A day or so ago pro-Palestinian protesters painted graffiti over the Labour party’s headquarters, doubtless in protest at Starmer’s continuing support for the Israeli state and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. GB News has posted a video about this, and the response of Lord Walney. Walney has blamed the far left, of course, and according to the blurb for the video said it shouldn’t be allowed. I haven’t watched the video, but I was struck by its thumbnail. This had the line ‘Democracy has failed!’ Well, I always had the suspicion that GB News didn’t believe in democracy. This is the broadcaster that flouts Ofcom regulations against employing politicians as news presenters. And it has been described by one Labour MP as having two points of view: right, and far right. With this latest headline from them, I’m left wondering if they’ve got a portrait of Oswald Mosley down in the basement. I suppose it’s a good thing that there’s no longer a TV closedown, as there was when I was growing up in the 1970s. The TV companies went off at about 10.30 or so. Just before then, there was the Epilogue, which I think consisted of a clergyman or other spiritual person giving us his thought for the day. Then I think you had the national anthem and that was it. Programmes are over, it’s time for bed. If GB News ended its broadcasting like that, I wonder if instead of ‘God Save the King’, we’d have the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel Song, and a photo of Mussolini.
But I think they have a point – democracy has failed. It’s failed because the three main parties don’t believe in it. Leaving aside the controversy over Scotland’s hate crime laws for a moment, neither Labour nor the Tories actually want to give the British public what they want. Poll after poll shows that severely normal Brits want a fully nationalised NHS and trains and the public utilities taken back into public ownership. A majority of Brits also want arms sales to Israel to stop. But neither party wants to enact such policies. Despite the massive profiteering of Thames Water, one of the Tory ministers appeared on TV the other day to say that nationalisation wasn’t the answer. Well, of course not. It would prevent their corporate chums from screwing their customers and then screwing the British taxpayer to bail them out. The Tories have been passing legislation after legislation to make public protests and demonstrations difficult, and both Blair and the Tories also set the legal foundations for secret courts. These are tribunals where, if it is deemed in the interest of national security, the trial may be held behind closed doors with the defendant not informed who his accuser is or the evidence against him.
Democracy is being stifled thanks to Labour and the Tories. It’s time to consider voting for the other parties, like the Greens and Independents, who may offer the voting public what they really want and need.
Here’s another little item from Scotland, though not nearly as entertaining as the spoof documentaries from the Haggis Wildlife Foundation. This comes from the Silver Fox Hot Takes channel on Youtube. The Silver Fox of the title appears to be a Conservative, and the channel is very much devoted to attacking the SNP for its alleged corruption and wokery. He put one video up a week or so ago wondering if the Scottish Greens and SNP were planning massive purges of Greens and Tories from the country. This was after a Green MP had declared that she wanted to make Scotland a ‘Zionist-free zone’ and someone from Sturgeon’s merry band said something similar about ridding the country of Conservatives. Of course, the problem with shouting ‘anti-Semitism’ about criticisms and denunciations of Zionism, is that Zionism is an ideology. Not every Jewish person believes in it, and some, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, actively oppose it. It was originally a gentile, Christian doctrine aimed at hastening Christ’s return, or simply cleansing Europe of Jews. The biggest Zionist organisation in America is Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. And apart from that, some of us can still remember Thatcher ranting that she was going to destroy socialism, and the fear that she really did intend to put leftists in concentration camps.
The Silver Fox has also moved on to criticising the Scottish Labour party, no doubt because certain polls have suggested that they will take over from the SNP as the majority party in Scotland at the next election. The right are as alarmed by this as they are of the SNP continuing in government, as Labour is apparently just as woke as the Scots Nationalists. But there are other, left-wing reasons why people should be wary of giving Labour their vote. In this short video, the Silver Fox takes very good aim at the man, John Grady, whom Glasgow East has selected as their prospective candidate at this year’s elections. According to the Fox, Grady is a lawyer who successfully fought for the cap on electricity bills to be raised, thus doing his bit to make the country poorer. I find this all too credible. Scottish Labour was as Blairite as the rest of the Labour party under the rule of Tony, Gordon and Miliband. Many Scots were massively unimpressed by its leader, Jim Murphy, who followed the British Labour party generally in capitulating to the attacks on the welfare state. Jeremy Corbyn challenged the grip of the Blairites and lost thanks to a massive smear campaign, and now we have Kier Starmer, a very definite, loud Blairite. And so it seems the Blairites are back in Scotland, selecting their Thatcherite candidates and activists while telling the rest of us that somehow they represent working people and everything will be better under them.
Be very careful who you vote for this election. If there’s an alternative candidate you prefer, no matter how small their party, vote for them. We need to show the big beasts they can’t take our vote for granted.
One of the issues regarding hate speech and racism that is particularly worrying some Christian groups is the definition of islamophobia that has been taken up by Labour and the other left-wing parties from the Lib Dems to the Greens. It’s been adopted by something like 62 local authorities, and with the Labour party apparently set to win the general election later this year, there are fears that they will make it national policy. This declares that ‘islamophobia is rooted in racism’ and seeks to ban prejudice or hostility towards Muslims based on their religion or ‘expressions of Muslimness’. The concern here is that it’s a blasphemy law by the back door as it does not distinguish between prejudice towards Muslims and dislike or criticism of the religion. I’ve said before now that I believe all ideologies and religions should be open to reasonable debate and criticism. But this is sharply curtailed in Islamic countries by blasphemy laws, such as that in Pakistan that carries the death penalty.
Mahyar Tousi in one of his vlogs has stated that islamophobia was formulated by the Ayatollah Khomeini when he was busy turning Iran into an Islamic republic. He could ban criticism of Islam there through the imposition of blasphemy laws, but was also determined to stop in the non-western world – what medieval Islam called the ‘dar al-harb’ or the Zone of War, as well. Hence he developed the idea of islamophobia as a form of racial prejudice. This was taken up in Britain by Trevor Philips, who now says he regrets having done so. I’ve more than enough problems with Tousi. He’s very right-wing, and seems to think that anyone to the left of the Tories is a Commie and is another who’s been telling the world that everyone supporting Gaza is an anti-Semite. But he is an ethnic Iranian and so I take some of what he says about Iran very seriously.
The most obvious criticism about the definition of islamophobia is its claim that prejudice against Islam or Muslims is ‘rooted in racism’. Islam isn’t a race. It’s a religion. The global nature of the religion means that there are White, Black and Asian Muslims, and the religion is not itself immune to racism. Although the adoption of Islam by African kings led to a positive attitude by the Arabs, as shown in books with titles like On the Excellence of the Blacks, the enslavement of Black Africans also created racial prejudice against them, very similar to the racist stereotypes that arose in the Christian west following the emergence of transatlantic slavery. During the war in the former Yugoslavia Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats were racially extremely close. They were all White, as shown by a photograph of a group of blonde Bosnian Muslims leaving a mosque. Further north in Russia and, I think, the Baltic states, there are Muslim communities that have been there since the Middle Ages. I think they’re descended from central Asian Turkic tribes, who were pushed westward by the expansion of the Mongols. They’ve now been racially assimilated to the Slav and Baltic populations, as shown by a photo in one of the genuine Fascist rags back in the ’90s of a Lithuanian mullah. This man had blonde hair and blue eyes, as well as a splenetic hatred of the Jews, and so got glowing praise from Aryan supremacist nutjobs publishing the rag. One female Fascist in Mussolini’s Italy was heavily into Sufi mysticism, and so converted to Islam. In the ’90s there was a group of Fascists around Robert Pash, who were very impressed by Gadaffy’s Libya. In this century the BNP’s fuehrer, Nick Griffin, held a debate with the Islamist Anjem Chaudhary. To his surprise, Griffin got on very well with Chaudhary, as they both had similar views about the Jews. Islam got the legal status of a race in Britain following a ruling designed to protect the Sikhs from similar prejudice. The Sikh community, although very definitely largely South Asian, is composed of a number of different ethnic groups, all of which were vulnerable to prejudice because of their religion. After the Sikhs won their legal recognition as a single ethnic group based on their religion, the Muslims applied for a similar status. This is possibly based on the doctrine that all Muslims are members of a single ‘umma, or nation or community.
I don’t deny that Muslim people do need to be protected from prejudice and harassment, but the simplistic formulation of anti-Muslim prejudice makes genuine, necessary criticism of the religion and the behaviour and attitudes of some of its followers difficult. The burka is a case in point. It comes from a time and culture that stipulated that women should be confined to the home. They were not to mix with men who were not close relatives, and if they ventured out they should have to be accompanied by their husbands or another close male relative. Not all Muslim sects accepted its validity. I’ve read that the clause in the Quran demanding the veiling of women actually only demands that the bosom be covered. Nevertheless, when Boris Johnson wrote a piece in his newspaper column years ago attacking it, and comparing the women who wore it to ninjas and bin bags, he was justifiably accused of islamophobia, not least because abuse of women wearing it increased following its publication. On the other side of the Atlantic, a Canadian cartoonist was sued for islamophobia under the country’s hate speech laws because of a caricature he’d drawn a notorious female Islamist. He’d drawn in her in burka with only her eyes and glasses showing, declaring that she was going to sue someone else for prejudice so her husband could yet another Islamist training event. The subject of the cartoon sued on the grounds that it portrayed her in an islamophobic stereotype. This was despite the fact that whenever she did appear in public, in court or on television, she was always dressed in a burka.
And then there’s the issue of that mosque in Kethley, Yorkshire, whose members were sending death threats to a 14 year old autistic boy who scuffed a copy of the Quran. This, they declared, was islamophobic. It wasn’t. It showed disrespect for the Quran, and would have been a horrendous blasphemy in their eyes, but it was not a comment on Muslims as people. The shrieks of islamophobia served as an accusation of blasphemy. The police complied, and so turned up at a meeting of the mosque in question where the boy’s mother basically pleaded for her son’s life. The cops didn’t act on the mother’s side, and neither did the local authorities, possibly from fear that this would cause mass rioting across the Muslims world as happened when a Swedish man burned a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish embassy in fury at the Turks refusing to allow the country to join NATO. I’m also concerned for the safety of Christians from Muslim majority countries, who have moved here to escape real persecution in places like Pakistan. In the 1970s there was an influx of Christian Pakistanis, who allegedly came here to escape rioting against them in Pakistan after one of the newspapers printed a story about texts from the Quran being used on the wallpaper in a British restaurant. It’s unclear whether this story is true or not, as the sociologists who reported it weren’t able to verify it. But it seems more than plausible to me, given the religious rioting that has occurred more recently against Pakistani Christians.
I do not want genuine asylum seekers persecuted for their religious beliefs over here through religiously intolerant legislation passed under the guise of protecting Muslims from prejudice.
Okay, as you’ve no doubt seen on the news, the Labour party won the Wellingborough and Kingswood bye-elections. In Kingswood, a suburb of Bristol, I think they increased their majority over the Tories to 8,000. The local Bristol Labour party has been campaigning hard up there for the past few weeks. I suppose that, as a member of the party, I should feel delighted, optimistically looking forward to Labour enjoying a sweeping landslide when Sunak chooses to call an election.
But I’m not. Because I don’t think that the election is necessarily secure, and that even if Labour win, it’ll just mean a change of faces, not a change of policies. As the saying goes, ‘Same sh*t, different assholes’. And the week has definitely been mixed for Starmer, no matter what spin he chooses to put on it.
To begin with, Starmer has managed to destroy Muslim support for the Labour party. He could have called for a ceasefire, citing the massively disproportionate casualties suffered by Palestinian civilians, most notoriously women and children. He could have made it plain that he condemned the terror attack by Hamas that killed the kids at the music festival, and said something about Israel having the right to defend itself while stating that the death toll on civilians had gone too far. In short, he could have acted as a statesman in waiting. He didn’t. He rejected a ceasefire, then when this started to lose him votes he did what he usually does when faced with electoral or political embarrassment: he started lying and claimed that he had always supported a ceasefire. Nobody bought this latest set of untruths. The result is that the party’s support among Muslims has collapsed, and various Muslims are now standing against Labour in their constituency as independents. In Rochdale he disavowed the Labour candidate, Afzal Ali, because he said something that one of the ultra-Zionist watchdogs decided was anti-Semitic. In fact, Ali simply repeated the Egyptian story about the attack and made a few observations and questions of his own. The Egyptians have claimed that they told the Israeli authorities that the attack was coming days before, and the Israelis did nothing. There are other questions as well. Israel is circled by surveillance equipment, including alarms that go off whenever anyone breached their defensive wall. But somehow all this highly sophisticated equipment failed to detect the terrorists when they flew into Israel. The music festival itself was only miles from a number of IDF bases, so why did it take the army eight hours to get there? And the festival was originally a bit further away, and actually moved closer to the Gazan border. Various people, and not just Ali, have smelt something very fishy. Sonia Paulton on her YouTube channel said that it looked very much like a false flag attack, of which the Israelis have been responsible for a number. The most famous was the attack on the USS Liberty during one of the wars in the 1960s. The Liberty was in the Mediterranean off Israel collecting intelligence. The Israelis were afraid they’d pass this on to Egypt and the Arabs, and so attacked the vessel.
But Ali was accused of anti-Semitism and spreading conspiracy theories about Jews. Er, no. He raised reasonable questions about the Israeli state, which is not synonymous with the Jewish people or religion whatever Netanyahu and his supporters over here may say. Starmer apparently threw Ali out. But this has led to further embarrassment. I think Ali is set to win, despite no longer being a member of the Labour party. And a number of Starmer’s own right-wingers have been accused of anti-Semitism, because they’ve said much the same as Ali. Or uttered other comments that could be viewed as anti-Semitic. The ever-excellent Damo Kernow has made a brilliant video about this. One of those who could be accused of anti-Semitism is Ruth Smeeth, the malign women who made a completely bogus accusation of anti-Semitism against anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth after he commented on her passing on pamphlets to a hack from the Torygraph. The bug-eyed Zionist right is now appearing on GB News and other right-wing propaganda outlets declaring that Labour still has a problem with anti-Semitism.
And along with this embarrassment, Starmer ditched his £28 billion pledge for Green energy and technology. The right hates the Green movement with a passion and so I doubt that they’re terribly upset at this. But that hasn’t stopped the Torygraph noticing that Labour’s lead was falling in the polls. There is preciously little now, if anything, that separates Labour from the Tories. Starmer has just about dumped the last left-wing policy he had. His stance now is basically, ‘Vote Labour – we’re not the Tories’. And many people are now wondering who they should vote for. I’ve had friends tell me that they don’t know, because Labour is now the same as the Tories. They’ve even said that they’d rather vote Communist, not because they are Commies, but because that party would offer a genuine alternative.
I’m very happy that the Tories didn’t win Kingswood, but I don’t really have any enthusiasm for Labour’s victory. I would have been happier if it was smaller, and there was a break out vote for the Trades Union and Socialist Coalition, the Socialist Party or the Greens, and that one of these parties had come second. Such a result might convince some people in the party that they should start returning to socialism sharpish if they don’t want Labour to start to come second to them. But that’s far too much to hope for.
At the moment it looks like a Labour victory is still on the cards, but with a reduced majority. I believe that, if they do get in, we should still prepare to carry on the fight to preserve the NHS and the welfare state just as the left is doing now under the Tories.
Because Starmer hates the nationalised NHS and the welfare state as much as they do.
This is so obviously a good thing that this country’s children desperately need that I’ve signed it automatically. However, I really doubt whether Starmer will listen in his drive to appease and ingratiate himself to the right.
‘David,
It’s a national scandal: 4 million children in the UK were living in households that went short of food last year.
In my 13 years as a teacher, I’ve seen child hunger rise astronomically. As the General Secretary of the National Education Union, I hear stories from educators across the country about their bringing food into school for pupils who don’t have enough.
In Britain? That’s just not good enough.
Where the Government is failing our children, the Opposition has a chance to stand up to demand better.Free School Meals for every child in primary school would be a strong start.
Sign the petition now asking Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer to join the fight for Free School Meals for All, and commit to making it happen if Labour wins the next election.
Free School Meals for every child in primary school is a policy that’s time has come. It’s already being rolled out in Scotland, Wales and now London — it can be done across England too.
This would make a huge difference for families.
Lightening the load for parents, and helping them rest a little easier knowing that their children are getting a healthy, hot school dinner every day.
And it would help every child come to class ready to concentrate, to create and above all to learn and thrive. It’s what teachers want for all our pupils.
To win this change for children and families, we need every political party behind it. The Liberal Democrat and Green parties already back extending Free School Meals. So do dozens of Labour MPs, peers, mayors and councils
As trade unionists, we know that nothing changes unless we take action together.
That’s why the National Education Union launched this campaign in September last year. It’s why unions representing doctors, dieticians, school nurses and staff and more have all come together to support it.
It’s why our call for Free School Meals for all is now backed by over 90,000 people and growing.
As Labour meets today, its leaders are setting out their priorities for the coming year if they win the next election.
Let’s help them focus on what matters most: building a strong future for every child.
In solidarity,
Daniel
Daniel Kebede
Teacher and General Secretary, National Education Union’
A week or so ago I put up a piece urging left-wing voters concerned about Starmer’s transformation of the Labour party into Tories 2.0 in the wretched man’s constituency should seriously consider voting for candidates from other left-wing parties to turf him out of parliament. And, hopefully, the Labour leadership.
Today I had this reply to the post from Eric Jarvis, letting us know about OCISA, an organisation that has been set up to do just that.
‘We are on this. OCISA was set up in February to stand a democratic left candidate in Holborn St Pancras. We have been out on the streets there surveying people to find out what they want from their MP, are busy fundraising, and will shortly be advertising for potential candidates (for a democratic selection process involving all our members) over the next month or two. We have got agreements from pretty much every left party to ensure there will only be one genuine left candidate standing (because Starmer definitely isn’t one).
Holborn St Pancras is one of the most diverse constituencies in the country as well as having had one of the largest Remain votes in the referendum. It has several large immigrant communities some of which include a lot of first generation refugees. The average age of the adult population there is under 35. The Tories are nowehere in the area and working hard at making themselves even less attractive. It is clear that neither the Lib Dems or Greens are targeting the seat.
For anyone even vaguely left leaning or concerned about democracy and living in Holborn St Pancras it is a no brainer. For any such people living elsewhere you can still help support OCISA, join and have some say in selecting the candidate, and help us raise funds to do an effective campaign. https://ocisa.org.uk/’
Thanks, Eric, for providing us with this information and I wish you the very best in your campaign for a proper left-wing MP for Holborn St Pancras, and a proper left-wing party for Britain.
Starmer has once again shown how authoritarian he is by passing regulations banning debate on ‘divisive’ topics from being discussed at the upcoming Labour conference. This shows that not all Labour members have swallowed his neoliberal rubbish and he’s afraid they’ll challenge him. This is just another, further step in transforming Labour into a top-down, highly autocratic party in which the leader dictates policy while the grassroots obey. Or Else. Mind you, if the purges and suspensions on trumped-up charges weren’t enough, Starmer’s preference for silencing open debate when it gets awkward has been shown very clearly when he was interviewed a little while ago over the trans issue. He was asked if women had cervixes. There are a number of ways he could have handled the issue. He could have muttered something about it depending on how you define sex and gender and then talked about gender identity, like some of the politicians from the Green Party and SNP. Instead he shouted that it was not a question that should be asked. I’m not trying to rehash the arguments over the gender ideology again, as I think we all know where we stand on this issue. The point I’m making is that when he’s presented with an awkward question or challenge his first instinct is to try to shut it down.
This, in my view, makes him extremely dangerous as a leader. Free speech is under attack from both left and right, and I don’t seen Starmer trying to defend our ancient liberties from the people trying to set up secret courts and stifle demonstrations through regulations pretending to protect people from nuisance.
‘Dear David,
Everywhere you look, things are falling apart. Through the negligence, corruption, and incompetence of the last decade, this country is now in a state of utter disrepair. Our politics, our institutions, our public services, our buildings, our homes, and our livelihoods are withering away, and those currently in power seem to be fine with it.
The calls from the public for meaningful change are only getting louder. 63% now say unequivocally that Britain is heading in the “wrong direction”. People are rallying behind campaigns led by public figures like Hugh Grant, Carole Vorderman and Feargal Sharkey, as well as subscribing to independent media outlets that are willing to criticise those in power. They’re joining political organisations like Open Britain to voice their frustration with our broken political system.
The public is showing a palpable appetite for change and a desire to engage and grapple with the issues of our time. Whether it’s Brexit, electoral reform, the transition to renewables, or immigration, people are begging for a proper forum to debate issues even handedly. They want discussions based on the facts instead of emotional rhetoric or misleading soundbites. They want to have their voices heard instead of dismissed.
Given all of that, we were dismayed at Labour’s decision today to shut down meaningful debateat their upcoming party conference, prohibiting discussion of “divisive issues” including electoral reform, Brexit, and the two-child benefit cap. Britain is clearly at a crossroads, a major inflection point likely to give way to a massive political swing. These kinds of moments are the true test for democratic debate, where we collectively re-evaluate who we are as a nation.
Labour, the party which polling suggests is likely to form the next government, will not gain anything from kicking the can down the road and avoiding these hard conversations. It’s precisely because they are so divisive that the party needs to decide where its members stand. So why is Labour shutting down debate?
The short answer is that our broken political system encourages it. Labour’s leadership seems convinced that their best bet is to appeal to voters in swing-seats, contorting the entire party policy platform towards a minority they believe will make or break the election. As often happens in First-Past-the-Post politics, nuance and debate is sidelined for a “win-at-all costs” mentality. In this case, it means the views of many within the Labour party will go ignored.
If Labour wants to avoid “short-term sticking plaster politics”, as the leadership claims it does, they need to address the root causes of the country’s problems. They’d do well to commit to delivering the UK Democracy Goals by 2030. They could build a democracy where leaders are truly held accountable (Goals 1-3), voting starts at 16 and registration is automatic (Goals 21-22), and proportional representation in the House of Commons builds a collaborative British politics instead of a combative one (Goal 24). That’s only the beginning.
Not only would it save Labour from having to twist and turn to fit a broken model, it would set the foundations for a more consistent and less volatile political future. It would ensure that whatever future crises or debates we find on the horizon – dealing with future pandemics, rejoining the European Union, or taking bold steps towards green energy – are truly held in the fairest way possible.
We’re urging Labour not to give in to complacency, and to take a bold stand for what the UK desperately needs right now: proper civil debate and open fair democratic deliberation about the issues that matter most.
Jo Bird is a Green councillor for Wirral, and this video describes how she was targeted for attack and smearing by the usual bug-eyed Thatcherite infiltrators and Likudnik Fascists for her thoughtcrimes against the state of Israel. Jo Bird is another Jewish opponent of Starmer and his purges, and the Blairites and their allies have been angered that, after joining the Green party they have selected her as their parliamentary candidate. And so we have Rebecca Filer of the anti-racist organisation, Hope Not Hate calling her an anti-Semite and declaring that she was expelled from Labour for supporting an anti-Semitic organisation. And the Likudnik Bowel Movement, sorry, Jewish Labour Movement, also put its oar in by saying that there was a hierarchism of racism in this country, and that anti-Semitism was viewed as more serious and given more attention than other forms of racism. Which a report found to be true. And Mdm. Bird was not expelled for anti-Semitism. She was thrown out because she dared to attend and speak at meetings of Labour Against the Witch Hunt in 2018 and 2020. This was when the organisation was still permitted in the Labour party. It was after Stalin had passed his regulations against it that Jo Bird and others were thrown out retroactively. As you will be aware, retroactive legislation like this is considered an attack on human rights and natural justice.
The presenter of this video makes the point that this isn’t about anti-Semitism. It’s the centrists trying to destroy the left everywhere. Hope Not Hate were also part of the witch hunt against Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party, because Jezza supported the Palestinians against their persecution by the state of Israel. This is very different from anti-Semitism, which, according to its s19th century founders like Wilhelm Marr, is hatred of Jews simply for being Jews, without regard to religion or ideology. And despite Netanyahu’s bluster and declarations, Judaism and the Jewish people are not synonymous with the modern state of Israel. Zionism has only one been one ideology among many, and for a long time most Jews didn’t support it, and nor did their gentile friends, because it was associated with real anti-Semites like Wagner. And this drives the hard-line supporters of Israel absolutely berserk, as the one thing they cannot tolerate is Jews visibly criticising and demonstrably not supporting Israel and its oppressive, apartheid government.
And the right-wing columnist, Quentin Letts, wrote about how there was a hierarchy of treatment for different races and minorities, with Jews at the top, in his book Bog-Standard Britain. I have yet to see Letts attacked for anti-Semitism. Nor do I wish to see it either, as despite his politics I have never seen anything he’s written that could be reasonably considered as anti-Semitic.
The video ends with its host declaring his solidarity with Bird. Absolutely, and I also declare my own solidarity with her, as a woman genuinely fighting for socialism, the environment and internationalism, and against all forms of prejudice and hate.
This little piece of news appeared on the Queens’ Speech podcast last Saturday. The Queens’ Speech team are two gender critical gay men, Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh, who discuss the latest news regarding the gender and trans issues. I think they’re opposed to the gender ideology and Queer Theory for the same reasons as Barry Wall, the EDIJester. This is the fear that gender-nonconforming children, who may turn out to be gay, are being diagnosed as transgender and put on the pathway to medical transition as a form of conversion therapy. They are also deeply concerned about the abuse of diagnoses of transgenderism by predatory, biological men to enter women’s private spaces, including self-declared translesbians propositioning lesbian natal women.
The Green Party in England and Scotland has taken a strong stance supporting transgender identity and rights. This may now be leading the party towards a trio of very costly court cases as three of their activists are suing them for unfair dismissal or similar crimes. These three have gender critical beliefs, and believe they have lost their positions due to them. Although their beliefs are definitely not party policy, they are protected under the British legislation guaranteeing freedom of conscience. This has been proved in a series of trials. The costs of such trials and the penalties that may be awarded if they win threaten the Greens with insolvency. Or so I understand.
I’ve expressed my gender critical views on this blog several times, and have no wish to go over the issues again. And I definitely do not support the abuse and persecution of ordinary trans people. I was talking to friends last week about the issue, and they told me of the people they knew who had changed their sex and the horrendous abuse they had suffered for it. I have every sympathy for these people and very definitely do not approve of their maltreatment. I am worried about this development because, while I disagree with the Greens on this issue, they are standing up for the environment while the Tories and Starmer seem determined to carry on trashing it. And I very much want them to be there as an alternative to the Labour party, for people who don’t want to give their votes to a party that seems desperate to turn themselves into Tories Mark 2. So, chizz, chizz, chizz, as Molesworth would sa.
I hope this issue can be settled in a way that will not lead to the Green’s insolvency, and allow them to continue as a needed presence on the political left.
I just got this latest e-petition through an hour or so ago. It notes that 78 per cent of the truly great British people want the NHS renationalised and that Keef’s shadow cabinet is divided on the issue. Five out of six of them do not agree with its privatisation. Labour is 40 points ahead of the Tories, and so will be in a position to renationalise the health service if it gets elect at the next election. I’ve signed it, and am putting it up here in the hope that others reading this blog will too.
But I am not confident Stalin will ever renationalise the health service. He’s too much of a New Labour corporatist, just like his wretched hero, Tony Blair. And I’m afraid it won’t matter to him what percentage of the British public demand the renationalisation of the health service and other public utilities. He’s already shown he has absolute contempt for democracy and majority opinion. All that matters to him is the support of the corrupt, media-industrial complex. But I hope I’m wrong.
‘Dear David,
What would you most like to see politicians delivering after the next election?
How about reinstating our NHS as the fully public service it was always intended to be?
We want to see our NHS reinstated as a fully public service. As it was intended to be when it was set up back in 1948. A service that everyone can be proud of. The best thing this country ever created.
Because it’s what we believe in. And because we know that whether you’re old or young, rich or poor, whatever your background, the NHS is something that brings people together.
And the only way you can win campaigns and make change happen is by bringing people together.
So if you want to see our NHS run for patients not profit, you’re not alone. In fact 78% of the public agree with you.
The question is, how can you get what you want? And the answer is – support our new campaign!
The British public is very clear and very united about the NHS and the fact that it should be there to care for people in our hour of need, not make a profit.
But the Labour Party, the main opposition party in Westminster, is not clear at all.
They are divided.
In fact, the Express recently reported that Labour’s shadow health team of ministers is ‘split from top to bottom’ over privatisation. 5 out of 6 of them have gone on the record saying they disagree with private sector involvement in our NHS.
That’s why Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, needs to hear from YOU.
He needs to know that you unequivocally want profit-making private companies out of our NHS. You want him to fund #OnlyTheNHS and fund it PROPERLY, instead of wasting money on privatisation.
Do politicians break promises? Of course. But our job as campaigners is to push them to MAKE promises and then hold their feet to the fire if and when they have the chance to deliver what people want.Labour is nearly 40 points ahead of the Conservatives so there’s a very good chance that they’ll win the next election. They’re holding their last party conference before the next election in just over a month.We Own It is independent of any political party. We want every single party and every politician to recognise that public services should be run for people not profit. That our NHS is NOT FOR SALE.As it stands, Sir Keir Starmer is the most likely next Prime Minister of the UK. That’s why it makes sense to target him.Whatever party you are in, whether you are Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, DUP or Green, whether you’re involved in party politics or not in any party – please, send him a message by signing this petition:
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