YouTube Video on the Nazi Persecution of Lesbians

This is something far more serious about gays and their history. Looking through YouTube on my phone the other day I found a video on the World History Channel on the platform on the ‘Brutal Persecution of Lesbians under the Nazi Regime’. That’s the video’s title. Its subtitle was ‘rape, murder, killings’. I don’t doubt all of this is absolutely true. I haven’t seen the video and I’m not putting it up here as I think it’s a bit too harrowing. It’s also quite long at about 19 minutes 44 seconds. However, I do think it well worth mentioning. I’ve found a wealth of material about the Nazi persecution of gay men but was not aware they also persecuted lesbians. One of the history books I bought on the Nazis and the Third Reich stated that they didn’t, because they believed that it was possible for gay women to become heterosexual and so they reserved their venom and hatred for male homosexuals. This obviously shows that was not the case, and a quick search on YouTube has found other videos about the persecution of gay people of both sexes by the Nazis. While it isn’t something I want to watch myself, I thought I’d better mention it in case any of the great readers of this blog would like to know about it and watch it. And the horrors of the Nazi era naturally still colours debates over homosexuality. I can remember the concern over Thatcher’s proposed Clause 28 in the 1980s. This sought to ban the promotion of homosexuality in schools, bit with the Iron Lady’s connections to the far right there were understandably fears that this was the start of something much worse. The fascist Britain of Alan Moore’s and David Lloyd’s comic strip V for Vendetta, filmed about a decade ago now, with its imprisonment of gays among other dissidents, looked like a very real possibility.

Toby Young on the Free Speech Union and Legislation Needed to Protect Free Speech

I am very definitely not a fan of Toby Young. He’s a very right-wing Tory with nasty eugenicist views. I think he’s part of the Spectator crew and something of a sleazeball, as Hill Street Blues’ officer Mick Belcher would describe him. If memory serves me right, he was one of the people behind a proposed free university, which collapsed a few years ago. Tweezer appointed him to the body that’s supposed to represent Britain’s students, despite the fact that it’s been at least a couple of decades since he was one. He got into Private Eye a few years ago for attending a eugenics conference at one of the London universities. Along with him were members of various American far right groups, who believed that race really did define intelligence and Blacks were biologically less bright than the rest of us. They also weren’t in favour of the welfare state, for the old, old reason that it’s a waste a money supporting people who can’t fend for themselves. In other words, some of the people there could be reasonably described as Nazis.

And his attitude to women leaves much to be desired. A few years ago he managed to cause mass disgust on Twitter or one of the social media platforms by describing how he watched female MPs on TV, commenting on their busts. Back in the 90s he wrote a piece for GQ about how he had been a ‘lesbian for a day’. He then revealed in the article that he’d dressed up in drag and then decided to go trolling through New York’s lesbian bars looking for a snog. He had successfully passed himself off as gay woman in two of them, before he was discovered in a third and had to beat a hasty retreat. Or been thrown out. Whatever. This is the kind of antics many lesbians are complaining about from trans-identified men, or possibly straight men claiming to be trans. They object to clearly biological men demanding romance or sex from them because they claim to be trans. There have been transwomen giving presentations on ‘Breaking the cotton ceiling’, which means getting into lesbians’ cotton underwear. Graham Linehan, formerly the writer behind Father Ted and now an anti-Trans activist, has remarked that one of the lesbian dating sites is actually full of bearded men, who are about as feminine as he is, all claiming to be trans. Well, Tobes tried this trick decades ago. But I wouldn’t like to see him as any kind of trans pioneer.

But his Free Speech Union does have a point.

Young and the others set this up to protect people from persecution because of their views. These are mostly individuals, whose views or comments are deemed offensive because of racism, sexism, homophobia or anti-trans. He appeared on a video on GB News talking about the work the Free Speech Union had done defending two such individuals. One was a railway worker, who’d been sacked because of a comment he’d posted on social media. He lived in one of the towns up north with a large Muslim community. After the lockdown was lifted, he posted that it was a relief no longer having to live in an alcohol-free Muslim caliphate. Someone complained to the company, and he was sacked. The Free Speech Union, however, took up his case, and an industrial tribunal declared in his favour that he was a victim of unfair dismissal and awarded him damages. The second case was a Christian woman, who offended woke sensibilities by stating that the Christian ideal of marriage should be the heterosexual one of a man and woman. Now I’d say that this was perfectly correct and normal, and that holding such a view doesn’t mean that you automatically hate gays or people in same-sex marriages. I’m absolutely sure you can hold such a traditional view of marriage, while recognising that gays also have the right to marry and for their marriages to be respected. But this traditional view was too much for someone, and she suffered because of it.

Now I realise that many people do disagree with these views, and particularly with the railway worker’s comments. It is islamophobic. But that’s the point. For free speech to mean anything, it has to include offensive or unpleasant speech. Free speech that only permits approved speech whether by the authorities or the populace, is no such thing. I’m not a free speech absolutist. There have to be limits, which in my opinion includes holocaust denial, the promotion of paedophilia or which urges people to commit other crimes, like incitement to riot. I’d also include real incitement to racial hatred, though my fear is that such reasonable legislation has been broadened too far to include comments which someone simply finds offensive, rather than which genuinely threatens the safety of Blacks and other people of colour. The guy’s remark is offensive and tasteless but not, I think, really worth his job.

Young explained that the Union would like to pass legislation protecting people from being sacked for their views, if they expressed them as private individuals and not as work or representatives of a company or organisation. He also talked about getting the trade unions to back such legislation, considering that the trade unions were founded to protect workers talking about their companies’ pay and conditions. Well, it was a bit more than that. They were founded to fight for workers’ pay and conditions, but yes, opposing victimisation for one’s views is part of that.

He also proposed having a two-year limit on what could be used to attack someone from their web history. Here I definitely agree with him. There have been a number of cases where politicos, celebrities and ordinary mortals have been embroiled in scandals because of something they said online a few years ago, sometimes when they were much younger. Quite often it’s people, who’ve said something unpleasant or bigoted about people from ethnic minorities and gays, sometimes when they were very young. Private Eye has done this several times. Quite often they’ve printed pieces showing that whatever such a politician, industrialist or media figure thinks now, back in the day he or she had very different views. Sometimes very far back, like in the ’80s or ’90s. People change, and don’t necessarily hold the same views they had when they were in their teens or twenties.

But another reason I’m prepared to give such legislation my approval is because it might stop some of the persecution by the witch hunters. The stock in trade of persecutory groups like the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and David Collier and the GnasherJew troll farm is going through their targets’ internet history looking for anything they can misrepresent as anti-Semitism. They’ve done it to a lot of people, many of them Jews and firm opponents of anti-Semitism. They did it to the great Jackie Walker, a self-respecting Jew by faith and blood and a very committed anti-racist activist. Jackie had been discussing the involvement of Jewish financiers – who she explicitly stated were members of her own people – in the slave trade. This is historic fact, and Jackie, as a proper historian and academic, has produced an enormous amount of mainstream scholarship by respected and respectable historians to support it. She has also made the obvious point that these financiers were working for Christian, European kings and states, with whom the ultimate responsibility lies. Again, perfectly correct. But she left out a word, which allowed the CAAS to misrepresent her grotesquely as an anti-Semite. That, and the Jewish Labour Movement secretly recording some of her perfectly reasonable comments about commemorating other groups’ holocausts, like the slave trade, during a workshop on commemorating the Holocaust, has led to her being expelled from the Labour party and receiving the most horrific abuse.

Another victim of the witch hunters was a perfectly innocent Jewish lady in Devon. She was mentioned in an online film Mike and other Corbyn-supporting peeps appeared on promoting a documentary refuting the accusation that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. That film opened with a group of venerable rabbis in long beards, dark coats and broad-brimmed hats stating very clearly that Corbyn was no such thing. Many of the speakers, including Mike himself, were victims of the witch hunt and what looks to yours truly as gross libel. One of these wretched witch hunting groups had posted a map of the locations of anti-Semites, and this lady and her address were on it. As a result, she not only received abuse but her car was firebombed.

This is what is called ‘stochastic terrorism’.

This is the name given to the type of online activism when someone deliberately posts comments that will rile people up against a particular group or individual to the point where they may physically attack them. But the remarks that provoke and encourage the assault are carefully phrased so that the person making them can always disavow responsibility: ‘T’wasn’t anything I said, your honour. It’s nothing to do with me and I didn’t intend anything like it should happen.’ Except, of course, they did. As in my view was the case with this lady.

Toby Young is a Tory with deeply unpleasant views. But I do think the Free Speech Union has a point and deserves support.

Especially if it prevents malign witch hunters doxing innocent people, leading to attacks on them and their property.

The Social Hierarchy that Makes Prejudice towards Some Minorities More Acceptable Than Others

Way back on April 23rd, Mike also wrote an article commenting on the near complete media silence over islamophobia in the Tory party, contrasting this with the furore over the supposed anti-Semitism in Labour. Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi had appeared on Robert Peston’s programme to state that islamophobic incidents and rhetoric were almost weekly occurrences in the Tory party. The only news outlet that reported Warsi’s statement, which not even Peston himself commented on, was RT. Which shows just how much we need the Russian-owned broadcaster and supposed ‘propaganda outlet’ to correct the massive bias in our own media.

Aleesha, a Muslim female blogger and political activist, who talked about the massive increase she’d seen in Tory islamophobia, but which went unnoticed and unremarked by the media, and which no one was condemning or acting against. She discussed the vehemently islamophobic comments of the Tory MP, Bob Blackman, Zac Goldsmith’s campaign for the post of mayor of London against Sadiq Khan, and the official EU Leave campaign, which said that Europe has an ‘exploding Muslim population’.

Aleesha further asked

“Why is nobody acting? I have been blocked by Tory councillors and Tory MPs when I call islamophobia out. Why are these MPs and councillors supporting islamophobes? It makes me think that the Tory party has an actual problem with islamophobia, not to mention the dozens of times I’ve been religiously abused by Tories.

“Are we just going to ignore it? When will we give these cases the rightful outrage? Islamophobia is absolutely normalised in British politics and nobody is really doing anything about it. The silence from our politicians shows their inability to act and their legitimation/endorsement of these views. Are we going to act, or are we going to do nothing and let MPs like Bob Blackman host more extremists in Parliament?”

Mike ended his article by referring back to Baroness Warsi’s comments, and concluding that the real reason islamophobia is being ignored is because the Tories love it.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/04/23/sick-of-labour-anti-semitism-lets-talk-about-tory-islamophobia-instead/

As Mike has pointed out repeatedly, racism of all types, including islamophobia, is far more prevalent amongst the Right, including the Tories, than the Left and the Labour party. But the media aren’t commenting on it, and are playing up the supposed anti-Semitism in Labour for purely political reasons. They fear Corbyn’s Labour and its programme of ending neoliberalism, renationalising the NHS, part of the electricity grid and the railways, and restoring the welfare state. The Blairites in the Labour party and their allies in the Israel lobby also despise him, not because he is an enemy of Israel, but because he demands dignity and justice for the Palestinians. This also attacks traditional geopolitics in the region, where the West has supported Israel and Saudi Arabia against Russia and the surrounding Arab nations. As a result, the Tories, the media, the Israel lobby and the Thatcherite Labour Right, the Blairites, have all seized on the spurious allegations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and his supporters as a way of trying to unseat the Labour leader and marginalise and expel his supporters.

There are also a number of reasons why islamophobia is far also far more acceptable than other forms of racial prejudice. Colour prejudice is one factor. Most Muslims in this country are Black or Asian, and Muslims may also be seen as more foreign than other ethnic groups because historically they lay outside and beyond the European Christian mainstream. While there have been Muslim communities in parts of Europe, like Spain, the Balkans and Russia and the Baltic states since the Middle Ages, they were always marginal communities outside the European mainstream. Europe in the Middle Ages was Christendom. Muslim Spain was part of the Islamic world, as were the Muslim communities in the Balkans which were established after the region was conquered by the Muslim Turks. The Ottoman Turks were an aggressive, expansionary threat to the European Christian states up until the late 17th century. The massacres of Christians carried out by the Ottomans at the end of the 19th century, when the Greeks and Serbs fought their wars of independence, became notorious, and so contributed to this stereotype of Islam as an innately hostile threat. At the same time, the massacres carried by Christians against Muslims was little reported and did not provoke the same outrage.

There is also the legacy of British imperialism, and its conquest of part of the Dar al-Islam in the creation of negative views of Islam and its peoples, followed by the continued instability of the region after independence. The result has been that Islam and Muslims have continued to be seen as a threat completely opposed to Europe and the West. The stereotype has been reinforced by the rise of militant Islam following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Islamist terrorism and highly emotive campaigns by some Muslims in Britain, such as the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the controversy over the Satanic verses, and the marches and demands for Pope Benedict’s death after he quoted a medieval Byzantine emperor’s negative comments about Mohammed.

And added to all this is Huntingdon’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis, which stated that after the collapse of Communism, there would be an inevitable conflict between the West and Islam. Huntingdon’s idea has been taken up by very many on the right, from the Republicans in America to UKIP, the Fascist and Nazi right in Britain and Europe, and now, it seems, a very large part of our own Conservative party.

But a few years ago, one right-wing writer also offered his own views on why prejudice against some minorities was more acceptable than others. He wrote

‘Is there, in effect, an unofficial pack of equality Top Trumps cards? In egalitarian Britain, who has the best minority credentials? They could go something like this:’

He then laid his scheme of how these cards would look as follows:

LESBIANS AND GAYS
Media Connections 9
Victim Status 4
Rarity Value 3
Fear Factor 6
Political/financial clout 8

MUSLIMS
Media Connections 4
Victim Status 6
Rarity Value 4
Fear Factor 9
Political/financial clout 4

JEWS
Media Connections 9
Victim Status 8
Rarity Value 6
Fear Factor 5
Political/financial clout 10

DISABLED
Media Connections 2
Victim Status 9
Rarity Value 8
Fear Factor 1
Political/financial clout 2

GURKHAS
Media Connections 7
Victim Status 5
Rarity Value 6
Fear Factor 9
Political/financial clout 4

TRANSSEXUALS
Media connections 1
Victim Status 3
Rarity Value 10
Fear Factor 2
Political/financial clout 3.

So who was the terrible person, who compiled this league table of marginalised groups? Well, actually it was Daily Mail sketch writer Quentin Letts, in his book Bog Standard Britain: How Mediocrity Ruined This Great Nation (London: Constable 2009), pages 115 to 117. They’re in the chapter ‘Bum Rap’, where he comments on the way the vile homophobia of some Caribbean rap lyrics are apparently considered acceptable, when Lynette Burrows was reported to the cops for homophobia when she questioned on the BBC the right of male gay couples to adopt baby girls. He concluded on this issue that

… it is hard to escape the conclusion that the police leave rap music alone because it has more minority value than the gay people it so charmlessly attacks. Lynette Burrows was collared because she was an easy target and because she was one of the majority. The rappers are more frightening and they have the political Scotchguard of victimhood.

But you could use his grading of the comparative power and victim status of various minority groups to argue that anti-Semitism is far more unacceptable than other forms of racial prejudice, because Jews have a greater victim status and political and financial power. If this came from someone on the left now, they would almost certainly be libelled as an anti-Semite. But there has been no such outcry against Letts. And I hope there isn’t, because I don’t believe he has written anything anti-Semitic.

There is some truth in what he writes, as the majority of Westerners are acutely aware of the long history of persecution the Jews have suffered in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust. Jews are also generally more integrated than some other groups, and Brits have a more positive attitude towards them. Only 7 per cent of Brits in polls say they are anti-Semitic. Many leading businessmen and media figures are Jewish, though this certainly does not mean that the vile conspiracy theories that claims Jews control business and the media are anything but murderous lies. And the anti-Semitic smears of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, and the Jewish Leadership Council carry weight, because they are part of the Tory establishment.

Against this, there are still anti-Semitic attacks and harassment. Nazi groups, like the banned National Action in England and the Alternative Fuer Deutschland in Germany have made terrifying speeches calling for the murder and extermination of Jews. And many of those libelled by the Blairites, the Tories and the Israel lobby as anti-Semites are self-respecting Jews, whose only crime is that, like their gentile anti-racist friends and comrades, they support Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left.

Real, murderous anti-Semitism, like other forms of racism, still exists, and Jews have given their support to other marginalised groups suffering racial abuse in the West. The ADL, the American Jewish organisation dedicated to tackling anti-Semitism, for example, also came out in support of Muslims against Donald Trump’s immigration ban.

Thus, for a variety of historical, social and economic reasons, prejudice against some minorities, such as Jews, is far less acceptable than others, such as Muslims. But racial prejudice generally is far more common in the Tory party, and the current attacks on anti-Semitism in the Labour party has far more to do with politics than real anti-Semitism, as shown by the fact that so many of those smeared are genuinely anti-racist and Jewish.

George Galloway Challenges Daily Mail Journalist Richard Littlejohn to Boxing Match

I realise that this may not be the wisest post to put up, considering the Blairite smears against Corbyn supporters as abusive, violent extreme left-wing militants, ignoring their own vitriolic, highly abusive rants against the Corbynites and their own rhetoric of violence. In this video, Galloway challenges the right-wing columnist to a boxing match over his comments about the beating of a disabled protester, Jody MacIntyre. You may remember the incident. MacIntyre has cerebral palsy, and is confined to a wheelchair. At one of the anti-austerity demonstrations, one of the rozzers hauled him out of his chair, and beat him as he lay in the ground. Like very many people, including Mike at Vox Political, and I believe Johnny Void and the Angry Yorkshireman, the Glasgae politico was outraged. He was also highly unimpressed by Littlejohn’s comments about the incident, in which he compared MacIntyre to the character in the wheelchair from Little Britain. Galloway has considerable respect for MacIntyre, and states that he accompanied him on a trip to Syria, which is impressive for anyone, and much more so for someone with MacIntyre’s disabilities. He derides Littlejohn as ‘rancid’ and challenges him to go five rounds in a boxing ring.

This is pretty much what very many people would like to happen to Littlejohn. Littlejohn seemed to be trying to position himself as a right-wing ‘shock jock’ a few years ago. He had his own talk show on Sky, the titles of which showed him walking past a Black beggar and other unfortunates or examples of the British Left, to show how hard, heartless and right-wing he was. If I remember correctly, one of his guests on the show, who was royally outraged by his bigoted sneering, was Michael Winner.

That’s surprising, as Winner was hardly a man of the Left. But Winner always supported gay rights, going as far back as the 1960s. Winner and a couple of gay women had been invited on Littlejohn’s show to discuss homosexuality or perhaps more specifically, lesbianism. Whichever it was, Winner was outraged by Littlejohn’s treatment of the two women and his sneering towards them. There’s a clip of this, which has been shown a number of times on TV. It shows Winner standing up, bristling and almost shaking with rage, telling Littlejohn to his face that the two ladies not only agreed to appear on his show, but have also been courteous and polite, while Littlejohn has treated them with nothing but sneers and innuendo.

The comparison of MacIntyre to the Little Britain character is also invidious. A friend of mine, whose partner is severely disabled and bound to a wheelchair, told me years ago that he felt the character had done immense harm. If you haven’t watched the show, that character pretends to be bound to his wheelchair, and in an almost vegetative state. When his brother, who is also his carer, is away, the character leaps up and runs around, showing that he is perfectly fit and well. I don’t think the two writers and stars of the show were trying to smear the disabled. Unfortunately, it seems many of the public, encouraged by inflammatory articles in the press about benefit cheats and scroungers on disability benefits, have believed that the character somehow reflects reality. And so disabled people, including my friend and his partner, have been insulted and abused because of the character. Abuse and prejudice that was no doubt reinforced by Littlejohn’s article.

And so it’s great to see a bully like Littlejohn being very publicly challenged for his comments. And the challenge to a proper, refereed fight is appropriate, considering that Littlejohn clearly enjoyed the spectacle of someone else being violently assaulted. I am not encouraging anyone to assault anybody because of their comments, no matter how bigoted and obnoxious. I’m merely enjoying the spectacle of a challenge being issued to Littlejohn designed to cut him down to size for supporting violence and bullying.

Vox Political on the Part-Privatisation of Channel 4

Mike over at Vox Political has also put up a piece today about the government’s proposed partial privatisation of Channel 4 under John Whittingdale. The Torygraph has reported that the government has climbed down from privatising it fully, and instead are just looking for a ‘strategic partner’, like BT. They would also like the network to sell its offices in Westminster and move to somewhere like Birmingham. Its account should also be checked by the NAO, responsible for examining government expenditure, and they would like to change its non-profit status and see it pay a dividend to the Treasury. Mike points out that the network chiefs have taken this as stepping stone towards Channel 4’s full privatisation, and are deciding to reject it. Meanwhile, the Tories don’t want to privatise it fully, because they’ll get the same backlash from their proposals to sell off the Beeb. See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/05/10/only-part-privatisation-for-channel-4-as-tories-fear-another-bbc-style-backlash/

This is another barbarous government attack on public broadcasting in the UK. Channel 4 was set up in the 1980s to be a kind of alternative to the alternative BBC 2, and to cater for tastes and audiences that weren’t being met by the established channels. According to Quentin Letts in one of his books, Denis Thatcher thought this mean putting yachting on the sports’ coverage instead of footie, which shows the limited idea of ‘alternative’ held by Thatcher and her consort. Jeremy Isaacs, its controller, was proud of his outsider status as a Jew in the network, a status he shared with Melvin Bragg, a Northerner. He said that he wanted to put on the new, fledgling channel programmes on miner’s oral history, and performances of the great classics of Britain’s minority cultures, like the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. He also believed that people had ‘latent needs’ – there were things they wanted to see, which they didn’t yet know they did. He was widely ridiculed for his views. Private Eye gave a sneering review of the book, in which he laid out his plans and opinions, stating that all this guff about people’s ‘latent needs’ showed that he thought he knew more than they did about what people actually wanted. As for being an outsider, the Eye observed rather tartly that they were all outsiders like that now in broadcasting, swimming around endlessly repeating the same views to each other.

In fact, Isaacs was largely right. Quite often people discover that they actually enjoy different subjects and pursuits that they’re not used to, simply because they’ve never encountered them. The Daily Heil columnist, Quentin Letts, comments about the way the network has been dumbed down in one of his books, pointing out how good the networks cultural broadcasting was when it was first set up. The network was particularly good at covering the opera. I can remember they broadcast one such classical music event, which was broadcast throughout Europe, rather like the Eurovision song contest but with dinner suits, ball gowns, lutes and violins rather than pop spangle, Gothic chic, drums and electric guitars. The audiences for its opera broadcasts were below a million, but actually very good, and compared well with the other broadcasters.

As for its programmes aimed at the different ethnic minorities, I knew White lads, who used to watch the films on ‘All-India Goldies’ and the above TV adaptation of the Mahabharata. This last was also given approval by Clive James, one of the great TV critics. James noted it was slow-moving, but still considered it quality television.

The network has, like much of the rest of British broadcasting, been dumbed-down considerably since then. American imports have increased, and much of the content now looks very similar to what’s on the other terrestrial channels. The networks’ ratings have risen, but at the expense of its distinctive character and the obligation to broadcast material of cultural value, which may not be popular. Like opera, foreign language films and epics, art cinema and theatre.

Even with these changes, there’s still very much good television being produced by the network. From the beginning, Channel 4 aimed to have very good news coverage, and this has largely been fulfilled. There have been a number of times when I’ve felt that it’s actually been better than the Beeb’s. In the 1990s the Channel was the first, I believe, to screen a gay soap, Queer as Folk, created by Russell T. Davis, who went on to revive Dr Who. This has carried on with the series Banana, Cucumber, and Tofu. It also helped to bring archaeology to something like a mass audience with Time Team, now defunct. And if you look at what remains of the British film industry, you’ll find that quite often what little of it there is, is the product of either the Beeb or Channel 4 films.

And from the beginning the Right hated it with a passion. Well, it was bound to, if Denis Thatcher’s idea of alternative TV was golf and yachting, and Thatcher really wouldn’t have wanted to watch anything that validated the miners. And it was notorious for putting on explicitly sexual material late at night, as well as shows for sexual minorities, such as discussing lesbianism, when these weren’t anywhere near as acceptable as they are today. As a result, the Heil regularly used to fulminate against all this filth, and branded its controller, Michael Grade, Britain’s ‘pornographer in chief’.

And over the years, the various governments have been trying to privatise it. I think Maggie first tried it sometime in the 1980s. Then they did it again, a few years later, possibly under John Major. This surprised me, as after they privatised it the first time, I thought that was the end of it. Channel 4 had been sold off completely. It seems I was wrong. It seems these were just part privatisations. Now they want to do it again.

It struck me with the second privatisation of Channel 4 that this was an election tactic by the Tory party. Maggie had tried to create a popular, share-owning, capitalist democracy through encouraging the working class to buy shares in the privatised utilities. And for all her faults and the immense hatred she rightly engendered, Maggie was popular with certain sections of the working class. By the time the Tories wanted to privatise the Channel the second time, it struck me that they were floundering around, trying to find a popular policy. The magic had worn of the Thatcherite Revolution, Major was in trouble, and so they were trying to bring back some of the old triumphs of Thatcher’s reign, as they saw it. They needed something big and glamorous they could sell back to the voters. And so they decided to privatise Channel 4. Again.

They want to do the same now. But the fact that they’re looking for ‘a strategic partner’ tells you a lot about how things have changed in the intervening years. This is most definitely not about popular capitalism. Most of the shares held by working people were bought up long ago by the fat cats. In this area, the Thatcherite Revolution has failed, utterly, just as it has in so many others. This is all about selling more of Britain’s broadcasting industry to the Tory’s corporate backers. Much of ITV is owned by the Americans, if not all of it, and Channel 5 certainly is. What’s the odds that Channel 4 will stay British, if it too is privatised?

And so we can look forward to a further decline in public broadcasting in this country, as it more of it is bought by private, and probably foreign, media giants. Quality broadcasting, and the duty of public broadcasters to try and expand their audiences’ horizons by producing the new, the ground-breaking, alternative and unpopular, will suffer. All for the profit of the Tory party and their big business paymasters.

Vox Political: Ian Duncan Smith Whines that It’s Not His Fault Councils Can’t Manage Services Due to Cuts

More whining and self-justification for the Gentleman Ranker. Presumably he believes that it wasn’t due to him that his wretched party couldn’t mount a successful challenge to Blair.

Mike over Vox Political has posted a piece about aIDS’ latest attempt to defend himself on the subject of cuts to local councils. Doug Taylor, the leader of Enfield council, has been forced to cut youth services, blaming the decision on the cuts in local government funding from the Tories. So aIDS got on his high horse to announce that successful councils were those, which were able to manage their funding successfully without it making ‘headline news’. In other words, ‘you should be able to deal with these cuts, shut up about it.’ The Grauniad, who are carrying this story, remarked that aIDS was like his boss, David Cameron, in carrying on blissfully unaware about the cuts his government was making, despite austerity being the government’s central policy.

Mike remarks that he’s just the latest politicians to claim that the cuts aren’t his fault, just like the deaths and suffering caused by his policies in the DWP aren’t his fault.

Iain Duncan Smith: the latest MP to pretend council cuts are not his fault

Precisely. The Tories don’t like the welfare state. With the exception of the questionable support it received from the ‘One Nation’ group, they have always attacked it on the grounds that state provision supposedly weakened the individual’s will and ability to stand on his own two feet. Hence all that cobblers about ‘welfare dependency’. It all ultimately goes back to Maggie in this current political incarnation, who in turn derived it from her precious ‘Victorian values’. Instead of complaining, you’re supposed to stand straight, straighten your tie, and sing ‘God Save the Queen’, or whatever it was Cameron shouted at Corbyn when he couldn’t answer his question at the Despatch Box the other day.

And it is all about closing services through cutting funding. It’s grossly hypocritical for aIDS and Cameron to claim otherwise, when for the past half decade and more they’ve been in power, services have been cut to the bone and beyond. This was, after all, part of their wretched localism campaign, in which senior citizens and other volunteers were supposed to take over the running of certain services like libraries. It was the ‘Big Society’. Which sounds good, as it’s supposed to call to mind the American’s ‘Great Society’. Unfortunately, this was the American’s penny-pinching, curmudgeonly, mean-spirited little brother. Rather like the people, who dreamed it up in fact.

The real cause of Tory fury here, is not that services are being cut – that’s always been the plan – but that they’re getting the blame. And that would never do. It would stop them getting re-elected. And so they have to find someone else to blame. It used to be ‘high spending Labour councils’ giving money to anti-racist activists, Blacks and lesbians. They can’t quite make that stick this time round, and certainly not after Cameron’s decided he wanted to get the gay community on board. And so without an adequate scapegoat, we have aIDS throwing a tantrum, yelling that they should be able to balance their books anyway, and that it’s not his fault. Perhaps he’ll go and sulk in a corner after this.

The man’s a pathetic charlatan, who’s unable to accept responsibility for the cuts, and for the suffering he’s deliberately inflicting on the people of this country. He has never, ever been remotely fit for office, and it’s a disgrace he got anywhere near the corridors of power.

Daily Mail-the Musical! Brains and Virgin: Daily Mail Reader

Another satirical song about the Daily Mail from the not very dark at all corner of Youtube. This ditty features a voice declaiming spoof ‘Daily Mail’ opinions with a musical chorus of harp and flute. This has an ethereal beauty not unlike one of the sublime works of Dowland or the other great Elizabethan composers. Over this another voice intones ‘He’s a Daily Mail – He’s a Daily Mail reader’.

The spoof Mail opinions start off with ‘Now I’m no racist, but it’s a well-known fact that Frenchmen only smile when an animal’s in pain, before going on to contemplate single mothers, state that disabled people have no manners, the Germans are allergic to spanners, and express similar contempt for gays, asylum seekers, and women teachers. The voice declares that a friend told him a sure way to get rid of asylum seekers yourself: simply behave like an ignorant, racist git and they’ll soon leave you alone. Other opinions include the statement by the speaker that there’s a Polish couple in his road. They haven’t done anything, but they must be b*stards because everyone knows that people, who drive a blue car sleep with their mothers. Also, lesbians wear dungarees to stop their intestines falling out. The factoids are clearly spoof, but the prejudices on which they’re based are very much those of the Mail. The PodDelusion in the video I posted up also noted and demolished the Mail’s hatred of the disabled, Muslims, asylum seekers, and its misogyny. Here’s the video.

The video’s address on Youtube is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2N-5-5b8nE.