He had been researching tales of atrocities committed by the Germans during the First World War. He came to the conclusion that one of these, the story that the Kaiser’s troops had crucified a Canadian soldier, was bogus and may have been just allied propaganda. He was then approached by a history magazine with a respectable-sounding title, who asked him if they could reprint his article. He innocently agreed, only to find out later it was a Nazi rag. Its editors were using stories of allied propaganda to suggest that the Holocaust was also nothing but fiction. But as an American judge has ruled, the Holocaust is so well documented that its existence cannot be sanely denied. The scholar was shocked and disgusted, and so wrote the article to let others know about the deception and to be on their guard about similar tactics and approaches.
As for coded language, the believers in a world-wide conspiracy to enslave humanity talk about the globalists, the Illuminati, or the global elite. Sometimes this is innocent of anti-Semitism, and they really are talking about a secretive group of leading politicos, capitalists and so on, which isn’t some Jewish conspiracy. But sometimes it isn’t, and is code for ‘Jews’. I’ve also noticed that while Simon Webb of History Debunked isn’t an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist by any stretch of the imagination, some of his commenters do seem to be. There’s a lot of talk by them about the Great Replacement, the idea that the Jews are trying to destroy the White race with non-White immigrate. There’s also comments about ‘small hatted people’, or ‘people with small hats’, which sounds very much like its about the Jews, referring to the kippa skullcaps many observant Jews wear.
Sometimes you really do need to be careful and be informed so you’re not taken in by such language and deceit. But the Jewish Labour Movement won’t help you.
They’re concerned to discredit criticism of Israel using literary criticism and citing entirely bogus conspiracy theories about the Jews from the past. Remember when Shai Masot was caught plotting with a senior British civil servant to decide who should or shouldn’t be in the cabinet? This could rightly be called a conspiracy. But if you called it that, or described the two as plotting, you were the using an anti-Semitic trope because of all the genuinely stupid, poisonous and entirely mythical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the past. The same if you report the atrocities committed by the Israeli state and IDF against Palestinians, especially if they can get in a reference to the Blood Libel, that Jews sacrificed Christian children to use their blood in the matzoh bread at Passover. This vile medieval smear has been responsible for numerous anti-Semitic pogroms. However, the Israeli state now is manipulating its memory to close down reasonable criticism. When the IDF shot a Palestinian woman a few years ago, one of the respectable newspaper cartoonists produced picture of her burning in the fireplace while Netanyahu, the-then president of Israel, hobnobbed with the US president. This was promptly denounced by the Israelis as anti-Semitic, because the fire recalled the gas ovens of the Holocaust. Similarly, when Gerald Scarfe drew a cartoon of the Israelis building their wretched wall to keep the Palestinians out using Arab blood, the Israelis again demanded a retraction and an apology because the blood supposedly referred to the infamous Blood Libel. And so another piece of entirely reasoned, reasonable and absolutely not anti-Semitic criticism and comment was again silenced. And this is what the Jewish Labour Movement also does in its events about anti-Semitism. They have nothing to do with making people genuinely aware of the threat of anti-Semitism and the way it is coded. They are all about discrediting justifiable criticism of Israel through using literary devices to make them apparently connected to past anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and innuendo.
I have absolutely no intention of going to this monstrous charade. If I want information and guidance on genuine anti-Semitism, I’d try to consult the JLM’s Jewish victims – Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Martin Odoni and others, self-respecting decent people, who have been smeared by the anti-Semitism witch-hunters as self-hating. Even though these people are Jewish and have fought against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism. Or I would contact Marc Wadsworth, the Black anti-racism activist. He was smeared as an anti-Semite, again using literary tropes, because he caught a Jewish Labour MP passing on a party brochure to a Torygraph hack. Oh, it was the trope of the disloyal Jew, they claimed. This was despite the fact that Wadsworth didn’t know the politico was Jewish, and had in the 1980s worked with the Board of Deputies about passing legislation to protect Jews against genuine anti-Semitic violence by the NF or BNP. Or I’d go to someone like Mike, who can tell fact from fiction, well-researches his stories and who was asked by a Jewish friend at College to be one of the readers in her performance commemorating the Holocaust’s victims.
All of the above have a far better understanding of anti-Semitism, or a more honest one than the Jewish Labour Movement and its highly ideological, distorted view of what counts as Jew hatred.
I’ve said it before: Judaism is a religion. The Jews are a people. Zionism is an ideology. Israel is a state. Judaism and its people are not synonymous with the modern state of Israel. Under a free society, all ideologies should be able to be examined and criticised, including Zionism. States can and do commit horrible atrocities, for which they should criticised. Israel should not be an exception merely because its people are Jews. Only hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, should count as anti-Semitism.
Fight racism! Fight anti-Semitism! And don’t be taken in by bogus propaganda like that of the Jewish Labour Movement.
Published by Hodder & Stoughton at Sevenoaks, Kent, in 1974, Cannibal Adventure was one of a series of children’s adventure books by Willard Price. It’s heroes were a pair of boys, who sailed around the world on a Yacht visiting exotic places like Africa, Polynesia and South America. The blurb for the book runs
‘A Willard Price Adventure story, about Hal and Roger and their amazing adventures in search of wild animals for the world’s zoos.
Hal and Roger themselves in a village of cannibals in New Guinea, but the native tribes and the animals the brothers want to catch are less dangerous than an old enemy who arrives secretly and is bent on revenge.’
I read it when I was at junior school, way back in the 1970s when one of the children’s shows on TV during the summer holidays was Daktari, about a vet treating animals in Africa. One of these poor afflicted creatures was Clarence, the cross-eyed lion. It was based on, or inspired by, an earlier film about a White doctor or anthropologist working with an African people and learning to respect their ways and he and his son make friends with the locals. I read a number of the Willard Price books, as did some of my friends at school. We liked the exotic locations, the animals and the different peoples the heroes encountered on their journeys.
But Cannibal Adventure was one of the many books that earned the ire of Bernie Grant in his crusade against anything he thought was even vaguely racist. And so it was put on their Index Librorum Prohibitorum, declared to be racist, and removed from the local libraries.
The 70s were a much more racist, or openly racist time than today, and I can understand why Grant and his minions would be sensitive about it. One of the nasty stereotypes about Blacks is that they are all cannibals living in mud huts, wearing grass skirts and with bones through their noses. Another children’s book from the same period on making costumes for parties includes a page or two on how to make just such a costume, along with others for less controversial figures like Frankenstein, Dracula and the man with another face on the back of his head and entirely different outfit pointing the same way on the rear half of his body. Some of the racist abuse Blacks have suffered has been based very much on the Cannibal stereotype.
But I read the book and didn’t think it was at all racist. Some indigenous Papuan tribes were cannibals, eating the flesh of their enemies. One tribe suffered from a degenerative neurological disease, Koro, related to Creuzfeld-Jacob and Mad Cow Disease because of their traditional custom of eating human brains. There were also at the time tribes that had still not been contacted by the outside world, while many Papuans still wore their traditional tribal costume. When the Papuan parliament was opened in the early 1980s by Prince Charles, the chiefs attending the ceremony flew in wearing pretty much the outfit sported by the Black gent on the cover.
The book was also careful to present the indigenous friends of the two lads as intelligent, dignified people despite their Stone Age lifestyle. They had a skull hut, where they kept the revered skulls of their ancestors. Again, this is based on fact, and I’m not going to sneer at it because the ancient Celts were also head-hunters. French archaeologists in Lyon, the ancient Lugdonensis, found a skull temple. It’s the carving of a monster, between whose front paws are a couple of circular indentations to hold human heads. On Anglesey in the 1980s British archaeologists also found the remains of a human skull in what was also probably a ritual site or temple. Cuts on the bone showed that the face had been cut off, probably for the priest or shaman to wear. Despite this, Price stated that the local people weren’t superstitious savages. They didn’t know what glass was, but they knew it wasn’t spirits, and so called it something like ‘transparent stone’. If I remember correctly, they were presented in a positive light, at least relatively for the time.
Lambeth and Brent’s zeal for banning books enraged some on the left as well as the right. Martin Barker, the author of Comics: Ideology and Power, which defends comics from attacks from both the left and right, rails in his final chapter against the new censorship, all the more so because it’s being done by the left and he was a man of the left. It was this bigotry and intolerance by those London councils that partly influenced my decision not to vote for Dawn Butler as deputy leader of the Labour party when a hustings was held here in Bristol. She made it clear she was going to come down hard on racism. I thought of some of the stupid things Lambeth and Brent got up to, and wondered if she was going to follow the same pattern of hurling specious accusations of racism against anyone who didn’t follow her definition of it.
Now, nearly fifty years after the book’s publication, there are the same kind of people demanding the censorship and cancellation of others for what they see as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and so on. Sometimes they’re right, but sometimes it’s the accusers themselves who are narrow and bigoted. And I firmly believe that children should have their imaginations stimulated through literature, escapism and the exotic as well as the real and the socially conscious. On a related topic, I notice that American Evangelical Christians are also screaming about the Harry Potter books’ promoting the occult again, despite the fact that they are very definitely well within the tradition of children’s fantasy.
Thomas – or was it Heinrich? – Mann said about the Nazi book burnings ‘When you burn books, you also burn people’. Well, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to burn some books, like those advocating paedophilia. And some books are definitely evil works of genuine racist propaganda, like The Protocols of the Eldersof Zion. Others are just innocent, but express the attitudes of their time. Or don’t find the very narrow ideological parameters of the censors. Of these, I strongly urge you to use your own judgement.
And don’t let anti-racist fanatics ban ordinary, decent books like those of the fanatics on the extreme right.
This is appalling. It’s an attack on free speech and specifically academic freedom by violent student thugs. But unfortunately, it seems to have caused little outrage except from a few individuals on the right because those responsible for the threats are members of a minority, who claimed to be simply defending themselves from persecution.
Before I go on, I wish to make it very plain that I condemn the persecution of anyone for their sexuality or sexual identity. I don’t wish to see trans people denied jobs, ostracised, beaten or worse. I have every sympathy for those struggling with their sexuality or gender. I think it was still within my lifetime that public transvestism was illegal and punishable by a jail sentence. When I was at secondary school in the 1970s-80s we studied ‘relationships’ as part of the Religious Studies course, along with other important issues like television and media bias and influence. One of the piece in the textbook we were using was about a young man, who’d been arrested and jailed for crossdressing. This poor chap wasn’t loud and proud, but tormented by his sexuality. I’ve also got a feeling one of the methods used to treat it was aversion therapy, in which the patient got an electric shock when shown women’s clothes. I think the psychologist Hans Eysenck used this method to treat a transvestite trucker. It’s horrible, and probably explains some of the hysteria amongst trans rights activists when they falsely claim that gender critical feminists somehow want to kill them. I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that anti-trans rights feminists actually do. But it seems to me that the trans activists are afraid that if they aren’t treated exactly as women, somehow the official persecution that existed forty years ago will somehow return.
But the trans rights activists are still perpetrating violent intolerance of their own, and this needs to be fought like any other kind.
Last week Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor at Sussex University, finally gave up the struggle and announced she was moving on. Stock had been subjected to a campaign of threats and intimidation, including, I believe, smoke bombs, simply because she believes that transwomen aren’t women and that sexual identity is based in biological sex. That’s it. A group of anonymous students issued a series a threats demanding her removal. I think the university initially gave in, but then pivoted and backed her. Unfortunately, her union, the UCU, refused to do so. Despite support from the university, Stock announced she was leaving. The University gave her a very gracious farewell praising her and her work.
The trans activists and certain sections of the gay rights movement were highly delighted. There were gloating comments about her departure by an anonymous individual, Sussex Against TERFS, the Pink Paper and an SNP MP, all of whom saw this as some kind of victory. But while it might be for them, it is an attack on genuine free speech and democracy.
Western democratic society is built on free speech, and much of the west’s intellectual progress has come from the ability to investigate, research, examine and discuss without interference or censorship. These freedoms have been hard won, and as we’re seeing from the Tories’ assault on the right to protest, they are still under threat. Now free speech is not an absolute right. There are laws against certain types of speech, such as incitement to racial hatred the promotion of paedophilia and so on. The argument trotted out by the Trans Rights Activists in their attacks on gender critical feminists and their supporters is that somehow the denial that transwomen are women is an attack on trans people’s very lives. J.K. Rowling has been accused of wanting to kill trans people, simply because she said that transwomen weren’t women. Russell T. Davies, the creator of the Channel 4 gay soap opera, Queer As Folk, who revived Doctor Who nearly a decade and a half ago, gave a bizarre speech last week attack the LGB Alliance. This was set up by gay men and women as an alternative to Stonewall, because they felt that the latter was concentrating on trans rights at the expense of defending ordinary gay people. They have no animus towards trans people. They merely regard trans identity as a separate issue which should have its own organisation. But because of this they were attacked as ‘transphobic’, ‘Nazis’ and Fascists. In his speech, Davies left the endings off various words, and then declared that ‘when you exclude the ‘T’, you kill’.
What? No-one is talking about killing trans people, except the trans activists. It’s a nasty, malign accusation.
But the accusation unfortunately believed by all too many trans people, and is motivating some to acts of violence and death threats, such as those against Prof. Stock. Her departure from Sussex University has been covered by the Lotus Eaters and Alex Belfield, who states that he doesn’t believe that real trans people are behind the threats. He says instead that it’s probably their supporters. One of the Lotus Eaters states that the threat of violence were so serious that when Stock came to talk at his old university, there were bouncers on the door checking peoples’ bags to make sure they weren’t trying to smuggle a bomb into the auditorium.
This is not defending the rights of a minority. This is terrorism andFascism. Almost literally.
This might sound incredible, considering that trans rights is generally considered to be a left-wing issue, but sections of Italian Fascism would have supported it solely because of the violence of its supporters. The Futurists, a radical avant-garde artistic movement linked to the Fascists, idealised ‘youth, speed and violence’. They praised ‘the slap, the punch, as the decisive argument’. And while they were vehemently hypermasculine and opposed feminism, they were impressed with the Suffragettes because of their dynamism and acts of violence and terror. In the 1940s the movement’s leader, Marinetti, raved about a coming war between lesbians and homosexuals, who would then united against normal men. Well, the violence and terrorist threats issued by militant trans activists aren’t quite like that, but they’re close, especially as Stock is a lesbian.
These Fascistic threats and violence should be stopped immediately. Anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Kean has said that the students responsible for them should be expelled. I agree. People have every right to protest, but this should not include threats of violence and real bullying.
The students making them are not defending democracy, but trying to destroy through a determination to stamp out any belief that disagrees with their own. It’s time this was halted.
Real tolerance is not only tolerating views you agree with or find acceptable. It is tolerating those you don’t. And it is time that the students responsible for these threats realised this.
Here are the video from the Lotus Eaters and Alex Belfield commenting on this. Yes, I know they’re terrible right-wingers, but this is such an important issue that I feel they should be heard. And I agree with Belfield when he states that he is horrified more people aren’t condemning Stock’s bullying. Absolutely. I wish more people were doing so too, especially from the left.
Because I don’t believe real threats and violence should be used against anyone in a democratic society, except perhaps real, violent Fascists.
It seems to me that there’s a real war going on in ostensibly democratic countries against freedom of speech and conscience. I don’t think this is confined to either the left or right either. In Britain we have had a successions of governments that have been determined to limit the right to public protest from David Cameron to Johnson with his wretched Criminal Justice Bill. And before then there was Tony Blair and his attempts to control what was being said about him and his coterie on state broadcasting, just as Berlusconi was doing to the Italian state media. John Kampfner wrote a rather good book about it, Freedom for Sale, a few years ago, arguing that governments from Blair to Putin were trying to bargain with their peoples. They got material prosperity in return for severe infringements on their ability to protest against their governments. Well, Blair was wretched, but he did at least tackle poverty with no little success. Cameron, Tweezer and Johnson are simply increasing it.
On the other side of the political aisle, the right are complaining about the imposition of curbs on free speech as part of the campaign against hate crime and the ‘cancel culture’. Some of this is exaggerated. Zelo Street demolished some of the claims Toby Young, Douglas Murray and the rest were making about right-wingers being prevented from speaking at universities by giving the precise statistics. These showed that, while it had happened, the percentage of speakers cancelled was minute. But I do think they have a point. For example, it should be accepted that trans people should not despised, persecuted or suffer discrimination. But I think there are legitimate issues and questions voiced by gender critical feminists about trans activism and that there are spaces that should only be reserved for ‘cis’ women. But to some people, simply voicing what to many people are reasonable questions and criticisms constitute hate speech. There are similar problems regarding the reporting and discussion of racial issues. Nobody should want to empower real bigots and Fascists, but it does seem that legislation put in place to protect minorities from real hate has now expanded into Orwellian thoughtcrime.
And these attempts to limit freedom of speech have got into what is permissible in comics. One of the astonishing snippets I found while flicking through Paul Gravett’s Comics Art yesterday, was that in 2011 Tokyo municipality expanded its ban on the sale of certain comics (manga) and animated movies (anime) to children under 18 by including materials ‘excessively disruptive of the social order’. (Page 72). I realise that Japan is a very conservative society. The right-wing Liberal Democratic party were in power for fifty years or so after the end of World War II. The country is very Confucian in that one respects one’s elders and superiors. Gender roles are very traditional, as are conceptions of nationality. I don’t know if it’s still the case now, but under Japanese law at one time a person could only be a Japanese citizen if both their parents were ethnic Japanese. I gather that there are ways you can become a naturalised citizen, but it’s extremely difficult. It’s also supposed to be a very conformist society, in which children are taught at school that ‘the nail that stands up must be hammered down’. But this attack on comics is extreme.
Such attacks on the four-colour funnies and related media haven’t been restricted by Japan by any means. In the 1950s there was a moral panic in America and the United States against comics, one of the major figures in which was the Austrian psychiatrist, Dr Frederic Wertham. Wertham was one of a number of left-wing, emigre intellectuals who believed that popular culture had assisted the Nazis into power. He believed that American youth was being corrupted into crime and sexual deviancy by comics. He accused Superman of being a Nazi, despite the fact that the character’s only similarity to Nietzsche’s superman is the name, and that the Man of Steel’s creators were American Jews. Batman and Robin were an idealised homosexual couple, an accusation that has continued to plague attempts to reintroduce Robin in the strips. Oh yes, and Wonder Woman was a sado-masochist feminist lesbian. I doubt any of these accusations would have been recognised by the kids who actually bought and read the strips. But Wertham’s denunciations were taken up by a variety of groups, from the religious right to the Communist party and led to the passing of laws across America banning or restricting the sale of comics to children. The ban led to the collapse of particular comic genres, specifically the horror and true crime comics, which were particular targets of the legislators’ ire. It also affected the SF comics, because some of them strayed into politically dubious areas. The superhero comics survived, not because they were the most popular, but because they were the type of comics least affected by the new regulations.
One of the SF comics singled out for censorship was a story in which an astronaut from Earth travels to a world populated entirely by robots. His face hidden in his spacesuit, he tells the robots that they’re being considered as candidates for joining a galactic federation. Shades of Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets by a slightly different name here. However, the robots are divided into two types, blue and orange, and there is hatred and conflict between them. At the end of the story, the astronaut informs them that they have been rejected because of these divisions. It was only when the people of Earth rejected their differences and united, that real progress was made, he states at the end of the story. In the last panel he removes his helmet, and reveals that he’s Black.
Shock horror! An anti-racist message! This was too much for one New York judge, who wanted the strip banned on religious grounds. He believed that God had only given speech to humanity, and hated the idea of talking robots. But the underlying issue is obviously its attack on racism at a time when Jim Crow was still very much in force. Eventually the judge had to back down, and the issue degenerated into a fight between the publisher, EC, and the authorities over how many beads of sweat they could show on the Earthman.
Well, at least there were comics creators in America prepared to deal with the issue. Pat Mills, the creator of zarjaz British comic 2000 AD, says in his book about British comics and his career in them, Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! that even in the late 1960s, the policeman heroes in British comics were making quite racist comments about Blacks. Part of what made 2000 AD’s predecessor, Action, so controversial was that Mills and the other creators there had been determined to make it as relevant as possible to contemporary British youth culture and deal with the issues and stories affecting and demanded by the young readership of the time. It was originally going to be called ‘Boots’, after Dr Martens’ distinctively rebellious footwear, followed by the years. So ‘Boots 1977′, Boots 1978’ and so on. But this was too much for the publishers, and the name Action settled on instead. In the end, the comic only lasted a couple of years because it was so controversial, with the major criticism that it was far too violent. 2000 AD was its successor, but here, unlike Action, the violence would be done in support of the law. This led to Judge Dredd, who was deliberately designed as a Fascist cop. The strip’s founding artist, Carlos Ezquerra, was Spanish, and so incorporated into Dredd’s uniform the style of the Fascists then making life a misery in Franco’s Spain, the helmet, the shoulder pads and the eagle badge. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the light reflected in Dredd’s visor looks like ‘SS’. Dredd was thus partly a comment by Mills and Wagner on some of the authoritarian trends in contemporary policing. Other strips tackled issues of racism and religious bigotry – Strontium Dog and Nemesis the Warlock, for example, and sexism, like The Ballad of Halo Jones. There was also a strong anti-war message in the ABC Warriors. Mainstream American comics had been tackling some of these issues for a decade or so previously. There were issues of Spiderman, for example, that tackled racism, and the Blaxploitation craze of the 1970s led to the appearance of Black superheroes like Powerman, Brother Voodoo and the Black Panther. Since then, and particularly since the collapse of the Comics Code Authority in the 1990s, comics have become an accepted and critically respected medium for the discussion of political and social issues. This has reached the point where Conservative and more traditional fans and comics creators believe that the medium and related forms of popular culture, such as SF and Fantasy film and television has become too politicised. In their opinion, contemporary comics writers and artists are too concerned with pushing overt messages about racism, sexism and gay rights at the expense of creating good, likeable characters and engaging plots and stories.
Martin Barker describes how comics have always been the subject of suspicion by the left and the right, going back to the Bloods and Penny Dreadfuls of Victorian Britain, and the cheap, popular novels being read by ‘the democracy’ in his Comics, Ideology and Power. Girls’ comics seem to me to have come in for a particular bashing. They were attacked by conservatives for being too radical and challenging traditional female roles. The left attacked them for being too conservative and not teaching girls their proper, traditional place. Barker shows how these attacks were way off, tearing to pieces specific criticisms of various strips. He argues that children actually subtly negotiate the content of the comics they read. They accept only those elements of the strips which appeal to them and ignore the rest. They do not simply accept everything they read. Barker’s final chapter is a passionate attack on those, who were trying to censor comics at the time he was writing. This included Thatcher and the Tories, but he was also angry at his own camp, the left. Brent and Lambeth councils were also leading an attack on popular literature through their zeal to purge their municipal libraries of anything they considered racist.
And they attack on popular literature has carried on. I remember the furore at the beginning of this century against the Harry Potter books. American Evangelical Christians accused J.K. Rowling of leading children into Satanism and the occult. Well, I admit I’ve only seen the films, not read the books, but I must have missed that one. It’s always seemed to me that the Harry Potter books actually were part of a long tradition of supernatural fantasy in children’s literature going right back to E. Nesbitt and beyond, and including The Worst Witch and Gobbelino the Witch’s Cat. Their attacks on Potter contrast with the Pope’s, who praised them and J.K. Rowling for encouraging children’s imaginations. There was also a rabbi, who wrote a piece praising Potter as a kind of model for Jews.
I’m not a free speech absolutist. I believe the promotion of certain opinions should be outlawed. Obvious examples include anything that encourages the sexual abuse of children or real hatred and violence towards minorities. I have no problem with the law banning the incitement to racial hatred. This was introduced in the 1920s or ’30s with the aim of combating the rise of real Fascism in the form of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, Arnold Leese’s The Britons and other violent, deeply racist and anti-Semitic outfits. I also believe that parents have every right to exercise concern and control about what their children read or listen to, or are taught at school regarding certain highly controversial issues.
But I am afraid that the rules against certain types of hate are being used to silence perfectly reasonable criticism. One of the quotes that my accusers have cited to show that I am an evil anti-Semite is a statement where I say that every state and ideology should be open to discussion and criticism, even Israel and Zionism. There is absolutely nothing anti-Semitic in that. Even the wretched I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism states that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic only if it is applied solely to Israel. But that sentence makes it very clear that I don’t single out Israel and Zionism for especial criticism. I simply state that they should not be above it. But to the anti-Semitism hunters, this is obviously too much.
I am very much afraid that freedom of speech, discussion and conscience and true liberty of the press is under attack. The Conservatives want to close down any view that isn’t their own, all while arguing they’re simply standing up for free speech against the censorious ‘woke’ left. And there are forces on the left trying to close down reasonable debate and criticism under the guise of protecting people from hate.
We have to be careful, and defending freedom of speech and publication from attacks, whether by left-wing councils like Brent and Lambeth in the 1980s, or right-wing local authorities like Tokyo and its law of 2011.
This should not be a partisan issue, but should stretch across the political spectrum. But my fear is that it won’t. And as both sides struggle to establish the kind of censorship they want, real freedom of expression will die.
More lies and racism from Nigel Farage and Andy Ngo. Yesterday’s big story was the riot in Bristol on Sunday night. A crowd had gathered during the day to protest the Tory’s wretched and abominable Police and Crime bill. This is another landmark in the Tories’ push to turn Britain into a Fascist state, as it would ban all protests or demonstrations if someone considered them a nuisance, as well as place further restrictions on Travellers. At the moment, the leaders or organisers of an illegal demonstration can be prosecuted and forced to pay a £10,000 fine. It may have been to avoid this that yesterday’s demonstration appeared not to have any clear leadership or organisational structure and this may have been one of the reasons it turned violent.
The crowd had originally been peaceful, assembling on Bristol’s College Green outside the Council House, sorry, ‘City Hall’. Most of the demonstrators had apparently left and gone home by the evening, when the crowd marched on the police station in Bridewell Street for a sit down protest. It was there that the protest became a riot. The police station was attacked, windows smashed and graffiti scrawled on the wall. Cars were also set at light, and the mob fought the police. Four policemen were reported to have been hospitalised, and seven protesters arrested.
It’s unclear who was responsible for the riot. Politicians from across the political spectrum yesterday condemned the rioters, including Bristol’s brilliant elected mayor, Marvin Reese. Reese called the riot ‘politically illiterate’, and made the point that it actually strengthened the Tories’ arguments for tougher measures against demonstrations. But people, who were at the demo claimed that the riot broke out when the police attacked the crowd. Mike’s put up a series of Tweets on his blog from one of the protesters, Adam Johannes, a Bristolian, who said that the police pushed people, kicked those on the ground, when the crowd pushed back, police in riot gear struck protesters on the head and sent in the attack dogs. Novara Media’s TyskySour discussed the riot and what it meant for left-wing protests in this country in their edition last night. They spoke to two people, who were present, one of whom was a journalist from the Bristol Cable. The journo believed that the riot was caused by the protesters. The other person believed that the police had started it with unprovoked attacks.
I don’t know which is true. The police have launched unprovoked attacks on demonstrators before, which the media has spun as the protesters attacking the police. The most notorious example of this was the police attack on the strikers at Orgreave colliery during the Miners’ Strike. The BBC reversed the footage of the attack to falsely accuse the strikers of attacking the police. One of the my cousins saw the police attacking members of the crowd during the Poll Tax demonstrations nearly thirty years ago. On the other hand, there are idiots who join demonstrations in order to provoke them to riot. One of my friends ran into one of these morons when he went to a Poll Tax demonstration with his mother.
But one this is clear. The riot had absolutely zero to do with Black Lives Matter. Or, indeed, any other left-wing organisation. But this hasn’t stopped the Fuhrage and Andy Ngo claiming that it did. Andy Ngo’s an Asian-American, but this hasn’t stopped him from supporting the American far right. He posted a series of Tweets stating that Bristol was England’s Portland, and that the rioters had raised hammers and sickles. The main groups at the riot, according to this observer from across the Atlantic, were Black Lives Matter, Antifa and Extinction Rebellion, among others. Well, he’s either lying or desperately needs glasses, because nobody in Britain has mentioned any of these groups. From what was shown on TV, the protesters were all, or overwhelmingly White. There was absolutely no connection to Black Lives Matter. As far as I can make out, there were no Antifa, Extinction Rebellion weren’t there either, and absolutely no-one, but no-one, was waving hammers and sickles. This is all just the product of Ngo’s fevered, Alt-Right imagination.
This didn’t prevent the man one of the commenters here calls ‘Niggle Frog-Face’ from also claiming that BLM were somehow involved. The Fuhrage tweeted “In Bristol tonight we see what the soft-headed approach to the anti-police BLM leads to. Wake up everyone, this is not about racial justice. These people want all-out anarchy and street violence … The BLM protests were anti-police, it is a key goal of the organisation. The worrying events in Bristol tonight are an extension of that. We have given into and encouraged the extreme left, and this is the result”. The peeps on Twitter responded by pointing out that Farage was only doing this because he was racist and hoping to stoke up further racism in the UK.
However, unfortunately I do feel that Farage may have a point. The right has accused the police of treating Black Lives Matter with a leniency that was not extended to White counter protesters. And it does seem that they are right. At some of the riots the police took the knee before the BLM protesters. There’s also video footage of the cops running away from BLM rioters, although such footage can be manipulated to present a false impression, as with the Orgreave film. On the other hand, the right-wing protesters, who turned out to stop further Black Lives Matter attacks on statues do seem to have been attacked and treated more harshly by the police. It is possible that the police’s admirable restraint in refusing to defend Edward Colston’s statue when it was pulled down by a group of BLM protesters in the summer may have encouraged some of the militants in the demonstration to believe that the police would act with a similar restraint if they rioted.
Whether that was the case or not, I don’t know. It’s a possibility. But what isn’t in doubt is that neither BLM nor the other groups were involved in Sunday’s riot. As for Bristol being England’s equivalent of Portland, I don’t know. I’ve never been to Portland. It might be a very nice place, despite being the scene of many of last year’s BLM riots. But, apart from the attack on Colston’s statue, Bristol hasn’t had any BLM riots. And the mob attacking the old slaver’s statue didn’t attack any of the other monuments in the area, property or police. Farage and Ngo are simply lying.
As for the wretched Police and Crime Bill, this certainly is an attack on our civil liberties which needs to be very strongly resisted.
But rioting will only strengthen the hands of those determined to turn this great nation into a Fascist police state.
The big news this week has obviously been Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, and specifically Markle’s allegations of racism against unnamed royal advisors and flunkeys. Yesterday Piers Morgan got the heave-ho for very baldly stating his objections to Markle’s allegations. Standing outside his own not unimpressive residence yesterday, the former editor of the Mirror said that he didn’t believe a word Markle said, and that she had done enormous damage to the royal family, especially when Prince Philip was lying in hospital. Zelo Street has published a piece critiquing his remarks, and pointing out that Morgan’s claims to believe in and defend democracy and free speech are a bit rich, considering how he shouts down those he doesn’t agree with. He was also the editor of the Mirror when its journos and those of the Scum were hacking phones left, right and centre. Back in the 1990s he was also in the pages of Private Eye as it was under his editorship of the Mirror that the two hacks in the paper’s ‘City Slickers’ column committed the share ramping that got them arrested. The Eye presented very strong evidence that Piers ‘Boy’ Morgan was also involved, but somehow managed to escape arrest and prosecution. Morgan has fully reciprocated the magazine’s animus towards him. According to Ian Hislop, Morgan sent round a hack to talk to his parish priest, hoping that the good clergyman would betray a few confidences Hislop had made during Confession. In this instance, he was disappointed. Hislop’s like me, an Anglican. Individual confession is part of Roman Catholic belief and practice, not Church of England. And I don’t think the priest told Morgan’s boy or girl any secrets anyway.
Of course, the right-wing scumbag press have been engaged in a long campaign against Harry and Markle. They dislike her as an intrusive left-winger. Alex Belfield, the arch-Tory YouTuber and internet radio host, sneeringly refers to her as ‘Meghan Mallarky’. Not only does he hate her for being left-wing, feminist, anti-racist and ‘woke’, he also sees her as aggressively self-centre and manipulative. His short videos about the couple frequently included him urging Harry to dump her and return to the bosom of the royal family. Zelo Street has also pointed out that there is more than a touch of racism in the press’ antipathy to Markle. Part of their hatred was also due to the fact Markle wasn’t prepared to play their games. She wanted all media access and interviews to be on hers and Harry’s terms, not theirs. Snubbed with their power to make or break celebrities under attack, the press responded with hostile coverage of the royal couple.
But this time I do think Morgan is right. Markle’s allegations simply don’t ring true, and are likely to damage the royal family. Simon Webb, the author of the ‘History Debunked’ YouTube channel, put up a video the other day critiquing some of the remarks Hal and Megs made to Winfrey. Webb is, I think, a Telegraph-reading Tory. He’s also a very strong critic of some of the assertions and fake history put out by anti-racist activists and believes in the ‘Bell Curve’ nonsense about there also being differences in intelligence between the races. But he also seems not to be personally racist, and has put up several excellent videos tearing down the vile conspiracy theory about the Jews promoting mass immigration to destroy the White race. His arguments also seem to be based on real, historic fact.
His video critiquing the allegations Hal and Megs made begins with him commenting on Harry’s complaint that his father had cut him off financially. Webb thought this was peculiar, because by the time he was 20, he’d been supporting himself financially and independently of his family. He was somewhat out of touch with contemporary young people, but it seemed quite odd to him that a 36 year old man on the edge of middle age should complain about no longer being sent money by his father. It can also be added that Harry is immensely wealthy anyway, and so can well afford to look after himself and his wife in the style to which they have become accustomed.
He also wondered how true the allegations of racism could be, considering that Markle doesn’t look particularly Black to him. He observed that she looks more like the olive-skinned people of the Mediterranean. Which, I think, is a fair comment. I know people, who as far as I know are completely White, who go her colour or darker in the summer. Black anti-racists have complained for a long time about ‘colourism’. This is the form of racism in which lighter-skinned people of colour are given higher status, better opportunities and respect than their darker-skinned kindred. It’s another hangover from slavery and the caste system that it gave rise to. Darker skinned, ‘Black’ slaves were held to be more suitable for tough, physical work, while lighter skinned slaves were given less arduous duties commanding greater respect out of the sun. It seems to me that if colourism does exist, then Markle is probably a beneficiary of it, and not a victim of racism.
Then there is that comment by a courtier, speculating what colour the baby would be. It’s actually highly questionable whether this is actually racist. People usually speculate about the appearance of an expected child, and which one of the parents it will take after. Webb here recalls how one of his friends was a bi-racial young woman, who had an affair with a White guy, and became pregnant. Their Black friends freely speculated on whether the child would be White or Black. It seemed to Webb that the royal courtiers were being accused of racism simply for doing what people, including Blacks normally do, without any racist intent.
And the more I look back at Markle’s conduct over the past few years, the more it seems to me that, unfortunately, the scumbag right-wing press do have a point. I think she is manipulative, egocentric and self-promoting. And while I am no great fan of Morgan, I don’t think he should have been forced out of his position on GMB for his opinions on Markle. It very much looks like another piece of cancel culture, where individuals are being silenced for having controversial opinions. Mostly it’s been done against the left, but there have been instances where someone has been removed from YouTube for expressing a reasonable opinion someone has taken exception to as racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic or whatever. I’m sure Zelo Street is right when they point out that Morgan is no real defender of free speech and democracy himself. But Morgan’s forced departure is itself an attack on someone’s right to express their reasonable opinion.
In this matter, it’s Morgan’s opponents who are undermining free speech. Just as the pair’s interview with Oprah threatens to further undermine the monarchy.
Earlier this week anti-racism activists finally succeeded in having hatey Katie Hopkins banned from Twitter. Hopkins started her notorious career as one of the contestants in the British version of The Apprentice. She was one of the runners-up, but her noxious right-wing beliefs nevertheless got her taken on as a columnist for the Scum and the Heil. She lost these thanks to her very outspoken racism.
In this clip from Novara Media’s Tysky Sour, Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani discuss her noxious career. This included such lows as her infamous description of immigrants and asylum seekers as ‘cockroaches’ for whom she had absolutely no love. This made that last sentiment very clear in a Tweet aimed at Philip Schofield after the sinking of a migrant ship and its human cargo in the Med. The newspapers covered this with a picture of a grieving father, who had stopped at Turkey, looking at the body of his infant son, which had just been washed up on the beach. Hopkins went on to say that illegal immigrants should be gunned down if they tried to cross into Britain. But perhaps the nadir came in a Tweet she made after the Manchester bombing in which she called for a ‘final solution’. This was too much even for whatever paper was then employing her, and she was given the heave-ho. But she was still free to spew her hate on Twitter. And now she’s lost even that.
Bastani and Walker agree that her banning is an open and shut case. She deserved it. But they also point out that the people who enabled her by giving her platforms and newspaper columns are still around. Stig Abell was the editor of the Scum who took her on. He hasn’t been damaged, and is now at the Times, where he’s pretending to be the voice of moderation. Well, I’ve absolutely no respect for the Times and its sister paper, the Sunday Times, because of their repeated smears and libels against the left, and particularly of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, including Mike. While they use a much more extensive vocabulary and are aimed at a far better educated readership than the Scum, those two rags are still utter, disgraceful trash. The time’s long past when all of the mendacious Tory press should have been cleaned out of his liars, propagandists and smear merchants.
I’ve no doubt that there are complaints against Hopkin’s ban as well as accusations of censorship, but I don’t think her defenders really have a case. There have been cases like Hopkins’ before, in which a right-winger with very racist or intolerant views has been banned from a social media platform like Twitter or YouTube. Their supporters have always tried to defend them on the grounds of free speech. But in America, this clause of the Constitution only applies to the government. They can’t imprison or persecute citizens for expressing their beliefs. But it doesn’t apply to private corporations.
Twitter is a private company. According to Conservatives and Libertarians, private industry should be left to do whatever it likes within reason in the pursuit of profit. Government should respect the rule of laissez faire economics and not interfere. But Twitter is a private company, and so it can, by the same reasoning, decide who or what it wants on its platform. And if it decides that hatey Katie has violated its terms and conditions, it has every right to throw her off. Also, Britain and other European countries don’t quite have free speech. A wide variety of opinions are permitted, but nevertheless it is an offence under British law to incite racial hatred. I’m not sure if someone has ever tried to prosecute her under the terms of the act, but she has certainly sailed close to the wind.
Hopkins has moved to Parler, which according to Zelo Street is rapidly becoming a cesspool full of racists like her and other extreme right-wingers, like the vile Toby Young. This is bad news for Hopkins as it means that she will probably never recover her popularity or audience. One of her fellows down there is Milo Yiannopolis, formerly of Breitbart. Yiannopolis is gay, half-Jewish and married to a Black man. But he’s another extreme right-wing propagandist, who made his name with attacks on ethnic minorities and feminism. All was going well for him. He had a speaking tour of American universities and a book deal with Simon & Schuster’s right-wing imprint. Then he appeared on the Joe Rogan Show and made comments suggesting he approved of paedophilia. At this point, it all vanished, including Yiannopolis’ invitation to CPAC or some other Conservative event. Yiannopolis tearfully retracted his comments, apologised and said that he now recognised that he also was a victim of child abuse. But it was to no avail. He was also turfed off Twitter, and has no joined in his fellow rightists in Parler.
Yiannopolis was also a massive grifter. He was also begging for money. One of his money-making schemes was appealing for donations for a bursary he was setting up so young White men could afford to go to college. He received plenty of money, but it all went straight into Yiannopolis’ own bank account. There was no bursary, and he never paid any aspiring underprivileged White male student anything. When last I took notice of him, Yiannopolis was claiming that he debts of £4 million. His chances of paying this off are slim. According to Zelo Street, his messages on Parler have included whinges that he now only has 1001 followers, who never go to anything he does, or buy anything from him. Well hard cheese. If only the same thing happened to others like him, who preached race hate and exploited the gullible. Now Hopkins is in the same boat, and likely to have the same difficulty recovering anything like her former success.
The only pity is that Abell and the rest of the ‘respectable’ Tory horrors that facilitated her haven’t also suffered the same treatment.
These are grim, scary times, but for Rupert Murdoch and his alleged cable news channel over the other side of the Pond, Fox News, things just might have become just that little scarier. Fox, Murdoch, AT&T and COMCAST are being sued by a group in the state of Washington, WASHLITE, over its coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic. Zelo Street has reported that the Republicans initially denied that the virus was a real threat, even denouncing it as a fake cooked up by the Democrats. Fox News is very firmly Republican and its statement that it is ‘fair and balanced reporting’ is very far from the truth, whatever the network thinks of itself. Its coverage of the former president, Obama, was hostile that he declared it to be an opposition group, rather than a normal news service. It seems that Fox dutifully followed the Republican line about the disease presenting no threat. And now, as the country endures lockdown, its hospitals are filling up with the disease’s victims and many of its enterprising people wondering if their businesses will survive, that coverage is coming back to bite ’em.
Zelo Street quotes a report from the Times of San Diego, that WASHLITE has asked the Washington state court to rule against Fox broadcasting any more fake information about the pandemic. It claims that the network violated the Consumer Protection Act by ‘falsely and deceptively disseminating “News” via cable news contracts that the coronavirus was a “hoax,” and that it was otherwise not a danger to public health and safety’. It specifically refers to broadcasts made by Sean Hannity and Trish Regan on March 9, in which ‘defendants acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel Coronavirus, or COVID-19, which is now recognized as an international pandemic’.
Fox have tried claiming that the suit is a violation of the First Amendment, the right to free speech. But a spokesman for the group said that defence didn’t apply, using the old metaphor about now shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. You have the right to free speech, but that right is transcended when what someone is saying endangers the whole community. Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman remarked that there was real fear in the network that their early downplaying of the threat posed by the virus could leave them vulnerable to potential legal action by people, who were misled and may even have died due to the channel’s falsehoods. He stated that Murdoch and his family had taken personal steps to protect themselves at the same time Hannity and Regan were telling everyone that the disease was a hoax.
Zelo Street also suggests that the WASHLITE suit could be the acorn from which a massive oak grows as it becomes a class action, an action that could make the damages to the Murdoch’s empire from the phone hacking scandal small beer.
Fox has been broadcasting propaganda and fake news for years. One academic study of the factual content of its broadcasting found that it was so low, people who took no news at all were actually better informed. The network also has the problem in that the majority of its viewers are in one of the groups most vulnerable to the disease – the elderly. Most of its viewers are in their 70s, which means that there are very many people, who may have been killed by taking the network’s denials seriously. I hope no one has died because of Fox, but the lawsuit does have a very good point. I’ve no doubt that Fox will throw whatever they can at the suit to get it thrown out of court or a ruling in their favour. But this could still be one to watch.
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