Latest from Open Britain: Farage and BoJob Have Spat Over Who Is Putin’s Greatest Fan Boy

This reminds me a little of a ‘La Squab’ cartoon in the British SF magazine The Edge. The ‘Squab’ was a little girl who unloosed her very forthright opinions on the state of British literature, and the state of British SF in particular. In one strip Will Self and Martin Amis are looking at each other and saying, ‘Which one of us is a (expletive deleted)?.’ The strip’s innocent heroine looks at them both and says, ‘Errrr’. I don’t really have any strong feelings one way or another about Self and Amis, having never been tempted to read their books. I’ve read some of Self’s journalism and listened to him on the radio, and he was certainly capable of saying some really interesting things. So, it could be a bit excessive to call either of these two British literary greats by such an obscenity. On the other hand, various obscene terms for scoundrels, villains and malignant characters certain fit Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.

‘Only ten days to go – Here’s what you need to know.

Ten days out from a historic election, and Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are currently engaged in an online spat over who is the bigger Putin sympathiser.

Farage published a piece in the Telegraph this weekend, in which he argued that NATO had provoked Russia into invading Ukraine – a Kremlin talking point with little substantial basis. Johnson called the article “nauseating ahistorical drivel”, despite the fact that he himself had blamed “EU  expansionism” for provoking Putin in 2022.

It’s emblematic of the chaos currently building on the British right. Even Johnson, who never did publish that Russia report in full, represents a slightly more NATO-aligned strain of Conservatism than Farage. Battles over key issues like these between Reform and the dying Tories will determine the very future of the British right. It’s trending in a dark direction.

Out of that chaos, something new will arise. The Conservatives were, for nearly 200 years, the most successful political organisation in the Western world. Their fall from grace is opening all kinds of new doors, and what steps through is likely to be more dangerous than anything we’ve seen before.

In other news…

• The Conservatives are embroiled in another – yes, another – crony contracts scandal, this time related to management consultants working on the broken “40 new hospitals” promise. It’s hard to be surprised by this lot anymore.
• Starmer announced over the weekend plans to add dozens of peers to the House of Lords, reportedly to push his agenda through and achieve a better gender balance. Just over a year ago, he claimed the second chamber needed to be abolished to “restore trust in politics.”
• A new poll has suggested that the Conservatives could be left with just 53 seats, and indicate likelihood that Sunak, the PM himself, will lose his seat in a historical first.

All the very best, The Open Britain Team‘

Mark Pattie, one of the many great commenters here, demolished Farage’s allegation that NATO had somehow provoked Putin to invade Ukraine. There is a sense in which Farage does have a point, though it certainly doesn’t justify his invasion and the current war. After the Fall of Communism Russia wanted the former satellites to be neutral, with that neutrality guaranteed by both NATO and Russia. A sort of buffer zone between the two military blocs. I think an agreement may have been signed between the two about this. Which didn’t last long, as the former eastern bloc countries then went ahead and quickly joined NATO, expanding the latter until it bordered on Russia. This is supposed to have increased the Russians’ fear of encirclement, and so, it is argued, is no more acceptable to them than the reverse would be if the Warsaw pact were still around and included Canada on America’s border.

There is also the problem that it’s been alleged that the 2012 Maidan Revolution which toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president wasn’t a spontaneous uprising but a very carefully organised coup set up by Hillary Clinton and her pro-consul, Victoria Nuland, in the US state department and the National Endowment for Democracy, the institution which now has the task of organising regime change for the American state now that task has been taken away from the CIA. Jimmy Dore, the American comedian and political commenter, discussed this possibility a few years ago on his show, I believe, and there have been articles about it in the conspiracy/parapolitical magazine Lobster. I think Dore has also played on his show recordings of Clinton telling Nuland that she didn’t want the Ukrainian politico Klitschko serving in the country’s cabinet. Dore recently appeared on the James Whale Show on GB News, where he continued his own independent thinking so that Whale threw a strop and threw him off.

I’ve also come across another video posted by the wretched broadcaster in which he did the same to the Oxbridge academic Avi Shlaim. Shlaim is professor emeritus of Middle Eastern history at one of those two august universities and is, I believe, a critic of Israel’s barbarous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He appeared in Peter Oborne’s documentary on the Israel lobby on Channel 4’s Dispatches. There he defended the Beeb’s reporting of the massacre of Palestinians in refuge camps in Lebanon by Israel’s allies, the Lebanese Christian Phalange against accusations of anti-Semitic bias by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Whale seems to have been arguing that all the opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza was just anti-Semitic and then lost of his temper when this highly respected scholar wouldn’t accept it. This effectively tells you all you need to know about Whales as a broadcaster – back in the ’90s he was trying to be the British counterpart to right-wing American ‘shock-jocks’ like Howard Stern – and GB News’ political bias in the international sphere.

As for Starmer’s U-turn on reforming the House of Lords, and instead of cutting down the number of peers or turning it into a democratically elected second chamber, filling it with even more members, who is honestly surprised at this? It’s just another broken promise, like so many others. And it is Blairite. I can remember the Labour party discussing reforming it in the 1980s and the possibility of turning it into an elected senate. Then Tony Blair won the election and promptly stuffed it full of ‘people’s peers’. Now we can see Starmer doing the same, though this time he’s using feminism as an excuse and claiming it’s all about gender balance.

Yay! X Files Returns in 2016!

Okay, I can’t really talk about conspiracy theories and conspiracy cultures without mentioning the return next year of the X Files, after a hiatus of ten years. During its 9 year run, Mulder, Scully and co in the FBI battled evil aliens, genetically engineered super soldiers, shadowy human conspiracies, bizarre cults, poltergeists, vampires, mad scientists, demons, ghosts, mutants and bizarre environmental hazards. The series finally ended with the trial of Fox Mulder, the defeat of the super soldiers, and the death of the series’ arch-villain, the Smoking Man in an explosion. Like Twin Peaks, which was similarly going to be revived after a twenty year or so gap, the X Files is going to return next year.

To those of us old enough to remember it when it was first on, the X Files is one of the modern classics of SF/ Horror television, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: Next Generation. It took some of the classic SF themes – alien infiltration, mad scientists, as well as more modern fears of Satanic Ritual abuse and the fascination with serial killers and gave it a modern angle. It also had a dry sense of humour, which gave it a uniquely quirky treatment of some of the themes, which formed a counterpoint to the grim subject matter. The episode, ‘Die Hand, Die Verletzt’ opens with a boring PTA meeting in the headmaster’s office in a typical American state school. The headmaster, his teachers and parent members are all presented a stolid, respectable citizens concerned about the moral content of the school plays. Grease is rejected as morally unacceptable for its portrayal of teenage sexual activity. It’s only when the meeting closes with a prayer that it’s revealed that the assembled group are in fact a coven of Satanists. The episode, ‘The Postmodern Prometheus’, is a homage to the Frankenstein movies of James Whale, but given a postmodern twist: the action takes place within the text of a comic book created by two of the characters. It’s title is also a postmodern homage to Mary Shelley’s original classic. That was subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’.There’s also a further, darkly humorous twist in that the monster, the deformed product of his father’s genetic experiments, is a fan of Sher.

Unfortunately, the factual background of some of the material – like all too real conspiracies, where the CIA and US intelligence funded and armed Fascist groups in South America – meant that too many people on the UFO fringe took it way too seriously. On the plus side, I don’t think it did the tailoring industry and the manufacturers of suits any harm. I’m looking forward to the new series, and hope it does really well and that it won’t be too soon before it crosses the channel. Here’s the trailer for it.

It’s obviously science fiction, though there really are people, like Alex Jones and the Tea Party, who genuinely believe that there is a secret conspiracy to launch a coup against the American government to set up a Satanic dictatorship. What I would say has far more basis in fact is the comment about the growth of the surveillance state. In the above video, Mulder says over footage of a drone that we are more watched than ever. This is supposed to make us safer. But in fact we’re in bigger danger than ever.

That’s not fiction. Snowdon’s revelations show that the intelligence agencies can hack into our mobile phones, turning them on to get secret footage and recordings of us. The software permitting this was used by the Yemeni authorities to intimidate and collect information on a human rights lawyer. It would be great if this was SF, like genetically engineered super soldiers with alien DNA and technology. Unfortunately, it’s all too real. And the real Fox Mulders bringing this to light need all the support they can get.