Farage Wonders Why We Don’t Mine Our Own Coal – We Did Until Thatcher

Mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield has put up a clip from GB News of Nigel Farage wondering why we don’t mine our own coal. Instead of importing it, suggests Nige, we should reopen that mine in Cumbria which has a large amount of it. Well, this might come as a surprise to Farage and Belfield, we did mine our own coal. However, this stopped, and the industry was first privatised and then decimated because Maggie decided that imported coal was cheaper and she wanted to break the unions. The NUM had humiliated Ted Heath when he tried to break them in the 1970s. The result was the three day week and power cuts, a clear demonstration of the union’s power. So Thatcher privatised it, and then broke the NUM with militarised, highly politicised policing backed with obedient TV propaganda with the miners’ strike. And after that was over, the Tories went ahead and did everything that Arthur Scargill warned about and closed down nearly all the pits. The result was the demise of an entire industry and the destruction of whole towns.

Belfield states that he’s a working class lad from a pit village, and rants about how the White working class are neglected and attention paid instead to ‘box tickers’ from ethnic minorities. But there’s an answer to that, and I correspondent Yasmin Alibhai-Brown gave it a few years ago when she appeared on TV with Rod Liddle. Liddle also complains about the marginalisation and official neglect of the White working class. Alibhai-Brown told him that she wasn’t responsible for that. Indeed, she’d actually worked with White, working class pupils. It wasn’t people of colour who destroyed working class communities and self-respect, but Margaret Thatcher.

Dam’ right!

We should be mining our own coal, provided it isn’t too harmful to the planet and we can make a transition to cleaner, greener energy in the long run. But a revived coal industry would need significant government investment to guarantee it, as private industry hasn’t resulted in greater investment in the utilities. Such a coal company might have to be nationalised.

Which would destroy a central plank of Thatcherism.

Oh dear. How sad. Never mind!

Paul Joseph Watson on Alex Scott’s Devastating Discovery of a Black Slave-Owning Ancestor

Paul Joseph Watson is another right-wing YouTube personality like Sargon. He used to be Alex Jones’ British sidekick on InfoWars on the other side of the pond. And like Sargon, he contributed to the destruction of UKIP by joining it. So, I make the same caveats and warning about his content as I do about Sargon’s. However, like Sargon and the ghastly Lotus Eaters, he also makes very good points occasionally. In this video he discusses the shock Alex Scott had on the genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are?, when she discovered that one of her Jamaican ancestors, Robert Francis Combs, owned slaves in the 1820s. Scott is a Black woman, who was brought in as part of the Beeb’s diversity campaign to replace Dan Walker on Football Focus. Her ancestor was Jamaican, and I at first thought that he might have been a White planter, as many of them had children through their Black mistresses. But this was not so. Combes was Black. Scott was assured by an historian present that this actually wasn’t uncommon. Paul Joseph Watson goes on to make the point that slavery was found all over the world, and that it was Africans who sold the slaves to us. At the same time the Barbary pirates from North Africa raided Europe as far as Iceland for slaves. He asks why this isn’t taught in schools, and complains that only Whites are taught to feel shame about their ancestor’s past involvement in slavery.

Watson is exactly right. One of the problems faced by the Abolitionists was that slavery was found all over the world. In America and the Caribbean, free Blacks and those of mixed race often did own slaves. Black slave owners also received compensation for the emancipation of their slaves by the British government on abolition in 1837. One of the documents I looked at when I was working on the slavery archive at the former Empire and Commonwealth Museum contained a list of Maroons – the descendants of the runaway slaves, who succeeded in establishing free Black towns in the Jamaican interior – who owned slaves, with the recommendation that they should also receive compensation. Watson also points out in the video that so great was the involvement of indigenous African chiefs in the enslavement of other Africans, that it’s become a major issue in Nigeria with commenters stating that they can now no longer blame the Whites.

However, it does seem that Black involvement in the slave trade is being deliberately played down because of current racial politics. It is held that there is a direct line from slavery to the current underprivileged condition of much of the western Black population. This is true, but it’s also an oversimplification as it assumes that slavery is only something Whites did to Blacks. Real, undisguised chattel slavery has returned to Africa, apart from areas like Mauretania where it’s never gone away. The Islamists in Libya have opened slave markets there, and there are also markets selling slaves in Uganda. But anti-racist activists really don’t want to discuss this issues because, as I columnist Kate Maltby wrote, it is diversion from the main issue of tackling western racism and inequality.

But this issue has to be tackled, even if it complicates matters particularly when it comes to reparations for slavery. I’ve pointed out how the motion passed by Bristol council calling for reparations for all ‘Afrikans’ is actually unfair, because of the complicity of many African peoples in the slave trade. And Critical Race Theory and other forms of extreme anti-racist ideologies are also unjust for precisely the reason Watson points out. They do demand that Whites feel guilty for slavery while ignoring others’ involvement.

I have every sympathy for Scott. It was a terrible shock to her as a woman of colour, and she is not responsible for whatever her ancestors did. But neither are contemporary Whites.

This is why we need to be properly informed and educated about historical slavery, rather than accept the received, simplified view devised by well-meaning anti-racists.

Critical Race Theories Rejection of Enlightenment Rationalism and liberalism

This is another short video from Simon Webb of History Debunked attacking Critical Race Theory. I’ve already put up a number of videos from right-wingers like Webb criticising CRT for its anti-White racism and its rejection of rationalism, logic and reasoned argument based on evidence in favour of Black prejudice and emotion, but this reinforces the point by quoting from the Critical Race Theorists themselves. This is the university textbook Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado.

Webb has been moved to put up this video by a report in the Torygraph about the Royal Veterinary College deciding to decolonise its curriculum, assuming they can find anything racist or colonialist in courses about animal medicine and husbandry. However, the Critical Race Theorists at the school for vets describe the intellectual tradition of the White north as a ‘colonial legacy’. And in Delgado’s book, it is explicitly stated ‘Critical Race Theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, enlightenment rationalism and mutual principles of constitutional law.’ Webb points out that the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism is an rejection of the principle that issues should be tackled through evidence, logic and reasoned discussion. Instead Critical Race Theory elevates feelings and instincts. Webb makes the point that few people are aware of Critical Race Theory’s rejection of Enlightenment rationality, and that this rejection means it is impossible to reach any compromise with this cult’s believers. Without rational debate or discussion, there is simply no common intellectual framework through which compromise can be reached.

Although he doesn’t mention it in his video, such a rejection of Enlightenment rationalism in favour of feelings, especially racial feelings, is Fascistic. This isn’t hyperbole or exaggeration. Fascism explicitly rejected the Enlightenment values of rationality and debate, along with equality and liberal values, in favour of emotion and irrationalism. And obviously, there was an explicitly nationalistic and racist element in this. In Nazism, a German was supposed to instinctively know whether something was right or wrong through his or her membership of the German Volk. As for regarding Enlightenment values as a form of enslavement for Blacks, this is exactly comparable with Hitler’s rants about democracy being against the racial character of the German people, a Jewish plot to enslave them.

This aspect of Critical Race Theory isn’t discussed, and there have been any number of articles in what passes as the left-wing press – the Groaniad, Independent and I – defending it. But CRT’s rejection of the Enlightenment and embrace of Fascistic irrationalism should mean that no-one on the Left should touch it, for the same reason that no-one on the Left should ever embrace any form of Fascism.

I have similar issues with the whole notion of ‘White privilege’. This is supposed to be an anti-racist strategy through attacking the supposedly higher status of Whites rather than Black poverty. But ‘privilege’ is something one uses to describe the power and status of particular social classes, such as the aristocracy. It reminds me of the way Fascism, following the legacy of the French Revolution, divided society into the real and false nation. In the French Revolution, the real nation was the middle class and the masses, as against the aristocracy, who were to be hunted down and eradicated. James Lindsay, one of the left-wing critics of postmodernism, including Critical Race Theory, has expressed fears that if it carries on, the attacks will move beyond ‘Whiteness’ to Whites themselves and I’m afraid I can very easily see it happening. I imagine Robert Mugabe used much the same rhetoric to whip up his followers during his ethnic cleansing of the White farmers of Zimbabwe. And for all their gentle words, when BLM activists such as Sasha Johnson talk about founding Black militias, that’s another step taken towards real Fascism with the establishment of paramilitary foundations.

I am definitely not denying that there aren’t glaring racial inequalities in Britain, or that Blacks don’t need state action to assist them achieve equality. I am simply saying that Critical Race Theory has nothing sensible or reasonable to add to the debate through its race feeling and Fascistic irrationalism.

If this ideology is wrong for Whites, then it should also be wrong for Blacks. And the Groan, Independent and I are deceiving their readers by not discussing this and presenting Critical Race Theory as somehow left-wing, liberal and acceptable.

My Email to the ‘I’ Recommending Putting Up Statues of African Slavers in Bristol

I’ve just sent this email to the I newspaper, noting that Colston’s statue is now rightly on display in the M Shed in Bristol. But I also go further, and suggest that in order to get a proper perspective on the city’s connection with the slave trade, it needs to put up statues to the African slavers involved. These were the chiefs who actually supplied the slaves, and the Barbary pirates who raided Europe, including Bristol and the south-west for White slaves. Here’s the email:

Dear Sir, 

I note on the local news for Bristol that Edward Colston’s statue has been lifted out of the docks and put on display at the city’s excellent M Shed museum. I think this is the proper place for it, because Colston is part of Bristol’s history, and his philanthropy – he founded charities that supported numerous schools in the city – is one reason he was defended for so long. It is, unfortunately, an uncomfortable fact that otherwise admirable people can do the most terrible things, and we distort the past and miss this vitally important point about human nature if it is omitted.

But I also strongly feel that there are other presences in Bristol’s history that are going unrecognised, if not actively and deliberately edited out. Europeans did not catch the slaves themselves. They purchased them from powerful Black African kings, who organised the raids and did the bloody business of enslaving. Chiefs like Duke Ephraim of Dahomey made £300,000 a year in the 18th and 19th centuries. But, with the exception of the excellent ‘Respectable Trade’ exhibition at the City Museum in the 1990s, there is no mention of this, and indeed I get the distinct impression that Councillors Cleo Lake and Deputy Mayor Asher Craig would very much like to place the whole blame for Black slavery on Whites. A few months ago they passed a motion calling for the payment of reparations for slavery, which included all ‘Afrikans’ as victims of the infamous trade.

Another presence is Sultan Mahomet IV of Morocco. From the 16th/17th century through to the early 19th, Barbary pirates from what is now Morocco and Algiers raided Europe for White slaves. About 2 1/2 million White Europeans were so carried off into bondage. In Britain, the south-west of England, including Bristol, was particularly vulnerable to attack and ships and their crews from the city were taken and enslaved. But there are no monuments commemorating this anywhere in the city, again presenting a cosy, distorted view that slavery is just something evil Whites did to Blacks.

Colston’s plinth is now empty, and no doubt there is a debate going on about how it should be used. Might I suggest two statues, one of King Guezo of Dahomey, against whom Britain went to war to stop his predations on other Africans, and Mahomet IV to correct the racial imbalance?

Yours faithfully,

I’ll let you know if they publish it, and if there’s any response.

In Today’s I Newspaper: Desmond, Express Magnate Backs UKIP

Private Eye: Desmond Considering Supporting UKIP

In today’s I newspaper is the news that Richard Desmond, the pornographer and owner of the Daily Express, has come out and backed UKIP. This isn’t entirely surprising. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, long before it was bought by Dirty Des, the newspaper was extremely Thatcherite, publishing articles attacking the unions, benefit scroungers and, of course, non-White immigrants. Under Desmond, it has tried to compete with the Daily Mail, and so become even more shrilly Right-wing and bigoted than Paul Dacre’s mighty organ. This isn’t exactly news, as Private Eye revealed in its issue on Wednesday that Dirty Des was planning to support UKIP. Representatives of Fuehrer Farage’s party visited the newspaper’s offices last week, and Farage had re-hired Lord Stevens, who represents UKIP in the House of Lords. Nevertheless, this represent a new low even for Desmond.

Desmond Grandson of Ukrainian Jewish Immigrants

Desmond is Jewish, and his grandparents came to London in the 1900s from the Ukraine. The Eye described how he wrote a moving piece in the Jewish Chronicle two years about how his grandparents came here from the Ukraine, and the pilgrimage he and his son, Robert, made to Auschwitz. According to Desmond, this helped him to understand not only the vast scale of the atrocity and the immense logistics involved, but also the mentality and the millions required to co-operate in the holocaust in order to bring it about.

The Kippers’ Ally, Korwin-Mikke, and Holocaust-Denial and Anti-Semitism

By supporting UKIP, the Eye pointed out that Desmond would also be supporting some very unpleasant, and deeply anti-Semitic people, who are the Kippers’ partners in the European parliament. Like the extreme Right-wing Polish party, the Congress of the New Right. Their leader, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, is a critic of what he calls ‘the holocaust industry’, and, while not denying the holocaust, follows other extreme Right-wing parties and groups in claiming that it was actually much smaller than everyone else believes. Korwin-Mikke has also stated that the Jews ‘are our worst enemies because they are very talented Communists.’ We’re back to the usual Nazi claim that the Jews are part of the Communist threat. The Eye points out that the Kippers have their own ‘Friends of Israel group, but quotes the Chronicle as saying that they were an ‘unpalatable’ lot after meeting them last week. It’s therefore deeply grotesque that Desmond, as the grandson of Jewish immigrants, who left their homeland because of persecution, should back UKIP, an anti-immigration party, many of whose members are indeed extremely racist.

Nazis Dangerous Even When Small and Insignificant

Desmond’s public embrace of the Kippers is extremely dangerous. Now the actual numbers in the Nazi extreme Right has always been extremely small. Similarly the amount of votes cast for them at elections, though for a time in the 1960s and ’70s it did look as though the NF or BNP would overtake the Liberals as Britain’s third party. The closest the BNP got to power, it could be argued, was a few years ago when their Fuehrer Nick Griffin got elected as MEP and appeared on Question Time. The party’s success didn’t last long, as society recognised the threat Griffin and his stormtroopers posed, and subjected them to a barrage of criticism and attack. As result, the BNP has just about collapsed, split into a number of minuscule warring factions and grouplets, while Griffin himself has been ousted.

One reason why the Nazi Right has been regarded as such a threat despite its small size in Britain, is because of the parallels between them and the Nazi party in Germany, and the Fascists of Mussolini’s Italy. The Nazis were similarly a tiny fringe party for most of the period of the Weimar Republic, the number of Germans who voted for them was similarly small. What raised them to power and made them a political force was a series of crises. They gained their first electoral breakthrough in 1924 in Schleswig-Holstein, where they represented the peasant farmers after an the shock of an agricultural crisis. They were further catapulted into power by the global depression caused by the New York stock market crash of 1929.

The Italian Fascists were similarly a minute, electorally insignificant party. Despite Mussolini’s boasts, the Fascists were soundly beaten in the 1919 elections. When Il Duce stood for election in his home town in a later election, he too lost badly. Very badly. In fact, the only way the Fascists actually gained power in Italy in an election was through a massive piece of gerrymandering in which the whole of Italy was declared to be a single constituency.

Nazis and Fascists Gained Power through Support Mainstream Figures

What made a difference with both the Nazis and the Fascists was the support of powerful members of the political establishment, who by giving their support and that of their organisations – their newspapers and businesses – legitimised them and encouraged the rest of the public to vote for them. They were helped into power by mainstream, establishment politicians, who sought their support against their rivals as the system of coalitions governing these two countries broke down. Hence, decades later, the NF and BNP are still regarded as a danger to British society because of the way the Nazis rapidly grew from insignificance to political strength through the collusion and endorsement of mainstream figures. No-one wanted to see the same thing happen in Britain through mainstream political figures, businessmen and celebrities giving their support to the NF or BNP.

Danger of Desmond Supporting UKIP, Like German and Italian Businessmen Supported Hitler and Mussolini

Desmond has broken that tacit agreement by the British establishment to withhold its support, at least openly, from the extreme Right. This means that there is a real chance UKIP will become a genuine force in British politics, despite its vile xenophobia, its misogyny and its contempt for the working and lower-middle classes. Farage has been extremely clever in concealing its true nature under a public anti-racist façade and by suppressing or disavowing those parts of Kipper policy that are aimed at attacking workers’ rights and the welfare state.

He’s made UKIP respectable, and Desmond has fallen for it, just as there were Germans and Italians, who believed that they could somehow make Hitler and Mussolini respectable, and that they wouldn’t carry out their threats and plans.

Desmond and the Kippers have to be stopped, before more people are persuaded into believing that UKIP are an acceptable, mainstream electoral choice.

According to Hope Not Hate’s I’m With the 85% campaign, only 15% of people support Farage and his stormtroopers. Let’s do everything we can to keep it that way and reduce it even further.