I got this email yesterday giving the details about an online event this evening being put on as part of the Arise Festival of left-wing ideas. It’s about justice is to be obtained for the working class, and the blurb runs as follows.
‘1) No justice! No peace! What is working class justice and how do we get it? – Tune in at Arise Festival
Premieres, Sunday July 10, 19.00.Register here // Retweet here // Get ticket for the whole festival here.
Whether it’s justice for the many miners violently assaulted by the police and the 95 arrested miners picketing the Orgreave coking plant in 1984, to the 72 people killed in the Grenfell tower fire in 2017, justice has often evaded working class communities – and been bitterly opposed by the establishment.
In this session, co-hosted by Arise Festival and the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), Kate Flannery (OTJC), Yvette Williams (Justice for Grenfell), and Matt Foot (author, Charged: How the police try to suppress protest) meet to discuss the complicity of the state in committing violence against working class people, what justice looks like for those communities, and how we build the movement we need to get it.
Also on the subject of hypocrisy and racism, Buddy Hell has written an excellent little piece about it in the Lib Dems under Jo Swinson. He notes that she said nothing about the Tories Hostile Environment policy and how it disproportionately affected Blacks and Asians, and said little about the Windrush scandal. She also hasn’t raised any objections to the Tories’ persecution of Gypsies and Travellers, has said nothing about islamophobia and has also said little about the rise in hate crimes against people of colour. He observes how she was silent in the House of Commons when Sir Paul Beresford called Travellers ‘a disease’. She has also welcomed into her party former Tory Philip Lee, who has also expressed racist views on immigration, hidden behind coded language. She also welcome the former Labour MP Angela Smith, formerly of the Change group, who infamously referred to people of colour as having a ‘funny tinge’.
The shadow equalities minister, Labour’s Dawn Butler, was also angered by her failure to act properly over the claim of one of Swinson’s activists that Butler had made up her own experience of racism. The activist involved was Steve Wilson, Angela Smith’s husband, Wilson wrote to Butler to apologise, and Swinson said that she believed Butler had been racially discriminated against. But Butler was not satisfied as Swinson had not revealed whether Wilson had been suspended or punished. She also wanted Wilson and Smith to undergo diversity training.
He also notes that before Sam Gyimah and Chuka Umunna arrived, the Lib Dems had no people of colour among their MPs. But Gyimah has shown his character by accusing Labour’s candidate for Kensington, Emma Dent Coad, of being one of those responsible for making the decision to use flammable cladding on Grenfell Tower. Coad hotly denies this, and is suing. Dr Geoffrey Seef, the Lib Dem candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, has also been making coded islamophobic comments against Labour’s Faiza Shaheen, who has complained to Swinson with the support of Dawn Butler. Coded racism isn’t anything new to the Lib Dems either. In 1991 one Langbaugh produced leaflets urging constituents to vote for a ‘local candidate’. Presumably he thought he and his constituents lived in the League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vesey. In 2009 the Lib Dems in Islington were accused of camouflaged racist campaigning against Travellers, and used the same tactics in Tower Hamlets to try and get votes from BNP supporters.
He also describes how Swinson has lied time and again over a number of other matters. Despite claiming that the Lib Dems must own the failures of the coalition with the Tories, she’s done absolutely nothing to change their policies. She was caught lying about her misleading graphs claiming that the Lib Dems were the leading opposition party in certain constituencies by Sophie Ridge on Sky, but continued repeating the lie. She also has fantasies about becoming prime minister, something that is beginning to irritate her followers. He notes that she has done precious little herself about racism and anti-Semitism, while falsely accusing Jeremy Corbyn of it all day long.
Absolutely. She’s a massive liar and hypocrite. She certainly is no progressive, despite her claims. After all, what true progressive would support the Tories’ attacks on the poor and vulnerable through their welfare cuts and the bedroom tax, for example. I also strongly believe that she isn’t a serious remainer, and that it’s just a voting tactic to provide her with an excuse not to go into coalition with Corbyn. If she’s given the opportunity, she will show her true Tory nature and go back into coalition with the Conservatives again. Just like Nick Clegg.
Don’t be fooled by her egregious lies. Don’t vote for her, or the Tories, but Corbyn.
Tory chairman James Cleverly was due to appear on Sky this week to be interviewed by Kay Burley. But he didn’t turn up. She was understandably annoyed – HIGNFY last night played a clip of her saying that she was ‘fizzing’ with anger about it. And so she carried on with the interview. Cleverly was replaced with an empty chair as Burley told viewers about the questions she wanted to ask him.
I found this short video about the incident on Christian Tonnies’ channel on YouTube. Here it is.
Burley begins by saying that she has an empty chair that was supposed to be filled by the Conservative chairman. Where is he? She replies that he’s probably 15 feet away from where she is at the moment, and that she’s been in to see him during the break. He said he wasn’t due to come on and talk to them today, although they had said that they would. She says that she wanted to ask him about things like this, like the front page of the Telegraph, ‘The tragedy of the modern Labour party and its boss’, comparing Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin persecuting the kulaks. She puts the paper down in order to show people the empty chair again.
She also wanted to ask him about the Grenfell incident and the comments by Jacob Rees-Mogg about the people in Grenfell, suggesting that he was smarter than they were, which is why they stayed in their properties. She says to the audience that they’ll remember how many people sadly died, and asks why on Earth Mogg is still a member of the Cabinet. She goes on to show the empty chair again. She also wanted to ask him about the Welsh Secretary and the calls for him to resign of a former aide. She also wanted to ask him about a row over whether the transition will be extended if we don’t have a deal by the middle of 2020. She also wanted to ask him about a different row over attempts to get officials to cost Labour policies. Another issue she wanted to ask him about was the row over the failure to publish the report into Russian interference. She also wanted to ask him if she thought the Tories were having a good day. She also wanted to ask him about his or his boss’ suggestion that Jeremy Corbyn was demonising billionaires and whether or not it was a good idea to defend billionaires at the very start of the campaign.
She goes on to say that she knows Number 10 watches the show and she also knows that the spin doctors at No. 10 had absolutely reassured her via text that when many politicians were doing the rounds in the morning they would do this programme. And yet we have an empty chair. She repeats the rhetorical question about his location, and answers it, saying his 15 feet away from her, and says that he, James Cleverly, will not come on the programme to answer all the of the allegations.
The clip ends with a message from the Labour Party saying its time for real change, and that Labour stands for the many, not the few.
Quite.
It would appear from this that Cleverly is a coward, who has absolutely no answers to the questions Burley was going to ask him. But he’s not alone in this. We saw with Tweezer how very carefully stage-managed her appearances were. They were all here done before selected audiences from which the public were excluded, crafted to make it seem the opposite. The Tories can’t stand probing interviews, and the moment someone asks them a question they can’t answer without lies and spin, they go to pieces and start ranting about how unfair it all is.
Of course Cleverly has not answer to Burley’s questions, just as his party has no answer to the poverty and misery they’ve inflicted on working people. Because they’re responsible for it.
Get them out, and a party in that does have real solutions: Labour.
This is another short, excellent little video from RT. It states that its about the uncomfortable facts the media is trying to cover up about this son of a bus-driving dad. When he was working for Deutsche Bank, his annual salary was £3 million a year. He voted 16 times against a tax on bankers’ bonuses. He was responsible for a speech vilifying Momentum as the ‘hard-left Fascist group’. ‘Hard left’ and ‘Fascist’ are contradictions in terms, as Fascism is far right, whatever Tories and American Republicans try to argue. Momentum is actually neither. It’s traditional centre left, Labour’s traditional post-war political stance before the destruction of the social democratic mixed economy and the welfare state under Thatcher. Oh yes, and he was responsible for the government’s failed promises to the Grenfell victims, and just this week warned that the government was about to break another one. They weren’t going to be rehoused any time soon. So much for Tweezer’s claim that they’d all be rehoused within twenty weeks, and it would be a top priority.
In short, Safid Javid is another massively overpaid, corporate banker. Like Rees-Mogg he votes consistently for the benefit of the rich, his own class, and cares nothing for those beneath him. Which includes the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.
He and the rest of the Tories should be sent a message through the council elections tomorrow that people are sick of them, their contempt for ordinary people, their own monstrous, unrestrained greed and their vile treatment of the poor – the victims of Grenfell fire, the members of the Windrush generation they’ve deported, and just about everyone their policies have attacked and reduced to insecurity and misery – the unemployed, the disabled and those on low incomes, who are now having to choose between eating and paying the bills. Vote them out!
If this is true, then it shows that the Tory party is in a very dire situation, no matter what their cheerleaders in the media are trying to get us all to swallow. Mike has put up on his blog a piece reporting an article stating that the Conservative party in London is so afraid of being absolutely wiped out at the council elections in May, that they’re considering breaking away to form a separate party with its own name and programme.
I’m not entirely convinced, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true. A decade or so ago, at the height of Blair’s administration, one of the Tory journos wrote a piece in the Daily Mail about a similar eventuality. He also believed that the Tory party was in danger of dying out completely, and so recommended that they should become ‘the English Nationalists’. This was obviously when the SNP were riding high north of the border as support grew in Scotland for devolution, and the Welsh were also gaining their own, rather more limited measure of autonomy. It was about the same time that there were demands for an all-English assembly to debate matters affecting only England. It was an anti-Labour measure, as the Tories had rather more MPs than Labour in England, and hoped to gain a great measure of power by stopping Labour MPs from elsewhere in Britain voting on English matters. The Tories were clearly trying to whip up English nationalism in order to gain votes. Just like they’ve always whipped up xenophobia and hate against those they consider outsiders, like Blacks, Asians, Jews, immigrants, the poor and disabled. I never really took the suggestion that the Tories would reform themselves as a differently party seriously, but I’ve been told by others that it was seriously considered. It’s supposed to be described in the book, True Blue, which talks about how under Cameron they fought back from near collapse.
London’s a world city, with a large Black and Asian, and immigrant population. Brexit, and the return of racism under the Tories, threatens these people. And the Grenfell fire tragedy and the Tories’ refusal to honour the promises they made about fire-proofing buildings and putting those left homeless into proper accommodation, shows the absolute contempt they have for some of the poorest members of our society. Who happen to be Black, Asian or immigrants.
And this is apart from the growing inequalities of wealth in Britain generally, which is becoming particularly acute in the nation’s capital. Ordinary people are being priced out of London as more and more property is bought up by the rich upper and middle classes. It’s either gentrified, or else ‘landbanked’. Which means that it’s kept purely as a property investment by rich, often foreign investors, who make sure that it remains unoccupied. And I’ve no doubt people do still remember the ‘poor doors’ in one apartment block. These were a separate entrance put in so that the rich people living there wouldn’t have to rub shoulders entering the building with the hoi polloi. This, readers of H.G. Wells’ science fiction, will be aware is like the origin of the split between the eloi and the subterranean, cannibal morlocks in The Time Machine. Wells based it on how the upper classes in his time wanted to force the working class underground, to tend the machines safely away from their sight. Trained as a biologist, Wells projected the split far into humanity’s evolutionary future. And the result was not only an SF classic, but a criticism of the class attitudes and contempt for the working class in Victorian society.
Whether the Tories in London are planning to form a new party or not, I hope they are wiped out in the May elections. For forty years they have done nothing but try to privatise the health service piecemeal, deliberately running it down for the benefit of private healthcare companies. They’ve privatised the utilities to foreign investors, who have not given customers the service that they were promised. All again for corporate profit. And they’ve carried on New Labour’s project of benefit sanctions and the work capability test, all to make it increasingly difficult for the poor and disabled to get the state aid they need. This was in line with Tory policy under Thatcher, and followed the advice of the private health care insurers, like Unum, who were advising Peter Lilley and the Tories. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people now have a choice between eating and paying the bills, and tens of thousands of disabled folk have died after being found ‘fit for work’.
The sooner the Tories suffer a devastating electoral defeat, the better. And I hope it’s truly catastrophic.
More scaremongering from the right-wing press. This time it isn’t the tabloids, but the august Times. In this clip from RT, the station reports how the Times has accused them of exploiting the Grenfell fire to foment a class war, as well as misreporting some of the facts about the £10 million cladding. This provoked an angry response from George Galloway. Galloway states that this was a fire that killed 71 poor people in the richest borough in Britain. They died because the cladding used to coat the building also used arsenic, so that if people didn’t burn in the fire, they were poisoned. Galloway himself lives and works in the borough, and is a governor of one of the schools. Every day he sees the results of the fire, and indeed, smells it. He rightly describes it as ‘beyond offensive’ and ‘obscene’ to claim that people are angry about it because of Vladimir Putin.
He’s absolutely right. You only have to read Mike’s comments about the fire to realise that people were talking about it, and expressing their anger without reference to RT. Vladimir Putin has nothing to do with the anger people feel about the incident, and the way the Tories are constantly lying and fiddling around with the inquiry to avoid incriminating themselves and their fellows on the council.
But the British media and Conservative establishment is just following what Killary and the Americans are doing, and trying to blame RT and alternative media generally for their own failures. RT is a threat because an increasing audience is turning away from the Conservative press and media, and tuning into it, both here and in America. This is because the network is covering the issues that the mainstream media doesn’t like to show too much – the poverty, homelessness, debts and the crisis in healthcare caused by decades of Thatcherism/Reaganism, privatisation and welfare cuts. I’m not denying that the mainstream media don’t cover these, but they don’t do so in as much detail, nor tackle these issues from a left-wing perspective. And they really, really don’t want to tackle the unjust, illegal imperialist wars we’re fighting in the Middle East.
Once upon a time, when it was edited by Harold Evans in the ’70s, the Times was a genuinely respected newspaper. Then it was bought up, against the advice of people who knew better, by Murdoch. And it’s been a right-wing propaganda rag ever since. A friend of mine buys it, and whenever I’ve looked inside there’s always been at least one piece written by an entitled, upper-middle class windbag rubbishing Corbyn. ‘Cause he represents a real threat to Murdoch and the rest of the corporate elite causing mass poverty so they can enjoy more tax cuts and power over their workforce. The Times readership has fallen dramatically, to the point where, if it was a normal paper, it would have been wound up. But as it’s Britain’s ‘paper of record’, Murdoch keeps it going as it allows him a place at the table with Britain’s great and good in government.
And so it, and the rest of the press and mainstream media, feel threatened by RT and other alternative news outlets. Thus they try to combat them by spreading lies and smears about evil, subversive Russian influence. It’s not Russia that’s tearing this country apart, as Chunky Mark observed in his video on the Heil attacking social media. It’s them. And if you want a deeper view of what’s really going on in Britain, then you’re better off watching some of the material on RT than reading the Times, Torygraph or other right-wing news sheets, or watching the Beeb with its very blatant, pro-Tory bias.
As for ‘class war’, the best quote about that comes from Stanley Baldwin during the General Strike: it’s class war, and we started it. But you ain’t going to hear such a frank admission from this government or its shills in the media.
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