Hope Not Hate Publishes Dossier of Tory Islamophobes

A week or so ago Mike put up a piece on his blog commenting on the Equalities and Human Rights Committee’s apparent double standards towards racism in the Labour and the Conservative parties. They have spent a year combing the Labour party for evidence of anti-Semitism. It’s undoubtedly there, because it exists in wider British society. However, the fact that they haven’t published anything about it so far indicates what has already been said about anti-Semitism in the Party: it’s at a much, much lower level than mainstream British society, and the majority of it comes from the right and especially the far right. However, the Tory, media narrative demands that Labour be a hotbed of anti-Jewish hatred, and so they’re determined to find it. No matter how long it takes.

This is in sharp contrast to the Tory party, which is seething with real islamophobia. The internet personality Jacobsmates found plenty of it on Tory Facebook and Twitter accounts, with the supporters of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg expressing real, vicious, murderous hatred towards Muslims. Sayeeda Warsi has been demanding that islamophobia in her party should be investigated, as has Miqdaad Versi of the Muslim Council of Great Britain. I think Boris even promised an inquiry, but put it off until after the election. How very convenient! A fortnight ago, 20 Tories were suspended and expelled for their prejudice towards Muslims. But so far the EHRC has done nothing. Perhaps it has something to do with its leader, Trevor Philips, being suspended from the Labour Party for it. This has infuriated the Tories, who are all claiming that Philips is innocent and it’s because he was telling the truth about Muslims and their grooming gangs. But the evidence against Philips seems strong. He did make false accusations against Muslims, particularly over the case of a child placed with a Muslim foster family. Please go and see Zelo Street’s posts about this for further information, such as https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/03/trevor-phillips-doth-protest-too-much.html

Now the anti-racism/anti-religious extremism organisation, Hope Not Hate, has published its list of Tory islamophobes, and is calling on the Conservatives to take firm action against them and racism in the party. The organisation says

Throughout 2019 there was a steady flow of allegations made against Conservative Party councillors, activists and members which, when viewed alongside the polling of members conducted by YouGov in July, paints a picture of a party that has a significant problem with anti-Muslim sentiment at local level. Now HOPE Not Hate can reveal a new dossier of Islamophobic social media posts by more than twenty Tory officials and activists, including six sitting councillors. We are calling on CCHQ to take immediate action against these individuals, and will continue to demand that they take proper steps to tackle the Islamophobia crisis that has gripped the party at every level.

The list includes:

Councillor Steve Vickers, of Nottingham County Council

Councillor Sonia Armstrong, Harworth and Bircotes Town Council

Councillor Judith Clementson, Winchester City Council

Councillor Karl Lewis, Llandinam Community Council

Councillor Derek Bullock, Bolton Council

Councillor Ranjit Pendhar Singh Gill, Hounslow

Parliamentary Assistant Fraser McFarland

Ex-councillor Bryan Denson, Wakefield

Ex-Councillor Gail Hall

Ex-Councillor Christopher Meakin

Ex-Councillor Susanna Dixon, Coventry

Ex-Councillor Martin Akehurst, Henley-on-Thames

2019 Council Candidate Liam Christopher Ritchie

2019 Council Candidate Roger Vernon, Bassetlaw

2019 Council Candidate Deirdre Vernon, Bassetlaw

2016 Council Candidate Yonah Saunders

2018 Candidate Paul Ingham, Tower Hamlets

2017 Council Candidate and Former Chair, Alan Booth, Durham

2016 Council Candidate John Hill, Portsmouth,

2016 Council Candidate John Shoesmith, Calderdale

2016 Council Candidate Charles Beckham, Darlington

Party Donor Fraser Duffin

Activist Fraser Duffin, Inverness

The offensive comments and posts they made include personal attacks on London’s mayor Sadiq Khan and Sayeeda Warsi, general hatred of immigrants and support for Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, some of them also believe that Muslims are collectively responsible for 9/11 and support terrorism, as well as the various conspiracy theories about Muslims deliberately invading Europe in order to take over and destroy western society. Many of them believe the discredited ‘Eurabia’ nonsense, which holds that Muslims are outbreeding everyone else, and in two generations will be the dominate ethnic/ religious group.

https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2020/03/02/revealed-new-evidence-of-islamophobia-among-conservative-party-officials-and-activists/

I have strong reservations about Hope Not Hate. They’ve done some brilliant work exposing genuine racism and religious extremism. However, one of the organisations they liaise with is the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which has been one of the major promoters of the Labour Party anti-Semitism smears. Nevertheless, they’ve done an excellent job in helping to expose the rabid islamophobia in the Tory ranks.

And Labour’s allegations of deep-seated islamophobia in the Tories is clearly causing more than a little discomfort. One of the hacks in the I last week wrote a piece attacking political ‘whataboutery’. I didn’t read the article, just the headline, so I may well be wrong. But I took this to mean that they weren’t happy with Labour raising the issue of Tory islamophobia in response to the anti-Semitism smears. Smears which the I, like the rest of the press, was all too eager to promote.

This is an embarrassing issue for the Tories. Which is why they and the media are trying to play it down and cover it up. But it’s not going away, and needs to be exposed and dealt with.

Perhaps after Hope Not Hate, other organisations will take up the challenge and pressure Johnson to do more to combat such racism in his ranks. But as he’s one of them, don’t bet on it. 

See: https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2020/03/02/revealed-new-evidence-of-islamophobia-among-conservative-party-officials-and-activists/

 

 

Private Eye Still Keeping up Media Anti-Semitism Smear against Labour

The media smears claiming that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party are viciously anti-Semitic seem to have died down somewhat recently. This is no doubt due to Labour having folded and succumbed to the immense pressure to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in toto, which is being used, against the wishes of the man who devised it, to silence criticism of the state of Israel and its murderous oppression of the Palestinians. But Private Eye seems determined to maintain the smear.

In last fortnight’s issue, for 11-24 January 2019, the magazine chortled in a piece, ‘What the Papers Don’t Say’ on page 7, about how the Groaniad did not report how Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, was jeered when she said at a Jewish charity event when she said that Jeremy Corbyn had been too upset to address the Labour party’s anti-Semitism claims. Which was in contrast to the Torygraph, Scum, Fail and the Times.

Then in the ‘Rotten Boroughs Awards 2018’ on page 18 there’s the piece ‘Jewish Humour Award’, which gives this dubious honour to Hounslow for Labour councillor Nisar Malik, whom it describes as ‘something of a conspiracy theory enthusiast, especially when it comes to the you-know-whos.’ Malik tweeted that “the Zionist lobby controls all the media”. This amused the Eye’s contributor, as ‘the Z-word’ was spelt ‘zaniest’. ‘Those screwball Illuminati jokesters get everywhere!’ the Eye guffaws.

Ian Hislop’s mighty organ has shown how determined it is to repeat the anti-Semitism smear against Labour by posting a reply to a female Momentum member, who sent them a letter denying it. They replied by saying that Momentum itself had admitted that there was an anti-Semitism problem in the Labour party. This is the view of Jon Lansman, Momentum’s founder, but is very much denied by many of the organization’s members and especially its former vice-chair, Jackie Walker, and her fellows on Labour Against the Witch-Hunt. But the Eye hasn’t bother to talk to them, or showed any inclination to do so. It’s thus no surprise that it sneers at the Groaniad for not reporting the jeers against Thornberry at the Jewish charity event, rather than questioning the other papers and those jeering Thornberry for their acceptance and determination to promote nothing but a vile Zionist smear.

As for Nisar Malik, I don’t know anything about him rather than what the Eye has said about him. It might be that he’s as anti-Semitic as the Eye claims, but that’s not clear after the newspapers smeared Mike as one, along with Ken Livingstone, Mark Wadsworth, Jackie Walker and so on. Malik’s wrong about the Zionists controlling the media, but they are under very heavy pressure from the Israeli state and the Jewish establishment over here not to report Israeli atrocities or crimes against humanity. I’ve posted up on this blog the documentary Peter Oborne made eleven years ago for Channel 4’s Despatches on the Israel lobby, in which the former editor of the Groaniad, Alan Rusbridger and Jewish media figures, and academics, including the respected Oxford professor of Middle Eastern studies, Avi Shlaim, described how the Israel lobby and the Board of Deputies of British Jews had tried to close down accurate reporting of atrocities committed by Israel and its allies, the Christian Phalangists in Lebanon, with accusations of anti-Semitism. These were made not only against Rusbridger, but also the Beeb and its reporters Jeremy Bowen, Orla Guerin and then Dimblebore when said the accusations were ridiculous. Malik has a very, very good point to attack this very strong Zionist bias.

And now in this fortnight’s issue for 25th January to 7 February 2019 the magazine is trying to maintain the smear by very carefully reporting the accusations leveled at some of those smeared as anti-Semites in the Labour party. This is in the article ‘Unskilled Labour’ by ‘Ratbiter’ in the mag’s ‘HP Sauce’ page. This is about how Labour is supposedly unprepared for a snap general election, due to subscription income falling. Other allegations are that the party doesn’t have the strategy and isn’t putting in the funding to fight marginal seats, various candidates have been dropped because they are unsuitable due to conspiratorial beliefs about the Manchester Arena bombing and the murder of Jo Cox and unpaid tax. But what is remarkable is how it reports that the party is also suffering pressure on its finances due to legal action by those it has smeared and unjustly expelled as anti-Semites. ‘Ratbiter’ writes

While subscription income falls, costs are rising – not least thanks to legal bills from Corbyn’s friends, who cannot take exclusion from the fold now that they feel the party has power in its grasp.

Marc Wadsworth, an old Corbyn ally, is suing Labour for expelling him after he reduced the Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth to treats at the launch of a report on, of all things, anti-Semitism. Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, candidate for South Thanet, has raised more than 4,000 pounds and retained leftish brief Michael Mansfield QC to challenge the national executive’s decision to block her candidacy because she brought the party into disrepute by banging on about Hitler, Zionism and Ken Livingstone.

Some, but not nearly all of this, is true, but even the truthful bits are very misleading. Labour Against the Witch-Hunt was formed long before the media started admitting that Labour had a chance of winning a coming election. The same with those members, who have been unjustly and foully smeared as anti-Semites, like Mike. They are friends of Corbyn, but they’re motives are getting proper redress and admission back into the party they’ve always supported, and would still demand this whatever the party’s electoral chances were. But putting it that way makes it seem that they’re all infiltrators, just in it for power. It’s a continuation of the Blairite/ Tory smear that they’re entryists.

Now let’s deal with the Eye claim about Wadsworth. Yes, at least one of the papers did accuse him of making the odious Ruth Smeeth cry. No, that’s not why the party expelled him. They accused him of anti-Semitism because he had made a comment about her handing material to a journo from the Torygraph. She tried to claim that he was using an anti-Semitic trope of being party of a Jewish conspiracy to smear her. The Blairite/Zionist kangaroo court couldn’t make that stick, because it was all too clear that Wadsworth was anything but an anti-Semite. For crying out loud, he worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to get tougher legislation passed in the 1990s to combat real Nazi attacks on Jews in Thanet. This was dropped in favour of the catch-all claim that he had brought the party into disrepute. He hadn’t. Smeeth had with a completely and utterly false and libelous claim, which the gutter press was all too keen to repeat.

Going on to Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, it seems she was smeared and expelled for precisely the same reason Mike was. He also wrote a piece taking apart the smears against Ken Livingstone. These were that he had claimed that Hitler was a Zionist. He wasn’t, and Leninspart never said he was. The Leninist newt-fancier had outrageously told the truth and said that the Nazis had made a deal with the Zionists to send Jews to the nascent Jewish colony. This is the Ha’avara agreement, which is accepted, documented historical fact. It is mentioned on the website of the Holocaust memorial museum at Yad Vashem in Israel, and by Zionist historians of the Shoah. But this is too much for the Blairites, the Israeli state and the Israel lobby to stomach. And so they’ve libeled entirely decent, anti-racist individuals as anti-Semites.

The intention behind these smears has been to purge the party of Corbyn’s supporters, a move of which ‘Ratbiter’ evidently approves from the tone of the article. And the way these smears were done looks very much like an infringement of electoral law. Like the way Mike was smeared as a Jew-hater and Holocaust denier when he was standing as a candidate for his local council. Someone within the Labour party was obviously very much afraid that he would win, and so they leaked the smear to their friends in the press, a smear that was heartily taken up by Mike’s loudmouthed Tory opponent.

But there is absolutely no mention of this from the Eye.

Which makes you wonder how much of the rest of the material in ‘Ratbiter’s’ article is true. As for ‘Ratbiter’ himself, I believe Tony Greenstein on his blog outed this person’s real identity after he made similar misleading claims about Labour and anti-Semitism in Private Eye.

Despite the fact that Eye’s founders were all public schoolboys, as is Hislop and his deputy editor, Francis Wheen, the Eye has something of a countercultural reputation because of its irreverent approach to authority. But here the magazine seems to be staunchly following a very establishment line to prevent real change for this country by maintain the press narrative of Labour anti-Semitism.

The Private Firms Paid Millions to Check Hospital Admissions

Last Thursday, the I newspaper carried a story about private companies being paid millions of taxpayers’ money to check doctor’s referrals of patients to hospitals. Yet these centres, run by private healthcare firms, aren’t at all new. They’re mentioned in Alyson M. Pollock’s and David Price’s chapter, ‘From Cradle to Grave’ in NHS – SOS, edited by Jacky Davis & Raymond Tallis, published in 2013. Pollock and Price write

Increasingly, general practice and commissioning functions will be operated and managed by for-profit companies, twenty three of which – including well-established outfits Virgin Care, Care UK and ChilversMcCrae Healthcare – already run 227 general practices. Professional autonomy will be eroded if, for example, referral management centres run by corporate providers are used to ensure referral and prescribing practices conform to corporate budgets and the needs of shareholders. These centres were already rejecting one in eight general practitioner referrals before the full force of the new health law has been felt, and they seem to be operating along the lines of American-style ‘prior authorisation’ arrangements, whereby doctors are required to obtain approval from a higher authority (usually a private health insurance provider) before making a referral for treatment or investigation. Some of the centres, such as UnitedHealth Group UK’s recently established ‘referral facilitation service’ based in Hounslow, are run by subsidiaries of US healthcare multinationals. (pp. 191-2).

Of course, this also shows how fake the Tory claim of giving patients more ‘choice’ in their healthcare actually is. And contrary to another grotty Tory claim, it’s another layer of bureaucracy actually put into the NHS to make it attractive to private contractors.

The whole process of privatisation needs to be reverse. Now. The only political leader determined to do it is Jeremy Corbyn, but you won’t know this from the hysterical denunciations of him for being ‘Trotskyite’ from Blairites and the mainstream press, including the I.