Alex Belfield Defending Boris to Attack BBC

Alex Belfield is an internet radio host and Youtuber. He’s a ragin Conservative, and so a large number of his videos are attacks on left-wing broadcasters and critics of the government, like Owen Jones, James O’Brien and Piers Morgan. He has also attacked Sadiq Khan, immigration, especially the asylum-seekers floating over on flimsy craft from Calais, and the recent moves to expand diversity in broadcasting. This includes Diversity’s dance routine about Black Lives Matter the Saturday before last on Britain’s Got Talent. Another frequent target of his attacks in the BBC, and at the weekend he decided to join the Conservative papers trying to get sympathy for Boris Johnson.

According to an article in Saturday’s Times, BoJob has been whining about how hard it is for him on £150,000. Not only has he been through a messy divorce, but he’s also trying to support four of his six children. I thought he himself didn’t know how many children he had. And how is it he’s only supporting four, not all of them? The article claims he’s overburdened – which is also strange. I’ve put up a piece on Russian gulag slang terms which could describe him. One of them is mankirovant, which means ‘shirker’. Because he seems to be off on his hols whenever it suits, unlike other Prime Ministers. Unlike other PMs, he also dodges working at weekends and turning up at Cobra meetings. He has, apparently, taken a cut in income and, oh, the hardship!, has to buy his own food.

Mike has put up a piece in which he, and the folks on Twitter, tear into our clown PM and give him all the sympathy he deserves: which is precisely zero. They point out that Boris’ salary is still five times more than the median wage and that people on ESA are, if they’re over 25, on less £4,000 a year. By any standard, Boris is still filthy rich.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/09/19/poorboris-uk-citizens-give-what-sympathy-they-can-to-pm-complaining-about-money/

Belfield crawled out from under whichever Tory rock he hides under to try and defend Boris. Ah, but he has to pay all the expenses required of him now that he is prime minister. Mike points out that he has a fair few those paid by the state. His current residence, No. 10, is provided by the state gratis. Also, Boris wanted the job. This isn’t like the Roman Empire, where the rich were forced to perform ‘liturgy’. This was a list held by the local authorities of everyone, who could afford to do some kind of public service to the state. This went from acting as a kind of clerk recording and filing people’s tax returns, to membership of the ordo or local council. If you were saddled with that, it meant that you had to make whatever shortfall there was between public expenditure and tax revenue up out of your own money. The pagan Roman emperors used it as one of the punishments they inflicted on Christians, apart from torturing them to death in the arena. Neither the Queen, Duke of Edinburgh, Sadiq Khan or anyone else suddenly leapt upon Boris and dragged him off to be prime minister. No-one forced him to start plotting to be head of the Tory party. He wasn’t corrupted by Cassius, as Brutus was in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. And neither Cameron or Gove, the two Boris betrayed, were Julius Caesar. Although both of them, like Boris, thought they should ‘bestride the earth like a colossus’.

Boris chose the job himself. But people on ESA and low incomes don’t choose them. They’ve had them foisted upon them by exploitative employers and a government determined to make ordinary, working people an impoverished, cowed, an easily disposable workforce.

As for the expense of having a nanny and providing for his children, well, the Tories, as Mike and his peeps have pointed out, stopped child benefit after two sprogs. The argument from the right for a long time has been that people should only have children they can afford to support. Not bad advice, actually. But it has led to the Tories and New Labour demonising those they consider as bad parents. Like Gordon Brown ranting about how ‘feckless’ they were. In the words of the old adage, ‘if you can’t feed ’em, don’t breed ’em’. But this was all right when applied to the hoi polloi. But when it hits the upper classes, somehow we’re expected to cry tears over them.

Belfield also tried defending Boris by pointing out that his salary was much less than those in many industries, including entertainment and television. And then, almost predictably, he started attacking the Beeb for the inflated pay it awards presenters like Gary Linaker. Linaker’s another of Belfield’s bete noirs. Linaker has made various left-wing remarks on Twitter and has said he’ll take into his house some of the asylum seekers coming across from France. Which has sent Tories like Belfield into a fearful bate, as Molesworth used to sa.

Now the pay earned by prime ministers is lower than many of those in industry. It always has been. I can remember under Thatcher or Major there were various Tory MPs whining about how much they earned. They demanded more, much more, to boost their pay up to that of private businessmen and senior managers. The argument was that they should be paid this money, as otherwise talented professionals would go into business instead, where their talents would be properly remunerated.

It’s another argument that didn’t go down well, not least because however poorly MPs are paid, they’re still paid far more than ordinary peeps. And for a long time they weren’t paid. Payment of MPs was a 19th century reform. Indeed, it was one of the six demanded by the Chartists. Many of the Conservatives responded by giving the money to charity. I think part of the reason politicians’ pay has remained comparatively low for so long is the ethos of public service. You are meant to want to enter politics because you are serious about serving your country and its great people. You are not meant to do so because you see it as a lucrative source of income. It’s an attitude that comes ultimately from the Stoic philosophers of the ancient world and Christian theologians like St. Augustine. It became the ethos of the public schools in the 19th century through the reforms of Arnold Bennet at Rugby. Boris therefore deserves no sympathy on that score.

Now I actually do agree with Belfield that some presenters at the Beeb are grossly overpaid. But it’s not just presenters. Private Eye has run story after story in their media section reporting how production staff and the ordinary journos in the news department, who actually do the hard work of putting programmes and news reports together, have been the victims of mass sackings and cut budgerts. At the same time, executive pay has increased and the number of managers with various non-jobs have proliferated. There is, apparently, someone presiding over a department with title ‘Just Do It!’ These departments are entangled and seem to overlap, much like the Nazi administrative system. Yes, I know, another gratuitous example of Godwin’s Law. But sometimes you just can’t help yourself.

The problem is, it’s not just the Beeb. They’re just following in the tracks of business elsewhere. Here ordinary workers have been massively laid off, forced to take pay cuts and freezes, while senior executives have seen their pay bloated astronomically. The Beeb is no different from them.

And watch carefully: Belfield isn’t telling you how much leading journos and broadcasters are paid elsewhere. Like in the media empire belonging to a certain R. Murdoch, now resident in America.

The argument used by presenters like John Humphries, for example, is that they are paid what they are worth. The argument goes that if the Beeb doesn’t pay them what they want, they can go and take their talent elsewhere, and the Beeb’s competitors will. Or at least, that’s how I understand it.

But you aren’t being told how much the presenters over at Sky are on. Or indeed, what kind of pay Murdoch and his senior staff at News International trouser. And you won’t, because that could be more than a mite embarrassing. Especially as Murdoch’s British operation is registered offshore in order to avoid paying British corporation tax.

But Murdoch, and Belfield are attacking the Beeb because the Tories hate the idea of state broadcasting and its mandated ethos of impartiality. Mind you, the rampant shilling by the Corporation on behalf of the Tories and their savage, flagrantly biased attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and Labour showed that they don’t too. The Tories have also been taking Murdoch’s coin in corporate donations. From Thatcher onwards, right-wing governments – and that includes New Labour – signed a Faustian pact with Murdoch. They gave him larger and larger shares of British media and allowed him to dictate policy, in return for which Murdoch gave them publicity in his sordid empire of ordure.

That’s the real reason Belfield’s attacking the BBC.

Murdoch wants to get rid of state-funded competition and step in himself as the major broadcaster. And if he does so, you can expect nothing except propaganda and lies, which will we keep you poor and the elite even more obscenely rich.

Just like Boris Johnson and the Tories, despite his moans of poverty.

The Eugenicist Attitude to the Coronavirus: the Buck Stops with Boris

Earlier this week, I got a message from Labour leadership hopeful Lisa Nandy urging everyone to put their political differences,including trade unions and employers, and unite to tackle the current emergency. I’d agree with her, if I had faith in the current government. If I believed that Boris Johnson was a competent Prime Minister, who was also deeply concerned to protect the lives and livelihoods of everyone in this great nation. But I cannot honestly say that he is. And one of the reasons that he isn’t is that he let the government’s policy to the virus outbreak be determined by his pet polecat, Dominic Cummings. 

The Sunday Times astonished the British public last Sunday by revealing that the government’s attitude to the spread of the virus had been decided by Bojob’s favourite polecat, Dominic Cummings. And Cummings had decided that it should be tackled by allowing the British public to develop herd immunity. The virus was to be allowed to spread throughout the population, so that people became naturally immune. Biologists, doctors, and epidemiologists warned instead that this wouldn’t work. It has only ever been achieved using vaccination, and if the virus was allowed to spread, it could result in the deaths of a quarter of million people. Its victims would be chiefly the old and the already sick. Tragically, as we’re seeing now, its victims also include young, previously healthy people in their 20s and 30s. Cummings had told people privately that his chief concern was to protect the economy, and if a few old people died, too bad. It’s a disgusting attitude, and Zelo Street was exactly right in his article about it when he says that it places Cummings’ beyond the pale, and that he has to be removed and a public inquiry held afterwards.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/03/dominic-cummings-fan-hits-shit.html

Cummings’ attitude is rooted in eugenics. This views humans in very coarse, crudely Darwinian terms. For the race to improve, superior stock must be allowed and encouraged to breed. The inferior are to be weeded out through natural selection – they are either to be allowed to die through disease or their own mental and physical handicaps, or sterilised. In the 19th century, the American corporate elite advanced eugenicist arguments to prevent the government passing what would now be called ‘health and safety’ legislation. It was worse than useless to try to improve the condition of the poor with public welfare. The poor were sick and disabled not through poor working or living conditions, but simply because they were biologically unfit. Any attempt to improve their conditions would only result in the biologically inferior breeding, and so contaminating the rest of the human stock. By the 1920s, about 25 American states had passed legislation providing for the compulsory sterilisation of the disabled. The policy was enthusiastically adopted by the Nazis, who boasted that they were making absolutely no innovations. They took it to its horrific conclusion, however, with the SS’ murder of the insane and mentally handicapped in special clinics. A policy that prepared the way for the Holocaust and the wholesale murder of the Jews with cyanide gas.

And the Tories seem to be permeated through and through with eugenicist attitudes. They were forced to sack Andrew Sabisky as one of Bojob’s aides because he held similar noxious views. Toby Young, the Spectator journalist and media sleaze, lost his job on Tweezer’s board, set up to represent students, after it was revealed he was also a eugenicist. Tobes had attended conferences at University College London on eugenics, where real anti-Semites, racists and Nazis gathered. And Maggie’s mentor, the loathsome Keith Joseph, caused outrage in the 1970s when he declared that unmarried mothers were a threat to ‘our stock’.

This doesn’t mean that the Tories actively want to round up the disabled and long term sick. But it does explain their absolute complacency about 120,000 deaths or so that have occurred through their austerity, including their obstinate refusal to abandon a policy that is killing people. Cummings should not, of course, have ever been allowed to decide that the government should favour the economy at the expense of ordinary people’s lives. But as Mike also pointed out in an article he posted on Monday, the buck ultimately stops with Bojob. It was Bojob who told the British people that many of them would lose loved ones before their time, when he had not then taken the ‘social distancing’ measures he’s now been forced to adopt to slow down the virus – the closure of schools, pubs, clubs, leisure facilities and social gatherings. And so while the media talked about the Polecat’s horrendous attitude, other peeps on Twitter knew where the real culpability lay. And one woman, MrsGee, probably spoke for many when she said Johnson should resign.

Bid to blame Tory coronavirus strategy on Cummings is baloney. The buck stops with Boris

There’s no question that people’s lives should come before the economy. They were debating precisely this kind of situation in the 19th century. The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, even wrote a piece about it. In one of his plays, the leaders of a spa town are faced with a dilemma. The spa is in the grip of a cholera epidemic, but they are unwilling to close the spa down because of the income it provides the community. Perhaps we would be better governed, and our leaders had been truly prepared for this crisis, if sometime during their education they’d actually read Ibsen or seen the play performed.

But I don’t think Johnson is any too interested in modern Continental literature. He’d rather see what the classics have to say about things and compare himself to Caesar and Churchill.

IPSO and the Press Story about Princess Di’s Warning to Meghan Markle from beyond the Grave

I found another interesting snippet from Private Eye while I was looking through a pile of old copies last night, which adds a slightly different perspective Prince Harry’s decision to prosecute the press.  Harry is rightly angered at the way his and other’s phones were hacked, and it appears that one of the other victims was his mother, Princess Diana. It looks like one of those bearing responsibility for that was Piers Morgan, who was editor of the Mirror and then News of the World when it happened.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/10/prince-harry-says-they-hacked-diana.html

I’m afraid I’ve misplaced the snippet, but if anyone’s really interested, I’ll try to find it again. But it was a report on a later sent to a complainant by IPSO about an article published in one of the newspapers. This claimed that a pair of ‘psychic twins’ had been contacted by the late Lady Di, who had given them warning from her to be given to Meghan Markle. If the Eye’s account is correct, it was deeply tasteless story. I’m not a sceptic regarding life after death and the possibility of the dead contacting the living, but this is right up there with some of the nonsense spread by mediums like the late Doris Stokes in her prime. And the various celebrity mediums, who’ve come out with messages from everybody from Henry VIII, Julius Caesar and Queen Victoria. It’s nonsense. The person, who complained to IPSO about it apparently objected to it because these claims were being reported as fact. IPSO stated that they decided that it had not. The article had included plenty of terms indicating neutrality towards the truth of the twins’ claim, like ‘perhaps’, and indicated that they were only reporting what they claimed through statements like ‘they said’. And so IPSO turned the complaint down.

The article didn’t say, who had complained to IPSO, carefully preserving their anonymity. And it could have been anyone. Princess Di may be over twenty years’ dead, but she still has her fans. Just as Meghan Markle and Harry also have their admirers amongst the general public, quite apart from their personal friends.

I was never a fan of Princess Diana. She did some good as Prince Charles’ consort, notably in her campaign against landmines. But she was also adept at manipulating the press, and her spat with Charles did diminish the general esteem of the monarchy, even if Charles was the adulterer. Nevertheless, she was killed with Dodi Fayed trying to escape the paparazzi press that followed and exploited her.

This story reminds me of comments Robbie Williams made a few years ago on a programme hosted by Jon Ronson on Radio 4. Ronson and Williams were going to a UFO and alien abductions convention in the US. When asked how he got interested in ufology, the 90s singing sensation replied that it was partly due to the rubbish he had suffered from the press about his mother. She was a medium, and so the papers had run endless stories about Williams, his mother and spooks until he was so sick and tired of it that he couldn’t read the papers. It was then that he started getting into UFOs, as something of a diversion. And on the subject of UFOs, Williams sounded remarkably sensible and grounded. When asked about some of the absurdities of the alien abduction phenomenon and Indigo Children – supposedly aliens incarnated as children to guide us here on Earth – he simply replied that he didn’t believe it or disbelieve it.

You can well understand why Williams would be upset with the press stories about himself and his mother. Just as it would be no mystery to anyone if Harry was upset about similar stories about his own mother and wife. Lady Di was certainly no angel, but she was hounded to her death by the papers. And the papers have been attacking Meghan Markle, with more than an undercurrent of racism beneath. How dare this American woman of colour marry a royal! And anyone would be annoyed at the press for hacking their and their family’s phones.

I therefore have every sympathy for Prince Harry’s decision, and wish him the very best in his suit against the press, particularly Rupert Murdoch and Piers Morgan. I’m sure that many Conservatives will too. I know one, who hated the Sun despite its right-wing bias, because it had taken every opportunity to exploit and run down the monarchy. It looks like now one of the royals is biting back. 

 

 

Jacob Rees-Mogg and Tory Self-Delusions

I found this little gem in the ‘Pseud’s Corner’ column of an old copy of Private Eye. Amid the usual, very pseudish remarks from football pundits and cookery writers comparing that last goal by Arsenal to Julius Caesar crossing the Tiber, or literary types extolling the virtues of their last excursion around the globe, where they took part in the ancient tribal ceremonies of primal peoples, was a truly astounding quote from the Young Master. This is, of course, the current darling of the Tory party, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who declared.

“I am a man of the people. Vox populi, vox dei!”

This was in response to Andrew Neil questioning him about the influence of public schools on British political life.

Rees-Mogg probably does see himself as ‘man of the people’. He’s in a party, which considers itself the natural party of government. Decades ago, the Tory ideologue, Trevor Oakeshott, tried to justify the overpowering influence of the middle classes by saying they were the modern equivalent of the barons who stood up to King John, in providing a bulwark against the power of the state. True in some case, but very wrong when the middle classes are in power, and the state functions as their servant.

Rees-Mogg has never, ever, remotely been a man of the people. He’s an aristo toff, who has made his money from investment banking. He holds deeply reactionary views on abortion and homosexuality, which are very much out of touch with those of the genuinely liberal middle and lower classes. And he has always represented the aristocracy and the rich against the poor, the sick, and the disabled. He began his political career in Scotland trying to folks of a declining fishing community that what this country really needed was to keep an unelected, hereditary House of Lords. In parliament, he has continued to promote the interests of the rich by demanding greater subsidies and tax cuts for them. For the poor, he has done nothing except demand greater tax increases on them, to subsidise the already very wealthy to whom he wants to give these tax cuts, and voted to cut welfare services and state funding for vital services. No doubt he genuinely believes all that Thatcherite bilge about making life as tough as possible for the poor in order to encourage them to work harder and do well for themselves.

Personally, he comes across as quiet-spoken, gentlemanly and polite. But he is not a man of the people. He hates them with a passion, but clearly thinks of himself as their champion and saviour against the dreaded welfare state.

Let’s prove him wrong and throw him out of parliament!

Vanessa Beeley: Britain Doesn’t Have Any Good Intentions in the Middle East

In this clip from RT, Going Underground’s host Afshin Rattansi speaks to Vanessa Beeley, a British journalist, who has covered the war in Syria. He asks her about Theresa May’s condemnation of the blockade against Yemen, which is resulting in a terrible famine that is starving about half of the population or so. Surely this shows that Britain has good intentions in the Middle East.

In reply, Beeley states very clearly that she cannot agree that Britain has any good intentions in the Middle East. Britain tried to undermine the UN Resolution 2216, which condemned the blockade. Britain’s military industrial complex has profited immensely from arms sales to Saudi Barbaria, and British specialists were in the command and control centre in Riyadh helping select targets. She openly describes May’s gesture as ‘faux humanitarianism’.

I think this is part of a rather longer interview, which I intend to put up, in which she talks about how the British and western media is deliberately presenting a false image of the corruption in the NGOs operating in Syria. One of them, the Adam Smith something-or-other, was the subject of a Panorama documentary. This revealed that massive sums of money were being taken out of the organisation by Islamist terrorist groups, through the use of payments to fictional people on the payroll, and even people, who’d died.

Beeley described this as ‘a controlled explosion’. The media and political establishment couldn’t keep it secret, and so did a limited expose of what was going on in order to divert attention from corruption and atrocities committed elsewhere. Like in the White Helmets, who are lauded as non-partisan heroes, but in fact are as partisan as everyone else. They have saved people, who aren’t members of their organisation, but this is just occasional, if they happen to be there. They don’t put themselves out of the way to do it, as is claimed on mainstream TV. Moreover, a number of their members put up posts and Tweets praising the Islamists. So definitely not the whiter-than-the-driven-snow heroes we’ve all been told. Beely made the case in that longer video that this cover up is because the White Helmets are becoming a global brand. They’re branching out in South America, Brazil and the Hispanic nations.

As for the Adam Smith whatever, I’ve had suspicions of any organisation that puts up his name ever since the Adam Smith Institute emerged under the Thatcher. These were manic privatisers, who wanted the health service sold off and the welfare state destroyed. This Adam Smith organisation isn’t connected with them, but still, I’m suspicious. It looks far too much like another wretched free enterprise group come to implement western privatisation under the guise of humanitarianism. In which case, you can expect the same results free enterprise has had on Iraq, Libya, Algeria and the rest of the Arab world. And indeed the world as a whole. I think the government of Algeria, or one of the Arab states in the Maghreb had been pursuing a socialist economy, before the recession of the 70s/80. They then followed the trend and started privatising industry. This made matters even worse, poverty grew, and people started looking to the Islamists for aid. The American-mandated free enterprise policy in Iraq after the invasion resulted in 60 per cent unemployment. This is in a poor country. Ordinary Iraqis were actually better off materially under Saddam Hussein. Hussein was a monster, without question. But they had access to free healthcare, free education, and relatively secular society in which women enjoyed a high status. They could go out to work, and felt safe going home at night.

The invasion destroyed all that. Instead you had sectarian violence, which did not exist in Baghdad previously, or if it did, it was at a much lower level than under the western occupation. You had General MacChrystal running death squads against the Sunnis. Valuable state assets were privatised and sold to American multinationals, and tariff barriers torn down so that the world and especially the Chinese dumped all the stuff they couldn’t sell on the country, driving native Iraqi firms out of business.

You can find the same wretch story in Libya. Gaddafi was a monster, but as I’ve pointed out ad nauseam he did some good things for his country. They were the most prosperous country in Africa. Gaddafi gave his people free education and healthcare. Women had high status. He was not racist, and supported Black Africans from further south. He saw himself as an African leader, and did was he thought was best for the continent. This involved using the Islamists to knock off his rivals, both in Africa and the Arab world. But they were never allowed to recruit or attack his own country.

Now there are something like two parliaments in the country, the free education and healthcare is gone, and the Islamists are running riot. The women connected with his party have been raped, and Black Africans are savagely persecuted by the Islamists. Slavery has returned, with these barbarians selling them at auctions. And this is partly motivated by hatred of Blacks for benefiting from Gaddafi’s rule.

All the claims that these military interventions are for humanitarian reasons are a lie. They’re so western industry can get its grubby, blood-stained mitts on these countries’ precious industries and natural resources. Oh yes, and they’re to help the Saudis spread their own, viciously intolerant version of Islam, and Israel to destroy possible Arab rivals and threats in the region. Plus the fact that the American military-industrial complex loathes Arab nationalism, secularism and socialism with a passion as the next worst thing to Communism. And our European leaders, Cameron, Blair, Sarko and now Theresa May have been enthusiastic accomplices, even the ringleaders, of these assaults on independent, sovereign states.

For the sake of global peace, we need to kick May out and put Corbyn in. His work for disarmament and peace was recognised last week when the International Peace Bureau in Geneva awarded him the Sean McBride Peace Prize, along with Noam Chomsky and the All-Okinawa Committee against Henoko New Bridge. But this received almost zero coverage in the lamestream media.

General Smedley Butler was right was right: War is a racket. Or to put it another way, was is business, and under neoliberalism, business is good.

I’m sick of it. Brits of all faiths and none, of all races and varieties thereof are sick of it. Americans are sick of it. But it means big bucks to the arms manufacturers and the military-industrial complex. And so Obama, who now describes himself as a ‘moderate Republican’, increased the wars in the Middle East to seven. Trump, following the demands of AIPAC and the Christian Zionist lobby, wants to start a war with Iran, if Killary and the Democrats don’t push him into a military confrontation with Putin and the Chinese first.

The people fighting and dying in these wars are working and lower-middle class young men and women. Service people of immense courage and professionalism, whose lives should not be squandered for such squalid profiteering. Old-school Conservatives in the American armed forces despised the neocons around George Dubya as Chickenhawks. They were more than happy to send American forces into countries that had never directly threatened the US. But when it came to fighting themselves, they lacked the courage they expected in others. Bush and the others had all scarpered abroad during the Vietnam War. Generalissimo Trumpo had three exemption from national service during the Vietnam War. He claimed that he had growth in one of his feet that made walking difficult. Still didn’t stop him playing college basketball though.

During the Middle Ages, kings led their armies from the front. In ancient Germanic society, that was the prime function of kings. The Romans noted there were two types of kings in the barbarian tribes that later overran them. There were hereditary religious leaders, who acted as judges. And then there were elected kings, who took charge of the tribe’s armies. They were often elected only for a single campaign. And the Roman Empire itself basically arose through the seizure of supreme power by military dictators, like Julius Caesar and then Augustus. I think the last British general, who physically led his army into battle was in the 19th century.

Would our leaders be so keen on sending good, brave men and women to their deaths and mutilation, if they had to stand there and personally lead them into battle. Shouting like Henry IV, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends!’ If they personally had to put on the heavy, cumbersome battle armour, or wear hot and unpleasant chem suits in case of a gas attack. If they themselves had to feel some of the squaddies’ natural fear of suffering a hit, of seeing their friends and comrades die, or lose limbs and other organs. If they personally saw the civilian casualties, the ordinary men, women and children driven out of their homes, or killed as ‘collateral damage’. Dying and suffering from wounds, famine, disease. If they had to face the horrors that have scarred decent, strong women and men, leaving them mental wrecks. Sights no civilised person, whether in Britain, Damascus, Cairo, New York or wherever, should ever see.

No, of course they wouldn’t. They’d run screaming to their offices to get their spin doctors to find some bullsh*t excuse why they were too valuable to fight, er, things need doing back home, terribly sorry and so forth.

Saint Augustine said in his City of God that kingdoms without justice are giant robberies. It was true when he wrote in the 5th century AD, and it’s true now. Whatever the gloss put on it by the corporatists and the religious right.

Vox Political on the Strange Disappearance of aIDS Whinging Letter about ‘Outrageous Claims’

Mike put up this story earlier today about the letter Ian Duncan Smith had written, whining about the ‘outrageous claims’ Mike and other bloggers had made about his reforms causing the deaths of the poor and disabled. It seemed for a moment it had mysteriously disappeared. In fact, this seems to have been something of a false alarm. One of Mike’s commenters, however, states that it had vanished, only to reappear on the Commons Work and Pensions website.

Iain Duncan Smith’s latest attempt to justify benefit-related deaths has disappeared from the government’s website

I’ve blogged several times about the way the Spurious Major gallops away at high speed, whenever it looks like he might have meet his opponents. The minister for chequebook genocide simply can’t stop himself. He’s hidden in laundry baskets, run out of the rear entrance in Job Centres, and spoken at early hours of the morning at Tory-run job fairs in order to avoid the angry Great Unwashed. And when he was forced to face the disabled and their carers in the public gallery in parliament at a meeting of the Commons’ Work and Pensions Committee, this mighty general in the tradition of Wellington, Mark Anthony, Julius Caesar and Henry IV, surrounded himself with armed goons.

Now it seems even cyberspace is not safe from his cowardice. He’s starting to run away from people there. Of course, the Tories have form for this kind of thing. Some of us can still remember how a paragraph in one of the papers, written by a leading Tory, which lauded the motto on the gates of Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘Work Makes You Free’, mysteriously disappeared after someone realised that it made them look like what they are: Nazis. Just that they don’t have the stormtroopers and the jackboots just yet, although no doubt aIDS is working on the forced labour camps. They’ve certainly set up their own system of secret courts, under which you may not even be told under what law you’re charged if this is deemed to be against ‘national security’. We are heading to the old Nazi strategy of Nacht und Nebel – ‘night and fog’, the mysterious disappearance of dissidents.

And like the Spurious Major, Himmler was also not nearly half as tough as he made himself out to be. When he attended an execution by firing squad, he had to be carried away, hysterical. IDS also shows that he wants to run away as from shame and personal danger as possible, even when its Virtual.

Demonstrations against Bombing Syria by Stop the War Coalition

According to the Huffington Post, there was a mass protest today in London, in streets near to Downing Street, protesting against the possible bombing of Syria.

The article begins

Thousands of people gathered in London on Saturday to protest against plans for Britain to join air strikes against the Islamic State group in Syria.

Parliament is expected to vote on the issue next week after Prime Minister David Cameron on Thursday urged action on Syria saying: “The threats to our interests and to our people are such that we cannot afford to stand aside and not to act.”

The protest was organised by the Stop The War Coalition protest movement, which is also holding a string of other demonstrations around Britain.

In a statement the group said: “The proposed vote in parliament on bombing Syria by British forces is likely to take place within the next week.

“Yet this bombing will not stop terror attacks.”

The articles at http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/28/thousands-protest-against-syria_n_8670402.html. As well as further information, there are pics of the protest and tweeted messages from some of the protesters.

I wish them well, and am convinced they’re right. Bombing Syria won’t make Britain safer. It’ll probably make us a bigger target, as the bombing radicalises the local population that ISIS haven’t yet been able to reach through their indoctrination.

I am not confident that these protests will have any effect, however. A decade ago there were a million people on the streets in Britain marching in the protest against Bliar’s plans to invade Iraq. Yet this had absolutely no effect whatsoever. Teflon Tony showed what he really thought of public opinion, took no notice and invaded anyway.

The result has been over a decade of war, bloody civil war and ethnic and religious violence in Iraq, and the emergence of ISIS to replace al-Qaeda and the Taliban as the new Islamist threat.

Bombing and invasion don’t work, but we still haven’t learned that lesson, it seems.

As for Cameron, I’m not surprised he’s bloodthirsty. When George Orwell finally gave in, stopped protesting, and went to work with the British government in preparing for the coming war with Nazi Germany, he observed that part of him was enjoying it. I don’t think he was entirely happy with that part of his personality, but he observed that the middle classes are brought up for war, and so are excited and enthusiastic about it.

Much of public school education is based around great historic war leaders, like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. Cameron is probably even now thinking of himself as the next Winston Churchill, receiving the thanks of a dutifully grateful nations in return for saving them from their darkest hour. Is that seems like a bit of far-fetched hyperbole, so is all the rubbish the Coalition has spouted from day one about how terrible the national debt is. They’ve talked about it endlessly as though Britain is experiencing a bigger crisis than the recession following the original Wall Street crash, or the Second World War. It’s nowhere near that level, but that’s been the way its been described, and the way they’ve sold their austerity programme to the electorate. Despite the fact, again, that it’s nothing like the austerity our parents and grandparents experienced in the late ’40s and ’50s to pay for the NHS.

This austerity, by contrast, is all about privatising the NHS and the welfare state to boost the profits of the rich by impoverishing everyone else. And my guess is that Cameron’s also hoping that in the wake of the Paris bombing there’ll be a wave of nationalist sentiment that will increase his support, just like Thatcher’s popularity was boosted by the Falklands victory. That bloody, needless war was over in quite a short period of time. This one looks set to drag for many more years yet.

The cycle of violence has to stop, and stop now. We have to hit and punish ISIS, but that doesn’t mean we have to bomb Syria.