Ho ho! What was all that rubbish about the Change Party changing British politics? Earlier this evening I just caught a snippet on the Six O’Clock News that six of Change UK’s MPs have left the party following its poor performance at the elections and the recriminations against its leader, Heidi Allen. Some, but not all, would probably go to the Lib Dems, with whom the party has said they wish to have closer ties.
So much for all that nonsense about being a completely new form of politics, which the British public were crying out for. The British public looked at them, and drew the conclusion that they were the same old politics, pushed by the ambitious and arrogant, who definitely weren’t going to broaden British democracy. Not when they refused to fight by-elections after their defections. They were going to be the next SDP. Well, that got merged with the Liberals, and at their height the SDP were far more politically distinguished than Change UK. Their founding members, included David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, who were senior politicos with quite distinct ideas. All Change UK offered and offers is the same threadbare corporatism and neoliberalism, under a pro-Remain banner. They don’t offer anything which the Tories, Lib Dems and Blairites in the Labour Party already aren’t.
With luck, this will be the beginning of the party’s complete collapse. They won’t be missed.
Here’s an interesting little piece from today’s I for the 28th Mary 2019. Change UK came very much bottom of the poll in the Euro elections this Thursday, and the recriminations have started. Anna Soubry as criticised her party leader, Heidi Allen, for telling people to vote tactically. She considers that Allen was effectively telling them not to vote for their party.
The article by David Hughes, titled ‘Allen’s bizarre strategy hit votes, says Soubry’, on page 10, runs
Senior figures in Change UK were involved in a public row after the party formed by breakaway Tory and Labour MPs failed to win any MEPs.
Anna Soubry, the party’s Brexit spokeswoman, accused leader Heidi Allen of “bizarre” behaviour for suggesting their supporters engage in tactical voting.
Former Tory minister Ms Soubry said “over 600,000 people went and voted for us, a genuinely new party”, which was an “extremely good” result, she claimed.
But she criticised Ms Allen, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today: “I think it is rather bizarre for an interim leader on the eve of a poll to tell people essentially not to vote for their party.” Mocking the leader, she added: “Let’s engage now in big, grown up politics.”
Former Tory MP Ms Allen acknowledged that her party needed to learn from what went wrong in the European Parliament elections before the next general election.
I caught a snippet of one of the female members of Change UK talking on the Beeb the other day comparing her party’s performance with that Farage’s Brexit. She said that Brexit’s success wasn’t surprising, as it wasn’t really a new party. It was simply another vehicle for Nigel Farage and his campaign against the EU. Which is exactly true. It’s simply another version of UKIP when it was under Nigel Farage’s leadership, complete with the racism, anti-environmentalism, anti-feminism, planned destruction of the welfare state and privatisation of the NHS. All of which the female speaker for Change UK didn’t mention, probably because they’re also mostly policies shared by the Tories, Blairite Labour and Change UK, with the possible exception of the anti-feminism.
She then complained that Change UK really was a genuinely new party, trying a different type of politics. A politics that was no confined to party interests. Here she was utterly wrong. There was absolutely nothing new about Change UK. It was the same old Thatcherite neoliberalism, still demanding austerity, the privatisation of the NHS and the destruction of the welfare state. It very happily continued the existing system of parliamentary corruption by working for the interests of its rich, corporate donors, instead of the British electorate. That’s why it was registered as a private company, rather than a political party, so that they could hide their accounts. It was, unlike the Tories, pro-Remain, and tried to dress up its solid hostility to policies that would genuinely improving conditions for working people by claiming that it was somehow centrist and non-partisan. Which is what the Lib Dems have also been saying for decades. And many people would have been put off voting for Change UK because of their selfish rejection of democratic principle by refusing to hold by-elections in their constituencies after they switched parties.
The simple fact is that Change UK is a party no-one wants and practically no-one voted for. But they really can’t accept that, and so have to carry on with all this rubbish about being a brave, new party and finding someone they blame for a defeat all of them deserved. I doubt, however, that the recriminations and backbiting are going to stop here. Time to get the popcorn in and watch as they melt down!
In this 20 minute long video from Novara Media, presenter Aaron Bastani utterly demolishes the new ‘Independent’ grouping of MPs. He shows that rather than being any kind of new politics, they are simply the old, Blairite and Tory politics neoliberal politics. They are radically out of tune with what people really want, especially millennials, who have left much worse off than the preceding generation by the same politics the Blairites and Tories were pushing. And they’re being promoted by the media because they represent the old style of politics the media like: austerity with a smiley face.
Labour MPs All Going Before They’re Pushed
Bastani begins the video by describing how the departure of the seven Labour MPs – Gavin Shuker, Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Ann Coffee, Luciana Berger, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, who left to form the Independents – wasn’t actually a surprise. They were all loud critics of Corbyn, and almost all of them had been subject to motions of ‘no confidence’ or were facing deselection. They were then joined the next day by Joan Ryan, another critic of Corbyn, who had also lost a ‘no confidence’ motion. They were then joined the day after that by Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston from the Tories, who complained about the old, ‘broken’ politics of Labour versus Tories.
Independents Not Democratic, and Not a Political Party
The Independents, however, aren’t a political party as such. Which means that they don’t get the Short Money given to opposition parties. This could add up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. They also don’t have to conform to the same standards as proper political parties, although they claim that they will try to do so as best they can. They also don’t have a membership. You can give them your name and contact details, and make a donation, but there is no mechanism for creating a mass organisation where the membership can determine policy. It’s a private organisation more than a political party. But what concerns Bastani the most is that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, because this would ‘crush democracy’. It’s doublespeak, and the truth is that they don’t want bye-elections because they’d lose.
Angela Smith’s Racism
He then goes on to describe how the seven founding ex-Labour members claim that they were driven out of the party by its racism, only for Angela Smith to say within hours the most racist thing he’s ever heard a politician say on television. To show how badly their launch went, Bastani produces some viewing figures. On the Monday the video of their launch had 75,000 views on Twitter. The video of Angela Smith’s apology got 700,000 views. But the video of Smith making her racist comments got even more – 1.5 million views. And while the Mirror and the Guardian wanted to splash on a video by Tom Watson, which got 500 shares on Facebook, Novara’s video of their own Ash Sarkar showing the corruption at the heart of the group – she challenged smith on her chairmanship of a parliamentary group supporting water privatisation, funded largely by the water companies – got 200,000 views. Chris Leslie then appeared later on the Beeb to sort this out. Where once again he talked about their love of democracy. A love so strong, that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, thus disenfranchising the hundreds of thousands of people, who voted for these 11 MPs. They claimed to be anti-racist, but set a new record by being racist ‘pretty much by lunchtime’.
People More Politically Engaged, Not Less
But their fundamental principle is that people don’t want Labour or Tory, but what Labour used to be 15 years ago. But at the 2017 election, 82 per cent of the population voted for either of the two main parties – Tories or Labour. That was the highest percentage the parties had since 1979. In 2010 only 65 per cent of the public voted Labour or Tory. The idea that people are turning away from the two main parties when there is a clear choice, socialism or neoliberalism, isn’t true. And the claim that people are disengaged from politics doesn’t stand up either. Voter turn-out was higher in the 2017 election, just as it was higher during the Scottish reference in 2014, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Which was the biggest democratic exercise in British history. More people voted in that than in any previous general election or referendum. And Labour now has more than 500,000 members – more than it has had in a generation. The same is true for the SNP. More people are members of political parties now than at any point in Bastani’s lifetime. And if people genuinely do want centrist politics, how is it that the Lib Dems, who got only 8 per cent of the vote in 2015, got even less in 2017? This was despite the ‘media Einsteins’ telling us all that they would do well against the two main parties in a Brexit election. It’s almost as if, says Bastani, that the media don’t know what they’re talking about when they claim to know what the public wants.
Labour Policies Massively Popular
And then there are the policy issues. Labour’s policies are very popular. They’re right at the top of the list of why people voted Labour. But they don’t want to imitate these popular policies. Chris Leslie in an interview with New Scientist said he didn’t want a top tax rate of 50 per cent. That’s not a Corbynite policy, it’s one of Gordon Brown’s. He was also against stopping tuition fees and rejects the renationalisation of the railways, both extremely popular policies. These aren’t just popular with Labour voters, but also with Tories and Lib Dems. And polls conducted by IPPR And Sky News did polls at the end of last year which showed clear majorities of the British public wanting the Bank of England to keep house prices down and a minimal presence, at least, of workers on company boards. People don’t want centrist policies. They’re moving left, as shown on poll after poll.
Millennials Left-Wing because of Neoliberalism
And there’s a clear generational difference. At the last Labour split in 1981 when the SDP was formed, there was a clear movement to the right and post-war socialist policies had become unpopular. And yet when this split happened, the Economist carried an article decrying the popularity of socialism amongst millennials both in America and Britain. This meant ‘Generation Z’ young people, who want the government to address climate change as a fundamental part of 21st century politics. And these millennials despised the Tories, as shown by footage of an anti-Tory march. These are going to be the voters of the 2020s. And they’re not going to be bought off. They’re not left-wing because of something the read in a book, or because they want to be countercultural. They’re left-wing because their living standards and expectations are lower than their parents, they have a less expansive welfare state, they’re going to have higher levels of debt and earn less, and they will have to deal with systemic crises like demographic aging and climate change. They rightly feel that they’re screwed over. And the idea that these same people are going to agree with Chris Leslie’s idea of politics is probably the stupidest thing you’ll hear this year. And this is only February.
The Failure of Centrist Parties in France, America, Italy, Spain and Canada
But since 2015 centrist politicians have been hammered in election like Hillary Clinton in 2016. Emmanuel Macron in France was hailed as the saviour of French centrism, despite only taking 24 per cent of the vote in the first round. Now he’s the most unpopular president in French history after months of protests by the gilets jaunes, which have been met with tear gas attacks by the gendarmes, which have left people losing their eyes and their lives. Then there’s Matteo Renzi of the Partito Democratico, the Democratic Party, the Italian sister party to Britain’s Labour. In 2014 they took 42 per cent of the vote. But he was out within two years, having lost a referendum by 20 points. And in the last election the party lost half of their senators, leaving Italy governed by the Five Star Movement and the far-right Liga. Then there’s the example of the PSOE’s Pedro Sanchez. The PSOE is the Spanish equivalent of the Labour party. He’s also suffered mass protests and this week Spain called new general elections, which his party are certain to lose. Centrism is not popular in Europe or America, so the Independents have to turn to Canada’s Justin Trudeau. But Trudeau is now less popular in his country than Donald Trump in the US. Not that the media pushing ‘centrism’ will tell you this.
The Centrist Real Policy: More Austerity
The unpopularity of centrist politics is due to the fact that they still haven’t solved the problems of global capitalism created by the 2008 crash. They believed that financialisation would create the economic growth that would support public services. But financialisation hasn’t created growth since 2008. And as they can’t create prosperity and tackle income inequality, all they’ve have to give us is austerity ‘with a nice smiley face’.
Labour Splitters against Iraq Inquiry, For Welfare Cuts
And not only do the eight former Labour MPs have Brexit in common, they also voted against an independent inquiry into Iraq. A million people have been affected by the war, along with those, who suffered under ISIS, and Iranian influence has expanded across the Middle East. The idea that Iraq is irrelevant is not only absurd, it is a disgrace. People have died, and it has made an already volatile region even more so. And Britain is directly responsible. The former Labour MPs also abstained on the vote of welfare reform before Corbyn came to power. They do not stand for a moral foreign policy, or for a more just social system at home.
Their politics are a mixture of careerism and opportunism, and their opposition to Brexit actually makes a new deal more likely. They are driven by fundamental democratic principles, but won’t stand for a bye-election. No members, no policies, no party democracy, no vision. Bastani states that this isn’t the future of politics, it’s the past, and the worst aspects at that. He looks forward to sensible people joining them, because they’re going to be found out sooner or later. And if we want to establish the primacy of socialist ideas, he says, then bring it on.
This is another great video from left-wing YouTuber Gordon Dimmack expertly taking apart the new, Independent group of MPs, the Tory splitters who have joined them, and how they signal a possible return to politics of Tony Blair.
Yeah. Him. That monster. The man who killed Iraq.
He begins his video by talking about how he’s already done several other pieces on the Independents already. He points out that they aren’t a party, but a private company, and that this means that they don’t have to reveal their donors. They have, however, suggested that they might, just might, reveal the identities of people giving them over £7,500. He also says again that Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s remark that it might be racist or anti-Semitic to suggest, as Ruth George did, that the party’s funded by Israel is itself anti-Semitic. And he goes on to state that it’s obvious what the Independents are doing, considering who has just joined them: Joan Ryan.
He discusses how Ryan was accused of fabricating an accusation of anti-Semitism at a Labour party member in 2016, despite herself criticizing Jeremy Corbyn for anti-Semitism. He points his viewers to the Al-Jazeera documentary, ‘The Lobby’ and an accompanying article about it on the Electronic Intifada. Ryan was filmed by an undercover reporter fabricating her accusation against a pro-Palestinian activist, Jean Fitzpatrick, at the 2016 Labour party conference. The documentary also revealed Ryan discussing a million pounds of funding the Labour Friends of Israel were getting from Israel for junkets there with Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot. And six of the eight, who have split off from Labour were members of the LFI. The report also said that Ryan had said to him that she talked to Masot ‘most days’. This who Joan Ryan represents – not her constituency, but Israel. And by extension that’s who the Independent group also is. He’s sees no reason why anyone should have apologise for that.
Dimmack also angrily points out that Fitzpatrick, the woman smeared, had her membership suspended. She was later readmitted, but no apology was given. Ryan herself was totally unrepentant. Dimmack then angrily points out to the Labour party that if they allow this to happen – which it has, repeatedly – then people like him won’t join. He also asks the BBC if they don’t think that they should also discuss how Ryan falsely accused another Labour member of anti-Semitism in the two articles that they wrote about Ryan the day Dimmack posted his video, articles in which she continued making her claims about anti-Semitism. He states that not doing so is clear bias, and it’s not towards a party, but to another country.
He then moves on to talk about the three Tory splitters – Sarah Wollaston, Anna Soubry and Heidi Allen. Wollaston is fairly quiet, and generally toed the Tory party line. But she astonished people in January by tabling an amendment which, if it had gone through, would have resulted in a second referendum. So she’s pro-People’s Vote and a Remainer. Like Chuka Umunna. Heidi Allen is also a Remainer, as is Anna Soubry, who can’t open her mouth without saying ‘People’s Vote’. He plays a clip of a reporter asking the Tory splitter if the honourable thing wouldn’t be for them to call a bye-election. They respond by telling him that, no, they don’t think it would, because they think the British people are sick of elections. He points out how colossally hypocritical this is, when they want a second referendum after another the first, in 2016, which hasn’t been implemented yet.
He then posts up Anna Soubry’s ‘Bloody horrible’ voting record as published on a Tweet by Dave Ward. She was
For the Bedroom Tax
For reducing corporation tax
For £9,000 tuition fees.
For phasing out secure life tenancies
Against investigating the Gulf War
Against a banker’s bonus tax
Against increasing a tax on earnings over £150,000.
Ward says in his tweet: Any former Labour MP prepared to welcome someone with this record into their new party was never a Labour MP to begin with.
Dimmack says this comment applies to all seven of the Labour defectors. And their ‘centre’ party isn’t centre, it’s centre-right. He then puts up a picture of this voting bloc from Red Resistance, another tweeter, and comments that if this is the starting 11, how crappy must the subs bench be like? They’re also trying to get two other MPs to join them. One is Ian Austin, whom Dimmack wrongly identifies as a Tory, an MP who is currently suspended on a charge of sexual harassment. They’re already a laughing stock, now they want a creepy pervert to join them. And they also want Stephen Kinnock to join them, but this guy’s holding back, because his wife will probably say ‘No’. Dimmack then plays a video of Kinnock looking absolutely dismayed when the Labour party under Corbyn got 266 seats with Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ playing.
He then criticizes Lucian Borgia, I mean, Berger for her accusations of anti-Semitism. He admits that she has suffered genuine anti-Semitic abuse, for which two people have been to prison. But she points it in the wrong direction, towards Jeremy Corbyn, the most anti-racist MP in parliament. And the most pathetic thing about her is that she was parachuted into the safest of safe seats in Liverpool in 2005. When she was going out with Euan Blair. He thanks Craig Murray for highlighting that little fact.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it can. Because there are rumours that Tony Blair will return to politics to lead it. And here he shows a photograph of Blair, with black irises in his eyes, looking absolutely evil in front of pile of human skulls. As an aside, he also mentions that when Chuka Umunna was asked which of Labour’s policies he disagreed with, he couldn’t name one. Dimmack declares that the Independents are a joke, and the only way he can see them getting through it is if Tony Blair comes back in a year or two’s time and stands to lead them.
Dimmack briefly returns to the point that the Independents are a company, not a party, so we don’t know who their donors are, but thanks to Krishnan Guru-Murthy, it’s anti-Semitic to say it could be Israel. And then he returns to the possibility of Blair returning to politics. He says that someone left it in a comment to one of his videos the previous day, and when he looked into it, he found others were taking it very seriously. And the possibility of this occurring gave him nightmares. Blair is a ‘fr***ing war criminal’, he says, but considering how awful the rest of them are, ‘a war criminal might fit right in’.
It’s a nice summation of how ridiculous, evil and pernicious the Independents are. But I think he missed the point about people not joining the Labour party because of the lack of consequences for those making false accusations of anti-Semitism. I think it is being done precisely to stop people like Dimmack joining, by a Blairite clique that is still in control of the party bureaucracy. Just as I follow Mike’s post today about Derek Hatton’s suspension from the Labour party for anti-Semitism being no accident. It’s another attempt to discourage genuine leftists, concerned with Israel’s brutality, from joining.
Yesterday, a group of three MPs, Sarah Wollaston, Heidi Allen and Anna Soubry, defected from the Tory party to join the Independent corporation, that had split from Labour.
At their press conference they gave three reasons why they had left. Heidi Allen said she was disgusted with the suffering the party had inflicted and its lack of benevolence. For Sarah Wollaston, it was the harm the Tories had done to the manufacturing industry. And for Anna Soubry it was the way her former party had wrecked the country with their massively inept handling of Brexit. Or it might have been Wollaston, who was most concerned about Brexit, and Soubry about the destruction of Britain’s manufacturing sector under the Tories. This is how the reasons for their departure was presented on one of the short videos on YouTube, although I got the impression from listening to Heidi Allen speaking on the 45 minute long video of their press conference put out by Channel 4 News that she was also concerned about Brexit and the attack on manufacturing, as she also ran her own manufacturing firm.
The Tories, who had previously been gleefully exploiting Chuka Umunna and company’s split from the Labour party, were left outraged in their turn. Hunt gave a speech saying how much he regretted the departure of such valued colleagues. Other Tory functionaries demanded that the Splitters should now call a bye-election. Just like the real supporters and activists in the Labour party have been demanding Umunna and his coteries of bitter Blairites do.
I don’t know how sincere Allen and her two colleagues are about the suffering caused by the Tory party. She made a number of speeches saying how upset she was by the suffering caused by her former party’s wretched welfare reforms, but voted for them all the same. So in her case it was, as Mike pointed out, a case of crocodile tears. She may be genuine, and that after years of dutifully following the party line her conscience has won at last. Or it may simply be that, like some other Tories, she’s just worried that the electorate will punish the Tories for the misery they’ve inflicted at the next election.
I think the three’s statement that they’re concerned about British manufacturing and the devastating effects of Brexit are rather more genuine. Margaret Thatcher and Blair in his turn ignored the manufacturing sector. One members of Thatcher’s cabinet, who was the only member in it from that sector of the economy, described how he couldn’t get Thatcher to understand that a strong pound would harm British manufacturing by making our products more expensive. She also uncritically accepted as an article of her neoliberal, free market dogma, that failing firms and industries should be allowed to go under, and should not be given government assistance. Which contrasted with Labour’s promotion of the National Enterprise Boards and state assistance for British industry, where the government would help firms acquire plant and equipment.
And as a good Thatcherite, Blair also adopted her destructive attitude to British industry. He was also quite happy to see British manufacturing collapse. Instead, its place at the heart of the British economy would be taken by the financial sector and the service industries. Deanne Julius, a leading official at the Bank of England, recruited from America, actually said that Britain should give up its manufacturing industry, and simply concentrate on the service industries.
The result has been that vast swathes of traditional British industry have been destroyed by Thatcherism, including mining. Which was done simply to destroy the miners’ union, so they could never overthrow a Tory government as they had Heath’s. However, as Ha Joon-Chang has shown in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, manufacturing is still an extremely important part of the British economy. It looks weak simply because it hasn’t expanded as much as the other sectors of the British economy. But if it went, the British economy would collapse completely.
As for Brexit, the past few weeks have seen company after company leave the UK because of the Tory party’s incompetence. They’re leaving because we haven’t reached a trade agreement with EU, and so the tariff barriers that will be erected after Britain leaves will make it difficult for them to sell their products after our departure. The latest firm to announce it was closing down its British plant has been Honda in Swindon. When this goes, so do 3,500 jobs.
But I doubt that this will concern those in the Tory party demanding a hard Brexit, like the odious Jacob Rees-Mogg. The financial sector has also been hit, with various banks and international financial regulators announcing that they will leave Britain for Dublin, Paris and the Netherlands. But this doesn’t seem to dismay Mogg and his comrades. They seem to be all financiers, who make their money through investing in companies around the world. And so the destruction of the British manufacturing sector simply doesn’t affect them. They’ll get their money anyway.
The Tory party is seriously split over Brexit. It was to call the Eurosceptics’ bluff that Cameron called the referendum in the first place. He was so confident that people would vote ‘remain’ that he didn’t do any proper campaigning. The result was that he was astonished when the ‘Leave’ vote prevailed. But I gather that the Tories were on the edge of splitting years before, when Tony Blair was in power. Blair stole their policies, and indeed moved further right than the Tories had dared. The party was also split between the Tory paternalists and Thatcherites, and the rural sector, which believed that British agriculture and country communities were being ignored. I’ve heard it said that if Brown had won the 2010 election, the Tories would have collapsed completely, and would have tried to rebrand themselves instead as the English Nationalists. This has the ring of truth, as I do remember one opinion piece in the Heil actually recommending that the party thus rename itself.
I hope that the departure of Allen, Wollaston and Soubry will spark a series of other defections from the Tories and bring about the party’s much-need demise. It’s brought nothing but misery and poverty to Britain’s working people since Thatcher came to power in 1979. And even if the party doesn’t collapse completely, I want there to be so many defections that at the least it causes the collapse of May’s vile, malignant, destructive government.
Here’s an interesting development. Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston have finally split from the Tory party. They gave a press conference at lunchtime today, which was streamed live by Channel 4 News. The video of it, which is about 3/4 of an hour long, is on YouTube. I won’t put up it up, as I’ve done no more than see five minutes of it so far.
But what is interesting is its virtual disappearance from the videos that first appear in my YouTube feed. All the videos there in the ‘Breaking News’ section instead have been about Shamima Begum and Sajid Javid’s denial of her British citizenship. These are videos that have been put up by the Scum, the Times and Sunset Times, and ITV News, as well as the Guardian. Now these videos are more recent than that about the Tory Splitters. They were all posted within the last couple of hours. However the split should cause considerable embarrassment to the Tories and their lackeys in the press, who yesterday were in a feeding frenzy baying over the Labour Splitters. They were running headlines like ‘Leader Who’s Lost the Plot’, which I think was the headline about Corbyn in the Scum or Heil. But any controversy over the defection of the Tories is going to be very muted. One of the commenters to the Channel 4 video on YouTube remarked that there need only be five more Tories leave the party, and their majority in parliament collapses to the point where even the alliance with the DUP won’t save them.
Which rather puts the Tories in the same position as the minority Labour government in the mid-70s, when Harold Wilson also only had a majority of five MPs. I think this was also the time of the Lib-Lab pact, when Labour had to rely on the support of the Liberals.
Just like Tweezer now has to rely on the DUP, and has to rely for her majority on a pact with the DUP.
But as with the massive racism in the Tory ranks – the party is institutionally islamophobic – the Beeb and the right-wing press will far prefer to dwell on the anti-Semitism allegedly rife in the Labour party and the split from their ranks. Which should also show why people can’t trust the lamestream media, and are better off getting their news from alternative sources, like the Canary, Another Angry Voice, Vox Political, Pride’s Purge and all the other great, Zelo Street and all the other great, left wing news sites and bloggers.
As Mike has described in detail on his blog, Universal Credit is set to increase the misery of millions more people across the UK when it is rolled out across the country. Various Tories have made gestures of opposing it, but as Mike also explains, you can’t trust any of them. When Tory rebels have their bluff called, or the government offers just a token gesture to placate them, they immediately show their true colours: blue, all the way through. They automatically give in. And the Tories making noises about opposing it are doing no more than that: making noises. Heidi Allen made a great show of weeping in parliament at one woman’s description of the hardships she had suffered due to Iain Duncan Smith’s wretched brainchild. But when Labour made a humble petition to have all the documents published, which the government has not released on the effects of Universal Credit, Allen voted against it with the rest of the Tory party.
Hypocrites to a man and woman.
The Labour party is genuinely critical of Universal Credit, and will do something about it. And in this video, Jeremy Corbyn attacks it and reveals some of the changes he intends to make. He also talks about the mess Brexit has created regarding Northern Ireland and the open border with Eire. It’s from the Daily Heil’s channel on YouTube, but they seem to be letting him speak without misrepresenting him. Corbyn made the comments to them when he appeared in Bristol, and gave his opinion that British schoolchildren needed to know the complete history of the British Empire, and what it had done to the subject nations and peoples.
The video shows Corbyn getting out of his car in front of Bristol Cathedral and the city’s Central Library before going into City Hall, where he watches a video on the Empire. It then moves to him standing outside, with College Green and Park Street, including the Lord Mayor’s chapel, as his backdrop. He says
Three million families are going to be worse off by about fifty pounds a week from Universal Credit, 2.7 million more families will be forced into Universal Credit next year. So immediately we will say ‘We will stop this process and we will make sure that no-one is worse-off under Universal Credit. The experience of Universal Credit has been that the majority of people are considerably worse off, many forced into debt due to delays in payments and many, particularly in the private rented sector, property or home is put at risk because of it. This has got to change very, very rapidly. I raised it yesterday with the Prime Minister the question of the poverty that’s come about because of austerity and because of University credit.
He goes on, but it’s obvious there’s been a cut at this section of the interview.
Well, it would cost in the sense that we’re cutting benefits by Universal Credit, we would be maintaining existing levels of benefit immediately.
There’s then a question from the interviewing journalist, who asks about ‘those savings being built into projections of the country’s (path?)’
Corbyn replies that That is the problem. The savings that are built in are at the expense of the poorest in our society.
Then comes the inevitable question: ‘so how will you pay?’
Corbyn replies
We’ll pay for it by increasing income from corporate taxation and the wealthiest in our society. We would not be taxing the lowest paid and medium income groups.
Another cut, then
I think it has to change, I think the system has to change dramatically and we will be using a more comprehensive system on this, but essentially our benchmarks would be: nobody should be worse off, nobody should have their homes put at risk because of Universal Credit.
Another cut, then
Well, I think it’s a very real threat, and the DUP are obviously speaking up for their own constituency on this, and indeed there is a great deal of unity on this amongst all political parties in Northern Ireland across all the political divide on having an open border with the Republic, obviously open trade and therefore a customs union within the European Union which reflects that, and I think their position is very real. We will judge this government against the six tests that Keir Starmer has laid out for us and we will vote accordingly in parliament, but we cannot support chequers.
Another cut, then Corbyn concludes
The government has had more than two years to negotiate this and still hasn’t made any progress on it. Quite simply there has to be open trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and that has to be the basis of any agreement.
Mike today reported that the DUP were threatening to vote against Tweezer and with as many as 40 other Tory MPs. May was seen blustering in parliament when it came to questions about Northern Ireland. She declared to do that Brexit was ’95 per cent complete’. Among the many excellent Tweets Mike has put up about this issue, from Clare Hepworth, David Lammy, Corbyn and Steven Swinford was a nice rebuttal from Dan Lewis, the NW Chair of the CWU. He reminded everyone that the Titanic also successfully completed 95 per cent of its journey.
Tweezer and her disgusting party are a menace to the British people. The poverty foisted on us through austerity and Universal Credit is killing people. And their debacle over Northern Ireland risks one of the essential pillars of the Good Friday Agreement. And if that goes, then the province really could return to murderous chaos.
Mike states that it’s possible she won’t last till the end of the week. I hope so. And if she’s pushed tomorrow, it won’t be too soon.
I found this quotation on malice from the Roman poet and epigrammist, Martial, in an old copy of Focus magazine dating from the ’90s. The great Roman wit said
Man loves malice, but not against one-eyed men, nor the unfortunate, but against the fortunate and proud.
Well, that’s how things should be, amongst people of taste. Unfortunately, many people really aren’t that well-brought up. And this extends to the entire Tory party, who are full of hatred and malice against the unfortunate. Not just the poor and the unemployed, but also the disabled, including men with one eye. You can see that from their entire welfare policy of depriving benefits to those, who desperately need it, and the way it has forced people into misery, debt, starvation and death. And this is despite all their hypocritical crocodile tears about the poor and cant about ‘caring conservatism’. Heidi Allen, who ostentatiously wept about the suffering of one poor soul on benefit, has voted against reforming the Universal Credit that has caused so much of it. And David Cameron and his mate Iain Duncan Smith had a good cackle together in parliament when a Labour MP read out a piece from one of their constituents describing the depths of suffering she had been reduced to due to their wretched reforms.
The Tory cabinet is stuffed full of public school toffs, who like, Boris Johnson, have received a Classical education. Clearly they were asleep or skiving that day when they covered that epigram of Martial’s.
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