Tory Cuts Destroyed Our Preparedness Against Pandemic Threat

On Friday, Mike put up a piece commenting on and reporting a devastating article from the Huffington Post. This revealed that the Tories’ cuts, imposed in the name of austerity and cheap government, had destroyed or discarded the plans previous governments had drawn up against the threat of a global pandemic.

The Cabinet Office had apparently been drawing up a National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies, listing the possible threats to the United Kingdom. At the top of the list in each document was pandemic flu. Mike states clearly that the British government knew an event like the present global emergency was coming. However, the strategy to cope with it was written in 2011 and not updated. And it gets worse. The government’s plan for getting the right messages across to the public during a pandemic, the UK Pandemic Influenza Communications Strategy, was written in 2012. It is now very out of date in its assumptions about how and where people get their information. The guide to dealing with the pandemic’s fatalities, which names key contacts, was written four years before that, in 2008. And the government abolished the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Team, a section within the department of Health, was abolished in 2011. The Tories thus got rid of the very organisation, which would have had the expertise to deal with the pandemic because they were so keen on inflicting cuts.

As a result, according to the HuffPo, “the government has had to either make policy up as it has gone along or is having to beg, borrow and steal from other countries who have been better prepared”.

This is in stark contrast to one of BoJob’s announcements today. Our glorious leader, or one of his minions, declared that Britain was a world leader in tackling the virus. Now this claim was made in the context of the amount of money the government was going to devote to the international effort to develop a vaccine – £500 million. But the statement could be taken to mean that Britain leads the rest of the world in combating the pandemic. Which we don’t. The Chinese are reporting no new cases, or were, and half of the new cases reported in South Korea are of foreigners. It would appear that these countries, which imposed a lockdown much earlier, have been far more successful than we have in tackling it. And other countries have been far less impressed with Johnson. The Greek newspaper Ethnos declared that BoJob was a worse danger than the Coronavirus and reported that he had publicly and essentially asked Britons to accept death. This is in reference to his speech where he declared that Britons were going to lose their loved ones before their time. As he said this, the government was only issuing guidelines but had not imposed a lockdown. The Irish Times stated that Boris was gambling with the health of his citizens. He was. He and his adviser, Dominic Cummings, had decided that they were going to deal with the threat by allowing the disease to spread. The British people would develop herd immunity and the economy would be allowed to continue unharmed by a lockdown. And it was just going to be too bad if a few old people died. The Irish government is relieved that BoJob has at last seen sense. Boris was apparently forced to impose the lockdown because Macron told him he would close the French borders to us if he didn’t. And the mayor of Bergamo, the Italian town hardest hit by the virus, Giorgio Gori, was so frightened by Boris’ complacency and inaction that he flew his two daughters home, because he believed they’d be safer.

Also states that Boris’ singular lack of action on the virus, and the way he dragged his heels before doing anything, bears out criticisms that the Tories have a eugenicist attitude to the poor, the weak and the disabled. They regard them as useless eaters, biologically unfit, who do not deserve to live.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/26/the-tories-axed-their-defence-against-coronavirus-years-before-it-arrived-deaths-were-inevitable/

And the Tories long-term attitude towards the poverty and mass death inflicted by austerity really does suggest that attitude. They seem to believe that the state is only wasting resources by supporting them and they should be allowed to die, so that the biologically superior, meaning the rich and especially the corporate elite, should be left free to do as they wish without government interference and the high taxes required by a proper welfare state

Scientists have been worried for decades about the threat of a pandemic. Some of this fear comes from previous viral outbreaks, such as AIDS in the 1980s, and avian flu and swine flu in the 1990s and early part of this century. I guess that the Tories decided that because these diseases did not require the current measures, such precautions weren’t necessary and could be scrapped.

It was a massively short-sighted decision that has undoubtedly cost lives that could otherwise have been saved. 

 

Andrew Neil Shows Staggering Ignorance of Irish Politics

Zelo Street put up this story on Saturday, and it’s one of those that makes you wonder just how intelligent and insightful certain highly paid Beeb journos and political pundits really are. In this instance, the journalist in question is Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunday Times and the Economist, and chairman of the board running the Spectator. Is he really this ignorant, or is he just pushing Brexiteer propaganda?

Zelo Street notes that next Saturday there’s a general election over in the Emerald Isle. This is also important for us over on this side of the Irish Sea because of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace back to Northern Ireland. Panelbase, a polling company, conducted a survey of Irish voters, and concluded that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael party was down four points. Neil picked this up, and told his followers on Twitter that it was due to the party campaigning on an ‘anti-British’ small country ticket.

Er, no. No, it wasn’t. And various Irish Tweeters let Neil know that it very definitely wasn’t. Jonathan Mills posted this explanation of the real reason Fine Gael were down in the polls:

“For UK ppl reading this; FG are down in the polls for good domestic reasons to do with health waiting lists and homelessness (we’ll get them on the economy next week). Their Brexit performance is about the only thing they have going for them. They are the pro-British party”.

Others cast aspersions on Brillo’s abilities as a journalist. ‘Ban Normality’ commented

“I’m surprised that Andrew is following this line but it is still slightly worrying that such an established, supposedly informed politically commentator tweets something like this. Does he believe there is a correlation in Ireland that FG stance on Brexit has lost them votes?”

Paul O’Kane went further, and tweeted

“Any journalistic credibility you ever had in relation to Irish politics has just evaporated in a single tweet”.

Irishmonk called him a junior reporter, and told him there was such a thing as being informed, and advised him to use Google.

And Irish Times writer Conor Gallagher went further and observed how this reflected badly on the British press as a whole. He said

“One of the most striking things I’ve noticed since Brexit started was how badly the British people are served by their media”.

Yes, we are very badly served by our media. It has become particularly dire after Brexit, but it was always terrible. However, the real rot set in about 1980 with the toxic combination of Maggie Thatcher in No. 10 and Rupert Murdoch owning the Scum and the Thunderer. He made these newspapers much less about journalism and all about pushing Tory ideology, and set in motion a trend that has affected all the British newspapers. And the Beeb and television in general also became far more about promoting Tory propaganda rather than objective reporting, with a few notable and honourable exceptions, of course.

Neil’s tweet hasn’t completely destroyed his journalistic credibility by any means. He’s still highly paid and respected, and isn’t as massively ignorant about Brexit as Julia Hartley-Brewer. She’s shown several times that she knows less than zero about it, as Nigel Molesworth would put it, and simply repeats pro-Brexit lines even when anyone, who really does know anything about the EU, knows that the reality is the complete opposite. But Neil’s tweet does raise questions about the limits of his knowledge. Surely someone with his reputation and career should know more about Irish politics than this? And have more concern for the facts than to say something that anyone could check and see was wrong?

Or is Neil really not bothered at all with getting his facts right and keeping the British public properly informed, but just with pushing the Conservative/ Brexiteer line regardless. Like pretty much the rest of the BBC newsdesk.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/02/andrew-neil-youre-embarrassment.html

More Warmongering by the Beeb and the Tories over Salisbury Poisoning

Quite a few people have put up pieces tearing great, raw chunks out of the government’s story that the Russians are responsible for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Salisbury. Last week, Leftwingnobody, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted up a link on his blog to a piece in the Irish Times, which stated that it was unlikely the Russians were responsible. Leftwingnobody’s link is at https://leftwingnobody.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/unlikely-that-vladimir-putin-behind-skripal-poisoning/?wref=tp. Go to it, and follow the link for more information.
Craig Murray, who was formerly our man in Uzbekistan, before being kicked out because he had moral objections to our dealing with a corrupt, repressive tyrant, has also cast doubt on the government’s story. And Mike has also posted up continuing developments, which add more questions. Today he put up a piece quoting the Russians, who said that if they had used military grade nerve agents, then far more people would have been affected than the Skripals and the poor cop, who was poisoned. And they would all be dead, not incapacitated. Which is how it struck me. Furthermore, the Russians couldn’t use their original stocks of the Novichoks poison, because this would have decayed after 27 years. Quite apart from the fact that the international chemical weapons authority confirmed the Russians had destroyed them. But as the scientist, who developed the toxin revealed, the knowledge of how to manufacture it is now out in the public sector, and so any number of countries or individuals could be behind the attack. Porton Down has refused to confirm that the Russians were responsible, and stated only that the nerve agent was of ‘Russian manufacture’.

But as far as May and the Tories, and their lapdogs in the Beeb are concerned, the Russians are responsible, and we’re facing a new threat from Putin. Who, according to BoJo, is now like Hitler. At least in the way he’s going to use next year’s world cup in Moscow, which will be like the Berlin Olympics in 1938.

I caught May pontificating on the Six O’clock News about how the Russians were threatening us and our European allies. The report also said she was trying to persuade the other European leaders to join her. Queue a shot of Angela Merkel going down a corridor, looking grim and serious. Then it moved on to Boris, saying that he wasn’t trying to stoke tensions with his wild comparison with Hitler. And on the local news this evening, they were also talking about the Salisbury poisoning and described the chemical used as ‘the Russian nerve agent’, although this is still open to doubt. Back to the Six O’clock News, the Beeb showed an Estonian diplomat talking about the Russian threat.

This is dangerous talk, whatever nonsense BoJo might try to bluster in order to justify his absurd comments. The Russians lost 20 million people fighting Hitler during the War. Millions of their squaddies were starved and worked to death as slave labourers after being captured as P.O.W.s by the Nazis. It’s therefore highly offensive for BoJo to make this stupid, insulting comparison. Also, as Simon Reeve showed in his documentary series about Russia a few months ago, the Russians are genuinely proud of their armed forces and the way they defended their homeland during the Great Patriotic War. Their equivalent of Remembrance Day/ Veteran’s Day is far more like a party, with food and drink, as well as marches and speeches, than the very solemn and austere ceremonies we go through every November 11.

I don’t doubt that Putin will try to exploit the World Cup to promote his government and his country, but the accusation that he will is more than a little hypocritical. Every government uses international sporting events like the World Cup, or the Olympics, to promote themselves. I can still remember the Americans at the Atlanta Olympics in the 1980s. As for Russia threatening Europe, in many cases it’s the other way. Russia is ringed by NATO bases right along its borders. This was after the original treaty with Gorbachev pledged NATO not to expand up to its borders in return for Gorby withdrawing all their troops from eastern Europe and allowing the former satellites to go their own way. I’m sympathetic to the fears of the Baltic States, who were reincorporated into the USSR after a brief period of independence when Stalin threw the Germans back in World War II. But at the same time, the Estonians are building monuments to Nazi collaborators as national heroes. And the supposedly democratic government of the Ukraine includes real, uniformed Nazis, who are now out on the streets of Kiev to keep order. But you won’t find that mentioned on the news, because obviously, the vast majority of people in this country will not want to support a blatantly Fascist regime.

So once again, we’re being fed lies by the Tories and the media, lies which could take us to war. And who benefits? Well, May and the Tories, obviously. She was seven points behind Labour in the polls, and the Tories are looking at being wiped out in London. Thus, she’s trying to copy Thatcher, and act like a ‘bargain-basement Boadicea’, rattling her sabre furiously. The real reason for this tension is less a military threat from Russia, and far more the fact that the American multinationals, who thought they would get to control the Russian economy under Yeltsin, have found themselves stymied by Putin. It’s like the Iraq invasion all over again: dodgy claims of weapons of mass destruction, and economic motives – western corporate interests – disguised as an attack, or resistance to, an evil tyrant.

Putin is a thug, and a real enemy of democracy. Journalists and opposition politicians in Russia have been arbitrarily arrested, jailed, beaten and murdered by his thugs. And I don’t doubt that at least some of the 14 Russians, who’ve died over here in suspicious circumstances, have been assassinated by him. But Corbyn is right about the Salisbury poisoning. It isn’t clear that he’s behind it, and we need far more proof before stoking up international tensions.

But the Tories are doing it anyway, for their own cynical electoral advantage, and those of their corporate financers. And if there is a war, the people who will pay the price will be ordinary working people. When Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the Republican Neocon leadership were very careful to make sure that none of their sons or daughters were likely to be posted to the conflict zone. As opposed to the poor and working class, whose districts were targeted by the recruiting sergeants.

As for Boris, looking at the way he has conducted himself as foreign secretary, I can only agree with the Russians. It is amazing that he is the spokesman of a nuclear power. Actually, it’s downright terrifying.

For all our sakes, we need the media to hold May and the rest to account, to ask the hard questions that Laura Kuenssberg and the rest of the Beeb’s pro-Tory lackeys aren’t asking. Before the Tories start another war for the benefit of multinational capital.

Vox Political: May Is a Hypocrite and Playground Bully over Terrorist Accusations and Brexit

I gather that the Tories are today trying to resurrect the tired old canard that Corbyn supports terrorism, because he, like many other MPs, met and supported talks with members of Sinn Fein in the 1980s. In fact, the Labour leader, like very many of his parliamentary fellows at the time, urged talking to the Irish republicans as a way of finding a peaceful resolution to the Troubles. I also have no doubt that he was, like many other Labour MPs such as Clare Short, also acutely aware of how badly Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholics were discriminated against.

But Mr Corbyn was respected by both sides. He has been praised by both the Irish Times and the Belfast Telegraph for his efforts for the people of the Emerald Isle. And the wife of the Reverend Ian Paisley described him as courteous, polite and ‘a gentleman’.

Which is obviously not the way the wife of one of the provinces most fervent Loyalists would describe a genuine terrorist fanatic.

Labour were vilified not because they wanted to talk to the Nationalists, but because they were open about doing so. At the same time Maggie Thatcher was jumping up and down on her soap boxes screaming abuse at the Labour party as supporters of terrorism, she herself was holding talks in secret with the IRA. One high-ranking republican commander has even written about, describing how strange it was to be saluted by a British squaddie when he visited an army base as part of the talks.

Now to compound the Tories’ hypocrisy, there’s a photo of another person of the right meeting Gerry Adams. Yes, it’s that well-known opponent of global terrorism, Donald Trump.

Mike has the incriminating picture of the two together on his article about it, and writes

The image undermines everything Mrs May has been saying about the terror threat. Her hypocrisy is revealed.

Both Mr Corbyn and Mr Trump had talks with Mr Adams, but she vilifies Corbyn and venerates Trump.

It is clear that she has no principles on this issue – none at all – other than kowtowing to power.

She is nothing more than a playground bully – and a failed one at that.

Mike also observes that while she enjoys bullying and intimidating weaker nations, she will do everything she can to please countries that are stronger, like the US, China and doubtless many others.

The countries she believes are weaker won’t be bullied by her, and so she will fail massively at the Brexit negotiations.

He concludes

She is a hypocrite and a liability to the security of the United Kingdom and she has to go.

On Thursday – if you vote Labour – you can make that happen.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/06/07/revealed-mays-hypocrisy-over-connections-with-terrorists/

Looking at the photo of Adams and Trump, you could be quite justified in wondering who is the real terrorist fanatic there. Parliamentary papers released about the negotiations between the British and Sinn Fein state that Adams always gave ‘reasonable’ and ‘considered’ replies to the questions his British interlocutors put to him.

Furthermore, after the peace deal was negotiated, he and Ian Paisley became staunch supporters of the deal and close friends. So close they became known as ‘the Chuckle Brothers’. Mr Adams also travelled to Spain in an attempt to negotiate a similar peace between the Basque terrorists, ETA, and Spain.

Trump has done the exact opposite. Despite his noise about combatting terrorism, he has just concluded a massive sale of American arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia. A country, whose Wahhabi absolute monarchs and princes have actively sponsored global Islamist terrorism, backing ISIS, the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

And those arms will be used by the Saudis to butcher innocents, including children, in Yemen, for no other reason than that their victims of Shi’a, another branch of the Muslim faith, whom the Saudis vehemently despise. It wasn’t that long ago that one of the leading Saudi clerics declared that they were ‘enemies of the faith’ and ‘worthy of death’.

And the Saudis have no qualms about threatening Britain with terrorist atrocities when it suits them. When Blair began investigations into corruption between BAE and the Saudis, Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi National Security Council, flew to Britain to tear him off a strip. During his tirade, Bandar threatened Blair was ‘another 7/7’.

The IRA were killers and murderers, but they emerged from legitimate social and historic grievances in Ulster. Bandar threatened Britain with another atrocity purely from pique at the possibility of having his nation’s greed and venality exposed.

The Americans are also funding Islamist terrorists in Syria, as are the Saudis, against the Assad’s secular, Arab nationalist regime. The Ba’ath party there are no angels, but they’re not the absolute monsters they’ve been painted by American propaganda either. And the Islamist terrorists America and the West have funded, armed and trained – al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front and even ISIS, have committed horrific atrocities themselves.

And if we are talking about western governments with terrorist connections, we can go back once more to Maggie Thatcher. Under her, the British government gave information to Loyalist paramilitaries, using them as death squads against prominent IRA members and republicans.

She also implanted SAS men within regular army units, who were also used as assassins and death squads, just as she and her friend, Ronald Reagan, were staunch supporters of Pinochet and the real Fascist butchers in South and Central America.

May and Trump offer nothing but hypocrisy, violence and more war.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, is a man of peace, who wants to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and who will set up a ministry of peace and disarmament.

He isn’t going to be soft on terrorism. Far from it – he will strengthen our security forces to enable them to combat it. But he will also stop funding and arming the very people behind it.

Don’t be taken in by Tory lies and deceit.

Please, vote for Corbyn tomorrow for a safer, saner, more peaceful world.

Counterpunch: Manchester Terror Attack Blowback from Western Imperialist Recruitment of Salafi Terrorists

I’ve mentioned several times over the past week or so the hypocritical smears the Tory press – the Torygraph, Scum and Heil – have published claiming that Jeremy Corbyn was a supporter of IRA terrorism, and, by implication, of the Manchester terror attack last Monday. Corbyn wasn’t. He did support attempts to find a peaceful solution to the Troubles through negotiation, something Thatcher and the Tories loudly denied they were doing, but did anyway. Both the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times have hailed the Labour leader as a man, who strove for the best for the people of Ireland and Ulster. Ian Paisley’s wife even said that Corbyn was courteous and polite.

So, not quite the fanatical supporter of Irish nationalist terrorism these papers wanted to smear him as.

And the Tories, under Thatcher, did their own supporting of terrorist violence in Ulster. Peter Taylor’s 1999 documentary, Loyalists, featured interviews with leading Ulster Loyalist politicos and terrorists, one of whom admitted that they were getting information from British intelligence in the late 1980s allowing them to kill members of the IRA and other Republicans.

And that hasn’t been the only incident, where terrorists supported by the British state have committed atrocities. The last one was just a week ago. In Manchester.

Jim Kavanagh writing in Counterpunch has a piece pointing out that the family of the suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, were members of a Libyan Islamist terrorist group, who were given sanctuary in Britain as part of NATO’s recruitment of such terrorists in their campaign to overthrow Colonel Qaddafy. He attacks the racist double standards of the western media, for giving massive attention to attacks like this in the West, while paying much less attention to the other victims of Islamist violence in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Such as Mali, where 100 people, mostly Russians, Chinese and Africans, were butchered by two Islamist terrorists at the Bamako hotel a few years ago.

He reminds his readers that, despite Qaddafy’s own political posturing, Libya was a secular state with the highest standard of living in Africa. And Qaddafy himself hated and persecuted the Islamists. The late ‘mad dog of the Middle East’ and his son, Saif, even tried to warn Blair, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that if he was killed, the terrorists would move on to attack Europe and there would be a massive influx of refugees into the continent.

Kavanagh also reproaches American liberals for believing that you can be politically liberal, and still support western imperialism. He states that Barack Obama and Killary, whose gloating over the death of the Libyan dictator was particularly repulsive, have so far presided over more carnage than Donald Trump. American liberals are deluded if they believe that they can unleash and then contain the Islamist terrorists they have recruited, armed and trained at will. He compares terrorist atrocities like that committed in Manchester to the film ‘Groundhog Day’, whose hero is doomed to go through the same day again and again. And this, he feels, will continue until something immeasurably more horrific finally wakes Americans up to the horrific reality.

He states

‘Last Monday, jihadi suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 people. Salman grew up in an anit-Qaddafi Libyan immigrant family. In 2011, his father, Ramadan Abedi, along with other British Libyans (including one who was under house arrest), “was allowed to go [to Libya], no questions asked,” to join the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda-affiliate, to help overthrow Qaddafi. In Manchester, as Max Blumenthal puts it, in his excellent Alternet piece, it was all “part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war.” In Manchester, Salman lived near a number of LIFG militants, including an expert bomb maker. This was a tough bunch, and everybody—including the cops and Salman’s Muslim neighbors—knew they weren’t the Jets and the Sharks. As Middle East Eye reports, he “was known to security services,” and some of his acquaintances “had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.”

Could it be any clearer? The Abedi family was part of a protected cohort of Salafist proxy soldiers that have been used by “the West” to destroy the Libyan state. There are a number of such cohorts around the world that have been used for decades to overthrow relatively prosperous and secular, but insufficiently compliant, governments in the Arab and Muslim world—and members of those groups have perpetrated several blowback attacks in Western countries, via various winding roads. In this case, the direct line from Libya to Mali to Manchester is particularly easy to trace.‘

‘The jihadi attackers in Mali and the jihadi bomber in Manchester were direct products—not accidental by-products, but deliberately incubated protégés—of American-British-French-NATO regime change in Libya, a project that was executed by the Obama administration and spearheaded by Hillary Clinton.

Before the glorious revolution, Libya under Ghaddafi had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa, according to the UN Human Development Index. Before the jihadi onslaught backed by NATO bombing campaign, Ghaddafi’s Libya was an anchor of stability in North Africa, as even the U.S. and British governments knew and acknowledged, per a 2008 cable from American foreign service officer Christopher Stevens, published by Wikileaks:

Libya has been a strong partner in the war against terrorism and cooperation in liaison channels is excellent…Muammar al-Qadhafi’s criticism of Saudi Arabia for perceived support of Wahabi extremism, a source of continuing Libya-Saudi tension, reflects broader Libyan concern about the threat of extremism. Worried that fighters returning from Afghanistan and Iraq could destabilize the regime, the [government of Libya] has aggressive pursued operations to disrupt foreign fighter flows, including more stringent monitoring of air/land ports of entry, and blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam.

The US-British-French-NATO humanitarian intervention put an end to that by overthrowing the Libyan government under entirely phony pretexts, in contravention of fundamental international law, and in violation of the UN resolution they claimed as a justification. The executioners and beneficiaries of that aggression where the jihadis who have been rampaging from Mali to Manchester. It’s a bright, clear line.

Ghaddafi himself warned Tony Blair that “an organization [the LIFG].has laid down sleeper cells in North Africa called the Al Qaeda organization in North Africa.” Ghaddafi’s son, Saif, warned that overthrowing Libya’s would make the country “the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean” and “You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.”’

‘Manchester is the latest iteration of a scenario we’ve gone through so many times now, like some groundhog-day dream. At the end of my post two years ago, I was urging and hoping that Americans would wake up. But a lot of American liberals and lefties, including Berniebots, still like to imagine there’s a political space they can inhabit called Progressive Except Imperialism. There isn’t. Imperialism with Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare—even single-payer healthcare—is imperialism, and it’s reactionary and supremacist. Equal-opportunity imperialism is imperialism. African-American, women, Latinx, or LGBTQ presidents, generals, and drone operators do not make it any less criminal, or dangerous, or any less inevitably erosive of all those cherished progressive domestic programs.‘

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/29/no-laughing-matter-the-manchester-bomber-is-the-spawn-of-hillary-and-baracks-excellent-libyan-adventure/

The recruitment of Islamist terrorists goes back further than Blair, Bush, and Obama and Killary, right back to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher gave sanctuary in this country to Islamist terrorists as part of the proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. She and Ronnie celebrated them, because they were anti-Communists fighting against ‘the Evil Empire’. And the Russian ambassador told the Americans that once the Salafists had finished with them, they would come for America.

And this came horribly true on 9/11. Having defeated the Soviet Union, the Saudi-backed terrorists believed they could bring down the other superpower, America.

As for Thatcher, one of the terrorists she gave asylum to in Britain was a monster, who blew up a plane-load of schoolchildren flying to Moscow in order to kill the Soviet officers also on board.

And the same Islamists she settled in Britain became part of the wider underground of radicalised Islamist discontent.

Corbyn never supported terrorism. But Thatcher, and her New Labour protégé, Tony Blair, certainly did. And the results were Loyalist terrorists acting as Thatcher’s death squads in Ulster, and Islamist terrorism in Britain.

And Theresa May made it all easier for the Manchester bomber and those like him by cutting the numbers of the police force, armed forces and border guards. And when members of Her Majesty’s finest tried to warn of her of this danger, she sneered at them.

Jeremy Corbyn has promised to reverse all this. Which, despite all the Tory screaming and posturing, trying to portray them as the party of great war leaders since Churchill, Corbyn and the Labour party represent this country’s best hope of peace and security.

Vote Labour on June 8th.

Vox Political and Eoin Clarke Refute Smears of Tory Warmongers Against Corbyn

Mike over at Vox Political has produced another excellent blog post utterly demolishing the lies of the Tory warmongers that Jeremy Corbyn supported IRA terrorism, and that his election would somehow leave Britain more vulnerable to atrocities such as the one on Monday night in Manchester.

His piece contains a graphic by Eoin Clarke showing that far from supporting terrorism, Corbyn consistently condemned paramilitary violence and sincerely looked and worked for peace in Northern Ireland. As such, he was respected not only by the Republicans but also by Loyalists.

Clarke’s graphic states, for example:

* In November 1994 Corbyn signed a parliamentary early day motion condemning the Birmingham Pub Bombings committed by the Provisional IRA.

* The same year, Corbyn held several meetings with four Loyalist leaders to discuss the release of Neil Latimer, a member of the UDR, and to be informed that October at the Labour Party’s conference of the ceasefire the following week.

* In October 2015 Ian Paisley’s wife told the Belfast Telegraph that she found the Labour leader courteous and polite, and thought he was a ‘gentleman’.

* In February 1987 the Times apologised to Jeremy Corbyn. Murdoch’s British ‘paper of record’ had smeared him by claiming that he had not phoned the police to warn them of a suspected Provisional IRA terrorist in London. In fact Corbyn had.

* In August 1988 the Irish Times hailed him as ‘a tireless campaigner for the Irish.’ Corbyn had worked to the quash the wrongful convictions of the Guildford Four, and reopen the inquiry into Bloody Sunday.

* Corbyn in fact only ever met Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams after Adams had been elected to parliament, 14 years after the commencement of the Troubles, in Adams’ capacity as an elected MP. He did, however, oppose Thatcher’s ban on broadcasting the voices of elected Sinn Fein politicians, and was keen that Adams’ constituents in West Belfast should not be silenced.

* When Adams visited Westminster in 1996, Corbyn was only one of a number of Labour MPs, who met him. The meetings were solely concerned with reviving the IRA ceasefire. This was achieved several months later. And Bill Clinton, who was then president of the US, had the previous year invited Adams to the Whitehouse. As Clarke’s graphic points out, this places Corbyn’s meeting with Adams firmly within the context of wider attempts by politicians to secure peace in Ulster.

Clarke does admit that there are two incidents, which are controversial, and do require an explanation.

* Shortly after the Brighton bombing of the Tory conference, Corbyn and other MPs met Republicans in Westminster. Corbyn’s motive for doing so was to end the strip searching of female prisoners on remand. However, Clarke states that the meeting was insensitive and wrong.

* In May 1987 Corbyn stood for a minutes’ silence to show respect for eight people, who had been killed by the British armed forces in Northern Ireland at a meeting of Irish sympathisers in London. Although one was entirely innocent, seven were members of the Provisional IRA. The circumstances of their deaths were unclear, and they may have been the victims of a ‘shoot to kill’ policy. The European Court ordered the payment of £10,000 each to the eight victims’ families.

* As for Adams himself, Clarke states that it was the Tory government, who began talking to him eleven years before Corbyn became an MP. Adams had been released in prison for the secret talks the Conservatives were holding with Irish paramilitaries following the deaths of 476 people in 1972, the worse year of the Troubles. This was revealed in MI5 files released under the 30 year rule. The files also showed that the Tories considered that Adams genuinely wanted a ceasefire and an end to the violence, and that his answers to questions were ‘reasonable and moderate’.

So while Corbyn did meet with Gerry Adams and other Irish Nationalists, he also worked with Ulster Loyalists. It certainly appears from this that Corbyn wanted to find a fair, peaceful solution to the violence and hatred in Northern Ireland.

Mike’s piece also includes a short video, running just under a two minutes, by the Labour MP Chris Williams. Williams points out that 14 years ago in 2003, Corbyn had warned that ‘the Iraq war will set off a spiral of conflict that will fuel the wars, terrorism and misery of future generations.’ He also warned several times that police cuts would leave the country more vulnerable to terrorism. He also warned that intervention in Libya would lead to it becoming a breeding ground for terrorism. He also objected to selling arms to Saudi Arabia for the same reason. Williams states that Labour has a crystal-clear policy to make Britain safer, unlike the Tories. They intend to undo the cuts to the police force, and have the longer term goal of rethinking this country’s foreign policy. This means not sending more of our courageous young men and women to die in wars no-one invited us to take part in, and destabilising countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. And Williams asks his viewers to challenges the Tories, the rich, the media magnates and the cheerleaders for these wars in voting for Labour. New approaches and responses are required following the evil terrorist atrocity in Manchester, and Labour has precisely done that.

Mike also includes a wonderful little video of Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy refuting Michael Fallon, the Tory defence minister. Guru-Murthy quotes Boris Johnson at him. Boris had said that the Iraq invasion didn’t create the problem of Islamist terrorism – the attack on the Twin Towers occurred before that – but it did sharpen their resentment. Fallon then attacks the quote, believing it was said by Jeremy Corbyn. When Guru-Murthy points out it’s by Johnson, he then flails around trying to claim that it shows that Johnson really concurs with him, that this does not explain terrorism. But the Channel 4 newsman goes on, and quotes Boris as saying that you can’t disagree with the nay-sayers, who say that the invasion has increased Islamic resentment. Even after he’s been told, Fallon continues to state that he’d have to see what Boris Johnson really says for himself, and denies that Britain’s foreign policy explains away terrorism.

Mike comments drily if there’s anyone, who doesn’t agree with Jeremy Corbyn? (Apart, obviously, from Michael Fallon).

And at the very top of the piece is a quote from the former director of MI5, Theresa Manningham-Buller, that the Iraq invasion ‘undoubtedly increased the terrorist threat in Britain’.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/27/dont-believe-the-warmongers-on-jeremy-corbyn-get-your-story-straight/

So Jeremy Corbyn was right about the Iraq invasion. He’s been right about the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, and he was right about the cuts to the police force. And he is very right to demand a ban on arms sales to the Saudis.

And while two of his actions in support of the Republicans in Northern Ireland have been insensitive, he is not a supporter of terrorism, as the Scum, Heil and Torygraph would have us all believe.

Go to Mike’s blog and read and watch the full article. Eoin Clarke’s information about Corbyn is in the form of a graphic, so that you can post it elsewhere on line to refute the Tories and their stooges, who still continue with their smears about the Labour leader.

And if you really want to see a just end to the violence in the Middle East, and a sensible policy to eradicate Islamist terror in this country, then vote Labour on June 8th.

If we don’t, if we continue to follow the Thatcherite warmongering of Blair, Cameron and May, it will only lead to worse violence and terror in the Middle East and at home.