Frances Barber’s Racist, Anti-Semitic Meltdown at Ash Sarkar and Jon Lansman

Frances Barber is a minor ‘sleb, who appears in bit parts here and there. She turned up in Red Dwarf in the ’90s as one of the forms of shape-shifting genetically engineered organism that fed on emotion. Appearing as a glamorous woman, the creature fed on the Cat’s vanity. She also appeared a little while later in an episode of the sitcom My Family, in which she played a woman with depression, who was part of a poetry group which the son joins. She’s part of the coterie around Rachel Riley and Tracy Anne Oberman, who think that Corbyn and the Labour party really are Nazis. Because criticising Israel as an apartheid state and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians means you have to be a fully paid-up anti-Semite ready to get another Holocaust going. And Zelo Street has put up an excellent piece describing and commenting on her meltdown at Ash Sarkar in which she unintentionally displayed how racist she was.

Why the fury? Sarkar had appeared on Question Time, and describes her self as Communist. She then issued a series of tweets declaring that her beloved Labour Party was now the Communist party, attacking Communism as a hateful, despicable regime and sneering that it was ‘good our [Labour] representative – meaning Ash Sarkar – loves it’. There two things at least wrong with that statement, as Zelo Street reminds us. Firstly, just because a regime describes itself as something doesn’t mean it actually is. North Korea describes itself as the ‘democratic people’s republic of North Korea’, but is obviously anything but. And as Sarkar herself reminded Barber, she’s not a member of the Labour party. Barber couldn’t accept this. She asked Sarkar why she was representing Labour. Sarkar replied that she wasn’t, unless she’d been elected an MP and hadn’t noticed. Then Barber had the first of her racist sneers. She responded

“Neither you or Shami Chakrabati [sic] have been elected, but you speak on behalf of Seumus [sic] each time you are on Political programs . We the people hate it. You do not speak for us”.

To which another tweeter, Louise Raw, answered in turn by asking Barber why she was throwing Sarkar in with Shami Chakrabati. Sarkar was a media commentator, Chakrabati the Shadow Attorney General. It couldn’t be because they were both Asian, could it?

Then Barber moved on acting out Godwin’s Law. This states that in an internet debate, sooner or later someone will compare someone else to the Nazis. Barber then commented on the news that there had been a proposal in the Labour party to put a candidate up against Harriet Harman if she chooses to stand as Speaker by declaring that Labour were ‘the Brown Shirts’. And when she found out that Jon Lansman, the head of Momentum had tabled a motion calling for the abolition of the post of Deputy Leader, she again made an accusation of Nazism. ‘As if we didn’t tell you,’ she wrote, Ernst Rohm in action’. As Zelo Street pointed out, she had just called a Jew a Nazi, which is anti-Semitic according to the definition of the term by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association.

Zelo Street concluded

‘Not much use calling anti-Semitism on others if she’s going to indulge in it herself. And that’s on top of the brown people inference. Ms Barber needs to learn one lesson.

Stay away from Twitter late at night. Or don’t bother, and give us all a good laugh.’

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/frances-barbers-bigoted-meltdown.html

Let’s make a few more points here, just to expand on those already made by the Sage of Crewe. When Sarkar describes herself as Communist, she’s undoubtedly talking about the Communist ideal, before it was substantially altered by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. I’ve put up pieces showing that most Marxists before the Bolshevik coup were democrats, after Marx himself. Except that they believed in a genuine democracy in which the workers took power into their own hands. Mainstream Marxist intellectuals like the Austrian Karl Kautsky hated the Bolshevik dictatorship and their persecution of the former upper and middle class. As for Soviet Communism, this described itself as Marxist-Leninism. In other words, Marxism as interpreted and adapted by Lenin. And when I was studying the Russian revolutionary movement at College, we were told that Lenin had altered Marxist doctrine almost as much, or as much, as the Revisionists.

As for the Labour party, the one thing Corbyn and the rest aren’t, is Communists. Corbyn’s programme of empowering the working and lower middle class by reviving the welfare state, taking the railways and other utilities into state ownership, giving back working people rights at work and restoring trade union power, is really simply a return to the post-War social democratic consensus. The consensus that no-one seriously challenged until Thatcher in 1979, with disastrous consequences. It’s nowhere near the complete nationalisation or the bureaucratic state Soviet Marxism demanded.

And let’s make one thing very clear: Corbyn and his supporters are very far from Nazis. 

Historically, it’s been left-wing Socialists, Communists and trade unionists, like Corbyn and his supporters, who’ve actually stood up physically to Nazism and Fascism in this country. If you want further evidence, go over to David Rosenberg’s blog, Rebel Notes. Rosenberg’s Jewish, and a member of the Jewish Socialist Group. He comes from the tradition of the Bund, the eastern European Jewish Socialist party, who fought for Jews to be able to live and work as equals and fellow countrymen with the gentile peoples of the countries in which they lived. They had no desire to go to Israel and displace a people, who had historically treated the Jews better than Christian Europeans. Which means he’s also a strong critic of Israel. Rosenberg has put up many pieces describing how the Communists, the ILP and trade unionists, including the ’47 Group of Jewish combat vets kicked the rear ends of Mosley and his squadristi in the BU up and down London and the provinces, so that gentiles, Jews, Blacks, Asians and working people in general could live in peace and dignity without fearing the jackboot. See, for example, his article ‘When Stockton Fought Back’, about how the good folk of Stockton on Tees fought Mosley when he tried campaigning in their toon.

See: https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2019/09/08/when-the-people-of-stockton-fought-back/

His most recent article is ‘When I Listen to Boris Johnson and Hear Mosley’, about the similarities between our anti-democratic populist Prime Minister and Mosley when he was leader of the New Party before its transformation into the BUF.

https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2019/09/10/when-i-listen-to-boris-johnson-and-hear-oswald-mosley/

It’s a comparison that has become particularly pertinent, especially as the Torygraph a few days ago decided to give space to Jaak Madison, a member of the Estonian conservative party. The article’s been taken down because Madison stated that he found Fascism had many great points, and Madison himself was a Holocaust denier or minimalist.

Corbyn and his supporters are anti-Fascists. The real stormtroopers are nearly all on the right, whatever idiots and liars like Barber, Riley and the rest think, led by a mendacious media and Zionist Jewish establishment. They are the only people, who really stand between us and real Fascism in this country.

As for Barber herself, she clearly thinks of the Labour Party in terms of New Labour, Blair’s Thatcherite entryist clique. They did some good things, but they stood for Neoliberalism and the destruction of the welfare state and privatisation of the NHS. They wanted it to become another Conservative party, and in some ways went beyond the policies of the Tories themselves. They were no friends to working people, both Jewish and gentile. And neither is Riley, Barber and Oberman for supporting them.

If You Want to Stop the Spread of Fascism, Vote Labour Tomorrow

Mike’s put up a series of articles this week arguing that anybody really worried about the spread of Fascism in Europe should vote Labour at the European elections tomorrow. He’s based these on comments and an article posted by one of the great readers of his blog, and by a Groaniad journo. And his and their logic is impeccable.

The election tomorrow is not a re-run of the Brexit referendum. The responsibility for deciding whether Britain leaves the EU and how lies very firmly with parliament. Nothing the Lib Dems for the Remain side nor the Brexit Party does in the EU parliament will alter that. But European democracy, culture and human rights are under threat from a renascent Far Right. The Brexit party is part of that threat, and the Lib Dems are part of the underlying cause: the misery and increasing poverty caused by neoliberalism for the benefit of the European elites, and particularly the financial sector.

Let’s start with the Brexit Party. Whatever the Fuhrage says to the contrary, his is an authoritarian, racist, far right party. It only looks moderate because Batten’s recruitment of Sargon, Dankula, Paul Joseph Watson and Tommy Robinson has pushed the party further right, bordering on the real Fascism of the BNP. But the party was already stuffed full of racists, islamophobes and militant anti-feminists under Farage. And the Brexit party still contains them and draws on them for support. The song by Captain Ska that Mike’s put up this morning attacking Farage as a racist is spot on. He did put up anti-immigrant posters that used the image of a long line of immigrants almost identical to a Nazi one against the dangers of Jewish immigration. His party is a corporation, like that of Change UK, and there are very strong suspicions that it is funded by dark money from foreign powers. Which is illegal. Quite apart from the fact that he lied about it not being funded by Arron Banks when it clearly was. The Fuhrage’s personal style of leadership is extremely authoritarian. In Chester last week he had a member of the audience at a rally thrown out because the man had the temerity to ask a searching question. Rather than cry ‘Duce! Duce!’ along with the rest of the adoring masses. Now he has blocked Channel 4 from his rallies, for the same reason. This is extremely ominous, as it shows that, like his friend Trump, he would dearly love to get rid of the freedom of the press and speech completely. He would also like to privatise the health service and roll back the welfare state even further than the Conservatives.

He’s a threat to Britain, and to genuine European liberal values.

As is Vince Cable and the Lib Dems. People are voting for them apparently because of their clear Remain message, and they’re supposed to have overtaken Labour in the polls for this election. But let’s remember that the Lib Dems went into the coalition with the Tories, where they were quite happy to support the further privatisation of the health service, the bedroom tax, the increasing destruction of the welfare state, including IDS’ and McVey’s lethal sanctions of the unemployed and the disabled in the DWP. Thanks in part to the Lib Dems, a quarter of a million people now have to rely on food banks for their next meal, the majority of whom I think are now working people. And something like a quarter of all children are growing up in ‘food insecure’ homes. Or something like it. And students in particular have a very good reason not to vote for Cable or his gang of bandits. The massive hike in tuition fees was urged by Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader. Cameron would have given in and lowered or dropped them had the Lib Dems insisted. Our young people, the doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists, engineers, and professionals of tomorrow, are being sadly with tens of thousands of pounds in debt because Clegg and the Lib Dems thought they should. They are also a threat to democracy, because they decided to throw out John Stuart Mill and his resolute support of democracy to bring in secret courts. All in the interests of national security, of course.

But hey, the austerity they and the other centrists demand will bring prosperity eventually. 

The answer to this is no, it won’t. It hasn’t so far, and won’t ever. A few weeks ago I put up a video from the Canary which explained that everywhere austerity has been implemented it has produced nothing but poverty. And far from being massively popular, those parties promoting it have met with the absolute reverse.

And the Fascists know this, and are exploiting it.

Hope Not Hate on Monday, 20th May 2019, put up piece about a mass rally in Milan of the various European far right parties, organised by Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Lega Party. It was a kind of ‘Unite the Right’ of European Fascists, attended by

Marine Le Pen of France’s Rassemblement National and Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom. Alternative for Germany (AfD), Belgium’s Vlaams Belang (VB), Estonia’s EKRE and the Danish People’s Party (DPP) had all sent their main MEP candidates and central party figures, Jörg Meuthen (AfD), Gerolf Annemans (VB), Jaak Madison (EKRE) and Anders Vistisen (DPP). Representatives from Slovakias Sme Rodina, Austrian Freedom Party, Finland’s True Finns, Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) from Czech Republic and Volya from Bulgaria also addressed the rally.

Hope Not Hate reported that

Welcomed by chants of his name from the crowd, Salvini said he wanted to “free the continent from the illegal occupation orchestrated in Brussels”, and that Europe had been betrayed by the “Merkels, the Macrons, the Soroses and the Junckers who built a Europe based on finance and uncontrolled migration.” The audience chanted “Matteo, Matteo, Matteo” in response.

Okay, Merkel is the leader of Germany’s centre right Christian Democrats, and Soros is the Hungarian-American billionaire financier. But the policies they are pursuing are the old shopworn neoliberalism and austerity. As are Macron’s, who’s supposed to be reviving French prosperity. And if you don’t believe that these people are Fascists, consider how close Geert Wilders’ comments that “We must secure the future of our land and children”. This is close to the infamous ’14 Words’ of the American neo-Nazis, which run something like ‘We must secure a White homeland and the future of White children’, although I’ve forgotten the right wording.

Salvini gathers leaders of the European far right in Milan

Europe desperately needs the return of genuine, socialist politics. Not just to restore its industries and people from decades of poverty, calculated neglect, privatisation and welfare cuts by its elites, but to save Europe and its tradition of democracy and human rights from a renewed Fascism. A strong vote for the Labour party in the elections will help them form a powerful bloc with the other European socialist parties. And it has always been the parties of the Left – the Socialists and Communists – who have been the most resolute and determined opposed of Fascism.

Don’t let Farage and Cable lead us into a Continent-wide new Fascist Dark Age. 

Vote Labour!

No Pasaran!