Rafe Heydel-Mankoo is one of the inmates of the IEA’s New Culture Forum. I heartily despise the IEA, but I do find myself agreeing with some of what the New Culture Forums says. This video is taken from a Cambridge Union debate over whether reparations should be paid for slavery. Heydel-Mankoo was one of the speakers against the motion that it should. He states at the outset that he has a particular interest in this as a child of empire. The Mankoo part of his double-barrelled surname suggests to me that he’s part Indian, as do his features. He also confesses that if this was 1807 or 1834, the dates when first the slave trade and then slavery itself was abolished in the British empire, he may well have crossed the floor and agreed wholeheartedly that damages should be paid for the horrendous suffering enslaved people had endured. But it is not 1807, 1907 or 2007. Six or seven generations have elapsed between the present Black generation and the time their ancestors were enslaved. Reparations are a matter of tort, and while damages should be paid to people who have genuinely suffered, the present generation of Blacks are immeasurably better off than their ancestors in Africa. Ethically, should they profit from the suffering of their ancestors? Is it right that people should be held accountable for the crimes of their ancestors? The advocates of reparations want it to be paid by the British taxpayer. There were also only 3,000 slaveowners in Britain. The major of people lived and worked in grinding poverty in conditions near serfdom. Is it ethically right that they descendants of poor workers should be asked to pay reparations? There are also demands for the payment of reparations from countries like Barbados. Sixteen per cent of this country, however, are foreign born. Is it right that they should be required to pay reparations for something they had nothing to do with? And what about Africa? They supplied the slaves to Europeans, and so shouldn’t the be required also to pay reparations? What about the Arabs and Muslims who enslaved Africans centuries before Europeans and continued to do so before the British and French put a stop to it? And what about slavery in Africa today? The International Labour Organisation estimates that seven out of every thousand Africans is a slave: 10 million people. In 2017 CNN reported hundreds of slaves are sold every week in Libya. He would have far more sympathy for the claim for reparations if the people making it showed equal concern for the plight of today’s slaves. Where are the protests outside the Nigerian high commission, the embassies of Niger, which has a hundred thousand slaves today? What about Mali and Chad and Sudan and Cameroon. It’s almost as though there’s an ulterior motive to ask for reparations exclusively from Britain.
He also asks how far this should be taken. Should Britain demand reparations for the attacks of the Barbary pirates? At the same time as enslaved Africans were crossing the Atlantic, one million Europeans were enslaved by the Ottoman slave states of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. And this carried on after the abolition of the slave trade by the British. But Britain should not demand reparations from north Africa. It’s time to move on, and so should we.
He then turns from slavery to colonialism, and asks what damage it has done to those now living in the Caribbean. Most of the countries of the Caribbean are successful middle-income countries. The GDP per head of the Bahamas is higher than Portugal and comparable to Spain or Italy. Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis and other former British slave colonies have higher rankings on the UN development index than many other South American countries such as Brazil and Mexico. It is not clear to him how the British empire has disadvantaged the Caribbean nations. Comparing the modern Caribbean with the West Africa, the homelands of West Indian slaves. The GDP per capita in Benin is $1,430. The GDP per capita in Barbados is $17,000. Life expectancy in Benin is 62. In Barbados it is 79. Rather than write cheques to well-off parts of the world, why not send money to countries that actually require aid? Financial aid, not attempts to cleanse one’s soul. While slavery was abhorrent to those enslaves, had they remained in Africa the lives of their descendants would have been markedly worse..
What is Britain being asked to pay reparations for? Because Britain wasn’t the first empire to practise slavery in Africa, in India, in America. But it was the most benign and the benefits from it far exceed those of Islamic and Indian empire, that carved up India, of the Ashanti empire, of the Dahomey Kingdom, or the hundreds of thousands of slaves that were ritually sacrificed every year in Benin. The Benin Bronzes, that have been mentioned, commemorate those who owned slaves. Why is there a celebration of these?
Why are we apologising for Britain? Are we apologising for introducing new food storage polices, which led to a decline in the subcontinents processes of famine? Every forty years in India there was a famine. The population of India soared from 170 million to 400 million over the course of the Raj.It was because medicine and health and food standards and storage were better than they had been that the population surged.
Let’s not forget what Britain did for women’s rights. It was through the British empire that we have had the progression of women in Africa and India. India’s history is one of female oppression. It was the British who abolished suttee, the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. It was the British who stopped the infanticide of young girls and it was the British who allowed Hindu widows to remarry. Facts are facts. Universities were brought into Africa and India by the British. There would be no system of democratic legislatures in these regions without the empire. He quotes Steven Pinker as saying that before the British empire, these states were more violent than even the most modern states. While many wrongs were committed in the 19th and 20th centuries, the success of Britain’s colonies in the 21st century is due in large part to their colonial inheritance The English language and law enabled them to become global players. Their police, military, the civil service, the judiciary, parliament, the universities in every region of the world you go to, the British colonies are those most likely to be the healthiest and most democratic.
He ends by quoting the great Black civil rights activist and socialist Bayard Rustin, a friend of Martin Luther King, who received King’s posthumous congressional medal of freedom from Barack Obama: ‘If my great-grandfather, who picked cotton for fifty years and who made some money. He’s dead and gone, and nobody owes me anything.’
It’s a powerful speech, and from the way they fidget and pull faces the students behind him simply don’t want to hear what he says. But these are arguments that definitely need to be heard.
Here’s another email I received from the pro-democracy, open government organisation Open Britain. It’s another expose of the extreme right-wing thinktanks on Tufton Street. These want the privatisation of the NHS and other public services, the destruction of the welfare state, tax cuts for the rich and the very worst kind of Brexit, for ordinary people, a no-deal departure from the EU, These people have extensive connections to the Tory party, especially under Liz Truss, and to the aristocracy. The expose also notes that these thinktanks are given airtime and serious discussion while those holding left-wing policies, such as Proportional Representation, are shut out.
‘Dear David,
In our ‘long read’ email last week, we filled you in on our research into the UK’s failure to address illicitly funded political campaigns. Unfortunately, sketchy shell companies and untraceable political donations from Russian oligarchs are only one element of the dark money problem. Think tanks hold increasing sway in Number 10, and many do not reveal their donors.
Nowhere in the UK symbolises these kinds of organisations more than Tufton Street. The headquarters for hard-right libertarian lobbying groups, Tufton Street discreetly houses a network of different groups that generally oppose public services of all kinds, advocate tax cuts for the rich, and promote austerity. While not all these organisations are physically located on Tufton Street, the name has become a symbol for a particular brand of political lobbying – one that has all but taken over politics today.
In recent years, high-level think tank “experts” have found their way into increasingly influential positions, from Conservative Party conference to BBC Question Time to the corridors of Number 10. Nothing made this more evident than Kwasi Kwarteng’s ballistic mini-budget, which looked to implement unpopular trickle-down policies dreamt up in Tufton Street boardrooms. As former Johnson advisor, Tim Montgomerie stated with glee after the mini-budget: “Britain is now their laboratory”.
When was the last time the government listened to the constitutional experts who concluded that PR would improve representation, the electoral experts that said Voter ID would disenfranchise millions or the human rights lawyers that said the UK is violating international law? Clearly, it’s only a certain kind of expert that holds sway.
This week, we want to get into the think tanks on Tufton Street (and beyond) and the influences they’ve had on the last decade of Conservative rule. In another longer-than-usual email, we will demystify the deep-pocketed and enigmatic think tanks that exert so much power in this country.
Libertarian Nonsense:
These groups advocate for outdated and deeply unpopular policies which – instead of dealing with the UK’s growing income inequality – generally look to make it worse. They want to slash or eradicate public services, give tax benefits to the nation’s wealthiest, and crush unions. We don’t know who funds most of them, but it’s fair to say it’s probably people and companies with a vested interest in those policies. What we do know is that much of the money comes from hard-right American billionaires and multinational corporations.
Here’s a brief overview of the most prominent libertarian lobbying groups on Tufton Street:
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is a libertarian think-tank masquerading as an educational charity. Closely allied to Liz Truss, the group lobbied at least 75 MPs before her leadership victory and practically hand-wrote her “trickle-down” policies. The group does not disclose details of its funding, but a general breakdown reveals the majority comes from large businesses and wealthy individuals – we still have no way of knowing who they are.
The Adam Smith Institute is another libertarian group that claims it seeks to “use free markets to create a richer, freer, happier world”. In reality, they also championed the mini-budget that imploded the UK economy and directly influenced Conservative MPs to advocate for trickle-down policies. Like the IEA, they believe “the privacy of their donors should be protected” and refuse to say who funds them. However, their breakdown also reveals a majority from businesses and wealthy individuals.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance has been around for years, claiming to be non-partisan and ostensibly advocating for more responsible use of our taxes. Like the two groups above, it gets a transparency rating of E on openDemocracy’s transparency index. In recent years, they’ve joined the culture wars, going after LGBT organisations like Stonewall and notably having their talking points immediately repeated across the right-wing press.
As we’ll see, these right-wing groups not only hold massive sway in government and advocate for radical trickle-down policies but also hugely influence the debates on Brexit and climate. Most of the organisations we mention in this email are members of the Atlas Network, a group of over 500 such think tanks operating globally and headquartered in the United States.
Brexit Zealotry:
How many times in recent years were we told that being a member of the EU called the UK’s sovereignty into question? But did anyone ever ask what effect dark money-funded think tanks controlling government policy was having on our sovereignty? In an incredible twist of irony, these groups worked hard to cement a no-deal Brexit aimed at regaining our sovereignty while actively undermining it by exerting influence over the nation’s future.
The Tufton Street lobbying groups that pushed a hard Brexit:
The Institute for Free Trade (IFT), formerly the Initiative for Free Trade (they were initially unable to meet the formal requirements to be an “institute”), was launched by Liam Fox and Boris Johnson in 2017. It was chaired by Daniel Hannan, one the leaders of Vote Leave and the right-wing Koch-funded Cato Institute. They were exposed for offering US donors direct access to UK politicians, claiming to be in the “Brexit-influencing game”.
In 2018, the IFT published a US-UK trade policy paper written in consultation with dozens of other libertarian groups. It called for a no-deal Brexit, a “bonfire” of EU regulations (which we would later see under Sunak), and an NHS open to US market competition.The whole thing was designed to advance Boris Johnson’s radical Brexit agenda with the veneer of “expert” advice.
Dominic Raab and Liz Truss were under fire in 2019 for meeting with the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) off the books, with the think-tank bragging that it could “side-step” transparency requirements. At the time, the IEA was pushing hard for a no-deal Brexit that would see radical free-market trade reforms put in place between the US and the UK. The IEA’s lobbyist, Shanker Singham, also worked directly with the European Research Group (ERG), the ominous group of Euro-sceptic MPs that won’t reveal its list of members.
The Brexit project was partly made possible by mysteriously-funded think tanks that viewed a hard Brexit as an opportunity for their donors to make a killing in a deregulated UK market. It was a dirty, dirty game that – despite being fully exposed – is not talked about nearly enough.
It took Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s shambolic mini-budget to truly reveal the extent to which think tanks like the IEA, Adam Smith Institute, and others have massively disproportionate influence over British politics. In reality, it had been going on for far longer than that.
If Britain is the laboratory for a gang of dodgy think tanks, where does that leave ordinary people? It renders us powerless, left to be the guinea pigs of organisations that have no real connection to our lives, values, or communities. It’s the antithesis of democracy.
You’ll have noticed through our examples that Tufton Street operates as one giant network – bringing together staff and resources from across their global network. They also all seem to have backdoor access to Tory MPs, a nexus of corruption in the heart of politics aimed at undemocratically advancing the aims of a wealthy elite. In his new book Bullingdon Club Britain, Sam Bright (the journalist that broke the PPE contracts scandal) explains the Tufton Street network’s intrinsic connections to the British aristocracy in more detail than we have time for here.
It’s vital that the British public is aware of what’s going on behind the scenes and understands the impact these networks are having on politics. The next government needs to be under no illusion that the people of this country have had enough of this corruption of our system and want an end to the toxic impact of foreign billionaires and multinational companies. If we’re ever going to build a system that works for all of us, these kinds of actors need to be sidelined for good. They don’t have the country’s interests at heart.
It will always be difficult for ordinary people to take a stand against these insanely wealthy and highly organised forces, but we aren’t put off by the magnitude of the challenge. We know that those forces CAN be beaten through the collective efforts of the hundreds of thousands of us who care about this country’s future and who are prepared to take a stand to get our political system back on track.
Excellent video by the Left-wing group Led By Donkeys which shows the pervasive connections between the former Prime Minister, swivel-eyed Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng and her cabinet and the mad, free enterprise groups located at or near 55 Tufton Street. These include the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Taxpayers Alliance. These groups are all in favour of privatisation, including that of the NHS, tax cuts for the rich and the ending of the welfare state. One of them also pumps out propaganda against global warming and climate change. Truss herself set up a Free Enterprise Group with the assistance of the IEA, and the group as how morphed into another organisation with a similar name, linked to them. Truss was among the authors of the noxious Britannia Unchained, which claimed that British workers were the laziest in the world and demanded more cuts and privatisation for the rich and that workers should be stripped of their rights. All of them were connected to the Tufton Street network. Kings College, Oxford, held a debate about whether the NHS should be privatised, put forward by one of the inmates of the IEA. And when one journalist asked them if Truss had handed the government over to the Tufton Street thinktanks, she was told ‘Yes’.
These organisations are very secretive and won’t disclose who funds them. Some of them received donations from BP, others from the tobacco industry. A number of them are American organisations. But for the most part, their donors are unknown. The video points out that nobody elected Truss except 0.1 per cent of the population, and her tax cuts benefited only 2,500 millionaires. It is for their benefit that she trashed the economy, an event Led By Donkeys commemorated by sticking a mock blue plaque about it on the front of 55 Tufton Street.
Their ideas don’t work and the economic collapse they caused showed they are catastrophic. But nevertheless, they benefit the rich and so the Conservative right definitely won’t question them, even when the force everyone else into poverty.
Last week it was revealed that Keir Starmer intends to abolish the House of Lords. Before I go any further, I should say that I have no idea what he wants to replace it with. I caught a few seconds of a video put up by GB News or one of the other god-awful right-wing YouTube channels of a Starmer being laid into on this issue by Peter Hitchens. From the few seconds I saw, Hitchens was accusing him of wishing to make all the members of the upper house appointed by the Prime Minister. Hitchens stated that this would be undemocratic, which is absolutely right, if true. But the debate is also more than a little familiar. Back in 1986 or 87 the papers carried reports that the Labour party then wanted to abolish the House of Lords. I think they also plans to reform the House of Commons to make it more democratic, which would have involved giving more power to the speaker. Then there were Tony Blair’s reforms in the late ’90s and early part of this century.
Blair took on the objection to the House of Lords that it was an unelected, undemocratic anachronism. It is. It is, or was, a remnant of feudalism, the old medieval grand council in which the king or the prince was advised by the kingdom’s great lords. It goes all the way back to the witangemot, the council of wise men, in Anglo-Saxon England and similar feudal assemblies in the Carolingian Empire and other states on the continent. Such an assembly is outdated and against the basic principles of democratic representation. On the other hand, it had the advantage of being cheap. Or so I heard it said at the time these reforms were being mooted. The other argument, put forward by really reactionary Tories, was that the hereditary peers deserved the place because they were better fitted to it through centuries of breeding and education. Which is the old Tory argument that all the great civilisations had an aristocracy that cost them an election in the early part of the past century. I don’t think it’s a vote winner, but I’ve no doubt that Jacob Rees-Mogg probably believed in it. He started his career as an aspiring MP campaigning for the seat of a Scots fishing town. He proudly announced that he was standing on a platform of trying to convince the local people that an unelected, hereditary upper house was actually a great institution. Obviously he didn’t succeed, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the SNP vote didn’t increase in that constituency as a result.. Blair reformed the House partly by appointing some of its members, and subsequent Prime Ministers have done the same, so that the number of peers is now 800-odd, far more than the House of Commons and even the governing political assembly of the Chinese Communist party. The peers get an allowance for turning up, and so there have been scandals and accusations that many of them just stick their head through the door long enough to claim their cheque before zooming off to business elsewhere. And the opposition objected at the time that Blair’s reform was hardly democratic. He was denounced as a new Cromwell, who was packing parliament with his supporters, just as England’s Lord \Protector and the butcher of Ireland had done during the Interregnum.
The suggested alternative was to transform the upper house into a senate like America’s. It would still have the duty of checking and amending legislation, but would be elected. According to Private Eye, there was no real enthusiasm behind this idea. People didn’t want to have to go through another round of elections, and the lack of popular support for such a chamber would mean that only mediocrities would serve in it. This must have been the view of the powers that be, or something similar, because the plan seems to have vanished soon after.
.I believe that the current House of Lords needs to be cut down, and no, I don’t want membership of the House to be by prime ministerial appointment. But I also don’t see any point in reforming it radically. The precise nature of the House of Lords doesn’t actually bother me to anywhere near the extent that this country needs a return to the social democratic consensus pre-Maggie. Privatisation has failed, and the Tory welfare reforms are leaving people cold and starving. We need to renationalise the utilities and the railways, as well as the NHS, which should be properly funded. We needed to reverse the destruction of the welfare state so people aren’t left dependent on food banks and private charity to feed themselves if they’re unemployed or disabled. And we need to make sure working people are paid a proper wage for exactly the same reason, not to mention nationalising the energy companies so that people pay less for the fuel and electricity bills and aren’t faced with the decision whether to heat their homes, pay the rent or eat. All this is far more pressing and important than tinkering with the constitution.
But I think the mooted reform of the House of Lords is another example of Starmer wishing to emulate Blair. And Blair wanted to make Britain more like America. But our political system is different. It’s parliamentary, not presidential, and that does apparently affect the results of Blair’s reforms, including his changes to the judiciary. There’s a very interesting video of David Starkey explaining this, put up by the New Culture Forum. Starkey is, of course, a terrible old reactionary while the New Culture Forum are the cultural wing of the Institute for Economic Affairs, a right-wing Buxton Street think tank that wants to privatise everything Thatcher, Major and Blair haven’t already sold off, including the NHS. But Starkey makes a very good case for the incompatibility of British and American constitutional systems.
But most of all I’m afraid that this constitutional tinkering is in lieu of practical policies, that will make a real difference to Britain’s poor and working people. Such as the return to proper, socialist, or at least social democratic politics. Blair changed the constitution, but didn’t change Tory government policies. He just carried on with them once he was in power. In fact, he ramped them up and went much further in the privatisation of the NHS than the Tories had dared.
Clare Page is the mother of two daughters at Haberdashers’ Hatcham College. Her story has been mentioned by the EDIjester and she has been interviewed by Calvin Robinson of the New Culture Forum and Dr Anna Loutfi of the Bad Law Project on Reclaim the Media, which is connected to Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party. She’s trying to sue the school or local authority to get them to reveal the lesson plans for the Personal and Human Development course at her daughters’ school and the identity of the person who taught it. She has very good reasons, as the school does seem to have a very hard left approach to teaching human sexuality and gender and racial politics. She became concerned when her daughter told her that they had been taught that society was heteronormative, and that this was bad. The EDIjester, in his video about this, stated that all heteronormativity means is that there are more heterosexual than gay people. And this is how it should be, as heterosexuals gave birth to the next generation of gay men, and without that, there wouldn’t be any younger gay blokes for him to chase. They were also told that the proper response to heteronormativity was to be sex positive and embrace all forms of sexuality. There’s clearly a moral problem there. Calvin Robinson made the point that this excluded people of more traditional views, for whom sex should be kept within marriage or a loving, committed relationship. The attitude seemed to be, however, that everything was alright provided it felt good. These lessons were delivered by an outside provider, the School of Sexuality Education, previously Sexplain. The lessons were given to 15- and 16-year olds, who were given such tasks as make lists of the way they would talk about which aspects of sex they enjoyed to another child in their class, as a way of making them less reticent about talking about sex. As Page said in her interview with Loutfi, this sexualised children, who may otherwise not have been so and were unprepared for it. The EDIjester, on the other hand, remarked that it was a bit pointless telling teenagers sex was fun, as they already knew that. The schoolchildren were also told that for more information they should watch the satellite/cable series Sex Education, even though this was rated 18+ and therefore inappropriate for them. The organisation’s website was also inappropriate for children, as the company also sold sex toys, pornography and tips on anal masturbation, all of which was available to the kids consulting the site at the click of a mouse. Page tried to get hold of the lesson plans from the school, but all she got in return were the titles of the various lessons. She, and the school itself, were told by the School of Sexuality Education that they were not going to release the information because of copyright confidentiality. There was an option briefly discussed in which she could go in and see the lesson plans but would not be given copies. She found that unacceptable because it would prevent her from contacting the authorities over specific points or discussing them with her daughter if she did not have the documents to hand. The school also refused to give them on the grounds that, she later found through freedom of information requests, the school and the SSE had been corresponding with each other over whether she was harassing the company and its staff. She complained to the school governors, but they couldn’t give her a decision about the lesson plans because they weren’t given copies of them either. The point was made by the jester that in this instance the school was prioritising the commercial interests of an outside provider over the democratic right to free speech and debate. There is also a commercial conflict of interest in giving the teaching contract to a company that also sells porn and sex toys.
The school was also teaching Critical Race Theory. Page’s daughter was told that she had White privilege. This was all right, but what was not all right was denying that this privilege existed. The children were also told that Black lives were viewed as lesser and expendable by the government and law enforcement. It wasn’t clear whether this referred to Britain or America or both. The sources for these assertions were similarly obscure. Sometimes searching for them on Google revealed they came from teenage magazines, sometimes the sources simply couldn’t be found. This racialised the school in a way that it hadn’t been before. Page states that her daughter was referred to by her race in a not-altogether friendly fashion, but this could have been simply playground banter. But she said that it introduced racial division into a school that had previously been very non-racist. The children were also taught that Whites were racist because of previous abuses, and that White people held all the social and economic power. The school curriculum itself would be biased as it was probably created by middle-class White men. They were also told that racism against White didn’t exist.
The history taught was heavily biased to niche Communist history before it got to the level when the national curriculum took over. Page’s daughter was taught that, in the period leading up to the Second World War, Hitler’s main opponents were Communist guerrillas in Cameroon. It was only several weeks later that they were taught about Nazism and the Jews.
Robinson also, unsurprisingly, wanted to know if there was a general anti-Tory bias at the school. Page agreed that there was. One teacher wore a pro-Corbyn T-shirt. Her daughter told her that she had been told to vote Labour. One of the schoolchildren had also thrown a milkshake at Michael Gove during an Extinction Rebellion demonstration, for which she was congratulated by the other schoolchildren. Back to race, a rap song with the refrain, ‘Our Prime Minister is racist’ was played in class with no comment.
Page herself comes across as reasonable and conciliatory. She stated that nobody really wants to sue their school, and that she would like these kinds of issues to be subjects that schools and parents could explore together. She also made the point that all indoctrination was wrong, regardless of whether it was far left or right, and even if we agreed with it, because it could all be turned around.
I am not a member of and certainly have no interest in joining either the New Culture Forum or the Reclaim Party. The New Culture Forum are the civilian wing of the Institute of Economic Affairs, who are a hard-right Thatcherite outfit that would like to privatise everything, including the NHS. Reclaim are also likely to be right-wing economically. But I think they are absolutely right to tackle the issue of woke political indoctrination in school. As for the teachers who teach it, EDIjester has remarked that they probably don’t understand it or the issues themselves. They’re too busy teaching, and so simply go along with whatever they’re told by their superiors. I find CRT to be an entirely fraudulent discipline and fear it is going to do enormous damage with its teaching. As for the material about sex, Page said in the interview with Loutfi that it was a case of a uniform attitude where it was inappropriate. Some children no doubt needed such explicit information, particularly if they were in danger. Other children weren’t ready and so it wasn’t suitable.
These are all major issues, which at least need to be discussed openly without highly biased organisations and private companies demanding silence and compliance for reasons of commercial sensitivity.
Here’s EDIjester’s video on it. Warning – there is more than a little bawdy humour.
The New Culture Forum’s video is entitled ‘Anti-White Racism Doesn’t Exist’: My Kids’ School Refused to Show Me What They Were Teaching’ and is on YouTube if you want to look at it.
The Reclaim the Media video is ‘What’s Being Taught In Our SCHOOlS – The Bad Law Show – Clare Page.
Sorry I haven’t been posting much over the last few days. I had a hospital appointment Thursday and although it wasn’t anything serious, I haven’t felt much like posting anything online afterwards. But I felt I had to post about this. I was watching one of the videos from the New Culture Forum yesterday. It’s the cultural offshoot of the Institute of Economic Affairs and has been set up to defend traditional British culture from left-wing ideas and ‘wokeness’. In this particular video, they were discussing various topics that had arisen over the past week. One of these was a video produced by biracial Tory Calvin Robinson about how British children’s education is being ruined by left-wing teachers pushing Critical Race Theory and so on. Now I do agree with them about Critical Race Theory. I think it’s just a form of militant anti-White racism based on a mixture of Marxist legal theory and postmodernism. It considers that all Black people are automatically oppressed because of their colour, while White people are privileged and should be made to feel ashamed and humiliated because of this. It’s divisive and I see absolutely no value in it whatsoever. But Critical Race Theory is only one of their targets. The broader target is the teaching profession itself, which they decided is far too left-wing and needs to be comprehensively attacked.
My mother was a primary school teacher, and I did my first degree at a teacher training college, which has since become one of the new universities. I realise that this is nearly forty years ago, and I honestly don’t know how much has changed or not. I did an MA in history in 2004 and then a Ph.D. in archaeology at Bristol university, graduating ten years ago. My experience of university is therefore dated and limited. But this contradicts some of the assertions that the New Culture Forum were making. They claimed that 85 per cent plus of teachers were left leaning. Perhaps they are. And so, the arch-Tories claimed, they wished to indoctrinate children with woke doctrines like CRT, Postcolonial Theory and so on. They also asserted that they were generally indoctrinating people with the left-wing attitudes that only people on the left support the NHS and are caring.
Now my experience is that teachers, whether left or right, go into the profession for the simple reason that they want to stand up before a class and teach. And what they want to teach is the traditional academic subjects – the three ‘Rs’, history, science, geography or whatever. They don’t want to push Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory or Queer Theory. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, feminism and so on used be part of what was called ‘the hidden curriculum’, the set of values that the educational system sought to impart to its pupils. From what I can see, the overt teaching of issues like anti-racism was imposed from outside the school by the local education authority and involved outside groups. After the 1981/2 riots, for example, the school at which my mother taught was visited by such a specialist group to teach the children to be anti-racist. As far as I can make out, this came from above, from the council or LEA and that neither the school nor its headmaster had anything to do with it. Today there are concerns about schoolchildren in Brighton being taught Critical Race Theory, and one man has taken his child out of the local school there and was protesting against it. But the leader of Brighton council is a member of the Green party, and this seems to be part of Green party policy down there. The New Culture Forum, as could be expected from a group of high Tories, declared that it was the fault of the unions. Well, the National Union of Teachers, from what I can remember, is very hot on anti-racism and so on, but there were a variety of different teaching unions, and I don’t think they were all the same.
As for universities, some lecturers are admittedly very left-wing. Others are, or used to be, Tory. And others keep their political and religious opinions out of the classroom. With some of the ‘woke’ courses that are being made mandatory at certain universities, such as anti-racism awareness for freshers, the impression I get is that they are being imposed by the administration. This seems to be largely a response to criticism from the Black community. Blacks tend to get lower grades than Whites, and so universities have been under pressure since the 1980s to implement affirmative action programmes to admit more Black students by lowering the grades required. And it’s also being done in response to complaints that Black and Asian staff and students also suffer from racial abuse and so on. This aspect does indeed come from the Black sections of the unions, as reported by the Guardian.
The impression that teachers have been indoctrinating vulnerable little minds with Communism has been around since the days of Thatcher, when her government started a moral panic about Peace Studies. I think this latest round of political suspicion and witch hunting is partly a result of concerns across the Atlantic about the promotion of Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter and Queer Theory in schools. There have been a number of videos put up on right-wing YouTube channels commenting on TikTok videos by gay/trans teachers informing the world about their sexuality and how they’re trying to teach their class about it, as well as news stories and controversies about Drag Queen Story Hour. But while this goes on, I’m really not sure how widespread it is. I’ve watched videos that have claimed it’s near uniform because of the influence of these doctrines and left-wing staff on the American teacher training courses. But I’m not American, and my contact with the American education system has been limited to American exchange and other students at the universities and colleges I attended.
I am also unsure how far the local authorities can be blamed for the schools in their area teaching left-wing doctrines like Critical Race Theory. I was at school just before the National Curriculum came in, when schools had far greater freedom to teach what and how they chose. This freedom has been limited by the National Curriculum. Also, schools have been part-privatised by being transformed into academies. This system was intended to take them out of local authority control. But if schools are teaching subjects like CRT and Queer Theory, it has to be due to the wishes of the academy chain itself. These are private companies, which makes it difficult for Tories like the New Culture Forum to blame the state or left-wing local authorities. It’s no doubt why they’re blaming the teaching unions instead.
So, what are their solutions to all this? They discussed home schooling but rejected that on the grounds that working class parents have neither the time nor the books required to do it. They concluded that if the education system could be rescued at all, there had to be a battle with the unions ‘like the miners’ strike’.
This is very ominous.
I’m not in favour of anyone imposing their own personal political opinions schools. But I’d say that the most pressing issues in education aren’t about Critical Race Theory and so on. They’re the constant issues of underfunding and poor pay for teaching staff, lack of resources and teaching materials and inability to retain staff. There are concerns that children’s, and particularly boy’s personal development and educational performance is being harmed by the lack of male teachers. But one solution to that would be to raise salaries to a level where they would be attractive to men, where they felt that it was worth their while economically to go into teaching rather than a better paid profession. Or launch a campaign that would otherwise attract more men in the same way that other, traditionally masculine professions, are trying to attract women. As for universities, the main issue there in my opinion is the extremely high tuition fees. As far as I can see, the money from these isn’t going to teaching staff, who can be quite poorly paid. One of my friends was an assistant lecturer for a time in the ’90s. It all seems to be going on the bloated salaries of university chancellors and administrators. These seem to me to be the real issues, though I’m not discounting the harm done by the introduction of specifically woke courses. And whatever the New Culture Forum may say, no, the Tories do not support the NHS.
Their talk of attacking the teaching unions is frightening, because it means another Tory assault on state education generally, at a time when education is in crisis because of Tory privatisation policies.
Get the Tories out, renationalise schools and get rid of tuition fees!
I’ve got a few interesting remarks from some of the great commenters on this blog about a piece a put up about a video by Simon Webb of History Debunked about Kwarteng. Webb wondered if the man now doing his best to trash our economy was a diversity hire, whose sole qualification for the job was his skin colour. Mark Pattie and Jim Round have pointed out that he isn’t. He was appointed because he was another Old Etonian willing to implement the programme of the Tory hard right.
Mark wrote
‘Kamikaze Kwarteng was *not* a diversity hire. He may be of Ghanaian descent, but he was Eton educated (hence probably why he got the Chancellor job). Suella Charlatan got the Home Sec job because she was more right-wing than Patel, and James Cleverley got his role because of his many years in the Army. Unlike the rest, he seems to be one of the very few (ten or so) genuinely decent Tories I’ve any respect for. It’s a damn shame he didn’t run for the leadership.’
And Jim commented
‘As with quite a lot of Simon Webb’s videos, it is what isn’t said rather than what is. It isn’t mentioned that groups like The Taxpayers Alliance and The Institute of Economic Affairs had a major influence on this “budget” (Tim over at Zelo Street has covered this) Also remember that The New Culture Forum, who Webb has been a guest of are based there. They think that this is a “Conservative” budget but it is unknown whether they thought that the markets would react so badly. Also not mentioned is the fact that Kwarteng is highly likely to be a millionaire, as well as attending Eton. But no, let’s feed the narrative that he is only there because of the colour of his skin.’
The Taxpayers’ Alliance tends to turn up on BBC News programmes to give their views on economic policies. They are always presented as if they are a politically independent organisation, but their leaders are all members of the Tories. The Institute of Economic Affairs have been demanding hard-right economic policies since before Thatcher. I don’t think Kwarteng’s a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but this shows that the people at the Arise Zoom meeting on the Tory minibudget were absolutely right: he’s a Thatcherite true-believer, working for arch-Thatcherite think tanks, and so shares the same grotty mediocre views as his leader, Liz Truss. I should say that I haven’t watched Webb’s wretched video, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a section of the Tories is now trying to make him a scapegoat for Truss’ abject economic failure.
This is another piece I found combing through my scrapbooks. It’s by the Financial Times’ columnist, Joe Rogaly. Titled ‘Market Victims Who Are Free to Be Poor’, and with the subtitle ‘One set of figures shows the capitalist road leading to paradise; a better set shows it leading to misery for many’ it compares and contrasts two reports on global poverty, one by the UN and another by a group of free market think tanks led by the Fraser Institute. And Rogaly comes down firmly on the side of the UN. The article, published in the Weekend edition for 14/15 June 1997, runs
When pictures of skeletal children or abandoned babies appear on the TV news do you (a) lean forward to catch the commentary (b) change channels (c) switch off and head for the kitchen? Some of us have seen about as many images of third-world distress as we can bear. Our assumption is that we know the cure for deprivation: unshackle the free market and the globalised capitalist wealth-producing machine will do the rest.
No it won’t. The 1997 Human Development report, published this week by Oxford University Press for the United Nations, demolishes the idea that the bounty created by the genius of market economics will trickle down. You have to spend tax -payers’ money to help the worst-off, or they will be dead before they are rescued.
Not everyone accepts this. It is contrary to the spirit of the 1997 Economic Freedom of the World report. Right-thinking and therefore expressive of familiar sentiments, it was published last month by the Fraser Institute, Vancouver, in association with 46 other pro-market think-tanks dotted around the planet.
This clutch of capitalist theologians, which includes London’s Institute of Economic Affairs, has invented an index of economic freedom. Its 17 components include growth and inflation rates, government spending, top marginal tax rates, restraints on trade, and so on. These are expressed in hard numbers and therefore “objective”. Hong Kong tops a list of 115 countries thus appraised. The US comes 4th, Britain 7th and France 36th.
You can guess what follows. A few clicks on the mouse-button tell you that between 1985 and 1996 the economies near the top of the economic freedom index grew fastes, while those at the bottom – the “least free” fifth – got poorer. That unhappy quintile includes Russia, Ukraine, and the well-known African disaster areas. The lesson is obvious. Impede the market, and you pay, perhaps with your life. The unobstructed capitalist road is the highway to paradise.
Wrong again. The UN’s Human Development Index is closer to the truth. it does not measure progress by the rules of conventional economics alone. To be sure, it factors in real gross domestic product per head, as do the freedom-theorists. But GDP is only one of three ingredients. The other two are life expectancy and educational attainment. The resulting list puts countries in a different order from the free marketeers’ league table.
On the latter, remember, Hong Kong comes first. On the development index it falls to 22nd. France, which believes in government expenditure, moves up from 36th on the economic freedom ladder to second place on human development. The United Kingdom falls from 7th to 15th. It’s not just the wealth you generate. It’s how you spend it.
The Human Development report introduces another index this year – for “human poverty”. It counts the people who are expected to die before turning 40, the number of illiterates, those without health services and clean water, and underweight toddlers. Once again you get changes in the rank order, particularly among developing countries.
Cuba, China, Kenya and Peru have all done relatively well at alleviating human poverty. Egypt, Guatemala and Pakistan score less on poverty relief than on human development. It is not only how you spend it, but who you spend it on.
The obvious message is aspirational. If the rich countries would put their hands in their pockets, poverty could be eliminated. We know this will not happen, in spite of the determination to give a lead expressed by Britain’s new Labour administration. Government to government aid is no longer fashionable. The money does not always reach its destination, as the worst case story, that of Zaire, teaches us. The US poured in the dollars, and they went straight into former president Mobutu’s Swiss bank accounts.
Tied assistance is better. Big donors usually demand that markets by set free. This is not quite enough to meet the needs of Human Development or the alleviation of poverty. Happily, contracts tying aid to certain actions are getting more sophisticated – although so are the means by which recipients contravene them. Anyhow, aid is but a part of what is needed.
The true value of the Human Development report lies in its implicit challenge to narrow-focused concentration on the market mechanism. Compiled by a team of economists and others directed by Richard Joly, it has evolved within the broad discipline of economics. It would be better still if someone could come up with an acceptable index of political freedom, to measure both economic and human development and democratic practices. That would require judgments that could not be quantified. How would you have treated 99 per cent votes in communist countries?
The outlook is not all so dolorous. Poverty is declining overall, largely thanks to the improvement in China, which has moved up the economic freedom tables and reduced destitution. Not many countries can make that boast. There are still 800m people who do not have enough to eat. We have some clever indices, but so far no great help to the misery on our TV screens. Only a change in the way we think can achieve that.
That was published nearly a quarter of a century ago. I don’t doubt that with time and the progress of neoliberalist, free market economics, things have become much, much worse. The book Falling off the Edge, which I’ve reviewed on this blog, is a full-scale attack on such globalisation, showing how it not only has created worse poverty and exploitation, but has also led to political instability and global terrorism. And as more British children go hungry, as more people fall into poverty due to the Tories’ privatisations and destruction of the welfare state, I wonder how long it will be before conditions very like those of the Developing World appear here.
This was published when the Financial Times’ weekend edition was still worth reading. It had good reviews and insightful columnists. It declined in quality around the turn of the millennium when it became much more lightweight. It has also switched its political allegiance from liberal to Conservative in an unsuccessful attempt to gain readers.
This article shows that neoliberal free market economics, of the type pushed by the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs, has always been a fraud, and known to be a fraud.
But our mendacious, vicious press and political establishment are still pushing it, at a massive cost in human lives and wellbeing. Even in Britain.
The week before last, Zelo Street published a piece about the launch of Reasoned UK, a right-wing propaganda outfit headed by a former member of Guido Fawkes, Darren Grimes. This fortnight’s issue of Private Eye, for 5th to 18th June 2020, also covers the launch. And it comes to much the same conclusions Zelo Street has. Far from being an original, grassroots organisation, this is just another piece of astroturf. While Grimes claims its YouTube channel is going to post original content, Private Eye shows that it has strong links to a number of similar American Conservative organisations and their British subsidiaries. The Eye’s article, on page 16, runs
Grimes Spree
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to BeLeave!
No sooner had Inspector Knacker announced the end of his investigation into Darren Grimes and Vote Leave last month, than the irrepressible ex-BeLeaver Grimes quit his day job at the Institute of Economic Affairs and launched a new “online grassroots organisation and video channel”, Reasoned UK. It aims to “challenge the pervasive left-wing bias in online content” by putting up a “mix of entertaining and informative content to help viewers reach their own informed opinions”.
Although Grimes boasts of its “NEW ORIGINAL CONTENT”, the Reasoned YouTube channel has in fact been rebranded from an earlier one called, er, Reason. Among those starring in Reason videos were Guido Fawkes hack Tom Harwood, recently seen defending Dominic Cummings round-the-clock on all TV channels; Chloe Westley, then of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, now a special advisor in No. 10; and Steven Edginton, former head of Digital at the Brexit Party, now at the Sun.
It’s unclear who was behind Reason, but the small print of Reasoned’s privacy policy reveals that Grimes’s “online grassroots organisation” is run by a Borehamwood-based company called Media and Activism. This turns out to be the same company behind conservative “youth” group Turning Point UK, in which Grimes, Harwood, Westley and Eginton have all been involved. The sole director, Oliver Anisfeld, is the son of the smoked-salmon tycoon and former Brexit Party MEP Lance Forman.
Not so much grassroots as Astroturf, perhaps. Bit Reasoned isn’t all that NEW, is its content at least ORIGINAL? Not exactly. Just as TPUK is a pale imitation of Turning Point USA, so the snazzy video in which Grimes makes his call to arms is mostly a word-for-word repeat of one produced by Prager University (PragerU) – which, confusingly, isn’t a university but an American outfit that makes right-wing videos and works closely with TPUSA.
The original from which Darren takes his script features American libertarian and TPUSA supporter Dave Rubin talking about the “Bravery Deficit”, the suggestion that conservatives are afraid to stand up for what they believe. Lo and behold, the Reasoned website also features a page headed “Bravery Deficit” – and a 45-minute video promoting Rubin’s new book.
Zelo Street’s article doesn’t go into quite so much detail, but it did quote a Tweet from ‘Loki’, who claimed that Reasoned UK was the youth wing of the IEA. Which prompted Zelo Street to ask whether Grimes really had left the organisation or not. As for the scintillating opinion-formers that are to appear on the channel, so far their Twitter feed has included mad islamophobe Melanie Phillips, and the noxious Brendan O’Neil of Spiked. Just the kind of people to galvanise Conservative British youth!
Grimes himself has something of a chip on his shoulder. He believes that he is snubbed and sidelined by the mainstream media because he is not university educated. There’s nothing wrong with not having been to uni. A university education doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is more intelligent or better morally, as shown by the all the Oxbridge and Eton-educated fools, thieves and mass murderers in Bozo’s government. What is more significant is that Grimes at best gets his facts wrong, and at wrong lies shamelessly and frequently. So he’s a typical Tory then.
He also looks very young in the picture Zelo Street has of him in its articles. He looks little older than Harry Potter! He doesn’t look old enough to vote, let alone be telling everyone else how to.
The fact that Reasoned UK is just a warmed-up, rebranded version of Reasoned doesn’t bode well for its future. Let’s hope that it’s no long before this worthless, mendacious organisation bites the dust.
One of the fascinating articles Mike put up yesterday was about an article in the British Medical Journal that reported that Institute of Economic Affairs, a right-wing think tank that funds the Tories and which demands the privatisation of the NHS, is funded by all the industries that actively damage people’s health: tobacco, gambling, alcohol, sugar and fast food. One of the major donors to this secretive think tank is British-American Tobacco. The report noted that the IEA had attacked campaigns against smoking, drinking and the obesity academic, and raised concerns that a future leader of the Tories would side with these industries against the interests of the British people.
Well, as Bill Hicks used to say ironically, ‘Colour me surprised!’
I don’t wish to sneer at the doctors and medical professionals behind this article, and am absolutely fully behind its publication. But I’m not remotely surprised. It’s almost to be expected that a think tank that demands absolute privatisation and deregulation in the interests of complete free trade, should be funded by those industries, which have the most to lose from government regulation. And in the case of the Tories, that has always included tobacco, alcohol and gambling. Way back in the early ’90s under John Major, when Brits were just beginning to get into the habit of binge drinking and the government was considering allowing pubs and nightclubs all day licences, there were concerns about the damaging effects of alcohol. People were demanding greater regulation of the drinks industry. But this was being blocked by the Tories, because so many Tory MPs has links to these companies. This was so marked that Private Eye actually published the names of these MPs, and the positions they held in various drinks companies.
As for gambling, the Labour government after the War tried to crack down on this, but it was the Tories under MacMillan, who legalised the betting shops. Later on, Tony Blair, taking his ideas from them, had plans to expand the British gambling industry further with the opening of ‘super-casinos’, one of which was to be in Blackpool, I believe. But fortunately that never got off the ground. Unfortunately, there has been a massive rise in gambling addiction, despite all the warnings on the the adverts for online casinos.
The Tories have also had a long relationship too with the tobacco industry, resisting calls for bans on tobacco advertising. Private Eye also reported how, after Major lost the election to Blair, former Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke then got a job with British-American Tobacco. As did, I believe, Saint Maggie of Grantham herself. BAT was employing him to open up markets in the former Soviet central Asian republics. The Eye duly satirised him as ‘BATman’, driving around in a car shaped like a giant cigarette, shoving ciggies into people’s, mostly children’s, mouths.
The Institute of Economic Affairs is a particularly nasty outfit that’s been around since the mid-70s. For a long time, I think it was the only think tank of its type pushing extreme free market ideas. A couple of years ago I found a tranche of their booklets in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham. One was on how the state couldn’t manage industry. This looked at four examples of state industrial projects, which it claimed were incompetently run and a waste of money. One was the Anglo-French supersonic airliner, Concorde. The booklet had a point, as many of the industries they pointed to, like British Leyland, were failing badly. Concorde when it started out was a massive white elephant. It was hugely expensive and for some time there were no orders for it. But now it is celebrate as a major aerospace achievement. While the British aircraft industry has decline, the French used the opportunities and expertise they developed on the project to expand their own aerospace industry.
Looking at the booklet, it struck me how selective these examples were. Just four, out of the many other nationalised industries that existed at the time. And I doubt the pamphlet has worn well with age. Ha Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism and John Quiggin’s Zombie Economics have very effectively demolished their shoddy and shopworn free market capitalism, and shown how, rather than encouraging industry and prosperity, it has effectively ruined them. Read these books, and you’ll see just why we need Corbyn, whatever the champions of free market capitalism scream to the contrary.
Oh yes, and ladies, particularly, be warned. This is an anti-feminist organisation. Mike mentions in his article that it has a spokeswoman, Kate Andrews, who turns up regularly on Question Time to push for the privatisation of the NHS. Or rather, its reform, as they don’t want to alarm the populace by being too open about what they want to do. Despite this feminine face, this is an organisation that has very traditional views about gender roles. One of the pamphlets I found had the jaunty title Liberating Women – From Feminism. The booklet was written by women, and I know that some women would prefer to be able to stay home and raise their children rather than go to work. And that’s fine if it’s their choice. But this outfit would like to stop women having a choice. Rather than enabling women, who choose to stay home, to do so, they would actively like to discourage women from pursuing careers.
The IEA really is a grubby organisation, and the sooner it’s discredited everywhere, the better. Like the Tories.
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