Private Eye on Blair’s Privatisation of the Government Service Examining Disabled Claimants

And which, needless to say, subsequently led to the the private company awarded the contract finding severely disabled people ineligible for benefit and fit for work.

I found this very enlightening article in an issue of Private Eye from 21 years ago, for Friday, 19th May 2000. It describes how the Tories intended to privatise the Benefits Agency Medical Services, the part of the agency that examined disabled claimants to see if they qualified for benefits. In opposition, Blair and his chums had been against the scheme, but once they were in government that all changed. They were all in favour of it, the office was privatised and the contract awarded instead to Sema. This was despite the fact that the company had no qualified doctors. Sema then took on two other companies to help it with the work and engaged various New Labour politicos to lobby for it. Once it had the contract, it started declaring severely disabled people fit for work. And so was the pattern set for the subsequent reigns of Atos and Maximus.

The article, entitled ‘Cringe Benefits’, runs

‘It was a Tory idea to begin with: how to make more money out of the disabled for a big private company.

After a “study of options” about what to do with the rather expensive government system for examining disabled people to see if they were entitled to benefit, the Tory government concluded that contracting out to the private sector was “most likely to deliver the improvements sought”.

Tory ministers agreed and the publicly-owned Benefits Agency Medical Services was divided into three areas “to encourage competition in terms of bids”. The Tory government fell in the spring of 1997, to be replaced by Labour with a huge majority and secretary of state for social services, Harriet Harman, who had been eloquent in the condemnation of privatisation.

Ms Harman, however, was at once convinced of the case for privatising the testing of the disabled, and in February 1998 (in the interests of competition) she awarded the contracts for all three areas to one company, Sema.

It was a juicy contract too. A government memorandum at the time announced that the three contracts would cost the government £305m, a figure which the memo announced, “represented savings of £62m” compared with what the service used to cost the taxpayer.

One problem which soon became clear was that Sema had no medical experience whatsoever. The British Medical Association, disgusted by the company’s treatment of doctors and patients, complained officially that Sema executives “did not understand the complexities, having had no experience of employing doctors”. This obviously worried the company so much that when the five original bidders were invited to discuss the complexities of their new contract with the BMS, which represents most British doctors, two declined, including Sema.

If it didn’t have any doctors or medically qualified staff, Sema made sure it was well-stocked with “new” Labour lobbyists. It hired Westminster Strategy, which had a batch of such lobbyists on tap. Jo Moore, former Labour press officer; Mike Lee, who used to work for David Blunkett; and former chair of the Fabian Society and wanabee Labour candidate Mike Dauber. To clinch the business, Sema acquired the then employment minister Andrew Smith as a speaker at its glittering conferences.

Partly to make up for this lack of experience, Sema engaged two companies as sub-contractors to do the new work, Nestor Healthcare group and Nestor Disability Analysts. The board of the former was graced by a former Tory MP, Charles Goodison-Wickes, who quickly made way for the more acceptable Anne Parker, who chairs the Carers Association and is an examiner for the Child Support Agency. Nestor Healthcare has just branched into prisons, explaining in true “new” Labour tradition that “prisoner numbers are steadily growing”.

The performance of these Sema subsidiaries, and of privatisation in general, has recently been examined in detail by the House of Commons social services committee, whose shocking report has just been published. “Too often”, say the report, “the organisation fails to deliver an adequate service… at its worst it puts claimants through examinations which are painful and distressing and gives poor advice.”

Bizarre examples of the doctor’s hostility to the people they are examining are provided by the report. In one case a patient was described as healthy because she could sit up watching television for up to two hours. In fact this patient could only watch television lying down. In another case a patient’s dirty fingernails were submitted as evidence of his ability to work in the garden – whereas in fact he could not even wash himself.

The conclusion makes sad reading for the “new” Labour lobbyists and privatisers of past years. There has been no improvement whatever. “our inquiry has led us to conclude that, so far, the primary focus of Sema has been on operational efficiency to achieve value for money rather than the delivery of a quality service”.

How has Labour responded so far to these devastating allegations? It has handed over a confidential contract for running the Labour party’s own membership records to…. Sema. And Sema’s subsidiary has won a contract for the provision of an immigration centre for Group 4.’

And Starmer would have us all vote for him, because Tony Blair did such great things for the people of this country. Well, Blair was serious and better than the Tories at tackling poverty. But the privatisation of that part of the Benefits Agency has just led to 20 years and more of profiteering and rigged assessments in order to throw genuinely disabled people off benefits.

The process needs to be renationalised, and the Tories, Starmer and his coterie of New Labour apparatchiks kept well away from power.

Bristol MP Karin Smyth on her Support for Afghan Refugees

I got this email from my local MP, Karin Smyth, in which she states her support for the refugees seeking to flee Afghanistan. She is also harshly critical of Boris Johnson’s attitude towards them, and his decision to accept only 5,000 in the next year. She also states her support for the country’s women who worked for our forces, as well as the 70 female members of the Afghan parliament, and calls for the government to support and protect those, who wish to remain in the country.

“I am writing to update you with my views on the situation in Afghanistan and the response to date of the British government. There is a statement on my website here which addresses some of the wider issues, however in this e-mail I will focus on the needs of the those most at risk from the Taliban regime. 

In his shameful, arrogant and complacent speech to the House of Commons this morning Boris Johnson did confirm that around 20,000 Afghan refugees would be allowed to come to United Kingdom. Shockingly the Prime Minister revealed that only around 5,000 Afghans will be permitted to apply to settle here this year. This puts at risk hundreds of interpreters and support staff who help UK forces in the country, those working for non-governmental organisations and, particularly, those brave Afghan women who stepped forward to improve the governance of their country.
 
His failure in this crisis has been highlighted by MPs from all sides, including a very powerful contribution from Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party which you can watch here.
 
As my Labour colleague Harriet Harman mentioned in the debate, there are nearly 70 women in the Afghan Parliament, many of whom are determined not to leave the country and lose all the gains of the last twenty years. There are also women teachers, doctors and many other professionals at risk in Afghanistan for simply having worked. It is imperative that the UK government offers genuine support for those women.
 
The Prime Minister has so far utterly failed to provide the leadership required. He must expand the re-settlement scheme, removing the arbitrary cap, and make the application process fast and straight-forward. He must also work with our international partners regarding the immediate safety of those currently in Afghanistan and those who may remain in the longer term.

I hope that he will do so.”

So do I, but this is Priti Patel and Boris Johnson. If there’s anything immoral and evil they can do, rather than the right thing, they’ll do it. As much as I detest Starmer, he’s doing the right thing here, as is Harman.

And so is Karin Smyth, who I’m very glad is also adding her voice to this debate and her determination to save the lives of people who have worked for us.

Private Eye: Starmer Appoints Pro-Tory Supporter of Middle Class as Head of Strategy

This fortnight’s edition of Private Eye for 23rd July to 5th August 2021 has a very ominous piece, ‘Keir Review’, reporting that Blair Stalin, I mean, Keir Starmer, has appointed Deborah Mattinson as his new head of strategy. The satirical magazine reports that when she previously held such a post advising a Labour leader six years ago, she wanted him to hold a review into the party’s economic performance, headed by a Tory, and to go after middle class swing voters. In other words, it was more Blairism after Blairism had failed with the election of David Cameron instead of Blair’s chancellor and successor, Gordon Brown. The article reads

Deborah Mattinson, Keir Starmer’s new director of strategy at Labour, has the job of relaunching his ailing leadership. The last time Mattinson advised a Labour leader in 2015, offers some clues of what’s to come: back then she wanted the party to have a review of its economic performance that would be “headed by a Tory”, and to start focusing more on the middle class.

Mattinson is a “public opinion” specialist who has worked for the party on and off since the New Labour years. She and her company, Britain Thinks, specialise in focus groups: the company has lucrative contracts with the Home Office and does opinion research for McDonald’s, Capita and Virgin Money. She will be stepping aside from her role there to work for Labour.

Starmer’s appointment of Mattinson is part of his attempt to rejuvenate his leadership with what is briefed as an undefined but “bold” new direction. Her previous political prescriptions were certainly bold, but were not popular with the party.

After Labour lost the 2015 election and Ed Miliband resigned, Britain Thinks produced a report for acting leader Harriet Harman called Emerging from the Darkness, advising how the party could recover from the defeat. The private report, which was leaked to ITV News, advised Harman to pull sharply to the right after the failure of Miliband’s modest move left.

One piece of advice was to commission an independent review of Labour’s economic performance in government “ideally headed by a Tory” – which Labour would publish because the party had to start “atoning for the past”. Mattinson also advised that Labour needed to “be for middle-class voters, not just down and outs.”

The report was based on conversations with focus groups of swing voters, relying on their opinion to form policy rather than just test potential messages. Harman did appear to follow the report’s logic, instructing Labour MPs not to oppose the government’s welfare bill or limiting child tax credit to just two children – decisions that were deeply unpopular in the party.

MPs, members and voters await the new direction the focus group guru will take Labour in now.

Basically, it’s going to be more Blairism: a return to neoliberal policies, the use of focus groups to test the popularity of policies, a concentration on the middle class to the neglect of Labour’s traditional base in the working class and absolute determination not to oppose Tory policies but to copy them. And her contempt for the working class is shown very clearly in the reference to ‘down and outs’. It comes after the massive success of Jeremy Corbyn in winning back Labour members and the popularity of his traditional Labour policies – a mixed economy, strong welfare state, renationalised NHS, powerful trade unions and strengthened workers’ rights – showed how bankrupt Blairism was. Under Blair, the party had been haemorrhaging members and the number of people who actually voted for it was lower than under Corbyn. Blair beat the Tories only because they were actually less popular than he was.

But all this has changed. It ain’t 1997 and these policies won’t work against a revived Tory party. Quite apart from the fact that they’re noxious policies that run directly counter to the Labour party’s whole raison d’etre. It was set up to defend and fight for working people, not abandon them and side with the employers and landlords who exploit them. But Starmer clearly hasn’t learned this lesson. Either he’s stupid and fanatical, pushing a set of policies long after they’ve been proved to be wrong and disastrous, or he’s deliberately trying to destroy the party. Either way, there’s a simple way to revive the Labour party:

Get the noxious Tory cuckoo out!

Scumbag Starmer Sacks Nadia Whittome Behind Back But Tells Fascist Guido Fawkes

This is another incident which shows the real, intolerant, treacherous face of Starmer’s administration. And it could have come straight out of the Blair playbook. Yesterday Starmer sacked three MPs from their posts as Parliamentary Private Secretaries – Nadia Whittome, Beth Winter and Olivia Blake because they had the conscience and the guts to vote against the government’s Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill 2019-21. The ladies objected to the bill’s provisions that would have exempted British service personnel for prosecutions for torture committed overseas. Starmer, however, had set up a one-line whip demanding that the Labout MPs abstain.

Other MPs from the ‘Corbynite’ wing of the party also had the courage to vote against the bill. They were: Diane Abbott, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Jeremy Corbyn, Ian Lavery, Rebecca Long-Bailey, John McDonnell, Kate Osamor, Kate Osborne, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Zarah Sultana, Jon Trickett, and Claudia Webbe. Kudos and respect to all of them.

Lobster has put up a number of articles about the involvement of British armed forces in war crimes and supporting brutal dictatorships. At the moment the British military is giving training to 17 regimes, including the Chinese, that are on a list of thirty which are of concern because of their history of human rights abuses. The SAS was also involved in training the Sri Lankan army in its brutal war against the Tamil Tigers, which included reprisals and atrocities against the civilian Tamil population. A recent book on war crimes by the ‘Keenie Meenies’, a British mercenary company, also notes that, although they’re not formally part of the British army, they too have been used by the British state to give military support to some very unpleasant movements and regimes at arm’s length. Like the Mujahiddin fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Fascist regimes in Central America in the 1980s. Going further back, British armed forces were also responsible for brutal reprisals against Black Kenyans during the Mao Mao rebellion, including torture and mutilation. The victims of the atrocities were only granted compensation after a long legal campaign a few years ago. For details of the atrocities themselves, see the book, Africa’s Secret Gulags.

Mike also points that Starmer’s order that Labour should abstain on the bill, but not vote against it, is similar to Harriet Harman’s order a few years ago that Labour should also abstain on a Tory welfare bill that would further cut benefits and impoverish claimants. It’s all part of the Blairite strategy of trying to appeal to Tory voters at the expense of the people they should really be standing up to protect. But they try to make it seems that they’re also paying attention to their working class and socialist base by abstaining. It’s unconvincing. To me, it recalls Pilate in the Gospels washing his hands and walking off when the Sanhedrin brought Christ before him to be crucified.

What makes Starmer’s decision particularly noxious, however, what adds insult to injury, is the way it was done. Whittome was not told she was sacked but a Labour ‘representative’ – some of us can think of other epithets for this unnamed person – instead went of an briefed Guido Fawkes. That’s the far-right gossip and smear site run by Paul Staines. Staines is an extreme right-wing Tory and libertarian, who’d like to ban the trade unions and other working class organisations, privatise everything, including the NHS, and get rid of the welfare state. When he was a member of the Freedom Association back in the 1980s, the organisation invited the leader of a Fascist death squad from El Salvador as their guest of honour at their annual dinner. Other guests, I think, included members of the South African Conservative party, who were staunch supporters of apartheid. He was also mad keen on the various psychedelics that were coming into the rave scene in the 1990s, including and especially ‘E’. It’s disgusting that anyone in the news should have been told before Whittome herself, but especially a Fascist like Staines and his squalid crew.

And Mike has pointed out on his blog that this is exactly the same tactic the Blairites in the Labour party used to stab him in the back. Mike was suspended for anti-Semitism the evening before he was due to stand as a Labour councillor in the mid-Wales elections. But he only found about it when a reporter from one of the local Welsh papers rang him up to ask him about it. And then some other weasel at the NEC went off and leaked Mike’s details to the Sunset Times, which then ran a feature smearing and libeling him as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Which Mike has never been, and very strongly and utterly condemns, as he has all racism.

But this also brings to mind the negative briefing Blair himself conducted against those MPs, who dared to go ‘off-message’ during his regime. Notable victims included Clare Short, who I think also clashed with him over his definitely unethical foreign policy. If a Labour MP or senior figure dared to contradict one of the Dear Leader’s policies or announcements, Blair and Campbell called the media hacks in for an anonymous briefing in which they or a representative then attacked the dissenting MP.

And now it seems that these old tactics have returned under ‘centrist’ Keir Starmer.

The Labour party is haemorrhaging members because of the way Starmer has turned his back on the great, socialist, genuinely Labour policies that Corbyn and his team were determined to return to. Mike’s pointed out that so far Starmer has broken 9 of his pledges to uphold them. Including his commitment to add 5 per cent tax to the upper right for big earners. That’s the multi-millionaires who have benefited from massive tax breaks, funded by savage benefit cuts to the poor and starving at the bottom of society, and who have squirreled their money away in offshore bank accounts. Including companies like that well-known patriotic group of papers and media, News International. Black members are particularly bitter and disappointed because of Starmer’s scant regard for the Black Lives Matter movement, which he dismissed as a ‘moment’.

Starmer has done nothing against the intriguers, who cost Labour the 2017 and 2019 elections, and who were responsible for the racist bullying of three senior and respected Black Labour MPs. Instead, the intriguers are arming themselves with lawyers and claiming that they have been smeared. And it shows how low Private Eye has fallen that the satirical magazine is uncritically pushing these claims, just as it was an enthusiastic supporter of the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn and his supporters.

Mike yesterday put up a piece commenting on this grossly shabby action by Starmer, including citing some very excellent tweets from the public. They include people like Tory Fibs, Kelly-Ann Mendoza and Rachel Swindon. But my favourite comment is this from Mark Hebden

Nadia Whittome has essentially been sacked for voting against war crimes.

The Labour Party is the Party of War criminality again then

Yes, just as they were when Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq.

Mike has pointed out that Labour is behind the Tories in the polls, although Starmer himself is actually more popular than Boris. He asks, quite credibly, if this is because the Labour party acts like this to betray its own members.

What comes out of this is that Starmer himself is another intriguing Blairite and that he and his scuzzy advisors really haven’t learnt that not only are such tactics against one’s own unacceptable in themselves, they will also make you unpopular with the public. The press didn’t hold back on using these negative briefings against Blair and Brown when they did it, in order to make them look personally unpleasant and untrustworthy. Which they were.

Starmer is damaging the Labour party. I wish the poll result were the reverse. I wish Labour was surging ahead of the Tories, and it was Starmer behind Boris. It is no more than he deserves.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/09/24/keir-starmers-labour-is-unpopular-because-he-supports-war-crimes-and-sacks-people-who-dont/

Frances Barber’s Racist, Anti-Semitic Meltdown at Ash Sarkar and Jon Lansman

Frances Barber is a minor ‘sleb, who appears in bit parts here and there. She turned up in Red Dwarf in the ’90s as one of the forms of shape-shifting genetically engineered organism that fed on emotion. Appearing as a glamorous woman, the creature fed on the Cat’s vanity. She also appeared a little while later in an episode of the sitcom My Family, in which she played a woman with depression, who was part of a poetry group which the son joins. She’s part of the coterie around Rachel Riley and Tracy Anne Oberman, who think that Corbyn and the Labour party really are Nazis. Because criticising Israel as an apartheid state and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians means you have to be a fully paid-up anti-Semite ready to get another Holocaust going. And Zelo Street has put up an excellent piece describing and commenting on her meltdown at Ash Sarkar in which she unintentionally displayed how racist she was.

Why the fury? Sarkar had appeared on Question Time, and describes her self as Communist. She then issued a series of tweets declaring that her beloved Labour Party was now the Communist party, attacking Communism as a hateful, despicable regime and sneering that it was ‘good our [Labour] representative – meaning Ash Sarkar – loves it’. There two things at least wrong with that statement, as Zelo Street reminds us. Firstly, just because a regime describes itself as something doesn’t mean it actually is. North Korea describes itself as the ‘democratic people’s republic of North Korea’, but is obviously anything but. And as Sarkar herself reminded Barber, she’s not a member of the Labour party. Barber couldn’t accept this. She asked Sarkar why she was representing Labour. Sarkar replied that she wasn’t, unless she’d been elected an MP and hadn’t noticed. Then Barber had the first of her racist sneers. She responded

“Neither you or Shami Chakrabati [sic] have been elected, but you speak on behalf of Seumus [sic] each time you are on Political programs . We the people hate it. You do not speak for us”.

To which another tweeter, Louise Raw, answered in turn by asking Barber why she was throwing Sarkar in with Shami Chakrabati. Sarkar was a media commentator, Chakrabati the Shadow Attorney General. It couldn’t be because they were both Asian, could it?

Then Barber moved on acting out Godwin’s Law. This states that in an internet debate, sooner or later someone will compare someone else to the Nazis. Barber then commented on the news that there had been a proposal in the Labour party to put a candidate up against Harriet Harman if she chooses to stand as Speaker by declaring that Labour were ‘the Brown Shirts’. And when she found out that Jon Lansman, the head of Momentum had tabled a motion calling for the abolition of the post of Deputy Leader, she again made an accusation of Nazism. ‘As if we didn’t tell you,’ she wrote, Ernst Rohm in action’. As Zelo Street pointed out, she had just called a Jew a Nazi, which is anti-Semitic according to the definition of the term by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association.

Zelo Street concluded

‘Not much use calling anti-Semitism on others if she’s going to indulge in it herself. And that’s on top of the brown people inference. Ms Barber needs to learn one lesson.

Stay away from Twitter late at night. Or don’t bother, and give us all a good laugh.’

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/frances-barbers-bigoted-meltdown.html

Let’s make a few more points here, just to expand on those already made by the Sage of Crewe. When Sarkar describes herself as Communist, she’s undoubtedly talking about the Communist ideal, before it was substantially altered by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. I’ve put up pieces showing that most Marxists before the Bolshevik coup were democrats, after Marx himself. Except that they believed in a genuine democracy in which the workers took power into their own hands. Mainstream Marxist intellectuals like the Austrian Karl Kautsky hated the Bolshevik dictatorship and their persecution of the former upper and middle class. As for Soviet Communism, this described itself as Marxist-Leninism. In other words, Marxism as interpreted and adapted by Lenin. And when I was studying the Russian revolutionary movement at College, we were told that Lenin had altered Marxist doctrine almost as much, or as much, as the Revisionists.

As for the Labour party, the one thing Corbyn and the rest aren’t, is Communists. Corbyn’s programme of empowering the working and lower middle class by reviving the welfare state, taking the railways and other utilities into state ownership, giving back working people rights at work and restoring trade union power, is really simply a return to the post-War social democratic consensus. The consensus that no-one seriously challenged until Thatcher in 1979, with disastrous consequences. It’s nowhere near the complete nationalisation or the bureaucratic state Soviet Marxism demanded.

And let’s make one thing very clear: Corbyn and his supporters are very far from Nazis. 

Historically, it’s been left-wing Socialists, Communists and trade unionists, like Corbyn and his supporters, who’ve actually stood up physically to Nazism and Fascism in this country. If you want further evidence, go over to David Rosenberg’s blog, Rebel Notes. Rosenberg’s Jewish, and a member of the Jewish Socialist Group. He comes from the tradition of the Bund, the eastern European Jewish Socialist party, who fought for Jews to be able to live and work as equals and fellow countrymen with the gentile peoples of the countries in which they lived. They had no desire to go to Israel and displace a people, who had historically treated the Jews better than Christian Europeans. Which means he’s also a strong critic of Israel. Rosenberg has put up many pieces describing how the Communists, the ILP and trade unionists, including the ’47 Group of Jewish combat vets kicked the rear ends of Mosley and his squadristi in the BU up and down London and the provinces, so that gentiles, Jews, Blacks, Asians and working people in general could live in peace and dignity without fearing the jackboot. See, for example, his article ‘When Stockton Fought Back’, about how the good folk of Stockton on Tees fought Mosley when he tried campaigning in their toon.

See: https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2019/09/08/when-the-people-of-stockton-fought-back/

His most recent article is ‘When I Listen to Boris Johnson and Hear Mosley’, about the similarities between our anti-democratic populist Prime Minister and Mosley when he was leader of the New Party before its transformation into the BUF.

https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2019/09/10/when-i-listen-to-boris-johnson-and-hear-oswald-mosley/

It’s a comparison that has become particularly pertinent, especially as the Torygraph a few days ago decided to give space to Jaak Madison, a member of the Estonian conservative party. The article’s been taken down because Madison stated that he found Fascism had many great points, and Madison himself was a Holocaust denier or minimalist.

Corbyn and his supporters are anti-Fascists. The real stormtroopers are nearly all on the right, whatever idiots and liars like Barber, Riley and the rest think, led by a mendacious media and Zionist Jewish establishment. They are the only people, who really stand between us and real Fascism in this country.

As for Barber herself, she clearly thinks of the Labour Party in terms of New Labour, Blair’s Thatcherite entryist clique. They did some good things, but they stood for Neoliberalism and the destruction of the welfare state and privatisation of the NHS. They wanted it to become another Conservative party, and in some ways went beyond the policies of the Tories themselves. They were no friends to working people, both Jewish and gentile. And neither is Riley, Barber and Oberman for supporting them.

Does the ‘I’ Really Believe People Hate May Because of her Gender?

On the front page of the I, the paper boasted that it had an article by novelist Philippa Gregory on the eight prejudices that have historically been levelled against women rulers.

Is this supposed to imply that opponents of Theresa May are motivated solely by sexism?

It wouldn’t surprise me. After all, the paper gave a lot of support to the various female Blairites, who claimed that voting for Jeremy Corbyn and not for his female rivals in the Labour leadership elections was very, very sexist indeed. Despite the fact that Corbyn had far better policies for women, while the Harriet Harman and Angela Eagle had all been Blairite neoliberals, who had backed the failed economic and social policies that have actively harmed women.

If this is what the newspaper intends, then I have got news for them.

May’s gender is completely irrelevant to me.

I would loathe and despair her, even if she was a bloke called Terry. Just as I despised her male predecessors, the unfunny comedy double act David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

I despise May because she has

* Cut and done everything she could to privatise the NHS, running it into the ground.

* Cut and done everything she could to privatise the education system.

* Maintained the current system of tuition fees, which are loading students with mountains of debt.

* Carried on with Cameron and Clegg’s policies of massive welfare cuts, including the Bedroom tax and the humiliating and murderous Work Capability Tests, which have thrown thousands off benefits and into misery and starvation.

* Cut the numbers of police, armed services, border guards and other services back so that Britain was left dangerously vulnerable. A policy that ultimately allowed the Manchester and London terrorists to commit their horrendous crimes.

* Lied about her intention to put British workers in the boardroom, while she’s done just about everything in her power to get rid of workers’ rights.

* Her policies have also resulted in stagnant wages and maintained high levels of unemployment, to the point where most of the people on benefit are those ‘hard-working’ folk she and the Tories have patronised with their condescending rhetoric.

* Shown that she is completely incompetent to negotiate a fair deal for Brexit, which will enable British firms and other organisations contact with the EU and access to their markets.

* Done everything in her power to support the erosion of our precious civil liberties begun by Major, Blair, Cameron and Clegg. This means the massive expansion of the surveillance state and the malignant system of secret courts, in which you may be tried without knowing the crime, the evidence against you, who your accuser is, and behind closed doors. Like Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union.

* Cut taxes for the rich, while transferring the burden to the poor. Which, incidentally, was one of the reasons behind the French Revolution.

* Repealed legislation protecting our environment, so she can sell off Britain’s forests and trash our green and pleasant land with fracking for the profit of her friends in the oil industry.

* Supported Tory policies that have, instead of drawing the peoples of our great island nation together, have instead caused even further division by supporting islamophobia, fear and resentment of immigrants, and general racial intolerance.

* Not that she’s simply worked up racial intolerance. She and the Tory press have also done their utmost to whip up prejudice against the disabled to justify cuts in their benefits. The result has been a massive increase in hate crime against people with disabilities.

* Carried on with policies which will result in the break-up of the United Kingdom after three hundred years in the case of Scotland and England, and two hundred in the case of Britain and Northern Ireland.

The ‘Celtic Fringe’ – Scotland, Wales and Ulster don’t want Brexit. The Welsh and Scots Nationalist leaders want their nations and Ulster to be part of the Brexit negotiations. And all of the Northern Irish parties want to keep the open border with Eire. But all this is in jeopardy through May’s high-handed attitude to the nations, and her determination to promote only ‘Leave’ supporters to manage Britain’s departure from the EU.

And I could probably carry with more. Much more.

This is why I despise Theresa May and want her voted out, along with the party that chose her and has done so much serious harm to this country and its people for seven years.

I therefore urge everyone to vote Labour tomorrow to get her and them thrown out.

David Davis’ Sexual Assault of Diane Abbott, and the Hypocrisy of Harriet Harman

Mike and the Skwawkbox have this week posted a series of articles reporting and commenting on David Davis’ unwelcome attempt to foist his attentions on Diane Abbott, and the complete failure of Harriet Harman to stand by her alleged feminist and egalitarian beliefs and actually stand up for her.

Davis is the minister in charge of Brexit. On Wednesday, Abbott voted to support the Article 50 bill, so that evening Davis mockingly showed his appreciation by hugging her and allegedly trying to kiss her in the Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons. For which Abbott rightly told him to ‘F*** off.’

Mike’s article quote Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin in Left Foot Forward, who commented on the lack of condemnation of Davis’ actions by the Tories shows how they believe sexual assault is still acceptable. She makes the point that if an MP like Abbott can be assaulted with impunity, then younger women in more junior positions are that much more vulnerable. She wrote

“His behaviour is offensive and disrespectful to Abbott — who has repeatedly been a target for sexism and racism — but it also raises serious questions about Davis’s attitude to women generally, and his treatment of younger, more vulnerable women he encounters.

“For those young women, who put up with sexism for fear of losing out professionally if they complain, the message this gives is that there’s no level of success that will shield them from the lecherous and powerful men of Westminster.

“One of parliament’s longest sitting members? Doesn’t matter. Shadowing on of the great offices of state? Doesn’t matter. There will always be someone who’s willing to humiliate you then ‘walk off laughing’.”

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/02/09/did-david-davis-sexually-harass-diane-abbott/

Yesterday, Mike reported that Young Labour Women and Labour Students Women have also condemned Davis’ actions and the way they have been treated. In their view, this has not only been misogynist, in that Davis’ harassment has been viewed by the media as a jolly jape, but is also racist. Abbott’s understandable outrage at his assault has been deliberately misrepresented to conform to the stereotype of the ‘angry black woman’. They therefore called upon Theresa May to launch an investigation into the incident, and show that the government will not turn a blind eye to such abuse.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/02/11/where-is-the-tory-party-investigation-into-david-daviss-harassment-of-diane-abbott/

Davis denies trying to kiss her. But he did embrace her, and then sent offensive texts afterwards to one of his Tory colleagues in which he made jokes about not being blind. This has been reported in the Mail, so Mike advises us to make up our own minds whether it is true. This is part of their article quoted by Mike:

‘I whispered in her ear ‘Thanks for your vote’ hence the ‘F off’. I am not blind.’ Davis’ friend responded: ‘Ha! Ha! Thank god you aren’t blind. Great week for you and Brexit!’

Davis: ‘Actually it would make a good Optical Express advert… Yes, a reasonable success.’

His last text appears to be a reference not to Optical Express but another opticians, Specsavers, whose TV adverts feature hilarious mix-ups caused by bad eyesight, followed by the slogan: ‘Should’ve gone to Specsavers.’

His line about not being blind seems to be a reference to Miss Abbott’s appearance.

See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/02/12/misogynist-david-davis-now-accused-of-sexist-texts-after-trying-to-embrace-diane-abbott/

The assault was part of a week of bullying of Abbott, including one incident in which a Tory councillor, Pearmain, called her ‘an ape’. However, the Skwawkbox noted that Harriet Harman, who has been touring promoting her new book, A Woman’s Work, and other female Labour MPs, who were ready to denounce the attacks on Angela Eagle for sexism, have said absolutely nothing about Davis’ assault on Abbott. The Skwawkbox wrote

The first ever minister for women and a former Secretary of State for women and equality, Ms Harman is considered a prominent campaigner on behalf of women’s rights and equality, so of course she would be quick to jump into the fray on Ms Abbott’s behalf, right?

Wrong. Ms Harman’s Twitter feed is active, for that of a busy politician. She found plenty of time for tweets to promote her new book. She found time to tweet in praise of Jess Phillips, a Labour MP and Chair of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party, who infamously bragged about telling Ms Abbott to ‘f*ck off’ and laughed as Abbott was mocked by a TV impressionist.

But a message of support and solidarity with a mistreated female colleague, or to condemn the racism of Councillor Pearmain or the misogyny of David Davis?

Nope.

See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/02/10/dianeabbott-called-ape-by-tory-assaulted-by-tory-wheres-outrage-from-harman-and-co-the-skwawkbox/

and follow the link to the original article.

This really shows the threadbare feminism and supposed anti-racism of Harman and her camp. Harman is fiercely ambitious – she’s been going around telling everyone what a great leader of the Labour party she’d make, and presents herself as a feminist firebrand. So much so that at least one Tory organ has called her ‘Harriet Harperson’.

Last week, Guy Debord’s Cat wrote a piece criticising the bizarre behaviour not just of Harman, but one of her supporters, Helen Lewis, one of the hacks on the New Statesman. Lewis sent a tweet declaring that Harman was a person, who had really stood up to the ‘establishment’.

Wrong. Like many of the anti-Corbyn lobby, Harman is the establishment. She supported the government’s anti-welfare bill, and ordered other Labour MPs to do the same. Then she told Southwark News a few weeks later that she’d oppose it.

Then both Harman and Lewis issued messages calling on Corbyn to quit. The reason for this is that Corbyn imposed a three-line whip on the Article 50 vote. This is the first stage in the process, but as the Cat has pointed out, it’s been misrepresented by the media as the last stage. So Harman and Lewis have been trying, once again, to oust Corbyn.

See https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/the-crazy-upside-down-world-of-helen-lewis/

In the article, the Cat reminds us that both Lewis and Harman come from privileged backgrounds, and therefore represent the Establishment. They are certainly not against it. He writes

In the last few weeks, the media has paraded a series of Orwellian neologisms like “post truth politics” before us. Can we therefore regard Lewis’s Tweet as “post-reality”? Let’s remember that Lewis herself comes from a privileged background and is, for all intents and purposes, like Harman, a member of the establishment. So it’s unlikely that she possesses the ability to identify anti-establishmentarianism and is more likely to characterize it as something else.

Harman’s feminism and alleged anti-racism is all about getting nice, middle and upper class women into power, while keeping the proles down. It’s the same kind of faux feminism mouthed by Hillary Clinton. Her supporters also made much about the supposed misogyny of the ‘Bernie Bros’ – who didn’t exist – who criticised her campaign. But Clinton is an extremely rich woman from a privileged background, who has been responsible for some the actions of the US government which have harmed women both in America and the Developing World. It was Killary who voted with her husband, Bill, to continue destroying the American welfare system after Reagan. It was Killary, who passed the anti-drugs legislation which has resulted in so many Black men being slung into jail, even though the same proportion of Blacks and White use drugs. It was Killary who talked about ‘superpredators’, when this term referred almost exclusively to young Black men. And it was Killary who made sure that US support went to the military junta in Honduras when they overthrew the previous, liberal president.

Clinton has always supported corporate power, including taking massive payments from Wall Street. Over half of Americans now recognise the need for a single-payer healthcare system. They also want education to be free. But Clinton blocked this, telling Americans that it was ‘utopian’.

This has not stopped her supporters presenting her as some kind of feminist radical. Madeleine Albright, who has been responsible for extolling and promoting some of America’s worst foreign policy atrocities, declared that there was a ‘special place in hell for women, who do not support [her]’. It was a view that many American women rejected, on the reasonable grounds that Hillary’s election to the presidency, while a historic feminist victory, actually wouldn’t make any material difference to the worsening conditions they and their families find themselves in.

And Harman’s the same. A woman from a privileged background, who stands for the corporate control of the Labour party, which Blair introduced, who despises the working class, who appears to be entirely comfortable with the privatisation of the NHS. Which was again continued after Thatcher and Major by Tony Blair.

In considering her feminist credentials, I’m reminded of a line from the American comedy Frasier. There was one episode where Niles’ estranged wife, Meris, was accused of stealing a piece of art from the Vatican. Niles thought that it was most unfair that she should be so accused, and so exploded ‘Rich, white women just aren’t getting their fair whack!’ Or words to that effect.

As for the Tories, their feminism has always been cosmetic. Margaret Thatcher did not see herself as a feminist, and her cabinet was repeatedly attacked by feminists because it had no female members. The Tory press, particularly the Scum, the Express and the Mail, have always been extremely anti-feminist. Over the years the Mail has run endless articles arguing that women’s places is back at home in the kitchen, and certainly not at work. And all of them have attacked legislation promoting racial and sexual equality, and outlawing the kind of assault Abbott has suffered, as ‘political correctness gone mad’.

They also have a cavalier attitude to sexual assault, regardless of the gender and sexual orientation of the perp and the victim. Remember when one Tory politico was acquitted of trying to rape a male colleague? Even though that gentleman was found not guilty, he had still tried to force his attentions on the man, and the incident showed an atmosphere in parliament where aides, both female and male, were regularly groped by the politicians.

So no, Harman and her colleagues aren’t going to stand up for Abbott. She’s too left-wing and too Old Labour, which puts her well outside the circle of privileged women Harman wants to promote. And as well as being deeply sexist and racist, whatever Cameron claims to have done, the Tory party seem to think that sexual assault is just one of those things the proles and new bugs have to put up with from their superiors. No doubt it all comes from the culture of bullying, including sexual assault, that went on at Eton and the other public schools.

It’s disgusting, and it’s high time Harman put her act in order to back Abbott on this point, and for May to show that her party is genuinely committed to protecting people of all backgrounds from sexual harassment. But I’m not holding my breath.

The Blairites and Middle Class Entitlement

Mike today put up a couple of pieces on the latest plans by the Blairites to hold on to power against Jeremy Corbyn and the majority of Labour members. One was to try and resurrect David Miliband as a challenger to Corbyn’s leadership. This is a sick joke, considering how unpopular Miliband was before under the old rules. He’d fare even worse now. And it shows how utterly cynical and manipulative they are about trying to insert him in Jo Cox’s vacant seat as the PLP’s preferred candidate, over the wishes of her constituency.

The other plan is a new, internal Labour party group, called Tomorrow’s Labour, which intends to set up an astroturf – fake grassroots movement – against Corbyn using spambots. This is pretty much against the rules of the internet as it is, and make a mockery of their claim to be fully transparent, and compliant with all existing rules.

I wonder how far the Blairites’ determination to hang on to power, no matter what the cost, is due to their sociological origins. I was talking to a friend of mine the other week, who remarked on the very middle class backgrounds of the Blairite politicians. Old Labour was largely, though not exclusively, working class. Many of its politicians had come into politics as members of their trades unions. These were people like Ernest Bevan, Nye Bevan, and the veteran Labour left-winger, Dennis Skinner. Obviously, there were even then members of the middle class involved in Socialist politics, like Clement Atlee, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the Fabians. This began to change in the 1960s, as the Labour party deliberately set out to attract a more middle class membership, as advocated by Tony Crosland. In order to attract them, it played down and minimised its advocacy of nationalisation. The Labour leader at the time, Hugh Gaitskell, wanted to drop Clause 4, the section of the Labour party’s constitution which advocated nationalisation. He failed. Despite this move to the Right, the Labour party still remained committed to the national ownership of the utilities and certain other important industries, such as mining and steel. Crosland himself was responsible for the introduction of comprehensive schools. Although this has been very loudly decried, the old system of schooling did reinforce class divisions and prevent children from working class backgrounds rising upwards. The party was also committed to a planned economy, something that also went very much against the principles of free marketeers like Milton Friedman and von Hayek.

All this went out the window with the 1979 election victory of Thatcher and the continued electoral success of the Conservatives. This convinced the Labour Right to adopt all of her policies – privatisation, the destruction of the NHS as a public service, the dismantlement of the welfare state and increasing criminalisation of the poor. They also turned away from the working class, and concentrated on trying to win votes from middle class voters in marginal constituencies.

And the party’s demographics also changed. Many of the New Labour MPs were like Harriet Harman. She’s a millionaire. They tend to be very middle class boys and girls, privately educated, with the advantages that accrue to the members of those classes. They sit on the boards of companies, various quangos and are active in the charities. This is all very well, but it makes me wonder how far the Blairites are motivated by purely ideological convictions, and how much of it comes from instinctive class loyalty? These are people, who have never had to work hard to get into their current position of power. They don’t have much contact with the working class, and apparently share the middle classes’ hatred and fear of them. You can see it in their determination to cut down on welfare benefits for the unemployed and for their support for workfare, as well as the unchallenged belief in the sociological myth of mass pockets of unemployment where nobody in a family has worked for generations. And there’s the instinctive hatred of the privately educated businesspeople for the trade unions.

As a rule, the middle classes uncritically accept that they have a privileged place in society, which is theirs by right. A little while ago Secular Talk did a piece, reporting on a study that found that the richer you are, the more likely you are to believe that the existing state of society was just. I don’t doubt that. Now I don’t deny that some of them are genuinely concerned with enlarging democracy through campaigns against racism and for female empowerment. They may also sincerely believe in Thatcher’s twaddle about making conditions worse for people in order to encourage them to try to rise above their station. But they do so through the middle class assumptions they have inherited as part of their background, including their belief that they have an innate right to rule. This might not be articulated or even conscious, but it seems to be there.

Hence the determination to hang on to power whatever the cost, the wild, stupid denunciations of Corbyn’s supporters as hippy Trots wearing donkey jackets. The great unwashed are trying to take their party back after good, Blairite middle class types have tried to make it respectable. How dare they! And so we come to their attempts to clean out Corbyn’s supporters through denying them a voice, in order to retain their middle class supporters and appeal to a middle class electorate.

Vox Political: The Canary on the Real Reason the Political Class Hates Jeremy Corbyn

Mike yesterday put up a very interesting piece from Kerry-Ann Mendoza of The Canary. Mendoza believes that the real reason the political class hates and fears Corbyn is partly explained as the result of the Blairite’s attempts to isolate the trade unions and consolidate the dominance of the right within the Labour party. The Blairites adopted a new leadership election process, in the hope that this would bring into the party new members, who were to the right of the trade unions. Instead, it brought in people who were well to the left. This panicked Harriet Harman and self-styled media pundits and commentators like Polly Toynbee, who despise genuine Social Democrats. As a result, they tried to purge these new members as infiltrators. The result of all this is that the grassroots party is going to have a real hand in formulating party policy, and not just the Front Bench. It will also mean that Labour will start again connecting with workers, the unions and disenfranchised groups to start campaigns that could tear the Tories apart.

She states further that

The permanent political class is facing the most real and present threat to their power since 1979. They are going to throw every weapon in their armoury at ensuring that doesn’t happen. But none of those weapons is more powerful than a tight-knit, grass roots movement with its eye on shared vision of an inspiring future. They don’t fear Corbyn because he might be unelectable, they fear him because he, and the movement he represents, might be unstoppable.

See Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/07/03/the-real-reason-the-permanent-political-class-is-trying-to-topple-jeremy-corbyn/ and follow the links to the original article.

This very much sounds as if its right. Lobster in their review of one of the biographies of Bliar that came out a few years ago stated that he had the public schoolboy’s hatred of the unions. Absolutely. One of the first things the smarmy warmonger threatened to do was cut the parties ties with the unions. As the Labour party was partly founded by the trade unions to protect their right to strike after the Taff Vale judgement, and to ensure that working people were represented in parliament, this move would have been an attack on the very core and raison d’etre of the Labour party. It’s also a major part of the Blairites’ adoption of the anti-labour attitudes of the Conservatives. The Tories, as representatives of the ruling classes, despise and fear the trade unions. Owen Jones in his book, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, notes that Thatcher hated the working class, whom she saw as treacherous and untrustworthy. Much Conservative rhetoric consists of holding the trade unions to account for the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1979, blaming them for causing economic chaos from which only Thatcher and her union-busting could deliver Britain. It’s largely rubbish. People were alienated from the unions because of some of the strikes, but several historians have also pointed out that Britain in the 1970s wasn’t any more prone to strikes than many other nations, and that many of those, which broke out were entirely justified. Nevertheless, it’s a rhetoric drum that the Tories insist on beating.

At the same time, the Blairites and the political do not like any political activity by the masses that they cannot stage manage and control. New Labour was notorious for this, using public relations and spin to try and stage popular demonstrations of loyalty and support for Blair. They’ve now resorted to the same tricks to smear Corbyn and his left-wing supporters. See the heckling of Corbyn by Tom Mauchline, not a Labour supporter but a fully paid PR goon from Portland Communications, the PR company owned by Jack Straw’s son. And then there’s the ‘hateful’ T-shirt, urging the eradication of Blairites, which was actually dreamed up by Anna Philips, another Blairite, and another PR goon.

Blairite New Labour, and his successor, Progress, is profoundly fake, and despises conviction politics. They stand for the privileges and profits of the corporate big wigs, who give them donations. Just as their pet journos on the Left, and, it goes without saying, the cheerleaders for the Tories and big business on the Right, like Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson and Laura Kuenssberg.

And so the campaign to marginalise and belittle Corbyn and his supporters with vilification, lies and distortion similar to Goebbels and the propagandists of the USSR.

From 2000: SEMA – the Atos of its Day

Private Eye in its issue for Friday, 19th May 2000, carried the story below on the establishment of the Work Capability Tests. These were originally a Tory idea, but where put into practice by Blair’s Labour after their election victory in 1997. The contract to administer the tests were awarded to Sema. Their conduct of them was so appalling that it was the subject of a report by the House of Commons social services committee.

Cringe Benefits

It was a Tory idea to begin with: how to make more money out of the disabled for a big private company.

After a “study of options” about what to do with the rather expensive government system for examining disabled people to see if they were entitled to benefit, the Tory government concluded that contracting out to the private sector was “most likely to deliver the improvements sought”.

Tory ministers agreed and the publicly-owned Benefits Agency Medical Services was divided into three areas “to encourage competition in terms of bids”. the Tory government fell in the spring of 1997, to be replaced by Labour with a huge majority and a secretary of state for social services, Harriet Harman, who had been eloquent in her condemnation of privatisation.

Ms Harman, however, was at once convinced of the case for privatising the testing of the disabled, and in February 1998 (in the interests of competition) she awarded the contracts for all three areas to one company, SEMA.

It was a juicy contract too. A government memorandum at the time announced that the three contracts would cost the government £305m, a figure, which the memo announced, “represented savings of £62m” compared with what the service used to cost the taxpayer.

One problem which soon became clear was that SEMA had no medical experience whatever. The British Medical Association, disgusted by the company’s treatment of doctors and patients, complained officially that SEMA executives “did not understand the complexities, having had no experience of employing doctors”. This obviously worried the company so much that when the five original bidders were invited to discuss the complexities of their new contract with the BMA, which represents most British doctors, two declined, including SEMA.

If it didn’t have any doctors or medically qualified staff, SEMA made sure it was well-stocked with “new” Labour lobbyists. It hired Westminster Strategy, which had a batch of such lobbyists on tap: Jo Moore, former Labour press officer; Mike Lee, who used to work for David Blunkett; and former chair of the Fabian Society and wanabee Labour candidate Mike Dauber. To clinch the business, SEMA acquired the then employment minister Andrew Smith as a speaker at its glittering conferences (see Eye 955).

Partly to make up for this lack of experience, SEMA engaged two companies as sub-contractors to do the new work, Nestor Healthcare Group and Nestor Disability Analysts. The board of the former was graced by a former Tory MP, Charles Goodison-Wickes, who quickly made way for the more acceptable Anne Parker, who chairs the Carers Association and is an examiner for the Child Support Agency. Nestor Healthcare has just branched into prisons, explaining in true “new” Labour tradition that “prisoner numbers are steadily growing”.

The performance of these SEMA subsidiaries and of privatisation in general, has recently been examined in detail by the House of Commons social services committee, whose shocking report has just been published. “To often”, says the report, “the organisation fails to deliver an adequate service … at its worst it puts claimants through examinations which are painful and distressing and gives poor advice.”

Bizarre examples of the doctors’ hostility to the people they are examining are provided by the report. In one case a patient was described as healthy because she could sit up watching television for up to two hours. In fact this patient could only watch television lying down. In another case a patient’s dirty fingernails were submitted as evidence of his ability to work in the garden – whereas in fact he could not even wash himself.

The conclusion makes sad reading for the “new” Labour lobbyists and privatisers of past years. There has been no improvement whatever. “Our inquiry has led us to conclude that, so far, the primary focus of SEMA has been on operational efficiency to achieve value for money rather than the delivery of a quality service.”

How has Labour responded so far to these devastating allegations? It has handed over a confidential contract for running the Labour party’s own membership records to … SEMA. And SEMA’s subsidiary Nestor has won a contract for the provision of an immigration centre for Group 4.

Since then, SEMA has been replaced by ATOS, who have now been replaced by Maximus, but still have the contract for administering the test for the Personal Independence Payments. ATOS made sure it avoided one of the criticisms of SEMA – that it didn’t have enough doctors or medically qualified staff. For patients and claimants, however, this has made absolutely no difference. The administrators of the Work Capability Test are still hostile towards those whom they are examining. Subsequent Tory policies, like those of Iain Duncan ‘Tosser’ Smith, have made this even worse. Maximus are going to be no different. Given the previous performance of the companies administering the test, they are likely to be worse.

There is even a lesson here for the recent recruitment of Sue Marsh, a disability campaigner, by Maximus. SEMA’s subsidiary, Nestor Healthcare, had on its board Anne Parker. As well as being an examiner for the Child Support Agency, she was also the chair of the Carers Association. This was doubtless to give the impression that the tests were to be fair, with the object of helping the disabled and their carers. It wasn’t, and isn’t.

This is the policy the Tories produced and are developing. It becomes nastier, more vindictive and humiliating every day. It’s high time the Tories were kicked out of office.