Open Britain: Daily Mail Publishes Mad Columnist Claiming that Truss Will Reinvigorate and Defend Democracy Against ‘Authoritarian’ Extinction Rebellion.

Just got this through from the pro-democracy groups about an article in the Heil by someone called Charles Dunst. Dunst says, rightly, that Brits, especially young Brits, are losing faith in democracy. They are, but this isn’t the fault of 13 years of authoritarian Tory rule and legislation setting up secret courts and curbing the right to protest and strikes! No! The real threat to democracy comes from authoritarian leftists like Extinction Rebellion. And Liz Truss, a puppet of the free trade NHS privatisation lobbyists at Tufton Street, is just the woman to defend democracy. This is just completely bonkers. It’s on the same level as telling the British public that Judge Dredd is a staunch believer in civil liberties and prison reform. I don’t have much respect for Extinction Rebellion as their stunts of holding up traffic and so on seem designed particularly to annoy the ordinary public. And they have harmed people, as when they prevented an ambulance from taking a woman having a stroke in hospital in time, so that they woman wouldn’t have suffered paralysis down one side of her body. But Dunst’s crazy article does remind me of the advice Private Eye gave about reading the opinions of Rees-Mogg senior. He must be read carefully. Then you turn his ideas through 180 degrees and, vioila! he’s exactly right. Here’s Open Britain’s comment:

‘Dear David, 

In 2023, Britain is inundated with flag-toting, vote-suppressing, reality-denying authoritarianism. In times like these, nations rely on journalists to speak truth to power, to challenge the government line and speak for the people when their voices aren’t being heard. In Britain, our media ecosystem is doing the opposite – its supercharging and amplifying our vocal right-wing minority.

You may have seen this Daily Mail headline circulating on Twitter. Charles Dunst’s unbelievable article claims that young people are losing faith in democracy, that they just don’t feel it’s working for them anymore – and that’s true. Our institutions are not adequately reflecting the will of the people, meaning we need to fix those institutions and restore trust (which is exactly what Open Britain is fighting for).  

Dunst has other ideas. Instead, he goes on to commend Liz Truss of all people for standing for “liberal values”, while arguing that the reason democracy isn’t working is actually because of China. He claims that climate protestors are the real authoritarians in the UK, despite their almost complete lack of power and the harsh government crackdowns on their right to protest. It’s an incomprehensible distortion of reality – but it still gets into people’s heads.

The mental gymnastics required to write such an article must have required years of rigorous training. But it’s just one example of how the UK media manufactures consent among the public, deploying specific framings and omitting hard truths that change the tone of the story altogether, functioning as unofficial state propaganda. This article is toeing the line of people like Liz Truss, Rees-Mogg, and Boris Johnson, presenting them as a solution to a problem that they caused. 

None of this is terribly new. From backing the actual Nazis back in the 1930s to going on xenophobic, anti-muslim tirades in the 2010s, the Mail and its counterparts have long pushed an unpopular agenda. But now, in the age of tabloid articles, social media, and targeted advertising, it’s posing a real threat to democracy itself. A democratic system is only as good as its information environment – and ours is clouded with propaganda and misinformation. 

For one thing, we need to support the independent media in the UK. In recent years, a new breed of media companies like Byline Times, Politics JOE, and openDemocracy have started to set a new standard, covering substantial political stories instead of hacking into Harry and Meghan’s phones. 

What we really need, however, is meaningful press regulation. At this critical time, we need to start asking questions like “Why does Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev get to sit in the House of Lords and own the Evening Standard?” or “Why are we allowing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to warp public opinion in his favour?”. 

It’s just another reason we need a democratic renewal in this country. As much as a broken press is a threat to democracy, democracy is equally the solution to a broken press. In a survey of 24 countries, the UK had the second lowest level of trust in the press (just 13%) – only beating out Egypt and ranking well below Russia, Indonesia, and Mexico. The people want change, and we need real democracy to reflect that. 

As Charles Dunst said, the people are losing faith in democracy. But the solution is not more NatC conventions or bringing back Liz Truss. It’s a wholesale revitalisation of the democratic institutions that deliver the will of the people. That’s what Open Britain is all about. 

All the best,

The Open Britain team‘

Hope Not Hate on Their Campaigns Against the Far Right and Voter Alienation

I got this message last week from the anti-racism, anti-religious extremism organisation, entitled, appropriately enough, ‘Paul Golding Is A Loser’. Just to really rub it in to the head honcho of Britain First.

‘Hi David,

With your help, the far-right had a terrible time at the local elections! Thanks to the backing of supporters like you David, we made sure we defeated the far-right this time out.

During the campaign, we had two aims, prevent far right success at the ballot box and make sure young people were aware of the changes to the way we vote. And, David, we smashed it!

Our team worked tirelessly throughout the campaign to beat the far-right, here’s what they got up to:

• We targeted the far-right parties Britain First and British Democrats in Salford, Dartford and Epping Forest. We ran several days of action in each ward, with Britain First losing in Salford and Dartford, and former BNP man Julian Leppert losing his seat in Epping Forest. Result!

• Elsewhere, as part of our commitment to raising awareness to the changes to the way we vote, we built this fantastic interactive map through which supporters could draw their MP’s attention to the level of local disenfranchisement. This tool was a trial ahead of the General Election and was a big success!

• We also wrote and produced two Voter ID awareness videos, which we carefully targeted at young people between the ages of 18-34 living in the North West to let them know about the changes to the way we vote. They were seen over a whopping 1.5 million times during the campaign!

• Our researchers trawled the candidate nomination papers to pull together a blog on all the notable candidates from across the far-right and radical right. This formed the backbone of our campaigning work, and was a useful reference point for our supporters. You can check that out here.

• HNH researchers painstakingly pieced together a dossier on what we believe to be electoral fraud committed by the leader of Britain First, Paul Golding, which was then sent to the authorities. You can read a summary of the evidence we collected here.

• Finally, we worked with The Guardian on a story about five Conservative councillors who stood for election this time out, but who had previously been suspended for alleged racism and Islamophobia. We will be doing much more on the mainstreaming of hate in the coming weeks and months.

Thanks for all that you do.

Georgie

Georgie Laming, Campaigns & Communications Director at HOPE not hate

P.S. We have a plan to go much further at the 2024 General Election, but we’ll need you to help us get there. Will you help?‘

One of the points here I found particularly interesting was that Paul Golding is being accused of committing electoral fraud. So, the voter ID laws are unnecessary, because the mass electoral fraud the Tories claim it combats simply doesn’t exist. There have only been a handful of cases. But one of those actually committing it is Golding and his far right outfit. This says much about them, and their contempt for democracy and thirst for power at any price.

Mad Official Demands More Arrests for Blasphemy on Pakistan TV

A few days ago the ex-Muslim atheist YouTuber Harris Sultan put up a link to a piece in one of the English language Pakistani magazines. Harris is an Australian of Pakistani heritage and a very bitter critic of Islam. The magazine had approached him for comment about a programme on Pakistani television in which various members of the clergy and officialdom had demanded more arrests to curb a wave of ‘islamophobia’ and blasphemy that was supposedly threatening the country. The official had stated that 400,000 blasphemous comments had been posted online, and the magazine claimed that Pakistan was the 7th most islamophobic country in the world, despite its draconian laws against blasphemy. Insulting the Prophet Mohammed himself carries the death penalty, and insulting the Prophet’s companions is punishable by 10 years to life in prison. The magazine claimed that this meant that Shia Muslims are particularly vulnerable to this charge, as they reject many of the first caliphs.

A friend of mine with a stronger stomach than me told me once that there’s a piece in William S. Burrough’s The Naked Lunch where the cops get arrestomania and go around arresting anyone they can. It looks like the official demanding more arrests for blasphemy has a bad case of it. The very idea that Pakistan is massively islamophobic seems to me to be entirely false. It was set up by Jinna explicitly as an Islamic state, where Muslims could live in accordance with their faith although it remained relatively secular until the country’s dictator, General Zia in the 1970s formed an alliance with the conservative Muslim clergy. It was then that the blasphemy laws, which had been introduced by the Raj to protect all religions, became solely about Islam and increasingly severe. I also think that the Pakistani upper house is composed of Muslim clergy who check whether the legislation passed is sufficiently Islamic. It’s also one of the nations where there is the strongest support for the return of a Muslim caliphate.

Accusations of blasphemy have led to murder, mob attacks and assassination. The laws are frequently abused by people wanting to get rid of their opponents in disputes that have nothing to do with religion. They’ve also led to attacks on Christians and other religious minorities, as shown in the cases of Asia Bibi, who was accused of desecrating a Quran, and a Christian student who was murdered by his classmates because he took a sip from a glass of water he was bringing to a group of girls. There was also the case of a seven year old boy, who was being charged with blasphemy because he urinated in a madrassa, a Muslim religious school.

Historically, Islam was admired by many intellectuals in the west because it didn’t have the history of mass persecution, such as inquisitions and witch hunts, that has marred Christianity. But this official’s complaints about 400,000 blasphemous posts looks like he wanted all that to change.

Sultan’s comments was that if they wanted to deal with anti-Islamic sentiment, they should stop forcing the religion down their children’s throats and abolish the blasphemy laws. I’m not an atheist, and believe that parents have the right to bring children up in their religion. But in my experience, many atheist activists come from oppressively religious backgrounds that have turned them against religion. And when religion comes into politics, then it does seem to lose popularity through its association with controversial or oppressive legislation. I think Christianity in America has lost some of its ground because of the emergence of the religious right and their influence in the Republican Party. A Pew Poll the other year found that Iran, which the magazine article stated also has harsh laws against blasphemy comparable to Pakistan, was no longer a majority Muslim country. People were either turning to other faiths, or abandoning religion altogether. There have also been other reports about the massive, underground spread of Islam in the Arab countries. I’ve no doubt that this is a reaction to the atrocities and horrors committed by ISIS. I therefore think Sultan is absolutely right about the blasphemy laws.

Religion should be a matter of one’s own private conscience, especially as these laws seem to be used as instruments of religious persecution.

Is Cruella Serious About Tackling the Grooming Gangs?

After her great and highly controversial Rwanda plan, Suella Braverman yesterday announced another grand scheme, this time to tackle the grooming gangs. She announced that she was going to set up a special police task force to deal with them. This is another area fraught with racial politics. Cruella declared that there was something in Pakistani culture that caused them. When challenged about this, she said she was just referring to the gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford. The news about this latest policy from the Tories included various experts. One of these cited a report commissioned by the Tories two years ago that found there was no link between the grooming gangs and ethnicity, and that the majority of men in these gangs were white. Which is what you’d expect, as this is a White majority country. Other issues include concerns about racial stereotyping and putting the focus on the perpetrators rather than victims. The concern was that the girls who were preyed on by the gangs were left without police and authority protection because of their high-risk life styles. Aside from this, Braverman has not made any statement about what funding and resources will be allocated to this new crime unit, how it will be organised and operate, and so on. So I wonder how serious she is. Not very, is how it all seems.

Firstly, the Tories have had years to set up a dedicated squad to deal with the gangs, ever since the scale of the abuse and the inactions and cover-ups by the police and local authorities became a scandal. They haven’t done so. Instead, this announcement has been made right at the time when the Tories are nearing the final years of their term, are low in the polls and, it seems, desperately looking for a policy that will resonate with the public. And I don’t believe it was an accident either that Cruella specifically mentioned Muslim/Pakistani gangs. Because of the size of the scandal, the impression was given that the grooming gangs generally came from this ethnicity. She was appealing to the Islamophobic right.

There are real issues regarding Islamic culture and attitudes to women. Traditional Islamic culture requires women to dress in the black, all-covering chadors and cover their hair with the hijab. Women were not supposed to go out in public except in the company of their husbands or close male relatives. And female sexual promiscuity is strictly forbidden. Thus there is an attitude in some parts of the Muslim and general Asian community that White girls are whores or sexually easy. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote about this in one of her columns in the Independent years ago. One of the lines in a spoof of ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’ on Goodness, Gracious Me, altered so that it was instead, ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mother’, was ‘Your mother says, ‘that White girls just a whore”. Anthropologists have also documented similar attitudes in the wider Muslim community. Norway has lessons for immigrants to teach them not to molest or rape western women. A few years ago the Finns released an English-language video with same intention. This featured three women singing, ‘Hey! Don’t touch me there! That’s my no-no space’. But I don’t see any attempt to tackle similar attitudes among Muslim migrants to Britain.

It looks to me instead that Braverman is deliberately appealing to the Islamophobic right and that section of the population that may be considering voting for Reform or whatever it is rump UKIP is calling itself. This is empty, culture war electioneering, and I see no intention of tackling grooming gangs, whether they’re Asian, White or whatever.

This is just about the Conservatives wanting to con people into re-electing them. And if they are, they’ll forget it, just as they’ve broken every other policy which hasn’t been about boosting the bloated incomes of the rich at the expense of the rest of us, Black, White and Asian.

GB News No Longer Paying Guests As Ratings Fall

‘Oh dear. How sad. Never mind’, as Sergeant-Major Shutup from It Ain’t ‘Alf ‘Ot Mum used to say. Mad Brexiteer Mahyar Tousi put up a video yesterday gloating over the continued demise of GB News and boasting about how his own YouTube channel now has more average viewers than the ‘old media’ TV stations. People are continuing to switch off GB News, and so Angela Frangopoulos, the station’s chief Dalek, has ruled that guests will no longer be paid fees for appearances. Regular guests will be paid a flat rate, which sounds like it’s basically just expenses, but it looks like they’re expected to find their own transport and be prompt and prepared for their appearance. Tousi points out that this isn’t a good idea, as guests and contributors should be paid for their expertise and broadcasters are in competition for them. This included GB News, which used to pay them well.

He then talks about the poor average ratings of these channels. The BBC is at the top with 100,000 average views. Next highest is Sky News. GB News is below them, and right at the bottom is Talk TV, which Tousi describes as only half a station that’s only on for part of the day. His channel has 300,000 views or followers, which shows how YouTube channels are eating the old media alive. Which is true, but I wish it didn’t include right-wing channels like Tousi’s.

As for GB News, I think this was supposed to be a rival to the ‘woke, wet BBC’. Their ratings have been steadily going down since they were launched. Many of their programmes have zero people watching. They tried to improve matters by bringing on Farage, and he did boost their rating – but only for his show. Once Farage’s programme had ended, people went back to not watching. This dire situation probably explains why they’ve now hired Lozza Fox and are hiring Jacob Rees-Mogg. Speaking personally, Mogg is one of the last people I want to see on TV, but for some reason the man who comes across very much as wanting to send small children back up chimneys is a great, molten hero of the Tory voters. And I definitely do not want to see any video with Nana Akua complaining about the health service and subtly hinting that it should be privatised.

And this isn’t all of the channel’s problems. Libertarian Islamophobe Mark Steyn left/ was given the heave-ho because of his remarks about the Covid lockdown and vaccination, and the channel is ordering its staff to keep any anti-vaxxer views they may have to themselves. This has outraged all the right-wingers who think that it should have been better to have kept Britain open, risking more people catching the disease and who think that there’s something in the vaccine itself that’s harmful. I think the YouTuber Paz 49 is one of these, as he threw a strop when Reform’s Richard Tice advised people to get the jab.

The internet is taking over, but rather than people watching GB News or Tousi’s right-wing rants, I’d rather people looked at left-wing YouTubers like A Different Bias, Novara Media, Maximilien Robespierre and so many others. As they are presenting a genuinely different view of this country and its politics, which is far more informative than the nonsense spouted by the privileged individuals spouting populist nonsense against the NHS. welfare state and the Channel migrants.

Yes, the Germans Have Banned Muslim Vigilante Sharia Police

Yesterday, Simon Sideways, a self-proclaimed ‘White activist’, put up a piece on his YouTube channel asking people what they will do when the Muslims finally take over and start forcing people to convert. It was once again the Eurabia myth, that Muslim birth rates are far more than White Europeans, and so in a few decades they will become the majority religion on the continent and take it over. It’s nonsense, although Muslim populations are set to expand and this could cause problems if the alienation and turn of some Muslims to radical theologies continues. He illustrated his prediction by stating that Muslims had established sharia police in Germany, who were forcing both Muslims and non-Muslims to attend the mosques.

I checked this story by Googling it, and it appears to be several years old. From what I’ve uncovered, it appears that a group of seven radical Muslims led by a German convert, Sven Laue, set up an Islamic sharia patrol in Wuppertal in Bavaria in 2014 or 2016. The German police arrested them and charged them under the Basic Law. This is article in the German constitution that forbids anti-democratic organisation and political parties. It’s a product of the denazification after World War II and has been used against neo-Nazi organisations like the National Democrat Party. The German Communist party evaded a ban by dissolving themselves and then holding a special congress at which it was declared that they recognised that society would have to go through a period of democracy. This is standard Marxist dogma, in which society goes through a stage of bourgeois democracy in which the remains of feudalism are cleared away before the workers take over and establish socialism. The seven were acquitted, but there was some kind of appeal, and in 2019 they were convicted and sent down.

The German authorities are as concerned as our political class about the growth of parallel societies. In the 1980s the German trade union confederation accused the Turkish sections of practising separatism while claiming to integrate with ethnic Germans. A few years ago the mayor of one of the German cities with a large Turkish population wrote a book describing their alienation and anti-social behaviour, sometimes violent, towards ethnic German. This was somewhat surprising, as he was a member of the SPD, the German socialist party, who I think expelled him soon after. It hasn’t, however, been only in Germany that vigilante sharia police have appeared. A group of fanatics at Anjem Chaudhury’s mosque in London set one up and posted their exploits on YouTube, before the police pounced on them.

As for forced conversion, Islamic laws forbids the forcible conversion of Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and/or Hindus, although massacres have occurred throughout history. This law was obeyed by the Ottomans in the Balkans. In the 7th century one of the sultans wanted to convert the indigenous Christian population by armed force, only to be told by the majlis, the assembly of Muslim clergy, that it was not permitted. Such toleration does not extend to pagans and atheists, who may be forced to convert to Islam on pain of death.

Sideways seems to have seen or read a garbled, very dated version of the story about the German sharia patrols, probably from an extreme right-wing source. There are problems with the growth of parallel Islamic societies in Britain, France, Germany and no doubt elsewhere, but the Muslims aren’t set to take over Europe and what attempts there have been to set up sharia police are minuscule – there were only seven members of Laue’s wretched outfit – and have not been tolerated by the authorities.

GB News’ Mark Steyn Coming Very Close to Pushing Fascist Conspiracy Theories about Covid Vaccine

GB News, the self-proclaimed alternative to the ‘wet, woke BBC’, is in this fortnight’s Private Eye. The broadcaster apparently has overtaken Sky News in ratings, and has taken to pushing stupid, and potentially dangerous conspiracy theories. These include myths that the vaccine doesn’t work, or is responsible for deaths, and that there’s no need for the lockdown. Pretty much staples of the wider right-wing anti-vaxxer fringe. But one of these conspiracy theories comes very close to fascism. Mark Steyn has apparently told his viewers that the coronavirus vaccine is the cause of the falling birthrate in the west of the ‘Aryans’, who built civilisation. Firstly, as the 19th century linguist, who used the term ‘Aryan’ for what are now termed the Indo-European languages, George Muller, it’s a linguist not racial term. A dark-skinned Indian, who speaks Hini or one of the other languages descended from Sanskrit, or an Urdu-speaking Pakistani can both be fairly described as Aryans, because their languages are derived from that introduced by the Aryans, who invaded Indian c. 3000 BC. But both would be targeted by the Nazis over here because of their race. Muller stated quite clearly that conflating Aryan with race was dangerous, and it’s a pity more people didn’t listen to him otherwise the carnage of the Third Reich might have been avoided.

He’s right that the birthrates in the developed west are falling along with the sperm count of western men. This is alarming, as there have been predictions by respectable magazines and newspapers that if it continues, by 2050 half of western men will be considered clinically infertile. No-one really knows the cause of this, but it’s been suggested since the 1990s that a type of plastic, phthallates, may be responsible. Other causes are probably the industrial pollution responsible for the reproductive deformities in amphibians, which Alex Jones notoriously declared were ‘turning the frickin’ frogs gay’. These chemicals are believed to mimic female hormones, hence their damage to those animals. I’ve also seen claims that it’s all due to female hormones from the reproductive pill getting into the biosphere, but I haven’t seen any scientist make this claim. In my opinion, it comes from that part of the right which is anti-feminist and so pro-life as to condemn contraception as well as abortion. I also got the impression that all western men were affected, including Blacks and Asians, and not just Whites.

Steyn’s claims resemble the conspiracy theories that were going around the Black communities in America and possibly apartheid South Africa back in the 90s. These claimed that the government was putting chemicals in Coca-Cola to sterilise young Black men. That was totally wrong, though it was understandable given the persecution of Blacks in both those countries. Steyn’s is a first-world, White version of this. It comes very close to all the stupid and murderous conspiracy theories about the machinations of the Jews to enslave and destroy the White race, although as far as I know Steyn isn’t an anti-Semite.

He is, however, an Islamophobe. About a decade ago he was a partner with late Reaganite bloviator Rush Limbaugh and his radio station out in New Hampshire. Much of the content Steyn put out on his blogs and columns on the internet were attacks on Islam, including some of the weirder rulings made by Iran’s late Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. He was one of those pushing the ‘Eurabia’ fear. This holds that Muslim birthrates are outstripping those of indigenous European Whites to such an extent that they will become the dominant race and religion and impose sharia law. A friend of mine told me he did some calculations, and that’s simply not going to happen. I don’t doubt that the Muslim population will expand immensely in the next decades, and this will present serious problems if the radicals and Islamists extend their influence over these communities, but it won’t lead to their population overtaking everyone else’s.

Steyn also tried to warn or scare people with the example of Feyenoord in the Netherlands. This is a majority Muslim town where some decades ago the Muslim dominated city council publicly invited the non-Muslim population to convert. I don’t know, but I think their attitude would be unremarkable, perhaps even ordinary in very pious, hardline Muslim countries like Pakistan, where non-Muslims can come under very intense pressure to convert. But obviously in the context of the non-Muslim, secular west, where religion is considered a matter for the individual’s private conscience, it’s totally unacceptable. The problem is, I don’t know how common such political moves by Muslim-controlled local authorities are. As far as I know, it only happened in Feyenoord, although I’m sure that non-Muslims living in solidly Muslim areas are under pressure to conform to their standards of behaviour.

Away from Steyn, the article describes how GB News, like Fox over in the US, threw in their lot with Donald Trump, talking him as US president until it became the ‘MAGA channel’. Their predictions of Trump’s eminent suitability for the Oval Office was definitely born out by the Orange Buffoons massive greed, incompetence and disastrous policies towards blue collar workers – more attacks on their rights, further decimation of their welfare provisions to enrich Trump’s friends and donors, and more outsourcing. As well as attempts to muzzle federal climate and environmental scientists for the benefit of the oil industry. And I could go on.

As for GB News’ attitudes over here, it’s solidly behind Farage and Brexit and resolutely against the welfare state and the NHS. If you’re a member of the working class, GB News is not your friend. But the stupid conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine threaten to do real harm. We’ve already seen instances where people have refused the vaccine, then caught the virus and died. And Steyn’s story about birthrates and ‘Aryans’ threatens to encourage real Nazis and Fascists, who’ll target not just Muslims but Jews.

Shock! Horror! Patriotic YouTuber Paz49 in Favour of Nationalising Energy Companies

Here’s a turn up for the books! Paz49 is a former squaddie and I think he may also have been a prison warder. He’s a patriotic, true-blue Tory who begins his videos with ‘Hello lefties’ and then begins to make it very plain that he thinks everyone on the left is well-below him in intelligence. He got a bit shirty with me a year or so ago for a piece I put up criticising him for applauding the ultimatum sent by a group of French officers and soldiers. This declared that they would take to the streets and fight unless the French government took a harder stand against Islam. This sounded to very many people like the threat of a far-right coup or civil war. Paz endorsed it, and then got angry when I described him as ‘far right’, which he took to mean ‘fascist’. Well, it can mean fascist. But equally it also means parties or organisations to the right of the Tories, of which the fascists are only one out of a number. UKIP were far right, in the sense that they were more extreme than the Tories, but they were national populist rather than fascist.

But it seems there is one left-wing policy Paz is prepared to support. He posted a poll asking his readers if they would support the nationalisation of the energy companies. He did, because they had got too greedy. I did the poll, voting yes, and it appears that over 70 per cent of his respondents did the same.

Which bears out the findings of organisations like We Own It that the renationalisation of the energy companies and public utilities in general is popular with people across the political spectrum.

It’s just the Tory government that doesn’t like it.

Correct, Not Political Showing Their Anti-Semitism with Meme

I’m not going to put it up, because I really don’t want to spread fascism even if its only by showing the kind of stuff that the fascists are posting. So, you’ll just have to settle for a description of it. Earlier today the Mosleyites of Correct, Not Political put up a meme showing a muscular bloke holding up the sun and a slogan stating that people would notice if all the institutions helping immigrants had people running them with names like Xjang and other vaguely Chinese-y names. It all looks obscure, until you read the comments. These applauded it, and the way it showed that ‘the tribe’, by which they mean Jews, are responsible for mass immigration. Of course, the Jews have nothing to do with it, and the respected Jewish historian, Geoffrey Alderman, found himself criticised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews because his research into the British Jewish community showed that 2 per cent of them supported the National Front, BNP and other ratbags. They did so because they didn’t want their children going to school with the new Black and Asian immigrants. And one of the Jewish bloggers – it could have been Tony Greenstein – noted that at elections in Barnet one of the right-wing Tory politicos, who was Jewish, used to hang around with the BNP at local elections. He used to complain to them about how it was terrible that the nationalist vote was split between Tories and the extreme right. Obviously, the vast majority of Jews, like the vast majority of severely normal Brits, despise Nazis and with very good reason. But I mention that there is, or was, a fringe that were prepared to support the far right against non-White immigration simply to make the point that conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement, which blame them for mass immigration, are nonsense.

I’ve posted up a number of blogs about Correct, Not Political and their fascism, which really is quite overt. When they begin a livestream, the run-up starts with old footage of Mosley and the BUF goose-stepping in front of adoring crowds while the Adagio for Strings weeps plaintively in the background. I suspected that there was an anti-Semitic undercurrent there – it would be odd if it wasn’t, considering the BUF’s Jew-hatred. It’s veiled, but becoming increasingly overt. The same type of people also comment on Simon Webb’s videos, but to his credit he’s not an islamophobe and very definitely anti-Semite. He’s even posted several videos attacking the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and it drives them nuts that he isn’t a Nazi like them. So much so that some of them are convinced he must also be Jewish. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Correct, Not Political, and I wonder how long they can go on before it becomes blatant or they get banned.

Open Letter from Hope Not Hate for Tories to Expel Former Fascist Local Councillor

I got this email from the anti-racist, anti-religious extremist organisation Hope Not Hate asking people to sign an open letter calling for the Tories to expel a local councillor, who used to be a member of the Mosleyite fascist group, the New British Union. It runs

‘Dear David,

Last night we broke the news that we’ve discovered a Conservative Party councillor with a worrying fascist past. 

Andy Weatherhead (formerly Andrew Beadle) represents the ward of Hythe West on Kent County Council. But as recently as 2014, he was a member of the fascist group the New British Union where he’d held the positions of Business Officer and Policy Officer.

The NBU is full of nazis and violent bigots. They are fascist revivalists who proudly display pictures online of members wearing pre-war fascist uniforms and openly try to emulate Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. One member of the group, Clive Ceronne, was even jailed for an arson attack on a mosque in Gloucester.

Tory councillor Andy Weatherhead wrote several blogs on the NBU website under a pseudonym. In them, he published deeply antisemitic passages, including criticising the government for “appeasing the British and International Jewish lobby, whilst allowing the British people to be feed [sic] lie after lie through the Jewish controlled Press and Media.”

Weatherhead’s NBU activity did not end there though. In 2013, he attended an NBU demonstration outside the Greek embassy in support of the Greek neo-nazi Golden Dawn party. Golden Dawn members were often accused of violently attacking immigrants, ethnic minorities and their political opponents. 

David, it’s simple. Andy Weatherhead is not fit to hold political office. 

And this is where you come in. Will you join other HOPE not hate members in calling for Andy Weatherhead to be permanently expelled from the Conservative Party?

EXPEL THIS TORY COUNCILLOR

This isn’t the first time that HOPE not hate has exposed elected officials with dangerous far-right beliefs. Last year, we discovered Tim Wills, a borough councillor in Worthing, West Sussex was an active supporter of the UK’s fastest-growing fascist threat, Patriotic Alternative. 

HOPE not hate supporters contacted Conservative Party Chairs asking for them to remove Wills and eventually, after immense pressure, he resigned.

Together, let’s drive out hate from our communities.

In solidarity,

Gregory – Researcher at HOPE not hate’

I’ve signed the open letter because the NBU really does seem to be exactly as they describe it – an attempt to revive Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. They even wear a uniform rather like Mosley’s Blackshirts, albeit the colour looks like very dark blue rather than black and have insignia very like Mosley’s black lightning bolt. Weatherhead also seems to be someone who really does believe all the real poisonous anti-Semitic conspiracies, which shouldn’t come as a surprise if he was a Mosleyite. Mosley denied he was ever anti-Semitic, but it was clear from his actions and general attitude that he was. He also changed the name of the BUF when he was trying to ingratiate himself with Hitler to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’. Nazism is, by definition, anti-Semitic, and the Golden Dawn racist thugs. He’s definitely the kind of activist David Cameron made so much noise about expelling the party. And somehow, I’m not surprised that he also used to be UKIP, despite that party also stating that they would not accept former members of the far right into the party. It’s possible that Weatherhead might have changed his attitudes towards race and human rights since he left the NBU, but that’s highly debatable considering how many real islamophobes and anti-Semites were found on internet groups supporting Rees-Mogg.