Last Saturday’s I for 8th February 2020 carried a piece about Dawn Butler by the paper’s political editor, Hugo Gye, ‘Butler: as deputy leader, I’d be like John Prescott without the violence.’ This consisted largely of an interview with Butler followed by how well the various deputy leadership contenders were faring. Butler argued that she should be leader as she was ‘the experience candidate’, having served under two Labour Prime Ministers. She also claimed that she could unite all sections of the party, and was therefore the unity candidate. She also stated that as deputy leader she’d be like John Prescott without the violence, because she doesn’t intend to punch anyone. As for her chances of winning – the favourite is Angela Rayner – she said that throughout her life as a Black female she’d always had someone telling her she had no chance.
But this isn’t what I found interesting. That was what she said about the positive reception she’d experienced of Labour’s manifesto, and that the Tories had stolen Labour’s policies. Gye wrote
I’ve put up several pieces about Butler, criticising her demand for all-Black shortlists and her statement that she intends to fight misogyny. The all-Black shortlists could make racism even worse, as some Whites in majority ethnic neighbourhoods with a Black MP may feel excluded. Her statement about misogyny is questionable because of the way what is considered misogynist has been expanded to include not just definite cases of sexism, but more dubious areas like microaggression. These are supposed to be the tiny, everyday pieces of sexism that affect women’s confidence and feeling of self-worth. Like calling them ‘Love’. At the same time, Private Eye has claimed that, rather than not having been a member of any coup against Corbyn, as she claims, Butler was very definitely one of the participants. This casts doubt on her position as a left-wing candidate.
But I think she is almost certainly right about the positive response of the public to Labour’s policies. In polls Corbyn’s policies of renationalisation and the restoration of workers’ rights and the welfare state were well-received. It’s why the Tory media had to resort to portraying him as an anti-Semite and communist or Trotskyite. And the Tories have been forced to appear to steal Labour’s policies. After Labour announced its policies on the NHS, the Tories announced they were going to invest a record amount in the health service and built more than 40 new hospitals. This is all lies, but it shows how they have been forced publicly to move away from their real policies of starving the NHS of funding and closing hospitals. Just as they have been forced to renationalise Northern Rail, although some of that was an attempt to divert attention away from the problems caused by government failures in the construction and maintenance of the tracks and infrastructure, on which the trains run, which is still government-owned. Just as the Tories have also promised – again, it’s just lies – a massive campaign of house construction as well as the expansion of the rail network.
I feel that even though Labour will be out of power for the next five years, it can still do much good by maintaining those left-wing policies and trying to force the Tories to move left, so that when the Tories – and they will – their right-wing policies will be soundly contrasted with Labour’s socialist programme that will be far more successful. If this is done properly, it will show to the public that socialism hasn’t been superceded by Thatcherism. Quite the opposite – it is Thatcherism that is now obsolete.
My fear, however, is that if Starmer and Rayner get into power, they will turn the clock back to Blair, and Britain will be further decimated, economically and socially, by the Thatcherite policies of privatisation of industry, schools and the NHS, and the destruction of the welfare state.
Here’s an inspiring story. Fraser Anning, an utterly repugnant far-right Australian senator, who literally blamed the victims of the Christchurch massacre for their own murder, got his just comeuppance. As he was speaking, a White kid hit him over the head with an egg. And the lad is now an internet hero.
The story’s covered by the I, whose article in today’s edition for 18th March 2019, on page 9, runs
Online accolades for boy who egged far-right senator
Will Connolly, the 17 year old boy who egged the far-right Australian senator Fraser Anning, has become an online hero.
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested yesterday that the anti-Muslim senator should be charged after he slapped a teenager who cracked a raw egg over his head.
Mr Anning has been condemned for blaming Muslim immigration for the racist attacks on two New Zealand mosques. Mr Morrison said: “The full force of the law should be applied to Senator Anning.”
Posting on after the mass shootings on Friday, Mr Anning tweeted: “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?”
“The real cause of the bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration programe which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place, ” he said later. A GoFundMe page set up to raise A$2,000 (£1,0000) to pay for Connolly’s ‘legal fees’ and ‘more eggs’ had exceeded A$25,000 yesterday.
The site says most of the money will go to Christchurch victims.
The I’s columnist Eleanor Margolis wrote a further piece about, When words fail, some people need egging, adding a bit of historical context to Eggboy’s act. She mentions the egging of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jeremy Corbyn at Finsbury Park mosque last week, and John Prescott, how it was used against people in the stocks in the Middle Ages, and by less than impressed audiences in Elizabethan theatres. She said of Eggboy’s strike against Anning that
For anyone slating Eggboy for food wastage, maybe supermarkets should start keeping the eggs that pass their sell by date specifically to see to people with grievances against our leaders. Becuase the thing about egging is, it’s sort of effective. When Eggboy matter-of-factly broke that egg on Fraser Anning’s racist head, millions of people soon saw a display of solidarity -from a White non-Muslim kid – with those impacted by the Christchurch shooting and the victims of today’s rampant islamophobia in general. When words fail, some people just need an egg to the face. It’s probably the most physical, yet mostly non-violent, way of showing the world you disagree with someone and their entire schtick. (p. 18)
Let’s add a bit more detail to this. Anning didn’t just blame Muslim immigration for the violence, he specifically suggested that the victims of this atrocity were themselves violent and to blame for it. He issued a statement essentially saying that Islam is a violent religion, all Muslims were violent, and the massacre victims were ‘not armed yet’. Very many religions and ideologies, including Christianity, have their violent as well as peaceful aspects, and Islam is no different. At times it has expanded through military conquest and at others through peaceful preaching and simply commercial interaction. It’s believed that Islam spread into sub-Saharan African, for example, through merchants, and that many of the African peoples, who adopted it did so because the majlis, or assembly of religious scholars, offered a constitutional check to the power of the kings. It’s also obviously untrue that Muslims are violent, as clearly shown by the peaceful behaviour of the vast majority. And Anning’s statement about the victims of the massacre is both wrong and obscene. They weren’t armed at all, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that they were going to be.
Kevin Logan dealt with this lie in his livestream he did with feminist professor Kristi Winters. It’s on YouTube, entitled ‘We Love You Kiwis’. I haven’t reblogged it, because it’s over an hour long and Logan, as an internet atheist, makes a series of gratuitous attacks on Christianity. But on a more positive note, he did post this video celebrating Anning’s nemesis. Enjoy!
Warning: Contains language.
Margolis’ article is also interesting for how she describes the attack on Corbyn. She repeats the falsehood that he was hit with an egg – he wasn’t. He was punched in the head. But she admits he was attacked by a racist. Which is interesting, as this is a tacit admission that Corbyn isn’t. And if he isn’t a racist, he can’t be an anti-Semite, by definition. But I doubt you’ll find the I going that far to buck the anti-Semitism witch-hunt against Labour.
My drawing of Boris Johnson, who seems to have been in some pain. Make up your own jokes.
Earlier today, Mike put up an audio clip of Boris Johnson, Tory MP for Henley on Thames, former editor of the Spectator, mayor of London, and frequent guest on Have I Got News For You being interviewed on the Queen’s Speech by Eddie Mair on Radio 4. Boris has got a reputation as an incompetent buffoon, based on the fact that things have gone spectacularly wrong with him in charge in public for years. Like, for example, when he tried coming down a zipline for some event, and got stuck halfway along and had to be rescued. Or when he shut himself out of his own house in front of reporters. Or when he held a press meeting for some campaign he was involved in, only to have the video go wrong, as reported in Private Eye.
This interview will most certainly not have dispelled that reputation.
Mair begins by asking Johnson about Theresa May’s comments last year about tackling various injustices. What was there in the Queen’s Speech today, about correcting the harsher treatment Blacks receive in court?
Johnson’s reply was a series a mumbled ‘ers’, followed by ‘I’ve got it here somewhere’ and rustling sounds.
So Mair moved on to his next question, which was about what plans the government may have to tackle mental health issues.
More mumbling and sounds of ignorance from Johnson, who then tried to change the subject and go back to the previous question.
At which point Mair brought him up sharp with the words, ‘No, Boris, this isn’t the Two Ronnies, where you can answer the question before last’, referring to that sketch which gently sent up Mastermind.
He then asked Boris about the contents of the Queen’s Speech in general. BoJo didn’t know, and so Mair told him. Or rather, he listed all the subjects and policies May had said she would tackle in her manifesto, which she has now discarded. 13.7 million people voted for that manifesto, said Mair. Was it right that this should now be thrown away?
More mumbling and muttering from Boris, who blustered something about ‘changed circumstances’.
Along with the clip, Mike has also put up some of the responses to it on social media, including those of the Labour politicos John Prescott and Chuka Umunna, and the left-wing writer and journo, Owen Jones. All of them make the point that this was a dreadful interview, comparable to that of Diane Abbott a few weeks ago. This resulted in Abbott being ridiculed across the media. Now Boris has given a similarly bad one, so will he get the same treatment?
No surprise there. The French Philosophical Feline, Guy Debord’s Cat, made this point over a fortnight ago when Abbott was forced to pull out of the campaign due to ill health. People started muttering about how this showed she was incompetent, while May asked the rhetorical question if people wanted this woman as Home Secretary? La Chat Philosophique Francaise compared this to the 1970s racist campaign against the Labour party, in which voters were explicitly told that if you wanted a ‘coloured’ living next to you, you should vote for the Labour party. Or to put it crudely, ‘If you want a n***er for a neighbour, vote Labour’. He writes
In the last week or so, we’ve heard May and her Tories say “Would you want Diane Abbott as Home Secretary”? Such a question is predicated on the knowledge of the Other. The idea that the Home Office will be run not only by a woman, but a black woman is too much to bear for our crypto-racists. Better to have a white woman or a white man in charge, eh? Where are the black faces in May’s cabinet? There are none. There are a couple of Asian millionaires but no black people.
Diane Abbott has been attacked precisely because she is black and because she’s a woman. Boris Johnson is allowed to make as many gaffes as he likes and get away with it. He’s given plenty of latitude when he indulges in racism and his thuggish behaviour is regularly overlooked, even laughed off. He’s a clown, so we’re told.
He concludes
When you base your competency argument on a handful of gaffes rather than a person’s record, then you play the bully’s game. If you can’t see the obvious racism that underpins the bullying of Abbott and prefer to focus on her presumed incompetency, then you need to have a word with yourself.
Part of the issue in Abbott’s case, I suspect, is the fact that challenging racism has been a very important part of Abbott’s political career. Her parents were both working class. The Daily Mail a little while ago in an article on her claimed that she was personally embittered because she believed that her mother had been passed over for promotion because of her colour. Which is very possible, given the racism of the times.
As a result, Abbott got a reputation as someone, who was prejudiced against Whites. In the 1987 one of the Tory papers – I think it was the Scum – ran a double spread of photographs of various Labour politicians, underneath which was a quote designed to frighten all right-thinking British Thatcherites. Underneath Red Ken’s fizzog was the quotation ‘I am not in favour of the army. I am in favour of arming the working classes to guard the factories.’
And below Abbot’s was the statement ‘All White people are racist’.
This was designed to show how far left and unfit for government the Labour party was. As it stands, Ken Livingstone was in favour of workers’ control, though this was only one aspect of his views on industry and government. And as some of his Tory opponents and colleagues in London admitted, Livingstone was far from a lunatic.
I’m sure the same can be said for Abbott. The quotations from the Scum sound plausible, but that’s what effective propaganda has to be. If it sounds like lies, then people won’t believe it. And it isn’t as though the Scum doesn’t have a reputation for lying. As one of the premier organs of Thatcherite propaganda, it shares all the mendacity of the party is loudly supports.
And this is quite apart from its blatant racism. Way back at the end of the 1990s or the first years of this century, Private Eye ran an article on yet another case in which the Scum had been hauled up before the Press Complaints Commission, as was, for racism. The Eye pointed out that the wretched paper had had 19 decisions against it by the Commission for racism over the years. And that was then. Who knows what the count is now!
As for Abbott, she seems perfectly at home with Michael Portillo and Andrew Neil on The Daily Politics. I did hear a little while ago that Portillo was her baby’s godfather, though I’m not sure if this is right. If it is, it confirms that she’s fitted right in as a politician of long and distinguished standing.
Will Boris get pilloried for his dreadful performance? Of course he won’t! He’s White, pukka old Etonian establishment – the type of people, who believe that they have an unquestionable right to govern the rest of us, and who the right-wing media, including the Beeb, will support against challengers like Abbott. Or Jeremy Corbyn, for that matter, who was also ridiculed after failing to know the answer to a question posed by Woman’s Hour.
Which will just show just how biased in terms of class and race the Beeb and media are.
And for fans of classic comedy, here’s the Two Ronnies Sketch in question.
Mike over at Vox Political has put up a piece reporting that Ricky Gervaise, Dr Stephen Hawking and Mark Ruffalo, the actor, who played Dr. Bruce Banner, the alter ego of the Incredible Hulk, have all urged the public to vote Labour on Thursday.
Gervaise issued a Tweet stating he wasn’t telling people which way to vote, but it was a fact that the only way to keep the Tories out was to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
Mark Ruffalo stated that he humbly endorsed Jeremy Corbyn, as he offers people an alternative to the corporate status quo, which never ends well for people. This prompted John Prescott to Tweet ‘Hulk smash Tories’.
Indeed he would. Banner and the Hulk in the original Marvel comics were profoundly countercultural figures. The Hulk was anger incarnate, born in the radiation blast of an American nuclear test when Banner tried to save teenager Rick. And Rick was very much a ‘rebel without a cause’, a youth, who’d driven into the test zone, heedless of his own safety, because he didn’t feel society had anything for him.
While Banner was very much a square, whose girlfriend was the daughter of the commanding officer in charge of the test, the tenor of the strip was very much anti-militarist. The commanding officer hated the Hulk, and had resolved to destroy him. The Hulk, however, really only wanted to be left alone, and so one constant theme was the running battle between the Hulk and the US army. Ang Lee’s film version of the strip, which unfortunately flopped, got this part of the Hulk’s characterisation absolutely right. And in the 1970s, the anti-militarist message of the strip became stronger. In one story, for example, Banner discovered and did his best to oppose dehumanising military experiments to link soldier’s brains to battle robots, experiments that had resulted in the troopers themselves feeling robotic and mechanical.
The influence of the Vietnam War in dehumanising a generation of American young men, to turn them into ruthless monsters responsible for horrific atrocities, is shown very clearly here.
And one real-life physicist, who has also come out for the Labour party is Cosmologist Dr. Stephen Hawking. Hawking told the Independent and the Mirror that he was voting Labour, because another five years of the Tories would be a disaster for the NHS, the police and other public services.
His endorsement has been welcomed by people like Dr. Alex Gates. Hawking is best known for his book, A Brief History of Time, though his background is in Black Holes. Dr Hawking even has a variety of radiation named after him. Black Holes, or rather the Event Horizons around them, are gradually evaporating, and the radiation they give off is called ‘Hawking Radiation’.
And so Dr. Gates quipped that Hawking had spotted the Black Hole in the Tories’ NHS budget.
One space scientist, who I feel would definitely have supported Jeremy Corbyn over here and Bernie Sanders in his own country, is Dr. Carl Sagan. Older readers of this blog may remember Sagan from his TV blockbuster history of science, Cosmos, and his SF novel, Contact, which was turned into a film with Jodie Foster as the astronomer heroine, who travels through a wormhole to make contact with an alien civilisation.
I very definitely don’t share Sagan’s views on religion. He was a religious sceptic and a founding member of CSICOP. But he was also a man of the Left, who hated imperialism and militarism, and supported the burgeoning Green movement. In the 1980s he warned that a nuclear war would result in a devastating global ‘nuclear winter’ of the type created by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
It’s since been shown that this wouldn’t actually occur. But Sagan was right to press for nuclear disarmament, and absolutely right to oppose the new Cold War Reagan and Maggie Thatcher were trying to whip up against the Russians.
He was also critical of the design of the space shuttle. This was supposed to be the vehicle that would open space up to just about everyone, provided you were fit enough to stand the three Gs of acceleration into orbit. The Challenger disaster put an end to that.
Sagan informed the public that the original design for the Shuttle had been for a smaller vehicle, which would have been purely civilian and much safer and more effective. However, the American military had stopped this, because they wanted a larger vehicle to carry their spy satellites. The result was the over-engineered machine, which exploded at least twice, and whose launches had to be cancelled because of engineering problems.
Sagan died of prostate cancer in the 1990s. He was a brilliant scientist and visionary, who speculated about life on Mars and Venus, and, like Hawking, was a staunch advocate of the colonisation of space. And he was inspiration to a generation of young people to have an interest in space and science. One of the most obvious examples of this is Dr Brian Cox, who freely acknowledges Sagan’s influence.
One feels that Sagan would have firmly resisted everything Bush, Blair, and now Trump, Cameron and May have done to destroy the environment and spread carnage around the world through their wars in the Middle East, quite apart from the Trump’s administration hatred of mainstream science.
You don’t have to use Sagan’s ‘spaceship of the imagination’ to travel light years to see the immense harm Theresa May and her party have inflicted on the NHS, the public services and our national security.
And you don’t have to be a great scientist to realise that the Tories’ attacks on education – their spending cuts, privatisation of schools, and burdening students with tens of thousands in debts – will stop the country’s young people fulfilling their academic potential, regardless of the bilge they may spout about encouraging the STEM subjects.
And I think Hawking has spoken out about the dangers of May’s cuts to science funding and research.
The only party that is ready to undo all of this is Labour.
Mike put up another report on yet another disgusting assault on party democracy by the Blairites on Thursday. It’s another purge, directed at anyone who used insulting or pejorative language against other Labour members. This includes the word ‘Blairite’, whether or not the term was used correctly to mean a follower of Tony Blair, or not. This is despite the fact that there has been no notification to Labour members against the use of the term. Hundreds of Labour members have already been expelled, suspended or told they may not vote in the forthcoming leadership elections.
The bans and the censorship on which it is based are highly selective. They seem to be another attempt by the New Labour, pro-corporate, pro-austerity leadership to purge the party of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. The ban does include people like Tom Watson, and other right-wing Labour MPs and apparatchiks, who went off on a rant calling Corbynistas ‘Trotskyite dogs’, ‘rabble’, and so forth. John McTiernan has also not been expelled, despite the fact that he has threatened his detractors with violence. These expulsions are extremely one-sided.
Among the victims so far is John Dunn, the miner and member of the party for 45 years, who was thrown out because he dared to upbraid Smudger on beginning his election campaign at Orgreave, when he had done nothing to aid the miners. It also includes Jonny Will Chambers, who’s a friend and supporter of Prezza and supports Smudger, which seems to show, according to Mike, that the purge has a scattershot approach. The letters sent out to individuals telling them they’ve been purged, or the hopefuls wanting to join the party that their application has been refused, are remarkably vague. Chris Devismes, one of those, whose membership application was turned down, was refused admission because he shared ‘inappropriate content’ on Twitter. There are no further details, so it’s difficult to challenge the accusation.
Mike reports that there is already a backlash on Twitter. Prescott was annoyed about his old oppo being banned, and Rhea Wolfson is similarly unimpressed. She’s a member of the NEC, despite the attempts of the Blairite Jim Murphy, head of Labour in Scotland, to stop her, on the grounds that she had connections to that terrible anti-Semitic organisation, Momentum. Despite the fact that Momentum’s members aren’t anti-Semites, and Ms Wolfson definitely isn’t. She’s Jewish. Wolfson put this message on Twitter observing that people were being punished for social media messages they put out before joining the Labour party. Their crime was therefore not joining the Labour party before they joined the Labour party. She concluded that the party needed to show more respect to its supporters. Another member of the Twitterati, ‘Susan’, summed this up by stating that if you tweeted nice things about the Tories, you were safe. But if you tweeted anything about the parties Labour might have to work with, such as the Greens and SNP, you were out.
Mike notes that the leaflets inform their recipients on how they may appeal about their expulsion or suspension. He also advises them to contact the barrister Liz Davies, who will also try to help them. Ms Davies is at:
There is a clear stink of corruption about this purge. The aim is to prevent anybody who wants to change the current Labour status quo from ever being able to do anything about it. That is wrong.
One hopes those who still have a say in the ballot will take note of what is being done and use their votes accordingly – to restore a leader who will end the corruption, remove the people responsible and restore fairness to the Labour Party.
This latest assault on the Corbynites by the Thatcherite entryists is ironic, given that their favourite term of abuse for Corbyn supporters has been ‘Trotskyites’. When not abusing them as ‘homophobes’, ‘misogynists’ and Nazi Stormtroopers, of course. Stalin also used purges to destroy the opposition against him and to consolidate his leadership in the Russian Communist party. He began his rise to power as the party’s secretary, which was then quite a junior post. His job was to throw out undesirables like seducers, drunks and the corrupt. What nobody realised until it was too late, was that he was throwing out the supporters of the other Bolshevik factions, and replacing them with his own loyal supporters. And once in power, the purges became lethal, as millions were hauled before firing squads and sent to the gulags on the flimsiest charges. One of those was Trotsky himself, who became an ‘unperson’. He was written out of Soviet official histories, and he and his supporters were attacked and vilified in the strongest possible terms as imperialist agents, Nazi collaborators, anti-Communist saboteurs intent on destroying the Soviet Union. Trotsky himself was forced to leave the USSR, and died in Mexico, murdered by one of Stalin’s agents.
The old brute said of his tactics ‘It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes’.
And it’s exactly the same with the New Labour leadership, which seems intent on securing their hold on the party by expelling anyone, who once looked cross-eyed at Smudger, or who doesn’t believe that a party founded to support the working class should be trying to win elections by appealing to a middle class electorate on the basis of Thatcherite policies against that class. Like cutting welfare benefits, privatisation and the selling-off of the NHS.
The Blairites’ tactics are massively counterproductive. Not only has Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal massively expanded the Labour party and shown, though various local election victories that Labour is quite capable of winning a national election. It also shows the absolute contempt for democracy for which New Labour was notorious under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Their appearances before the media were carefully stage-managed, along with very carefully crafted ‘popular consultations’, where the public was very carefully selected beforehand to agree with everything the leadership wanted. The purges are part of that shameful tradition.
By carrying them out, the Blairites, or whatever they want to call themselves, are showing the public that they haven’t changed. They’re still a faction of sham democracy and a calculated indifference to the working class and the real feelings and wishes of the general public, in order to appeal to their corporate paymasters. The more they carry on with the purges and other anti-democratic charades, the more the electorate will distrust them. They have nothing to offer Britain, but Tory policies. And like the Tories, they want what Corbyn has described as a ‘zombie democracy’: a political system that preserves democratic forms, but which is in effect a corrupt corporate oligarchy, like America.
The only real alternative is to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
In the three videos below, the left-wing American comedian Jimmy Dore gives an almost line-by-line, sentence-by-sentence commentary on Blair’s speech responding to the findings of the Chilcot inquiry into the invasion of Iraq. This has found that it was indeed an illegal war; that it was launched before all the opportunities of reaching a peaceful settlement had been exhausted; that there was no proper preparation for its conclusion and the restoration of peace afterwards; and that the invasion would result in further ethnic violence, bloodshed and the involvement of Iran.
Dore calls Blair what he is: a war criminal, who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of servicemen, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and for the rise of the bloody Islamist radicals of Daesh/ISIS. But these videos shows Blair is completely unrepentant. He tries to pass the blame instead on a ‘gridlocked’ UN, which could not come to a conclusion, and baldly states, against the evidence of the Report itself, that no-one could have predicted the sectarian and ethnic chaos that would follow the invasion. Except they did. They show he was desperate to join Bush, whom Dore also calls a rightwing maniac – and that he twisted the arms of the other 40 countries, who joined the coalition. Blair challenges his opponents to make an alternative decision, for what should have been done, as Saddam Hussein was a butcher who killed his own people. What do they think would have happened if Britain and America had not done anything? Dore makes it clear that nothing would have happened. There would have been no threat, no massacres, nothing. He also attacks Blair’s assumption of moral superiority in the violence he unleashed, as if western bombs were somehow kinder than those being used by Daesh/ISIS. As if rather than blowing people up, they hugged them to death. Blair also tries to shift the blame instead onto the rise of ISIS, but they only emerged after the Iraq invasion. And Dore also quotes John Prescott, who states that the radicalisation of British Muslims is probably due to the images they see on TV of their co-religionists being killed by western troops in an illegal invasion ‘rather than that book they read’. It’s not the Qu’ran that has encouraged so many western Muslims to join ISIS/Daesh. It’s western aggression.
These are angry, impassioned videos, and rightly so. Dore shows how the British press is uniformly condemning Blair, and how Blair, despite the evidence to the contrary, still won’t accept that he was wrong. Despite Blair’s pontificating, no lessons have been learned either. He shows a clip of Hillary Clinton mouthing off about invading Iran if they don’t get into line. And Dore states that Blair cut short his speech, after he went off to a dinner of arms manufacturers. I honestly don’t know whether that piece is real or satire. Considering how so many of the politicians connected to this conflict, including the Tory leader, David Cameron are cheerfully involved with the ‘merchants of death’, I think it’s all too likely to be real. Dore makes it very clear that Blair is indeed a mass killer, who should be behind bars.
Human Resources director, Granada Group plc., which appealed against an industrial tribunal to reinstate workers sacked for going on strike after their pay was cut from £140 to £100 a week.
Member of the Low Pay Commission on the minimum wage, and the New Deal Taskforce.
Sue Clifton
Executive director, Group 4, criticised for mishandling of child offenders after escapes, bullying, riots and attacks on staff.
Advisor to the government’s Youth Justice Board on how young offenders should be handled.
Keith McCullagh
Chief executive of British Biotech. This company has been repeatedly censured by the Stock Exchange, particularly when it was revealed that it’s leading drug product didn’t work.
Chairman of the government’s Finance Advisory Group to help high-tech companies gain financial investors’ confidence.
Sir Robin Biggam
Non-executive director, British Aerospace, which sells weapons to Turkey, some of which are used against the Kurdish separatists.
Chairman of the Independent Television Commission. This revoked the license of the Kurdish satellite station Med TV because of complaints from Turkey that it gave a platform to Kurdish separatists.
Neville Bain
Non-executive director, Safeway, one of the supermarkets which was swallowing branches of the Post Office.
Made chairman of the Post Office.
Robert Osborne
Head of Special Projects division of Tarmac Plc, one of the major constructors of PFI hospitals.
Chief Executive of the Department of Health’s Private Finance Unit. In 1998, returned to Tarmac to run PFI division.
David Steeds
Corporate Development Director of Serco Group Plc.
Chief executive of the government’s Private Finance Panel.
Tony Edwards
Director of the TI Group, which owned Matrix Churchill, the company which provided machine tools to manufacture arms to the Iraqis. He is the company’s chief executive, which is engaged in 150 military operations around the world.
Head of the government’s Defence Export Services Organisation, advising the government on granting licenses to companies wishing to sell arms to different countries around the world.
Neil Caldwell
Director of PTBRO, the distributor of the government’s landfill tax money, for which it receives 10 per cent of the amount handled in administration fees.
Director of Entrust, the regulatory body supervising the distribution of landfill tax money.
Judith Hanratty
Company Secretary, BP-Amoco Plc, one of the most controversial mergers of the 1990s as it amalgamated two of the world’s biggest companies.
On the board of the Competition Commission, monitoring and regulating corporate mergers.
John Rickford
On the board of BT, which has been frequently attacked for having too great a share of the market.
On the board of the Competition Commission.
Sir Alan Cockshaw
Chairman of Construction Company AMEC
Watson Steel, part of AMEC group, won contract to build the masts and cables on the Millennium Dome.
Chairman of the government’s Commission for New Towns. Chairman of the government agency English Partnerships, which is supposed to help ensure that new developments meet public needs.
On the board of the New Millennium Experience Company, firm set up by government to supervise the millennium celebrations.
Michael Mallinson
Property of industry lobby group for property developers, the British Property Federation.
Deputy Chairman, English Partnerships.
Peter Mason
Group Chief Executive, AMEC plc. In 1997 the company was the seventh largest recipient of support from the government’s Export Credit Guarantee Department for construction work in Hong Kong.
The trade body to which it belonged, The Export Group for the Construction Industries – has lobbied against the inclusion of environmental and human rights conditions in the Export Credit Guarantee Department’s loans.
On the Export Guarantees Advisory Council, which governs the payment of government money by the Export Credit Guarantee Department. Liz Airey, a non-executive director of Amec, is another member.
Professor Sir John Cadogan
Research Director of BP.
Director-General of the Research Councils, which are supposed to fund scientific work that doesn’t have an obvious or immediate application for industry.
Sir Anthony Cleaver
Chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority Technology Plc, which oversaw the organisational changes at Dounreay. These were criticised by the Health and Safety Executive as leaving the company in a poor position to decommission the site. Some researchers believed that Dounreay was the most dangerous nuclear site in Western Europe.
Chairman of the government’s Medical Research Council, which has been repeatedly criticised for failing to provide research funds for investigating the medical effects of radiation. Also member of the government’s panel on sustainable development.
Peter Doyle
Executive director, Zeneca Group Plc. Zeneca’s a major biotechnology firm, and was the foremost developer in Britain of GM crops. The company was engaged in a ten-year deal with the John Innes Centre in Norwich to find profitable applications for biotechnology.
Chairman of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, which gives substantial funding to the John Innes Research Institute. Employees of Zeneca sit on all seven of the BBSRC specialist committees.
Member of the government’s advisory committee on Business and the Environment.
Professor Nigel Poole
External and Regulatory Affairs Manager of Zeneca Plant Science; sits on five of the taskforces set up by EuropaBio, the lobbying organisation seeking to persuade European governments to deregulate GM organisms.
Member of the government’s Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment.
Professor John Hillman
Member of the board of the Bioindustry Association, the lobbying group seeking to ‘enhance the status of the industry within government’.
Director of the government’s Scottish Crop Research Institute, charged with supervising government-funded research projects and providing the government with impartial advice on biotechnology.
Antony Pike
Director General of the British Agrochemicals Association Ltd; Managing director of Schering Agrochemicals/ AgrEvo UK Ltd.
Chairman of the government’s Home Grown Cereals Authority (HGCA), carrying out and funding research into cereal crops. It has not funded any projects aimed at improving organic cereal production.
Professor P.J. Agett
Head of the School of Medicine and Health, University of Central Lancashire. This has received support for its research from three companies producing baby milk. Agett has personally received fees from two companies producing baby milk, including Nestle. The promotion of baby milk to developing nations is one of the most controversial issues in food and nutrition.
Chair of the Department of Health’s Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy (COMA). Three other members of COMA have either directly benefited from payments from the baby milk manufacturers or belong to academic departments which have. One of those, who personally received payments was a Nestle executive.
Professor Peter Schroeder
Nestlé’s director of research and development.
Director of the government’s Institute of Food Research.
Sir Alastair Morton
Chairman of the Channel Tunnel construction consortium, Eurotunnel. This had debts of £9m.
Advised John Prescott on financing of Channel Tunnel Rail Link; Chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority responsible for advising the government on the use of significant amounts to the industry, and ensuring that rail transport gives good value for money.
Buddyhell over at Guy Debord’s Cat, has some very pertinent observations on the Tory party conference, beginning with their complete absence of democracy, their ranting smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Left, Cameron’s recruitment of Blairite Andrew Adonis, and particularly journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer’s outrage at people spitting and throwing eggs at the Tories attending the conference. The Cat’s article begins
If anyone was ever in any doubt as to the Tories’ loathing of democracy, then they need look no further than this latest conference or, indeed, previous conferences. Speaker after speaker mounted the platform to address the conference, all of whom either syruped praise on their leadership or smeared their opponents. Policies are never openly debated or voted upon at Tory Party conferences. The unspoken dictum is, as ever, “we speak and you will listen”. The Conservative Party’s members have little or no say in how their party operates or how policies are decided. It is, for all intents and purposes, a dictatorship. Is it any wonder why Tory governments act to crush democracy in this country when there is so little of it within their own party?
This conference also showed us how far into themselves the Tories have retreated since Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the Labour Party leadership, and the hundreds of thousands who have joined the party since his victory. In contrast, the Conservatives are estimated to have less than 100,000 ageing members. So watching the Tory Party conference was, for me at least, a little like witnessing the last days of the Roman Empire. Degenerate and decadent, they can only look inward and indulge themselves in a little mutual masturbation for a bit of comfort. Indeed, it could be said that the security barrier surrounding the conference centre was the physical manifestation of their bunker mentality.
This is exactly right, and it’s been well-known for decades. I can remember being told about it by members of the Socialist Society back at College. They were outraged at the way the Tories under Thatcher were making much of the division in the Labour ranks over the Militant Tendency, and contrasting it with the supposed tranquil orderliness of their own party. In fact, the Tory party has never been a democracy, and given its history, this should come as no surprise whatsoever. The Tories started out as the party of the Anglican aristocracy. The Anglican Church has since clashed with the Tories several times on important social issues. I can remember Norman Tebbit’s frothing outrage when the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, dared criticised St. Maggie of Grantham on her contempt for the poor. However, the aristocratic attitude of patrician leadership over the masses continues. The major decisions are always made in private behind closed doors. The Cat notes that the Tories are now down to a bare 100,000 members – coincidentally – or not – the numbers the Italian Fascist and Nazi party in Germany claimed they would limit the membership of their parties to in order to make them truly elitist. Part of the reason the Tory party has shrunk so massively is that the rank and file members feel that they are being shoved aside and ignored in favour of rich donors and the party leadership.
Then there’s the little matter of Cameron’s tirade against Corbyn. Corbyn has stated that he wants a united Ireland. This, apparently, is the basis for Cameron’s denunciation of him as ‘friend of terrorists’. This looks very much like a piece of grossly malicious slander.
A lot of people in the Labour party want a united Ireland. One of the reasons for this is that a lot of Labour party members are themselves, or are descended from, working class Irish Roman Catholics. Clare Short was one of these. I can remember an interview with her on Radio 4, in which she talked about her Irish working class roots, and how she had made pilgrimages to the sites deep in the Irish countryside where her descendants were forced to worship secretly when the Roman Catholic church was banned by the British. Short was a very controversial figure, notably for her campaign to ban page 3 of the Sun. She was not, however, to my knowledge a supporter of terrorism. Neither is Corbyn.
Cameron here is trying to use one of the major lies Thatcher used against the Labour party in the 1980s. Some sections of the Labour party aroused extreme controversy for supporting Irish Republicans, including talking to Sinn Fein. Thatcher, by contrast, portrayed herself as resolutely defying the terrorists with her usual posturing of Churchillian patriotism.
It was all a lie.
All the time she was declaring her firmness of resolve never to give in Irish Nationalist terrorists, she was in peace negotiations with them. In fact, the Tories had tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the Troubles under Ted Heath, but that collapsed due to the obstinate refusals of the Unionists. And when a peaceful settlement was eventually found, the impetus for it was not the shocking violence and loss of life created by terrorist atrocity after terrorist atrocity from the paramilitaries on both sides of religio-political divide. No, it was purely monetary. It was when the IRA bombed Canary Wharf. Suddenly realising that the IRA could wreck the multi-billion pound financial hub of the City of London, Thatcher and Major finally decided to stop pretending military force was the only solution and talk to the Republicans.
Let’s get this straight: for all the Tories maudlin rhetoric about the victims of the IRA, what they really cared about, what really frightened them, was the IRA might force the bankers and financiers out of the capital, thus dealing a severe blow to the financial sector that they favour so strongly. Human lives don’t count. Elite money does.
As for supporting terrorists, this is another piece of massive hypocrisy. The Cat has already published numerous pieces about the connections between the Ulster Unionist parties and the various Loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that the British secret state heavily supported the Loyalist paramilitaries, using them to gather intelligence and act as death squads against leading Republicans.
As for spitting on and throwing eggs at politicians, the Cat rebutted Hartley-Brewer’s argument by putting up footage of Edward Heath having eggs thrown at him. There was a flurry of it in the 1980s under Thatcher, mostly directed against Keith Joseph. So much so that it became a joke in the spoof Dear Bill diaries published in Private Eye. As for it being only a feature of the Left, well, not quite. Some of us can still remember the incident when John Prescott punched a young Welsh farmer. The lad had thrown an egg at him, and Prescott responded with his fists. A thuggish, but perfectly understandable reaction.
So, as the Cat’s article shows, the Tory Conference shows the elitist contempt for democracy, and the revival of the kind of lies and smears used by Thatcher. It’s the politics of desperation, although you could be forgiven for thinking that the opposite was true. The Beeb was practically falling over itself yesterday about how exciting and optimistic it all was. The female newsreader on Points West, the Corporation’s regional news programme for Bristol and Somerset, even went and declared that it was ‘bubbly’. She seemed positively overjoyed.
It’s all forced. The fact that Cameron is claiming that Corbyn is a supporter of terrorism, simply because he wants a united Ireland, is proof of that. Behind the smiles is the looming spectre of despair.
There’s been talk this week of Labour forming some kind of pact with the SNP. Some of this has come from the SNP themselves, who have been keen to show their voters that a vote for them will still leave Scotland with power in Westminster through a weakened Labour party forced into coalition with them. Sturgeon’s predecessor, Alex Salmond, was heard at one point making a joke that he was already writing Labour’s budget.
Much of this also comes from the Tories, who are trying to scare the electorate with the prospect of a Labour/SNP coalition raising taxes and breaking up the three-hundred year union between England, Wales and Scotland. This reached its most extreme point so far, when the Mail on Sunday quoted Theresa May as declaring that this was Britain’s greatest constitutional crisis since abdication.
Even the guests on Andrew Marr’s show this morning thought that this was going too far, and smacked of desperation by the Tories.
Mike over at Vox Political has this article on it, Mockery of May and the Mail: Worst crisis since when? Mike points out the irony of this headline. A coalition between the SNP and Labour, which Ed Miliband has said will not happen, is deemed by the Mail to be worse than the abdication of Edward VIII, a Nazi supporter. The same Daily Heil was that was run by a Nazi sympathiser with a hatred of Jews at the same time.
The twitterati have also found the Mail’s hysteria immensely funny, and have produced their own list of crises that are as bad or worse as the abdication. Like having to tell Jeremy Clarkson his dinner’s not ready. Or finding out that Button Moon wasn’t real. Even John Prescott cracked a joke at the paper’s expense, tweeting about how he had to eat fish and chips without vinegar.
Mike goes on to quote the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour, who said May was entitled to her opinion, but she was wrong to impugn the legitimacy of a free and fair election.
The cartoonist Gary Baker also stated that it was a good job May didn’t have real issues to deal with, like child abuse, otherwise her comments would seem puerile.
The Mail, of course, has a very long history of making hysterical claims about the effects of a Labour government. Remember how a decade ago there were reports of an asteroid out in space that was poised to smash into Earth, ending life as we know it? Private Eye spoofed the Mail by producing a mock Daily Mail headline declaring that due to the asteroid, house prices would plummet and Labour was to blame. Which pretty much describes the Mail’s fixation with mortgages, house prices and the Labour party.
Behind May’s comment there are some very sinister implications. By declaring a coalition between SNP and Labour a crisis of the same type as the abdication, as Patrick Wintour points out, she seems to imply that the results of an election between the two would be invalid. If that’s the case, then what is she implicitly suggesting? That the election result should be declared null and void? New elections held, until the ‘right’ party won, and the union was safe once again? Or perhaps she thinks that, in the event of such a coalition, Cameron, Farage and Clegg should seize power at the head of the army, and rule as a military junta? Thatcher was a big fan of General Pinochet after all, and Cameron strikes me as a man, who would just love to be Britain’s General Franco. And if the Scots ever voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence, would May then recommend that the army should be sent in to stop them seceding?
Now I don’t actually think the Tories believe any of this. It’s just rhetoric to scare the voters, just like all the scare stories in the past about Labour being really a front for the Communist party, ready to turn Britain into a Soviet satellite. Frederick Forsythe, one of Thatcher’s favourite novelists, wrote a book about that way back in the 1990s. Needless to say, Maggie liked it enormously, as it reinforced her own bonkers paranoid suspicions about the British Left.
The Soviet Union, alas for the Tories, has vanished along with the rest of the Communist bloc. And as most of the Russian oligarchs are now funding the Tories, they can’t run another Zinoviev letter scare, like they did with the Sun in 1987. So they’re reduced to running bizarre headlines like this in Daily Fail.
It’s ridiculous, but the superpatriots in the Tory party will believe it. Along with the Kippers. In a recent interview with the Scottish Herald, David Coburn, the controversial UKIP politico declared that living in Scotland was like Communist Czechoslovakia. Somehow, I can’t see anyone who really grew up in Communist Eastern Europe agreeing. Like the Czechs and Slovaks, who have come over here since their countries joined the EU.
According to the article in yesterday’s Welfare Weekly, Opinion: £30 Billion National Insurance Surplus A Kick In The Teeth For Starving Families. John Prescott writing in the Daily Mirror revealed that George Osborne had held back about £30 billion in National Insurance contributions from the NHS or the benefits system. The article states that money from NI contributions can only be spent in these areas. It cannot be spent anywhere else. The former deputy Prime Minister recommends that it should be spent on the NHS. The article in Welfare Weekly suggests that it should also be spent on benefits for people forced to rely on food banks due to delays in processing their claims, or sanctions.
One question the article does not address, which is extremely pertinent is: Why was this money not spent? Clearly, the existence of such funds gives the lie to the Tories’ claim that the funding is simply not there. Nor can they reasonably claim that they are using the money to pay off the deficit. And please see the many pieces by the Angry Yorkshireman over at Another Angry Voice, Mike on Vox Political, Alittleecon, to name but a few, who can explain why this part of the government’s aims is voodoo economics anyway.
The real reason for withholding the money, it seems to me, is simply for the government to force more people into poverty, destitution and despair. A starving populace is a compliant populace, which they feel will accept any treatment they and the big businesses they represent care to mete out.
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