This is a bit more contemporary. It’s from the JOE channel on YouTube, and is a parody of former speaker John Bercow to the video of Electric Six’s Danger! Danger! High Voltage. It features some of Bercow’s best put-downs and Boris Johnson as the woman in the Electric Six video, who plays saxophone while her breasts light up and rides pillion on the moose behind Bercow. I realise Bercow is a controversial figure now with the allegations of bullying, but I found this video extremely funny. Especially as it sends up Johnson.
The signs are definitely increasing that Boris may be on his way out. His personal popularity has plunged to the point where a poll of Tory party members has rated him the second most unsatisfactory member of the cabinet. A poll a few weeks ago found that he was less popular than Keir Starmer, the duplicitous leader of the Labour party, who seems far keener on finding reasons to purge the party of genuine socialists and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn than opposing the Conservatives. Rishi Sunak, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, according to a similar poll a few weeks or so ago is actually far more popular. Zelo Street has published a series of articles speculating that as Boris shows himself to be ever more clueless and incompetent, the Tories and the press are starting to consider his removal and replacement. The Murdoch press has published a series of articles criticising him, while the Heil joined in to give him the same treatment they dished out to Corbyn and Ed Miliband. The rag published an article about Tom Bower’s latest book, which happens to be a biography of BoJob’s father, Stanley. This claims that he once hit BoJob’s mother so hard that he sent her to hospital with a broken nose. Bower’s last book was a biography of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which cast various aspersions on him. Of course, the Mail has more than a little previous when it comes to attacking politicians through their fathers. It published a nasty little piece a few years ago smearing Ed Miliband’s father, Ralph, as ‘the man who hated Britain’ when Miliband junior was leader of the Labour party. Ralph Miliband was a Marxist intellectual and I think he was Jewish Belgian, who immigrated to this country. He despised the British class system and its elite public schools, but nevertheless joined the army to defend his new homeland during World War II. Which is far more than could be said for the father of the Heil’s former editor, Paul Dacre, who spent the war well away from the front line as the paper’s showbiz correspondent. Reading between the lines of an interview one of the Tory rags published with Michael Gove, Zelo Street suggested that Boris’ former ally was possibly being considered as his successor. But if Johnson does go, it’ll have to be through a coup like that which ousted Thatcher. Former speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow is undoubtedly right: no matter how unpopular Johnson becomes, he won’t leave voluntarily because he’s unaccountable.
So with things looking ominous and the vultures circling, Johnson today gave an upbeat speech in which he promised to build 40 new hospitals, more houses and increase the amount of power generated from green and renewable sources. Mike in his piece about Johnson’s falling popularity includes a Tweet from ‘Russ’, who helpfully points out that Johnson also made the same promise to build 40 hospitals a year ago. And hasn’t done it. He’s allocated £3 billion for their construction, although the real cost of building them is £27 billion. As for his promise to have a greater proportion of this country’s power generated by renewables, like more wind tunnels out in the Severn, we’ve also heard this before. Remember how dodgy Dave Cameron told the British voting public that his would be the greenest government ever and stuck a little windmill on the roof of his house? That lasted just as long as it took for Cameron to get both feet into No. 10. As soon as he was over the threshold he very definitely went back on his promise, giving his support to fracking while the windmill disappeared. Johnson’s promise is no different. It’s another lie from the party of lies and broken electoral promises. Like when Tweezer told everyone she wanted to put workers in company boardrooms. It’s like the Tories’ promises on racism and racial inequalities. After the Black Lives Matter protests, Johnson promised to set up an inquiry into it. Just like Tweezer did before him. All lies, empty lies that the Tories never had any intention of honouring.
And then there was his promise to build more houses. This was fairly bog-standard Thatcherite stuff. Johnson declared that he was going to build more houses so that more people would be able to own their own homes. But this wouldn’t be done by the state. He would do it by empowering people, who would be able to paint their own front doors.
Eh? This seems to make no sense at all. It does, however, repeat some of the points of Thatcher’s rhetoric about homeownership from the 1980s. Thatcher aimed at making Britain a home-owning nation of capitalists. She did by selling off the council houses and passing legislation forbidding councils from building new ones. This was supposed to allow everyone, or at least more people, to own their own homes. Many council tenants did indeed buy their homes, but others had them bought by private landlords. A few years ago Private Eye published a series of articles about the plight of these former council tenants, whose new landlords were now raising the rents to levels they couldn’t afford, or evicting them in order to develop the properties into more expensive homes aimed at the more affluent. And one of the reasons behind the present housing crisis is the fact that many properties are simply too expensive for people to afford. This includes the so-called ‘affordable housing’. This is set at 80 per cent of the market value of similar houses, whose price may be so high that even at this reduced price the affordable houses may be well beyond people’s ability to purchase. Thatcher’s housing policy needs to be overturned. Not only do more houses need to be built, but more genuinely affordable properties and council houses for those, who can only rent. Johnson isn’t going to do any of that. He just repeated the usual Thatcherite rhetoric about people owning their own homes and empowering them against the state. Just as Thatcher said that there was no society, only people and the Tories talked about rolling back the frontiers of the state.
It’s just another set of empty promises. In the clip I saw on the news, Johnson didn’t say how many he’d build, nor who would build them if the state wasn’t. Like the promises to build the hospitals and increase green energy, it’s another promise he doesn’t even remotely mean to keep. Just like all the others the Tories have made.
And now for another of my cartoons, in which I try to express my outrage, anger and disgust at the Conservative party and their murderous, destructive policies. This one takes the form yet again of a CD cover or promotional poster for the totally imaginary band, the Dead Thatchers. I was inspired to invent them by the American punk band, the Dead Kennedys. Their angry songs bitterly attacked the economic and social conditions of Reagan’s America. One of their songs, which I’ve based this cartoon on, was ‘Kill the Poor’.
As you can see, the cartoon shows a firing squad shooting dead a representative selection of poor folks, that the Tories despise and have been killing for years, while all the while claiming to help them. Looking on are David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, their eyes blood red. The people shot represent the disabled, the unemployed, single mothers, low paid workers and asylum seekers.
And as left-wing bloggers and activists like Mike, Another Angry Voice, Zelo Street, The Poor Side of Life, Diary of a Food Bank Helper and so many, many others have shown for the past decade and more, Tory and Thatcherite policies are killing the poor. The harsh regime of fitness to work tests and benefit sanctions imposed by the DWP, as well as cuts in the amount paid and a waiting time of five weeks from making the claim to first payment for Universal Credit, have resulted in an estimated 120,000 people dying from austerity. Over a quarter of a million people a few years ago were forced to use food banks to keep body and soul together. Millions of children and adults were living in poverty. And thanks to Boris’ incompetent, bungled and penny-pinching handling of the Coronavirus crisis, that’s all got worse. Much worse. Firms have sacked their workers, rather than apply for the government help to pay 80 per cent of their wages. The government has promised to pay 80 per cent of the earnings of the self-employed and small businesses, but this is calculated on whether they pay business rates. Not all businesses do. Some, which share a building, leave it to their landlord. Those firms won’t get anything. And the small businessmen who will qualify won’t get it until June. For many of them, this will be too late.
And don’t be misled. The Tories do hate the poor. They despise and revile anyone on benefits as a scrounger. They see them as biologically inferior, people who should ideally be discouraged from claiming benefits or even allowed to die, rather than become a burden to the rich. Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and their brief hireling, Andrew Sabisky, all have this eugenicist view. As does the wretched, loathsome Toby Young, who attended a eugenics conference alongside real anti-Semites, racists and Nazis. And then there are all the Tory and other right-wing hacks, like Brendan O’Neil of Spiked, Trevor Kavanagh of the Scum and others, who complain bitterly about the lockdown, because, like BoJob and Cummings, they believe old people, the disabled and the weak should be left to die rather than the economy be damaged. Thanks to this attitude and the decades-long campaign of vilification in the press, the British public thinks that 27 per cent of all benefit claims are fraudulent, whereas the true figure is something like 0.2 per cent. This hatred also extends to single mothers, of course. Tory minister Peter Lilley had them on his little list of people he despised, who he sang about as a pranced about the stage in a parody of the song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at a Tory party conference back in the ’90s. And nearly two decades before then, in the mid-70s, Thatcher’s mentor Sir Keith Joseph declared they were a threat to our stock, provoking mass outrage at such a Nazi comment.
And of course the victims include asylum seekers because of the very long tradition of Tory racism, a racism that has led to their brutalisation by profiteering and incompetent government outsourcing companies like Serco in the detention centres. Not that the racism is just confined to asylum centres. A large section of the Tories is deeply racist, and particularly towards Muslims. They are also far more genuinely anti-Semitic than Labour. A few days ago David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group put up a piece detailing some instances of their anti-Semitism. This included an incident remembered by the former speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow. He was told by an unnamed Tory MP that if he had his way, ‘people like you’ would not be allowed in the chamber. Bercow asked him what he meant – lower class people, or Jews. The man replied ‘Both’. But never mind, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis heartily loves the Tories and warmly welcomed Tweezer entry to 10 Downing Street. Mirvis seems to consider anti-Semitism as synonymous with anti-Zionism or hostility to Israel, so he and the rest of the Jewish establishment have precious little interest in combating real anti-Semitism when it comes from genuine Nazis or the right. Comfy little Tory supporters, they’re only interested in manufacturing spurious claims and smears against the left.
As for the low paid, they hate them because not only do they claim benefits, but, like the unemployed, the believe it’s their fault they’re poor. In their idea of capitalism, a version that has never existed apart from their imaginations, the free market rewards merit. If a worker is low-paid, then it’s their fault. They should either work harder, or actively find a better paid job. Even if, thanks to the low-wage policies they’ve imposed since Thatcher, there are none about. In that case, it’s just tough. The free market is somehow sacrosanct and inviolable.
Here’s the cartoon. I hope you like it, and, as always, please don’t have nightmares.
Left-wing and anti-racism bloggers, commenters and campaigners have pointed out again and again how right-wing conspiracy theories about the supposedly nefarious activities of the financier George Soros, such as those promoted by the far-right Fidesz government in Hungary, conform to the poisonous Nazi conspiracy theories about evil Jewish bankers. Mainstream Conservatives have also blamed Soros’s influence for opposition to their policies in Britain. For example, Jacob Rees-Mogg, apart from accusing John Bercow and another Jewish politico of being ‘Illuminati’ – which has its own anti-Semitic overtones – also claimed that George Soros was financing the Remain campaign.
But the conspiracy theories about George Soros don’t just resemble Nazi mythology. They are a part of it, at least in some of the material that arose from the neo-Nazi fringe in the 1990s. In his book on contemporary Nazi paganism, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press 2002) Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke discusses the work of Jan van Helsing, real name Jan Udo Holey, and his 1993 Geheimgesellschaften und ihre macht im 20. Jahrhundert (Secret Societies and their Power in the 20th Century). Two years later, in 1995, Helsing published Geheimgesellschaften 2. This consisted of his extended responses to interview questions. As you can imagine, despite Helsing’s avowed denials, it is a deeply anti-Semitic book. Goodrick-Clarke writes
Here he denies the charge of anti-Semitism, claiming Jewish friends and colleagues, before making the disingenuous distinction between Semitic Hebrews and Ashkenazi Jews or Khazars, who are his real antagonists in the persons of Rothschilds, Warburgs, the English royal family (!), Marx, Lenin, Stalin, etc. This ploy recapitulates the progressive disqualification of Jews from their Israelite heritage in Christian Identity doctrine. He then reprints several pages of Dr. Johannes Pohl’s vicious translation of the Talmud that was published by the Nazi Party in 1943 as anti-Semitic propaganda. On the Protocols, Helsing simply denies that their authenticity is an important issue: they exist and they are being applied. To complete his anti-Jewish rotomontade, he reveals that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was born Henoch Koch and shows how George Soros is ruining East European economies through his liberal economic writ. Helsing’s dubious sources, his constant repetition of Jewish names as members of private and public organisations, and above all his emphasis on the assets and powerbroking influence of the Rothschilds as the top Illuminati family leave no doubt that his conspiracy theories are aimed at Jewish targets. (P. 296, my emphasis).
In case any of this sounds remotely credible, it’s worth noting that the royal family aren’t Jewish and neither were Lenin or Stalin. Stalin definitely not – he was a bitter anti-Semite. Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, wasn’t Jewish either. Van Helsing also believed that there’s a secret Nazi underground base in Antarctica, as well as colonies of other Reich Germans in the Canaries, the San Carlos area of Argentina, the Bermuda Triangle and the Himalayas. They also have a standing army of 6 million soldiers, including immigrants from Aldebaran. Yes, van Helsing believes the Nazi saucer mythology, in which Adolf and his band of thugs were helped by aliens from the star Aldebaran, who told them how to build flying saucers. Of which the Reich Nazis have an armada of 22,000.
When Jacob Rees-Mogg or the other Tories rant about George Soros, they are repeating an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and should be criticised for it. But Conservative anti-Semitism has received nowhere near the amount of attention as the anti-Semitic smears against Corbyn and the Labour party. This is despite anti-Semitism being far lower in Labour. John Mann, the Tories’ anti-Semitism tsar, has shown himself completely uninterested in investigating it in the Tories, and blocked and called the children’s poet, Holocaust educator and broadcaster Michael Rosen a troll when he tried to draws Mann’s attention to some examples.
This shows how fake the Tories’ concern about anti-Semitism really is, just as the inclusion of George Soros in van Helsing’s wretched, vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories show the real Fascism in similar fears about the financier in Tories like Rees-Mogg.
John Mann is the former Blairite MP John Mann, who has spent most of the past few years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership spreading the smears that his party was awash with anti-Semites and that it was all the fault of its leaders. This, he claimed, was the reason he finally left the party. He was then given the post of ‘Anti-Semitism Czar’ by the Tories, presumably in return for services rendered. It’s not exactly the best of titles, considering that the czars were notorious for anti-Semitism and the last years of the Russian Empire were marked by horrific pogroms. And how seriously the Tories and Mann take accusations of anti-Semitism in their ranks is shown by their massive lack of response to the concerns of the writer, lecturer, former children’s poet laureate and Holocaust educator Michael Rosen.
On Monday Mike published an article reporting that a very distinguished group of Jewish academics, journos, politicos, lawyers and other activists, including the actor Miriam Margolyes, had published an article in the Groaniad accusing Boris Johnson of anti-Semitism. This was partly based on a Jewish character, or perhaps caricature, in his wretched 2004 novel, 72 Virgins. This is a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which a bicycling Prime Minister, who bears an uncannily resemblance to Johnson himself, foils an Islamist plot to bomb parliament. The book talks about ‘Jewish oligarchs’ running the media and fiddling elections. There is a Jewish character, Sammy Katz, who is described as having a ‘proud nose and curly hair’. Katz is malevolent, stingy, and snake-like, exploiting immigrant workers for profit. The letter-writers comment, ‘There is nothing subtle about this. We know what antisemitism looks like.’
Further evidence of Johnson’s vile attitude to Jews comes from his editorship of the Spectator. He used to publish articles by Taki Theodorocopoulos, who really is an anti-Semite, claimed that Blacks have lower IQs than Whites and hailed Enoch Powell as ‘a great man’. They could also have added that he has also described the Greek neo-Nazi group, Golden Dawn, as just a group of patriotic Greek boys. The writers also note that even now Johnson is cosying up to Trump, despite the Orange Buffoon’s own support for neo-Nazis and comments about Greek disloyalty.
The writer’s state that they aren’t surprised by Johnson’s hatred of Jews, considering his general hatred for the poor and marginalised – minorities, women and LGBTQ+. But they reject Johnson’s cynical attempts to exploit the Jewish community’s fears about anti-Semitism in the Labour party to distract attention from his own bigotry.
The writers concluded their letter
A vote for the Conservatives is a vote for a far-right government that poses an existential threat to all minorities. As Jews, we understand that our fate is bound up with that of other minorities. We will only find safety through solidarity. We call on allies of the Jewish community to reject hate and vote the Tories out.
Now Mike and Zelo Street have reported that Mann and his fellow Blairite, the odious Ian Austin, have blocked Michael Rosen and called him a ‘troll’ after Rosen tried to pass on a few more instance of Tory anti-Semitism. Rosen had complained about anti-Semitism in the Tory party and provided examples. He got a reply from Mann simply stating that he wasn’t responding to incidents as they came up. Which Rosen flatly contradicted, saying he did. Rosen then annoyed the gruesome twosome of Mann and Austin by investigating the claim that Paul Golding, the fuhrer of the islamophobic Fascist group, Britain First, had joined the Tories. Rosen found that he hadn’t, and said so. But this refutation of what is a damaging rumour to the Tories infuriated them. Austin tweeted
“Looking forward to [Michael Rosen] a) apologising for trying to belittle and undermine [John Mann]’s work on Antisemitism, and b) resolving not to stupidly give horrible racists like Paul Golding and Britain First the publicity they crave”.
Rosen corrected him,
“I don’t undermine [John Mann]’s work on antisemitism: I provide him with examples he hasn’t retweeted so that he can slot them alongside the ones that he does”.
At which point Mann himself waded in, tweeting
“All trolls are blocked. Another trolled added. Thank you”.
Tim Fenton, telling this tale, is astonished that Mann, supposedly an anti-Semitism campaigner, called Michael Rosen a ‘troll’ and blocked him. And so were other people. He quotes a couple of observers who also weren’t impressed. ‘Funny Tinge; Twitter Dinosaur’ commented
“Lord John just blocked [Michael Rosen] for raising concerns about Anti Semitism. How do you think this looks John, that you, the AS tsar has just blocked a prominent Jewish figure from highlighting areas of concern he has? Cause to me it looks really really bad. Be better”.
Malcolm Finch also tweeted
“Just take this in for a minute! The AntiSemitism Tsar John Mann has blocked Jewish Holocaust author & educator Michael Rosen for asking for feedback on alleged AntiSemitism in the Conservative Party”.
The Zelo Street article concludes
‘John Mann gives every indication of not being impartial. I’ll just leave that one there.’
In fact, as the article also points out, Mann has form in overlooking anti-Semitism in the Tory party. He ignored Suella Braverman’s comments about ‘cultural Marxism’, Priti Patel on the ‘north London metropolitan elite’, Gove conflating Jews with Israel, and Rees-Mogg calling two leading Jewish MPs, one of which, I believe, was John Bercow, ‘Illuminati’ and claiming the Remain campaign was funded by George Soros.
Rosen commented on his treatment by Mann thus:
‘Interesting: a public figure, so used to having the right to talk at us, comes on to twitter expecting to do the same. Then, when he finds that people offer him a view of the universe different from his, he does a bit of name-calling and stomps off.’
and concluded
‘I’ll have to report the Antisemitism Tsar to the Antisemitism Tsar.’
The anti-Semitism smears were never about protecting Jews. They were all about stopping Corbyn getting into government. The Israel lobby were afraid that he would do something to help the Palestinians and the Blairites and Tories afraid that he would return Britain to the social democratic consensus that had actually empowered working people.
The cynicism with which these accusations are wielded by the Israel lobby was demonstrated a few days ago in a Counterpunch article about Labour’s election defeat. They attributed this among other causes to the massive disinformation campaign by the British press, including flagrant breach of electoral law by Laura Kuenssberg, and the anti-Semitism accusations. The article quoted Jacob Baime, the leader of the anti-BDS campaign, the Israel on Campus Coalition, about how these accusations are psychological warfare intended to throw those accused into confusion. And the article makes the point that this is what happened with the Labour party:
Labour’s pathetic acquiescence to Zionist bullies inside (e.g., Tom Watson, John Mann) and outside the party (e.g., the Board of Deputies of British Jews) allowed “anti-Semitism” (of which few claims were genuine, as Justin Schlosberg and others have documented) to act as a blanket to hide Labour’s actual policies. Labour internalized the problem and apologized for things its staff never did. This opened the floodgates to more Zionist abuse and the lowering of party morale, as was the Zionists’ intentions. For example, Jacob Baime, the Executive Director of the anti-boycott organization, the Israel on Campus Coalition, explained how “anti-Semitism” accusations work: “It’s psychological warfare. It drives them crazy. They either shut down, or they spend time investigating [the accusations against them] instead of attacking Israel.”
Mann is not going to pay any attention to anti-Semitism in the Tory party, no matter how many supporters of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are outed by people like Jacobsmates claiming that the Jews are behind non-White immigration because they want to destroy the White race.
Mann simply isn’t interested in anti-Semitism per se.
He’s only interested in anti-Semitism as a weapon against the socialist in his former party.
More on the hidden racism and bigotry seething away under the surface of the Tory party. A week or so ago, Mates Jacob got tired of James Cleverly’s decision not to do anything about the rampant islamophobia in the Tory party, and published his extensive dossier on it. Zelo Street put up the details of ten of the Tory politicos caught expressing bigoted views about Muslims. They happened to be local councillors, and had made the usual rants about Muslims being ‘barbarians’ and invaders, who forced their views on others through war and conquest. One also thought that immigration from Africa should be stopped, and famine was just nature’s way of dealing with overpopulation. Another was angry that the Muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was still in Britain. Which shows how perverse their bigotry is. Alibhai-Brown’s a committed anti-racist, but she’s no friend of Islamism and has criticised extremist Islam for its bigotry and repressive attitudes. Just as she’s also criticism anti-White racism, as well as that directed at Blacks, Asians and Muslims.
Mates Jacob stated that his dossier of 25 Tory islamophobes showed that the party was a hostile environment for Muslims. Miqdaad Versi of the Muslim Council of Britain commented
“Islamophobia is truly endemic within the Conservative Party & yet they still do nothing and ignore the problem … The scale of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party continues to be ignored by the mainstream political commentariat, with little scrutiny or accountability despite the Party’s total inaction & despite the depth of Islamophobia across all levels of the Party”.
Faced with its publication, the Tories were forced to act and suspend the 25, pending an investigation. A spokeswoman declared that the swiftness with which they were suspended show the seriousness with which the party took racism and discrimination, which they would not tolerate in any form. As Zelo Street drily commented, ‘Cue hollow laughter all round’.
And the blog concluded
‘Sadly, the reality of the situation is that it is only the Guardian and Mirror showing a willingness to follow up Mates Jacob’s work, and the impending election, that has spurred the Tories into pulling their fingers out. Moreover, there has been no action, and most likely will not be, against Jacob Rees Mogg, Priti Patel, and Michael “Oiky” Gove over their recent veering across the anti-Semitism line. Which leads to just one conclusion.
The Tory Party is institutionally racist from top to bottom. I’ll just leave that one there.’
Following this, Mates Jacob reported that he had uncovered a Tory Jew-hater. He’d been going through the alphabet, starting at ‘A’, and got as far as Aberdeen North before he found one.
This was Ryan Houghton, who the Scottish National reported had been suspended from the Tories because of comments he had a made several years previously. What were those views? Apparently, they were about gays as well as Jews, as well as Holocaust denial. The paper reported that
“Houghton said the National newspaper had taken a ‘selective look’ at comments he made in discussions about terrorism, LGBT rights and anti-Semitism and vowed to clear his name. He said that in the discussions seven years ago, when he was 20, he referenced the views of discredited historian and Holocaust denier David Irving but had made clear in subsequent posts that he was not defending them”.
Houghton tried to hang on as the prospective candidate by apologising unreservedly to the Jewish community, and saying that he was in contact with them. Put the Scots Tories didn’t accept it, declared his blogs about these issues were unacceptable, and suspended him.
Zelo Street notes that he wasn’t the only Tory to be suspended for anti-Semitism. Amjad Bashir, the Tory candidate for Leeds North East, had described British Jews returning from Israel as ‘brainwashed extremists’, He also accused the chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee of also being an apologist for Israel. Leeds has a large Jewish population, and that constituency was represented for years by Keith Joseph. The Tories really had no choice if they wished to retain the seat. They had to get rid of him.
Zelo Street also reminds its readers in this article that the Tories have made some very anti-Semitic remarks using coded language. Suella Braverman had ranted about ‘cultural Marxism’, a term that goes all the way back to the Nazis, and which has been used to refer to left-wing Jewish intellectuals. The smirking Priti Patel praised Viktor Orban, the anti-Semitic far right president of Hungary. Michael Gove confused Israel and Jews, which is a mark of anti-Semitism according to the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. But Benjamin Netanyahu has passed a law in Israel stating they’re one and the same, so he got a pass. And then there was Jacob Rees-Mogg calling Oliver Letwin and John Bercow ‘illuminati’, from the far right conspiracy theory about Freemasons, Jews and Satanists trying to take over the world. He also claimed that George Soros was behing the Remain campaign, which follows the Nazi conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers.
As Jewish bloggers like David Rosenberg and Tony Greenstein have pointed out, anti-Semitism has always been far more prevalent on the right than on the left. Conservatives value tradition, and Jews have been seen as an invasive threat to traditional social structures, ideologies and values. In the 1930s the membership of the various British pro-Nazi organisations was largely made up of upper and upper middle class Tories. The Daily Heil is notorious for its support of Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler in this period. And certain sections of the Tory party had such a reputation for Jew hatred that in 1970 the Monday Club opened its membership books to the Board of Deputies of British Jews in order to show them that it didn’t contain any anti-Semites or Fascists. That didn’t stop the Monday’s Club’s deserved reputation for racism, stemming from its intense hostile to Black and Asian immigration. It’s reputation was so toxic that when David Cameron became leader of the Tory party, he made a great show of cutting the party’s ties with it as part of his campaign to clean out racists from the party. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
The Nazis and racists were still there throughout the 70s and 80s. I can remember the uproar during Thatcher’s tenure of No. 10 when the Union of Conservative Students decided to support racial nationalism as their explicit ideology. That’s the same one as the BNP and former National Front: you’re only British if you’re White. This provoked a crackdown by Norman Fowler, who was forced to merge them with the Young Conservatives to produce Conservative Future, a new youth organisation. The overlap between the Tories’ membership and that of far-right organisations was so great, that Panorama was going to screen a documentary about it, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’. But that was never broadcast due to pressure from the PM in an act of explicit state censorship.
Despite their claims to the contrary, the Tories are still a deeply racist party, but this is overlooked by a Conservative press and media establishment, which shares and promotes their bigotry and hatred. And so it’s silent about the vicious racism within the Tory ranks, while hypocritically doing all it can to present Labour as an institutionally anti-Semitic party.
More evidence to add to the plentiful pile of it showing that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a Jew-hater was given by John Bercow the other day. Bercow, who has just stepped down as Speaker of the House of Commons, was interviewed by Alistair Campbell for GQ magazine. Campbell told him that he realised Bercow was a Jew, and asked him about the issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Bercow responded cautiously and diplomatically, pointing out that racism was a problem across society. He said that anti-Semitism was an issue in the Labour party, and that it needed to be dealt with and that he respected those, who were concerned about it. But in all his time in parliament he had never encountered it from a member of the Labour party, and in the 22 years he had known and worked with Corbyn he had never experienced it from him either. This was not even when Bercow was a right-winger. Campbell joked with Bercow about Corbyn, as a long-time opponent of New Labour, probably voting with the Tories more often than he voted with the Labour party. Bercow chuckles, and admits that he always got on well with Corbyn, and found him personally very supportive.
Okay, it’s not a refutation of the lie that anti-Semitism is rife in the Labour party. It most definitely isn’t anywhere near as serious as the Tories and the right-wing media are making out. Anti-Semitism has actually dropped in the party since Corbyn became leader, and he himself has led numerous initiatives to root it out. But Bercow has said that Corbyn isn’t anti-Semitic, which contradicts what Stephen ‘Goysplaining’ Pollard of the Jewish Chronicle and Rabbi Jonathan Romain in the Torygraph have been telling people this week.
Tory Fibs has put a short clip of this part of Bercow and Campbell’s discussion in a tweet, which Mike posted on his blog yesterday. Along with twitter comments from other people supporting the Labour leader. Many of these messages came from Jewish Labour supporters, who have also found themselves abused as anti-Semites by those taken in or responsible for these lies.
Also, Mike and another twitter commenter, ‘Paul’, point out that Corbyn rarely voted with the Tories. The Conservatives mostly voted for New Labour policies, which is hardly surprising as both groups were Thatcherites. Corbyn, as an old-fashioned Socialist, would have opposed them.
There was also a tweet from RedCountessa, who said that there were plenty of left-wing Jewish people, who support Corbyn, but it was also very noticeable that they were rarely interviewed by the lamestream media to get the other side of the argument.
And Jill Gore showed a twitter response from a Mark Fleischmann to show the odious response some individuals have towards Jews, who support Corbyn. So convinced was Fleischmann that no true Jew could ever support the Labour leader, that he was demanding the Jews who did to prove their Jewishness. I’m not Jewish, but this strikes me as a form of anti-Semitism itself. It’s as racist as Richard Spencer ranting about ‘octaroons’ to smear Blacks and people of mixed race, and in my opinion, anti-racist Whites, ’cause he can’t understand how real White people don’t hate Blacks.
And there were other tweeters attacking Ian Austin, who was in the news yesterday telling everyone to vote for Boris.
Pauline Lane retweeted a message from Children’s Poet Laureate, Michael Rosen, asking the Tory party to stop using the Holocaust and the threat of anti-Semitism to attract people to the party of Windrush, the Hostile Environment Policy, the anti-refugee and 20 years of austerity.
There was also a tweet from ‘Norman’ of Austin interrupting Michael Rosen’s testimony before the Education Committee for Holocaust Education. Norman states that he was aware of Austin, because of his support for Phil Woolas. Woolas was a ‘moderate’ Labour candidate, who got deselected because he ran a dirty campaign designed to get White voters angry and smearing the rival candidate, a Muslim, as a supporter of terrorism. But his interruption of Rosen showed how really horrible Austin is. Rosen testified that when the Nazis invaded the Channel Islands, all nine Jews were deported. Austin says something about how we cannot know what would have happened in Britain, because we fought back and stood alone against the Nazis. Rosen corrects him about this, stating that we had the support of two major powers, the US and Russia.
Rosen is quite correct. We didn’t stand alone. We not only had the support of America and Russia, but we were also supported by the entire resources of the British Empire. If we hadn’t, I gather that we too would probably have only lasted a week. As for what happened on the Channel Islands, Norman states that his grandfather evacuated from Jersey, and that Austin ‘is wrong’.
Absolutely right there, too. The Nazis did invade UK/ Britain, as the Channel Islands are part of it. And the people there were starved, they saw Russian P.O.W.’s worked to death as subhuman slaves, as they were seen by the Nazis, as well as the deportation of the islands’ Jewish citizens. And we can be sure that what happened there, would have happened elsewhere in Britain if the Nazis had invaded. Years ago Anne Applebaum wrote a piece in the Spectator saying that Brits would have collaborated with the Nazis, which I think was probably based on the evidence of the collaboration of the island authorities with the Nazis. This comes from the Speccie, which is the arch-Tory magazine.
And Josh tweeted a clip from Question Time, in which a Jewish lady stood up and attacked the Tories and the Conservative media for using anti-Semitism to smear and demonise Corbyn and the Labour party. The lady states that she and all her family are Jewish, and they’re not scared of leaving the house because of anti-Semitism. The Tories and the press take quotes of context to vilify Corbyn. But only 7 per cent of the time do they discuss his policies. 80 per cent of the time, she says, they’re just attacking his character, because his policies are right.
Clearly, not all Jews buy this rubbish about Corbyn being an anti-Semite by a long chalk. Ken Livingstone, who has now resigned from the party because of the smears and suspensions, said in an interview with George Galloway that he had Jewish people walk up to him in the street and tell him that they know he’s not anti-Semitic.
Perhaps that explains the desperation of the Tories to keep repeating the claim. Because now more and more people don’t believe it!
John Bercow has now stood down as Speaker of the House of Commons, and those merry funsters at JOE have produced another of their videos as a kind of warped tribute to the great man. This has edited extracts of some of his witty put-downs and attempts to keep order in the House, set to Electric Six’s ‘Danger, Danger, High Voltage’. This also has his face superimposed on that of singer Dick Valentine, and BoJob’s fizzog over the face of the scantily-dressed woman. Warning: it also includes shots of Valentine’s crotch and the woman’s boobs glowing, as well as the crotch of the moose they’re riding.
Do I scent fear hitting the Tory ranks? Surely not! But the proof is there, as the increasingly desperate Torygraph and the Jewish Chronicle are reviving the old smear that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. But they’re simply parroting the claim of James Cleverly, the Tory chairman – and Mike’s absolutely right that his monicker is a misnomer – that Jewish families are going to leave the UK, ’cause they’re afraid of what Corbyn’s going to do if he gets in.
Really? I don’t believe it!, to use Victor Meldrew’s old catchphrase. Has anybody asked the views of Corbyn’s many Jewish supporters? Like, you know, Jewish Voice for Labour? Jewdas, with whom Corbyn spent a Passover seder? Mr Shraga Stern and the Haredi community, who Corbyn gave his support to their campaign to save their historic London cemetery from redevelopment? Or just ordinary, grassroots Jewish Labour voters, like those, who have appeared on YouTube and in print stating clearly that there is anti-Semitism in the Labour party, but they personally haven’t experienced it.
No, clearly not, because this would undermine the narrative the British political establishment want to push: that Jeremy Corbyn is a vicious anti-Semite, and so are his supporters – decent, anti-racist women and men like Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone, Mike, Martin Odoni and too many others. The pro-Israel right is pushing this for all it’s worth, because Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite. But he does want a just peace in Israel with the Palestinians. And that can’t be tolerated. As for the Tories, they’re simply using any smear they can to destroy Labour, while it’s been repeated by the Blairites within the party as a way of ousting him and purging his supporters.
As for the two papers pushing this story, they’re going down the tubes at a rate of knots. The Torygraph has lost much of its readership, partly due to its mercenary editorial policy, which has seen it sacrifice journalistic integrity to the interests of its advertisers. And the Jewish Chronicle is under the helm of Stephen Pollard, who’s as Jewish as I am. Hence writer and academic Michael Rosen, who I think was Children’s Poet Laureate, has accused him of ‘Jewsplaining’. Yes, Pollard’s a non-Jew, who’s taken it upon himself to tell Jews what to believe as Jews. But he’s also a right-wing hack, who when he was with the Depress and similar rags wrote foam-flecked rants demanding the destruction of the welfare state, attacking the trade unions, and claiming that Labour and the Scary Muslims are going to destroy western civilisation.
The Tories have been pushing this line for a long time, ever since around about 9/11, I think. I remember Frederick Raphael giving a glowing review in the Spectator to a novel set a few years hence, in which the remains of the socialist parties in the EU and the Scary Muslims have joined together to begin a new Holocaust. And long before Corbyn won the Labour party leadership, the Right were already leveling accusations of anti-Semitism. Their target was Ed Miliband, who was, er, Jewish. And there was more than a shade of anti-Semitism in their attacks on him. Like the Mail’s article attacking his father, Ralph Miliband, as the ‘Man Who Hated Britain’. Miliband pere was a Belgian immigrant, who fled here from the Nazis. And unlike the father of former editor Paul Dacre, who stayed put in Britain as their society correspondent, Miliband fought for this country in the War. And then there’s the Mail’s own infamous history of supporting Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and how the father of the newspaper’s current editor, Geordie Grieg, was a member of one of the pro-Nazi British societies before the War.
And the anti-Semitism continues, along with the islamophobia and bog-standard racism. Zelo Street has posted a very good riposte to Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show, where the show’s host interviewed John McDonnell. Of course Marr had to raise the question about what Labour was doing to allay the fears of the Jewish community about anti-Semitism. It’s now part of the standard set of questions the media now ask. But they don’t ask it of the Tories, despite the flagrant examples in the Tory ranks.
For example, how about Jacob Rees-Mogg calling John Bercow and Oliver Letwin ‘illuminati’ in parliament? As I’ve blogged previously, the Illuminati were a freethinking sect, who infiltrated the Freemasons in Bavaria. They are now at the centre of a bonkers conspiracy theory, which sees them as the secret force behind the world’s governments, manipulating politics and industry. Not all varieties of this theory are anti-Semitic. In some, they’re just the global elite, who are seen as Masonic Satanists. But it does merge with the stupid, murderous theories about Jewish bankers. The accusation so alarmed one Jewish academic, that he wrote an article about it revealing the anti-Semitic underpinnings behind the accusation. But it was about the Tories, so the media ignored it. Oh well, at least Mogg didn’t accuse Bercow and Letwin of being members of the Zionist Occupation Government.
Then there’s Priti Patel’s support of the Viktor Orban, the head of the viciously anti-Semitic and islamophobic Fidesz party of Hungary, and her denunciation of the ‘north London liberal elite’. Now she might be referring simply to rich liberals in that part of London. But it also sounds very much like an attack on a certain religious/ethnic group, who stereotypically live in Golders Green.
Gove has also tried to smear Labour again with another accusation of anti-Semitism, following a tweet from an individual, who wasn’t a member of the party. Apart from the fact that Labour can’t suspend people who aren’t members, Gove himself was also criticised by the Jewish Chronicle, amongst others, for opposing an attempt by the European Parliament to censure Orban’s government in Hungary for its anti-Semitism.
And this is all quite apart from the rabid islamophobia and racism of the various twitter and Facebook groups supporting Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Gove’s equally odious wife, Sarah Vine, declaring that the statement that there should be ‘less Islam in Britain’ was funny.
Going back to the claim that Jewish families are going to leave Britain to escape Corbyn, Mike points out on his blog how this resembles Phil Collins’ statement back in the early ’90s that if Labour won the election, he’d go to America. Well, he didn’t. The Tories won the ’92 election, so he didn’t have to. But he didn’t leave when they won the ’97 election either.
It also reminds me of the curious case of Danny Cohen. Cohen was a senior Beeb executive, who bogged off to Israel claiming that Labour was anti-Semitic and Britain was unsafe for Jews. Not that unsafe, however, as I think he’s come back. So much for the claim that contemporary Britain is like Germany in 1937. It isn’t, not by a very long chalk.
Treat all this as just more scaremongering from the Tories. It’s just more lies, from a desperate and lying party. And one that hopefully will be out of power after the election.
Yesterday Mike put up the ominous news that BoJob has confirmed in parliament that he would break the Benn Act in order to bring about a no-deal Brexit. Mike comments that this seems to confirm that he is indeed in the pocket of financial speculators, who stand to make billions from the economic and social chaos and misery that would result. Jeremy Corbyn and the SNP have also made it clear that they will not support Johnson’s new attempt at a deal with the EU. It appears that they only course left open is a vote of No Confidence, followed by a caretaker government led by Corbyn. If that fails, Mike speculates that John Bercow may seek to delay Brexit again in preparation for a general election. Mike goes on to wonder if Johnson actually wants that, as well as the Lib Dems, who seem to be ready to support the Tories back into power once again. He concludes
Perhaps he thinks the Brexit-supporting public will put him back into Number 10 with a majority.
But after a series of failed attempts at Brexit, is anybody really stupid enough to think he has anything to offer us?
By stating plainly that he is prepared to break the law to get the Brexit he and his backers want, Johnson has made it blatantly clear that he is not fit to be prime minister. While I’ve no doubt his toadies and lackeys in the right-wing press would try to claim that this would be the action of a strong prime minister against a weak, divided and traitorous parliament – and where would we have heard that kind of rhetoric before? Oh yes, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy – it’s the actions of an autocrat. We have such laws binding the powers of prime ministers and the head of state because we have constitutional government. It’s evolved over centuries through turmoil and revolution to protect British people, their liberty and property, from arbitrary, tyrannical government. That’s it’s point. Johnson and his supporters are willing to break that. It puts the lie to the old Tory claim that they represent democracy and the British constitution. In reality, as this shows abundantly, they are increasingly keen on autocratic one-man rule, with BoJob as the new Duce or Fuhrer.
If BoJob does violate the Benn Act, then I believe that he should be arrested and impeached as a clear and present threat to democracy. Perhaps we could put him and his supporters in the internment camp the right-wing forces plotting a coup in the 1970s wanted to put Harold Wilson, trade unionists and left-wing activists and journalists.
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