Here’s a great clip of Dennis Skinner, the Old Labour ‘Beast of Bolsover’ tearing into Theresa May. Skinner begins by asking her if she’s aware that the result of her election has been to complicate the precarious situation in Northern Ireland. The government has become involved in laundering £1 billion of terrorist money from protection rackets. He’s clearly referring to the £1 billion May’s government has given away to the DUP in order to gain their support for her minority government. The DUP has very strong links with Loyalist terror groups in Ulster, several members of which were sent down for racketeering.
He goes on to ask why she doesn’t call a general election to solve this mess. He states clearly that it is because she is afraid that Labour would win, and that a Labour government would end the money from terrorist protection rackets in Northern Ireland.
He demands that she should call a general election, and ends, ‘Now get on with it.’
Here’s another fun video from YouTube, taking the mick out of the Tories. Remember how Theresa May was chanting ‘strong and stable’ every five minutes like a stuck record during her election campaign in a vain attempt to make the electorate think that she was a tougher negotiator than she actually is?
Well, this little video takes her catchphrase, songifies it, and shows it as a technical glitch running on Windows XP, so that intercut with footage of May herself are error messages and warnings of virus attack. All mixed in with shots of Boris Johnson on that zipline, of course.
It’s a great video, so sit back and enjoy the fun!
Boris Johnson: he really should eat more roughage.
I found this video on YouTube of that interview Boris Johnson gave with Eddie Mair, in which the Tory leadership contender and former editor of the Spectator failed to answer Mair’s questions on what was in the Queen’s Speech for correcting harsher sentences against Blacks in the courts and improving the lives of the mentally ill. Boris couldn’t answer the first one, and after umming and ahhing tried to answer the second, before finding out that he couldn’t answer that one either, and tried to go back to answering the first question again. At which point Mair told him this wasn’t the Two Ronnies’ Mastermind Sketch, ‘Answering the Question before Last’.
Mair then went to mention all the policies May had said she would implement in the Tory manifesto, policies which had the support of 17.1 million people, but which had subsequently been dropped. Was it right to do this?
Johnson then replied that things hadn’t gone the way they wanted at the general election. To which Mair objected, ‘But you won’.
The video shows Mair and Johnson sitting in the seats for Mastermind as contestant and question master. And as Johnson performs worse and worse, so he gradually takes on the appearance of a clown, until he has the full garish wig and make-up. His comedic performance then ends with a honk of the clown’s squeaky horn.
This is a short clip from vlogger Kevin Logan, who specialises in tearing apart the extreme right and anti-feminists. The Tory MP, David Davis appeared on Channel 4 News in the week, being interviewed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Davis made the comment that Murthy was bringing politics into disrepute by not waiting for his answer.
At which point, the veteran newsman lets rip in a diatribe that tells Davis exactly what’s what. He states that what’s bringing politics into disrepute is
* lying about your opponents, as Theresa May did when she claimed that Corbyn was in favour of controlled immigrations. If you looked at the Labour manifesto, you’d see that he was in favour of managed immigration.
* U-turns, such as when May said she wouldn’t hold a general election, only to declare several weeks later that she would.
* And not turning up to debates.
Logan graphically shows what a smackdown this is, by showing people dropping the mike, and crowds backing away after their man is punched out in a school fight.
This is another video I found on YouTube. It’s from Frankie Boyle’s Election Autopsy, in which he picked over the fetid remains of the 2015 general election. The video’s of his final monologue in which he tells Tory voters how they have destroyed this nation due to their middle class pretentious tastes. As it comes from Frankie Boyle, you will not be surprised to read that it’s coarse humour. There’s isn’t any political insight here, but as the Tories have wrecked this fair nation, I thought their supporters deserve everything they got.
Also in yesterday’s I newspaper was a piece by Adam Burnett, ‘Corbyn Is Not Treated Fairly, Says Dimbleby’, in which the host of the Beeb’s Question Time attacked the media’s bias against the Labour leader and said it would be wrong to rule him out of winning the next election. The article reads
Veteran BBC host David Dimbleby has blasted the “lazy pessimism” of the media’s election coverage, saying Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has not been given a “fair deal” by the press.
The Question Time chairman, who will host the BBC’s election night coverage, said Mr Corbyn has “a lot of support in the country”, and given the “political somersaults of recent years, it would be a mistake to count Labour out.
“It’s a very odd election”, said Mr Dimbleby, speaking to the Radio Times. “The interesting thing is that a lot of Labour supporters really like and believe in the messages that Jeremy Corbyn is bringing across.
“It’s not his MPs in the House of Commons necessarily, but there is a lot of support in the country.
“And I don’t think anyone could say that Corbyn has had a fair deal at the hands of the press, in a way that the Labour party did when it was more to the centre – but then, we generally have a right-wing press.”
He added: “My own prediction is that, contrary to the scepticism and lazy pessimism of the newspapers and British media, it’s going to be a really fascinating night, and it will drive home some messages about our political system and the political appeal of different parties that no amount of polling or reading the papers will tell us.”
Of course, Question Time has also shown it’s own bias at times against Corbyn and the Labour party. And under Blair, New Labour was not a centrist party. It was, in its determination to privatise the NHS, the education system, and throw millions off welfare benefits, a right-wing party, just as the Tories are now. And the Tories in their determination to destroy the welfare state, which began in earnest under Thatcher, are far right when compared to the post-War consensus in all parties to support the NHS and welfare state, and maintain full employment.
Dimbleby’s right to attack the media’s bias against Corbyn, even if some of it seems like he’s trying to whip up interest in his own election night programme by saying that the outcome isn’t a foregone conclusion. But he’s wrong about it being ‘lazy pessimism’. It’s deliberate lies and fabrications, by a media and political class that are desperately afraid that Corbyn will succeed in undoing forty years of Thatcherism, and create a genuinely fairer and stronger Britain.
The right-wing media, including Beeb, and its paymasters come from the upper middle class, which have done very well thank you under Thatcherism. They have profited from the tax cuts and massive expansion in power and wealth achieved by grinding the other 75 per cent of the population down with increased taxation, the destruction of the welfare states, the privatisation of state industries, including the NHS, stagnant wages and zero-hours contracts. They, and the businesses they head and manage, have profited immensely from a cowed workforce, who are forced to work for poverty pay.
It is because Labour under Corbyn threatens this, that they have responded with lies and smears.
The Beeb’s crowing about how they caught out Jeremy Corbyn over the costs of free childcare on Woman’s Hour has shown several things that the Beeb definitely wouldn’t have intended. Firstly, it revealed how massively biased the Corporation is towards the Tories. As the French Philosophical Feline, Guy Debord’s Cat, has pointed out, the Beeb never, or rarely ever, asks where the money is going to come from when the Tories announce tax cuts. It sounds counterintuitive, but he makes the point that tax cuts also involve costs as well. Not that this would have mattered – none of the Tories’ policies are costed. But it also shows how desperate the Beeb and the Tories are getting, now that Corbyn is closing the gap between them and Labour.
A poll conducted shortly before the Manchester bombing showed that the gap was down to 5 per cent.
Hence the Beeb trying to make as much out of this minor victory as possible.
Last night, May and Corbyn were interviewed separately by Paxo. And, for many people, May’s performance was a debacle, while Corbyn came out far better. How poorly May performed can be seen on the clips Mike put up on his blog earlier today.
Paxo showed that he still had the power to lay into the great and powerful after leaving Newsnight and becoming the scourge of student quiz teams on University Challenge. Commenting on May’s various U-turns, such as when she announced she wouldn’t call a general election, and then did, and reversals she had made over Brexit, he said that instead of finding someone who was a good negotiator, the EC’s politicos and functionaries would instead find ‘a blowhard who falls down at the first sign of gunfire’. May, at least, had the decency to acknowledge they were U-turns, but tried explaining them away as necessitated by the circumstances.
And the responses from Twitter have been brilliant. WirralinItTogether, in response to Paxo’s brief, pithy characterisation of May as a negotiator, posted a picture of a little girl falling out of her chair laughing. Tory Fibs put up a list of the devastating cuts that have been inflicted on the NHS, and their equally devastating effects, like waiting lists are now at a seven year high. Members of the audience laughed at her, were seen mouthing ‘that’s bollocks’ when she spoke. And Martin Lewis posted the results of the poll.
Asked who they believed won,
48 per cent, who also supported Labour, thought he’d won.
37 per cent, who were not supporters of Labour, also thought he had.
11 per cent, who were Tories, though May had won.
And 9 per cent, who weren’t Tories, believed May had been the victor.
He has various clips, including a whole video of the interviews, so you can judge for yourself, along with other Tweets and videos showing Labour’s promises, including their pledge to reverse the damage to Britain’s security inflicted by May’s cuts to the police, border guards and armed forces.
The leak last Thursday of the Labour party manifesto, with its promise to nationalise the railways and parts of the energy network, clearly has rattled the Tory party. Mike over at Vox Political remarked that leak was probably intended to discredit these policies, but instead they have proved massively popular.
I’m not surprised. The Tory party, of course, started shrieking that this would drag us all back to the 1970s – actually not a bad thing, as Mike has also pointed out, considering that the gulf between rich and poor was at its lowest during that decade. The Torygraph also went berserk, and plastered all over the front page of its Friday edition a headline claiming that Labour MPs were ‘disowning’ it. I don’t know how true this was. It could be the Blairites trying their best to undermine their own party again, in order to shore up virtuous neoliberalism. Or it could be just more rumour and scaremongering put out, as usual, by the rag and its owners, the weirdo Barclay twins. The Telegraph has been in the forefront of the newspapers attacking Corbyn since he was elected to the Labour leadership. So many of its stories are just scaremongering or, at best, the fevered imaginings of a frightened capitalist class, that you can’t really believe anything the newspaper actually writes about the Labour party or its leader. Ken Surin, in an article for Counterpunch, quoted statistics by media analysts that said that only 11 per cent of reports about the party presented the facts accurately.
But the fact that the railways do need to be renationalised was ironically shown again that day, as a train I wanted to catch was delayed by 15 minutes. Because a train had broken down. The British taxpayer now pays far more subsidies to the private rail companies for a worse train service than in the 1970s. So once again, we’re back to showing that rather than being a decade of uniform disaster and imminent social collapse, it was better in some ways than the present.
So May has decided to unveil a few radical policies of her own. In order to counter Labour’s promise to build a million new homes, half of which will be social housing, in the next five years, May has announced that her government will boost the number of social housing being built, and included a special right to buy clause. Which sounds good, until you realise that they’re not going to release any more money for it.
Without that extra money, the promise is meaningless.
It’s more Tory lies.
The Tory party has absolutely no intention of building any more social housing. Mike has put up in his article a table of the Tories’ abysmal record on housing. These include a 43 per cent increase in homelessness, a 166 per cent jump in the number of people sleeping rough, private rents have gone up by over £1,700 since 2010, and the cost of owning a home for first-time buyers has risen by £65,000. But this won’t worry the Tory party, as 1/3 of them are private landlords. And I distinctly remember Johnny Void posting a number of articles about they sought to profit by the dearth of housing in London.
And this is quite apart from the fact that the Tory press, such as the Daily Mail, is aimed very much at the kind of people, who buy to rent, and endlessly applauds high house prices even though they make homes unaffordable to an increasing number of people in 21st century England. Of course they see such prices as a good thing, as it means even greater profits for them.
So they won’t want to undermine the housing bubble they’ve created, and cause prices to fall by building any more.
But they can’t be seen to be doing that, with Corbyn and Labour hot on this issue.
So they’ve concocted this rubbish, self-contradictory policy, hoping that people will be deceived by the meaningless promise. They hope people will remember the first part, and forget that without any more money, it won’t happen.
Don’t let them fool you.
Vote Labour for a decent housing solution on June 8th.
I know this is ad feminam, but I couldn’t resist it. Not when the Tory press has flung out so many ad hominem attacks at Labour politicos and trade unionists over the years.
In his article on Jeremy Hunt and Theresa May running away from the British public yesterday, Mike has a photo of the Tory leader in full grimace.
Looking at her, I was reminded of a picture of a Roman statue of an actor, now in the Petit Palais Museum in Paris.
It all brings to mind what Frankie Howerd would’ve said as Lurcio in Up Pompeii, ‘Titter ye not! Oooooh, she’s off again! Don’t mock! You mustn’t mock! It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’
Howerd was one of the greatest funny men this country has produced, who gave millions joy with his own brand of comedy. May and the Tories are also clowns, but it’s a black farce and the only laughter is what Russian writers call ‘the laughter through tears’.
The ancient Greek word for ‘actor’ is ‘hypocrite’. And that’s what the Tories are: massive hypocrites, pretending to care about ordinary people, ending poverty, protecting the NHS, while doing the exact opposite.
Help end their hypocrisy and cruelty by voting Labour on June 9th.
Mike posted this little piece about the biased reporting of the BBC. This time it was on the radio and concerned the Beeb’s coverage of the Brexit negotiations with the EU. Steve Fox, one of the many commenters on Mike’s blog, told how he had been moved to write a letter of complaint to the BBC because of a piece by their reporter, Katia Adler. Adler had asserted that EU leaders are hoping for a “strong” leader to emerge from the UK general election, and that when “she” does, negotiations will be better.
As Mr Fox points out, the only ‘she’ in the election is Theresa May. So in effect, the Beeb was telling us that EU leaders are hoping that May wins the general election. And this is what Emma Duff from the Beeb’s complaint’s team, told him in their reply. They said that Katya was simply reporting her understanding, as European Editor, of the sentiments of leading European Union figures on this subject. This was followed by more verbiage about BBC reporters trying to be impartial and objective.
Mike concludes
Oh, so she was saying the European Union’s top brass want Theresa May to win the general election – but that’s not going to sway anybody voting in a poll that the same Theresa May wants us to think is about Brexit?
This is one more incident to add to a growing pile of stories about the Beeb’s pro-Tory bias. We’ve had Laura Kuenssberg belittling and attacking Labour and Jeremy Corbyn at every turn, Nick Robinson carefully editing footage of Alex Salmond at the debates on Scots independence to make it seem that he didn’t answer one of the Macclesfield Goebbel’s questions when he did. And this all just seems part of general policy at the Beeb not to cover Jeremy Corbyn in particular in any positive or objective manner, but only to give him limited, negative coverage. It’s more Project Fear. Saville and Barry Kushner have described how the Beeb’s coverage of austerity never questions the need for it, even though it is not the self-evidently true solution to the debt crisis it claims to be. Indeed not. Rather than cut the deficit, it has massively increased it. Academics from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff Universities have shown that the Beeb’s more likely to show interviews with Tory MPs and financiers, than with Labour MPs and trade unionists when covering the economy. And those Tory MPs and bankers are also more likely to be treated sympathetically by the Beeb.
And Private Eye has been railing for years at the Beeb’s patronising attitude, which denies any kind of bias at the Corporation, even when it is blatantly obvious.
There has even been published an entire book about how the Beeb’s claims of providing public service broadcasting is a myth.
At the moment, the Beeb, like it’s counterparts in the Tory press, is trying desperately to tell us all the Corbyn is unpopular and unelectable. Don’t believe the lies. The Labour leader’s policies are sound, far sounder than the Tories, and he is massively popular at the grassroots.
Which is what the Beeb and the press fear the most. It puts the lie to their claim pretensions to be opinion-formers that everyone should take notice of, and which brings in support from business and advertisers.
