Vox Political: Tory ‘British Jobs’ Policy Taken from Mein Kampf

Adolf Hitler and the previous Tory PM David Cameron. The face has changed, but its getting harder to tell the difference between the Tories and the Nazis.

Mike has a very ominous piece about the startling similarity between Theresa May’s ‘British jobs for British workers’ policy, announced yesterday, and those of the Nazis. The two policies are identical, as far as I can tell, and this struck the LBC presenter James O’Brien so hard that he announced it on his own programme yesterday. Amber Rudd had made a speech stating that companies will be compelled to list the numbers of foreign workers they employ, in order to give preference to British workers. Mr O’Brien read out Hitler’s statement of precisely the same policy, for the exact same reasons, as contained in chapter 2 of Mein Kampf. He said at first he was reading part of Rudd’s speech, but later corrected himself after he had read out the passage, and admitted where it was really from. He said

“If you’re going to have a sharp line of distinction between people born here and people who just work here, you’re enacting chapter two of Mein Kempf. Strange times.”

Mike also notes that the phrase ‘British jobs for British workers’ was a BNP slogan from a few years ago, and shows the proof in a picture of an election billboard on one of the Nazi organisation’s vans.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/10/06/radio-presenter-reveals-amber-rudds-speech-echoes-mein-kampf/

There have always been unnerving links between sections of the Tory party and the extreme Right. There was the Anglo-German Fellowship of wealthy businessmen and aristocrats advocating friendship with Nazi Germany before the Second World War. These links were re-established in the 1960s and 1970s, if not before, when the National Front coalesced from a number of different extremist groups, including Arnold Leese’s the Britons and the League of Empire Loyalists. Despite the Monday Club, then a section of the Tory party, banning members of the extreme Right from joining and opening its membership books to inspection by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the connections with the Fascist right continued under Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher was impressed with General Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile, and was personal friends with the mass murderer when he visited Britain. The libertarian section of the Tory party, the Freedom Association, also appeared several times in the parapolitics magazine, Lobster, for its dinners at which the leaders of various South and Central America death squads were the guests of honour. The links between the Tories and Fascism were so strong, that the BBC made a documentary about Nazi infiltration into the party, entitled Maggie’s Militant Tendency, after the Trotskyite entryist groups then a subject of controversy in the Labour party. Maggie showed her customary attitude tolerance and openness to tolerance and media criticism, and had the programme pulled.

Mike over at Vox Political has followed and described the increasingly authoritarian anti-immigrant attitude in Cameron’s government. Remember when he put the vans on the streets encouraging people to inform on illegal immigrants? And the posters which asked immigrants to turn themselves in, promising free repatriation back to their countries of origin if they did so? How long before the Tories start whipping up popular anti-immigrant hysteria, urging us to be vigilant and watch for illegal immigrants and foreign workers? Perhaps May will also start organising house to house searches for those that have gone underground, while those caught are rounded up and put into concentration camps for their own protection. Guarded, no doubt, by G4S, who have done such great work providing security staff for the present detention centres.

Mike commented on one of his blog pieces about the latest Tory attack on immigration that the Tories are trying to set Brits and immigrants against each other in divide and rule strategy. Keep the two at each other’s throats for scarce jobs and welfare benefits, all the while cutting down on the latter after running scare stories in the Heil and Murdoch press about immigrants occupying council houses and taking unemployment. All the while keeping from the public the fact that immigrants aren’t taking native Brits’ jobs, and are actually net payers into the welfare state, rather than a drain.

It isn’t immigrants, who are causing unemployment, lowering wages and cutting welfare benefits: it’s Thatcherite, neo-liberal economics, which is encouraging the outsourcing of industry, massive privatisation of whatever is left of the state sector, and the destruction of the welfare state. This is done with the deliberate intention of creating a cowed, fearful workforce, permanently in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy and destitution, ready to take any job, no matter how poorly paid and exploitative the conditions. It isn’t immigrants, who often work in poorly paid and exploitative jobs themselves, who are causing the immense profiteering of this country’s bloated rich. It is the wealthy industrialists, aristocracy and financiers and their puppets, the Conservatives and Blairite New Labour.

This is why we desperately need a genuinely socialist government to create proper jobs and restore the welfare state so that people can rely on decent medical treatment and the state support they need to care for them in sickness, disability, unemployment or retirement. Nye Bevan, the architect of the modern NHS, described the goal of such a socialist government in the title of his book, In Place of Fear. The Tories, on the other hand, believe in ruling by fear. And the grasping immigrant, ready to take British jobs, is another bogeyman set up to keep us afraid and divided.

Don’t be taken in. Immigrants are not our enemies. Our real enemies are in government and the CBI. We have to unite, and get them out. Only then can we start building a decent society built on proper compassion and respect.

No, Owen Smith, You and Neil Coyle are Not the Spiritual Heirs of Clem Atlee and Nye Bevan

Mike last week ran a couple of stories, which included amongst their other details the facts that Smudger and another Blairite, Neil Coyle, now seem to be trying to convince the public that rather than being neoliberal privatisers, they are really the spiritual heirs of Clement Atlee, Nye Bevan and ’45 Labour government that set up the welfare state and the NHS.

Last Friday, 9th September 2016, Mike commented on an article from Left Foot Forward commenting on how Smudger had been booed by the Corbynistas after he yet again invoked the memory of Nye Bevan, the architect of the NHS. Left Foot Forward commented that both sides were invoking this iconic statesman, but that their attempts to hark back to him were problematic because of the contradictory nature of his ideas.

Mike commented

Is it true that both sides of the current Labour debate will invoke the memory of Aneurin Bevan? I’ve only heard Owen Smith doing it – and inaccurately.

It seems more likely that Mr Smith wants reflected glory – he says he’s a fan of Mr Bevan so he must be okay as well – than to actually call on any of the late Mr Bevan’s political thought, which would be so far removed from the policies of Mr Smith’s strain of Labour that it would seem alien.

And concluded

You don’t see Mr Corbyn invoking Bevan at the drop of a pin, do you?

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/09/09/smith-compares-himself-to-bevan-because-he-seeks-reflected-glory-it-isnt-working/

Then Neil Coyle, one of the Blairites, started to bluster about how he was also a true, traditional member of the Labour party after he appeared in a list of 14 MPs Jeremy Corbyn’s followers wished to complain about for their abusive behaviour. Coyle insisted that he had been ‘defamed’ because the complaint was specifically against him for accusing Corbyn of being a ‘fake’. The trouble for Coyle was, he had indeed called Corbyn a fake, and been forced to apologise for it. He also accused Corbyn and his supporters of creating a victim culture, which must surely be a case of projection. This is, after all, what New Labour has been trying to do with its constant accusations of misogyny and anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum.

In his own defence, Coyle sputtered

“I am a Labour MP, joined Labour as soon as I could and will always be tribal Labour. I voted for a Labour manifesto commitment today based on decades of policy begun by Attlee and was in my manifesto last May. Couldn’t be more ashamed by fake Labour voting against internationalism, collectivism, security and jobs today. Time for a new leader who shares Labour values. Join now.”

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/09/15/neil-coyle-should-not-use-words-like-defamation-when-he-doesnt-understand-them/

Now as Mike points out in his article on Smudger and Nye Bevan, the NHS is an iconic institution with immense symbolic value, so naturally Smudger wants to identify himself with its founder. The trouble is, he and Coyle are polar opposites to what Atlee and Bevan actually stood for.

Both of them were classic old Labour. The 1945 Labour government had put in its manifesto that it was going to create the NHS, and nationalise the electricity, coal and gas industries, as well as the railways and other parts of the transport infrastructure. This was part of the socialist ideology that the workers’ should take into their hands the means of production, distribution and exchange. Bevan himself was a champagne socialist – he got on very well with the circles of elite businessmen in which he moved. But he despised the Tories as ‘vermin’, and his book, In Place of Fear, made it very clear that he felt alienated in Westminster because it was a palace created by the ruling classes to celebrate their power against working people. He was resolutely determined that the NHS should be universal, state-owned, and free at the point of service. It’s true that like some other politicians, he considered charging hospital patients a ‘hotel’ charge for taking up beds, but he dropped this idea. And the reason he left office was in disgust at the introduction of prescription charges.

This is in exact opposition to Blair and his ideological descendants in Progress, Saving Labour and Tomorrow’s Labour. Blair vastly extended the Tories’ privatisation of the NHS, quite apart from demanding the repeal of Clause 4, which committed the party to nationalisation. He and his followers, Smudger, Coyle and the like, stand for privatisation and the dismantlement of the welfare state. While Bevan wanted to remove the fear of want and destitution from millions of the working class, Blair and co have striven with the Tories to bring it back, through measures designed to ingratiate themselves with the Tory press. Such as the introduction of the Work Capability Test, which was launched after a conference in the early 2000s with the Labour party in consultation with insurance fraudsters, Unum, and which specifically assumes most disabled people claiming benefit are malingerers. And then there was the case of Rachel Reeves declaring that New Labour would be even harder on benefit claimants than the Tories. Quite apart from approving comments from New Labour apparatchiks about the wonders of workfare.

As for Coyle’s claim that he supports ‘internationalism and collectivism’, you to have to wonder when. For many on the left, who consider themselves ‘internationalists’, the term does not include imperialism and the invasion of other, poorer nations for corporate profit. But this is what Blair’s foreign policy – the invasion and occupation of Iraq consisted of, just as his successors, Cameron and May, are also imperialists. Mike states in one of his pieces that he doesn’t know how many of the 552 MPs, who voted for air strikes in Syria, were Labour; but he does know that two, who voted against it, were Corbyn and John McDonnell.

As for ‘collectivism’, it should be noted that this is not the same as ‘socialism’. Blair claimed to be a collectivist in making private enterprise work for the community as part of his vaunted Third Way. Which incidentally was the claim of the Fascists. In practice, however, this meant nothing more or less than the continuation of Thatcherism. This was shown very clearly by the way Blair invited her round to No. 10 after he won the election, and the favouritism he showed to Tory defectors.

So no, Owen Smith and Neil Coyle are not the spiritual heirs of Atlee and Bevan. Whereas the latter stood for the welfare state, socialism and improving conditions for the working class, Smith and Coyle have done the precise opposite, as have their followers. Mike also reported this week that in 2014 the Labour party conference voted down a motion to renationalise the NHS. This shows how far New Labour and its supporters have moved from Atlee’s and Bevan’s vision. They are Conservative entryists, who deserve to be treated as such, and removed from power before they do any more harm.

Nye Bevan on Conservative Plans to Destroy the NHS

Bevan was also aware that the Tories desperately wanted to stop the creation of the welfare state. This was particularly true of Churchill, who bitterly hated the idea of the proles getting free medicine, loudly denouncing the new welfare state and NHS as a ‘A Gestapo for England’. This shows that once the War was over, Churchill was basically another hard-right Tory louse and the returning servicemen were quite right to kick him out.

At one point in its creation, the amount spent on the new NHS exceeded the initial estimates. Churchill seized on this to try and discredit the whole scheme. Bevan says of this in In Place of Fear

The first few Estimates for the Health Service seemed to justify the critics. Expenditure exceeded the Estimates by large amounts, and Mr Churchill with his usual lack of restraint plunged into the attack. In this he showed less insight than his colleagues, who watched his antics with increasing alarm. They knew the Service was already popular with the people. If the Service could be killed, they wouldn’t mind, but they would wish it done more stealthily and in such a fashion that they would not appear to have responsibility.

And this is what is going on now, with the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS. 95 Tory and Lib Dem MPs in the last government had ties to private healthcare firms seeking to benefit from the NHS denationalisation. And my guess that privatisation is one of the motives for this assault on junior doctors. It’s to get rid of determined opposition to privatisation from within the medical profession itself. I also wonder if the aim isn’t also to drive doctors out of the NHS, and into private companies, which can then be employed in NHS contracts.

This must be stopped. Defend the NHS. Support the junior doctors.

Nye Bevin on the Treatment of Foreign Citizens by the NHS

The whole agitation has a nasty taste. Instead of rejoicing at the opportunity to practise a civilised principle, Conservatives have tried to exploit the most disreputable emotions in this among many other attempts to discredit socialised medicine.

The Tories and UKIP are both advocating cutting back welfare payments to foreign residents in Britain. In the case of the Kippers, this has even gone so far as demanding that they should be excluded from treatment by the NHS. This came up a year or so ago, and was properly denounced. I can remember that both Mike and I blogged about this horrendous attack on the poorest sections of our society under the guise of preserving the welfare state for the British at the time.

Nye Bevan, the founder of the NHS, was well aware that people would come to this country, seeking treatment by our health service, and was quite prepared to tolerate this. In his book, In Place of Fear (London: William Heineman 1952) he explains why. He believed that Britain should treat foreigners, because there was no way to separate the British from foreign citizens without creating the instruments of a surveillance state. It was also moral, and would have a civilising effect of encouraging other nations to create their own National Health Service.

Here’s the passage:

One of the consequences of the universality of the British Health Service is the free treatment of foreign visitors. This has given rise to a great deal of criticism, most of it ill-informed and some of it deliberately mischievous. Why should people come to Britain and enjoy the benefits of the free Health Service when they do not subscribe to the national revenues? So the argument goes. No doubt a little of this objection is still based on the confusion about contributions to which I have referred. The fact is, of course, that visitors to Britain subscribe to the national revenues as soon as they start consuming certain commodities, drink and tobacco for example, and entertainment. They make no direct contribution to the cost of the Health Service any more than does a British citizen.

However, there are a number of more potent reasons why it would be unwise as well as mean to withhold the Free Service from the visitor to Britain. How do we distinguish a visitor from anybody else? Are British citizens to carry means of identification everywhere to prove that they are not visitors? For if the sheep are to be separated from the goats both must be classified. What began as an attempt to keep the Health Service for ourselves would end by being a nuisance to everybody. Happily, this is one of those occasions when generosity and convenience march together.

The cost of looking after the visitor who falls ill cannot amount to more than a negligible fraction of £399,000,000, the total cost of the Health Service. It is not difficult to strive at an approximate estimate. All we have to do is look up this number of visitors to Great Britain during one year and assume they would make the same use of the Health Service as a similar number of Britishers. Divide the total cost of the Service by the population and you get the answer. I had the estimate taken out and it amounted to about £200,000 a year.

Obviously this is an over-estimate because people who go for holidays are not likely to need a doctor’s attention as much as others. However, there it is for what it is worth and you will see it does not justify the fuss that has been made about it.

The whole agitation has a nasty taste. Instead of rejoicing at the opportunity to practise a civilised principle, Conservatives have tried to exploit the most disreputable emotions in this among many other attempts to discredit socialised medicine.

Naturally when Britons go abroad they are incensed because they are not similarly treated if they need the attention of a doctor. But that also I am convinced will come when other nations follow our example and have Health Services of their own. When that happens we shall be able to work out scheme of reciprocity, and yet one more amenity will have been added to social intercourse. In the meantime, let us keep in mind that, here, example is better than precept.

And there are reciprocal system in place, as anyone who has signed the various forms to give them medical treatment abroad when they go on holiday has found.

Bevin was clearly writing before the era of mass migration to Britain, and the attendant social and political strains this has caused. But his argument still holds water. Migrants do contribute to the NHS and the welfare state the moment they start paying taxes in Britain, either by working or purchasing goods, on which VAT is levied. Which is just about all of them, but particularly if they smoke or drink alcohol.

And the attempt to deprive migrants of access to healthcare and welfare benefits it an assault on the NHS and welfare state as a whole. It’s salami tactics, a way of getting the public used to these services being withdrawn. And once you withdraw it from one group, then process is then extended to others, until finally British citizens have a private medical service like that suffered by the Americans.

We must stop this, and defend migrant’s rights to treatment on the NHS. For once they’ve done it to them, you can be sure the Tories will do it to the rest of us.

Letwin and Alienated Inner City Youths

Nye Bevan – Miner, Statesman, Founder of the Welfare State

Yesterday, Mike over at Vox Political put up another piece about Oliver Letwin, and his racist, bigoted views on Blacks and inner city youths. In his 1999 book, The Purpose of Politics, Letwin held forth about the underclass, and specifically drug riddled gang members, who were more alienated than the medieval serfs. See the article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/01/03/oliver-letwin-inner-city-youth-more-alien-than-the-serfs/. Letwin claims that these comments show his commitment to equality of opportunity. As everyone else but him has already realised, they don’t. They show the complete opposite.

They are actually bog-standard Tory views about ‘the democracy’, as the upper classes used to refer to us proles back in the 19th century, and they could have come from any time from the 17th century right into the 19th and beyond. The upper classes feared and hated the urban working classes as immoral, criminal and potentially subversive. Hence the harsh legislation enacted against trade unions and other potentially seditious assemblies and organisations. What eventually disproved this image was the Great Exhibition of 1854, when large numbers of working class people turned up at Crystal Palace showing themselves to be well-behaved, and generally not rioting, or trying to overthrow the government.

And youth culture has been particularly viewed with alarm and suspicion by the authorities since the 17th century, when the Mohocks ran wild in the streets of London. These were a group of thugs, who got their name from their Mohawk hairstyles taken from the Amerindian people. There’s even a book written about the historic distrust of working class popular culture Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. Thatcher, of course, hated the working class with a passion. She saw them as treacherous and subversive. Letwin is basically following the views of his leader, Maggie Thatcher, in that respect. Except that Thatcher was careful to craft an image of herself as somehow working class, with all that rubbish about living above the family shop.

And Letwin’s comments about alienation ignores the fact that such an attitude may be completely justified by the nature of society and the way it treats its least fortunate members. One of the clearest statements of political alienation in modern literature came from the pen of Aneurin Bevan, the architect of the welfare state and NHS. In his 1952 book, In Place of Fear (London: William Heinemann Ltd) Bevan describes his feelings as a member of the working class and the feeling he experienced when he entered parliament, the bastion of ruling class privilege and power.

“The past lies like an Alp upon the human mind.” The House of Commons is a whole range of mountains. If the new Member gets there too late in life he is already trailing a pretty considerable past of his own, making him heavy-footed and cautious. When to this is added the visible penumbra of sic centuries of receding legislator, he feels weighed to the ground. Often he never gets to his feet again.

His first impression is that he is in church. The vaulted roofs and stained-glass windows, the rows of statues of great statesmen of the past, the echoing halls, the soft-footed attendants and the whispered conversation, contrast depressingly with the crowded meetings and the clang and clash of hot opinions he has just left behind in his election campaign. Here he is, a tribune of the people, coming to make his voice heard in the seats of power. Instead, it seems he is expected to worship; and the most conservative of all religions – ancestor worship.

The first thing he should bear in mind is that these were not his ancestors. His forebears had no part in the past, the accumulated dust of which now muffles his own footfalls. His forefathers were tending sheep or ploughing the land, or serving the statesmen whose names he sees written on the walls around him, or whose portraits look down upon him in the long corridors. it is not the past of his people that extends in colourful pageantry before his eyes. They were shut out from all this; were forbidden to take part in the dramatic scenes depicted in these frescoes. In him his people are there for the first time, and the history he will make will not be merely an episode in the story he is now reading. It must be wholly different; as different as is the social status which he now brings with him.

To preserve the keen edge of his critical judgement he will find that he must adopt an attitude of scepticism amounting almost to cynicism, for the Parliamentary procedure neglects nothing which might soften the acerbities of his class feelings. In one sense the House of Commons is the most unrepresentative of representative assemblies. It is an elaborate conspiracy to prevent the real clash of opinion which exists outside from finding an appropriate echo within its walls. It is a social shock absorber placed between privilege and the pressure of popular discontent.

That’s a very strong statement of acute alienation from parliament, with all its ceremony, and the pomp and iconography of the ruling class. And Bevan is exactly right: for centuries the working class were excluded from any kind of power, and expected to serve and show due difference to their social superiors, if not betters. And despite all the slogans Cameron mouths about expanding opportunity, parliament is still the seat of privilege. Something like 90 % of MPs are millionaires. And the Tory party has always boasted of being the party of the ruling class.

Bevan was perfectly in his rights to be alienated. Just as contemporary working and lower middle class people are entirely within their rights to be cynical about a system and a party that is reducing them to desperate poverty. All while the Letwins of the British politics mouth off about how they are committed to equality of opportunity.