Reply from Local MP Karin Smyth to Letter Against Tory NHS Privatisation

Firstly, sorry for my silence the past few days. The TV company we’re with were upgrading the network in our area and we lost internet and TV reception. The TV came back on as expected, but we still couldn’t get the internet. We had to call an engineer out and the first opportunity for one to come was today. Well, he did indeed come and fix it, so all should be up and running as usual. We hope.

Last week I put up a piece about the pro-NHS group, We Own Out, encouraging people to write to their MPs asking them to vote against the Tories’ latest wretched health bill, introducing more privatisation into the NHS. I wrote to my local MP, Karin Smyth, as requested, and got an excellent reply from her last week. Here it is.

“Thank you for your email regarding the new Health and Care Bill which was debated for the first time in the House of Commons yesterday. I voted against the Bill along with my Labour colleagues but it was passed with a large government majority. Jon Ashworth MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Health, made a very strong contribution and you can read the whole debate on the Hansard website here. There was not time for me, or more than 30 other MPs, to speak so I was unable to place on record yesterday why this legislation is such a missed opportunity which fails patients and their families in Bristol South.

Before I became your Member of Parliament I worked in the NHS and witnessed at first hand the wholesale chaos of the last reorganisation of the NHS in 2012 pursued by the then Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government. Up until that point there had been a general consensus about how to improve healthcare in our country: enhanced GP services, more care within communities to help support people closer to home and a stronger role for local government. Instead of listening to those of us within the NHS about the problems their plans would create the government simply ploughed ahead with a market and competition based system.

So now the government has accepted the almost complete failure of their last attempt and is having another go.

What they should be doing is giving new life to the NHS to enable it to fulfil the objectives set out by its founders in the pioneering post-war Labour government – high-quality healthcare, free at the point of use, fit for the modern world. But instead of a focus on improving care we have a proposals to create nothing more than a cronies charter, giving the Secretary of State huge unaccountable power to interfere in local NHS decision making with dozens of new, appointed, positions of responsibility. There is nothing to tackle the workforce crisis which means it is becoming harder and harder to recruit doctors, nurses and other staff. It is the fault of government, not hard pressed staff,  that people in south Bristol found it difficult to see a GP or were waiting for an operation even before the pandemic.  

In the coming months the Bill will be subject to line-by-line scrutiny and I expect to be part of the committee which undertakes that work. I will have a relentless focus on amending it to improve outcomes for patients and their families, through an integration of health and social care based on quality rather than cost saving or even cost cutting. I want to see effective, locally accountable and properly funded health services of which we can all be proud.

I will be updating you regularly on that work. We must all keep up the pressure on the government to make sure the National Health Service, on which we all rely, can meet our health and care needs in the 21st century.

Yours sincerely

Karin Smyth
Labour MP for Bristol South”

I’m very grateful for her reply. I’ve heard Karin speak before at local meetings of her disgust with the Tories’ privatisation of the NHS. She has said that she became an MP specifically because she felt so strongly about what they were doing to this most precious of British institutions.

I think she is a member of Labour’s right-wing, but am absolutely confident she will fight for the NHS and do exactly as she says she will about scrutinising and opposing this vile piece of legislation.

Tony Benn: Socialism Needed to Prevent Massive Abuse by Private Industry

In the chapter ‘Labour’s Industrial Programme’ in his 1979 book, Arguments for Socialism, Tony Benn makes a very strong case for the extension of public ownership. This is needed, he argued, to prevent serious abuse by private corporations. This included not just unscrupulous and unjust business policies, like one medical company overcharging the health service for its products, but also serious threats to democracy. Benn is also rightly outraged by the way companies can be bought and sold without the consultation of their workers. He writes

The 1970s provided us with many examples of the abuse of financial power. There were individual scandals such as the one involving Lonrho which the Conservative Prime Minister, Mr Heath, described as the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’. Firms may be able to get away with the payment of 38,000 pounds a year to part-time chairmen if no one else knows about it. But when it becomes public and we know that the chairman, as a Conservative M.P., supports a statutory wages policy to keep down the wage of low-paid workers, some earning less than 20 pounds a week at the time, it becomes intolerable. There was the case of the drug company, Hoffman-La Roche, who were grossly overcharging the National Health Service. There was also the initial refusal by Distillers to compensate the thalidomide children properly.

There were other broader scandals such as those involving speculation in property and agricultural land; the whole industry of tax avoidance; the casino-like atmosphere of the Stock Exchange. Millions of people who experience real problems in Britain are gradually learning all this on radio and television and from the press. Such things are a cynical affront to the struggle that ordinary people have to feed and clothe their families.

But the problem goes deeper than that. Workers have no legal rights to be consulted when the firms for which they work are taken over. They are sold off like cattle when a firm changes hands with no guarantee for the future. The rapid growth of trade union membership among white-collar workers and even managers indicates the strength of feelings about that. Not just the economic but also the political power of big business, especially the multinationals, has come into the open.

In Chile the ITT plotted to overthrow an elected President. The American arms companies, Lockheed and Northrop, have been shown to have civil servants, generals, ministers and even prime ministers, in democratic countries as well as dictatorships, on their payroll. The Watergate revelations have shown how big business funds were used in an attempt to corrupt the American democratic process. In Britain we have had massive political campaigns also financed by big business to oppose the Labour Party’s programme for public ownership and to secure the re-election of Conservative governments. Big business also underwrote the cost of the campaign to keep Britain in the Common Market at the time of the 1975 referendum. (pp. 49-50).

Benn then moves to discuss the threat of the sheer amount of power held by big business and the financial houses.

Leaving aside the question of abuse, the sheer concentration of industrial and economic power is now a major political factor. The spate of mergers in recent years in Britain alone – and their expected continuation – can be expressed like this: in 1950 the top 100 companies in Britain produced about 20 per cent of the national output. By 1973 they produced 46 per cent. And at this rate, by 1980, they will produce 66 per cent – two-thirds of our national output. Many of them will be operating multinationally, exporting capital and jobs and siphoning off profits to where the taxes are most profitable.

The banks, insurance companies and financial institutions are also immensely powerful. In June 1973 I was invited to speak at a conference organised by the Financial Times and the Investors Chronicle. It was held in the London Hilton, and before going I added up the total assets of the banks and other financial institutions represented in the audience. They were worth at that time about 95,000 million pounds. This was at the time about twice as much as the Gross National Product of the United Kingdom and four or five times the total sum raised in taxation by the British government each year. (p.50).

He then goes on to argue that the Labour party has to confront what this concentration of industrial and financial power means for British democracy and its institutions, and suggests some solutions.

The Labour Party must ask what effect all this power will have on the nature of our democracy. Britain is proud of its system of parliamentary democracy, its local democracy and its free trade unions. But rising against this we have the growing power of the Common Market which will strip our elected House of Commons of its control over some key economic decisions. This has greatly weakened British democracy at a time when economic power is growing stronger.

I have spelled this out because it is the background against which our policy proposals have been developed. In the light of our experience in earlier governments we believed it would necessary for government to have far greater powers over industry. These are some of the measures we were aiming at in the Industry Bill presented to Parliament in 1975, shortly after our return to power:

The right to require disclosure of information by companies
The right of government to invest in private companies requiring support.
The provision for joint planning between government and firms.
The right to acquire firms, with the approval of Parliament.
The right to protect firms from takeovers.
The extension of the present insurance companies’ provisions for ministerial control over board members.
The extension of the idea of Receivership to cover the defence of the interests of workers and the nation.
Safeguards against the abuse of power by global companies.

If we are to have a managed economy-and that seems to be accepted – the question is: ‘In whose interests is it to be managed?’ We intend to manage it in the interests of working people and their families. But we do not accept the present corporate structure of Government Boards, Commissions and Agents, working secretly and not accountable to Parliament. The powers we want must be subjected to House of Commons approval when they are exercised. (pp. 50-1).

I don’t know what proportion of our economy is now dominated by big business and the multinationals, but there is absolutely no doubt that the situation after nearly forty years of Thatcherism is now much worse. British firms, including our public utilities, have been bought by foreign multinationals, are British jobs are being outsourced to eastern Europe and India.

There has also been a massive corporate takeover of government. The political parties have become increasingly reliant on corporate donations from industries, that then seek to set the agenda and influence the policies of the parties to which they have given money. The Conservatives are dying from the way they have consistently ignored the wishes of their grassroots, and seem to be kept alive by donations from American hedge fund firms. Under Blair and Brown, an alarmingly large number of government posts were filled by senior managers and officials from private firms. Both New Labour and the Tories were keen to sell off government enterprises to private industry, most notoriously to the firms that bankrolled them. And they put staff from private companies in charge of the very government departments that should have been regulating them. See George Monbiot’s Captive State.

In America this process has gone so far in both the Democrat and Republican parties that Harvard University in a report concluded that America was no longer a functioning democracy, but a form of corporate oligarchy.

The Austrian Marxist thinker, Karl Kautsky, believed that socialists should only take industries into public ownership when the number of firms in them had been reduced through bankruptcies and mergers to a monopoly. Following this reasoning, many of the big companies now dominating modern Britain, including the big supermarkets, should have been nationalized long ago.

Tony Benn was and still is absolutely right about corporate power, and the means to curb it. It’s why the Thatcherite press reviled him as a Communist and a maniac. We now no longer live in a planned economy, but the cosy, corrupt arrangements between big business, the Tories, Lib Dems and New Labour, continues. Ha-Joon Chang in his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism argues very strongly that we need to return to economic planning. In this case, we need to go back to the policies of the ’70s that Thatcher claimed had failed, and extend them.

And if that’s true, then the forty years of laissez-faire capitalism ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan is an utter, utter failure. It’s time it was discarded.

Arrest of Practical Joker at Tory Conference Shows How Empty May’s Comment about Tackling Injustice Is

More Tory hypocrisy revealed by Mike over at Vox Political. Theresa May in her speech was waffling on about how she went into politics to tackle injustice, claiming it was what she ‘was in this for’. This would be a sick joke anyway. However, the events at her own speech have shown this to be another, empty lie. Simon Brodkin, alias the comedian Lee Nelson, has been arrested following his prank of handing May a P45 and saying that Boris had asked him to give it to her.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/10/04/if-theresa-may-wants-to-fight-injustice-she-should-start-with-this/

Brodkin’s committed no crime of which I’m aware. He was not violent, nor threatening. He was not a threat to security. All he did was play a practical joke. But this is too much for the security obsessed Tories, who’ve had him arrested. My guess he’ll probably be released without charge. The arrest is probably meant to be a warning to others, who might want to disrupt the solemn Tory proceedings.

But it’s a good example of the authoritarianism at the heart of the Tory party, particularly under May. May is not a good public speaker, and during her election campaign she consistently ran away from public meetings. Instead, hers were invitation-only events held behind closed doors. They were extremely stage-managed, but her lickspittles in the Beeb and right-wing press nevertheless tried to present her as a brilliant orator of Ciceronian proportions. Meanwhile, even Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Mendip Pishtaco, has complained about the excessive security and mandatory applause at the Tory conference. He stated that it was ‘unBritish’, and was something more suited to Donald Trump’s America or, more specifically, Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea.

He’s right, but Tory conventions have always been stage-managed. And I rather suspect that if the Young Master took over the Tory party, his objections to its authoritarianism would magically vanish. It seems to me quite likely that under Mogg, Tory conferences would be like those of Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Stalin. There’d be hour-long standing ovations, because the first person to stop clapping the Great Leader would be taken out and shot. Or in the case of the Tories, debagged by a pair of giggling old Etonians.

Mogg himself has voted unquestioningly for Britain to become even more authoritarian. He voted for the expansion of the surveillance state, and I think for the secret courts embraced by the Tories, their Lib Dem enablers, and which were being touted by the Blairites in the Labour party. These are courts where, for reasons of ‘national security’, you can be denied every essential part of what constitutes a fair trial. You may not know who your accuser is, and have vital evidence withheld from you or your lawyer. And instead of justice being seen to be done, the trial will be held behind closed doors away from the public. I’ve said before that it’s like something from Kafka, and the monstrous perversions of the judicial system in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia.

As for the Tories, their party exists to perpetrate gross societal injustice. Under them there has been the largest transfer of wealth upwards from the poor to the rich in post-War Britain. They have consistently voted for cut benefits, and increase indirect taxes, which hurt the poor the most, while giving tax breaks to the increased the already bloated salaries of the upper 25 per cent. And Mogg has been solidly behind this.

One of the cynical remarks about the Tories is the saying, ‘A Tory wants a fairer deal for the rich.’ This is absolutely true. And everything they’ve done since Thatcher, including May’s own government, is for this purpose. And what they consider to be a fair deal for the rich, is a massive injustice for the rest of us. Get them out.

Majority Report’s Michael Brooks Urges Brits to Vote Labour against Odious Theresa May

In this clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, the host Michael Brooks urges British voters to support Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party against the Tories and their right-wing agenda. The Majority Report is an American progressive internet news programme. Brooks notes that May has called this snap election, despite lying that she wouldn’t. He also correctly says that she’s claiming its about getting enough support for her to win a strong Brexit. However, the real reason is that the Tories are decimating Labour in the polls. In Brooks’ opinion, this isn’t because Corbyn lacks a strong left-wing programme, but because of strategic mistakes by his campaign team and his own failures in trying to get his points across.

However, Brooks also says that in this speech in the House of Commons, Corbyn is precisely right. He plays a clip showing Jeremy Corbyn attacking the Tories for standing for the rich few against the many poor, for their massive mishandling of the economy, their deliberate incompetence in running down the NHS, and for creating a situation where millions are struggling to make ends meet. The Labour leader sums up their attitude, spearing May’s pretensions to be a strong leader: ‘They are strong against the weak, and weak against the strong’.

Brooks states that’s exactly right, and also mocks May’s wails that she’s ‘strong’, and her bizarre laugh. He also states that Brits should go in for damage limitation and vote Labour, as the Tories will bring in an even harsher austerity regime, which will leave millions much poorer, all for the benefit of the rich corporations. Just as the right has done over in his homeland, America. He also recommends that people in marginal constituencies should vote Green, SNP or Liberal to stop the Tories.

He’s right about Jeremy Corbyn’s analysis of the Tories’ attitude to the poor. They are bullies, who fear and hate the weak and vulnerable, and wish to create an impoverished working and lower middle class, who will be desperate to accept any kind of work, no matter how exploitative, from their lords and masters.

I don’t agree, however, with his analysis of Corbyn’s leadership. It has not been for want of trying that Corbyn trails in the polls. He has been consistently undermined and attacked by the Blairites in Labour, and the press. Corbyn has and is campaigning much harder than May, but you won’t know about this, because the press and the biased BBC won’t report it. Similarly, you won’t hear much about his policies either, in the same way that Tony Benn’s and Ken Livingstone’s policies weren’t properly reported in the 1980s. The press than simply attacked them as dangerous Commies from the ‘loony left’, despite the fact that both were highly rational men, who very carefully considered their policies. And unfortunately it was effective. One of the books I bought on media bias begins with the description from one woman how she was told by a friend that she wouldn’t vote for Tony Benn. This was despite the fact that she shared all of Benn’s beliefs, including getting British troops out of Northern Ireland. When the lady pointed this out, and asked her friend why she wasn’t voting for him after all this, the woman replied that it was because Benn ‘was mad’. The press said so, so it has to be correct.

The press lies, and the campaign against fake news is simply the mainstream press trying to stop their competitors in the new media from spoiling their lies by telling the truth.

Brooks is also wrong when he advises people to vote Lib Dem, SNP and Green in marginal constituencies. I don’t think the Greens are strong enough electorally to be able to get an MP into parliament, even with tactical Labour votes. As for the Lib Dems, I’ve seen no indication that, if people vote for them, they won’t do what they did last time and immediately jump in bed with the Tories. I also very strongly believe that if people return to voting Labour in Scotland, not only will it strengthen the left throughout the UK, it’ll also drive the Tories finally out of Scotland completely.

Guy Standing’s Arguments against Workfare: Part 3

In addition to demolishing the government’s arguments in favour of workfare, Standing also provides a series of further arguments against it. These are that the jobs created through workfare aren’t real jobs; workfare is unjust in its treatment of the unemployed; it stops the unemployed actually looking for jobs for themselves; it lowers their income over their lifetime; it also acts to keep wages down; it keeps the people, who should be working at those jobs out of work; it’s a dangerous extension of the power of the state; and finally, it’s a gigantic scam which only benefits the welfare-to-work firms.

Workfare and Real Jobs

According to the ideas of the market economy developed by the pioneer of free trade, the 18th century philosopher Adam Smith, workfare jobs don’t actually constitute real jobs. Smith believed that the market would actually produce higher wages to entice people into performing unpleasant jobs. On this reasoning, if workfare jobs were real jobs, then they would have a definite economic value. They would be created through the operation of the market, and the workers in them would also be paid proper wages for performing them.

There are also moral problems in the definition of what constitutes a ‘real job’ that someone on workfare should have to perform. If it is defined as one paying the minimum wage, then workfare is immoral as it puts downward pressure on the wages and conditions of the people already performing those jobs, forcing them into poverty. If those ‘real jobs’ are defined as those which are dirty, dangerous, undignified or stigmatizing, and so unpopular, they would have the opposite effect of what the advocates of workfare claim – that they are encouraging people to find work.

The solution for progressive is to make the labour market act like it is supposed to act, rather than it actually does in practice. Adam Smith was quite wrong about wages adjusting upwards for unpopular jobs in a market economy. The wages provided for work should match both supply and demand, and people should not be made into commodities as workers. They should have enough economic support to be able to refuse jobs they don’t want. Instead of assuming that people need to be forced to work, there should be the presumption instead that most people actually do. It is arbitrary and ultimately demeaning for all concerned to try to identify people who are somehow ‘undeserving’. Genuine supporters of equality should want the wages in unpleasant jobs to rise, until there is a genuine supply of willing labour.

Workfare Is Unjust

Workfare unfairly penalises the unemployed. For example, in 2011 the ConDem government made the conditions imposed on benefit claimants and the penalties for avoidance under the Labour government’s New Deal even more stringent. Those performing workfare were required to work for up to thirty hours a week for 28 days. The work performed was to be that which benefited the community. Taken as wages, this meant that claimants were working at a rate of £2.50 an hour, well below the minimum wage. If they turned the job down, or didn’t complete the course of mandatory labour, they had their benefits sanctioned for three months. This was increased to six if they repeated the ‘transgression’. This is unjust, because no-one else in society is expected to work for the minimum wage except convicts in prison.

It’s also unjust in that it makes the economically insecure even more so, and takes away the way long-accepted social right to refuse to work. At the same time, it gives power over the unemployed to the state’s bureaucrats and the private outsourcing companies. Also, forced labour is offensive against human dignity and does not lead to increased person development.

Workfare Stops People Looking for Jobs

Spending thirty hours a week on workfare actually cuts down on the available time the unemployed are able to spend looking for work. P.A. Gregg, in their book Job Guarantee: Evidence and Design (Bristol: Bristol University Centre for Market and Public Organisation 2009) actually found that because of this, workfare actually stopped people from getting jobs.

Lowering Incomes over Life

Workfare is also unjust, as instead of giving people the ability to acquire a career, or jobs leading to one, it may instead lower their long-term income by keeping them in a series of low-paid, temporary work. People should have the right to decide for themselves which jobs to take and what they should do when it affects their long term prospects. If the state instead forces them to take a certain course, then it should also be required to compensate them if the course demanded is the wrong one.

Workfare Keeps Wages Low

By forcing people to take low-paid jobs, and making this a threat to force other workers also to take jobs that pay less than they would otherwise take, workfare leads to lower wages. The Labour Party in the UK declared that it was in favour of a ‘national living wage’ above the minimum. However, it then contradicted this intention by stating that those performing workfare would do so at the minimum wage. The Labour party may have meant this to stop those on workfare competing with those in paid employment, though MPs like Liam Byrne have shown themselves to be every bit as spiteful and punitive in their treatment of the unemployed as the Tories. In any case, this policy still puts on pressure to force wages downwards.

For there to be a genuine living wage, politicians should increase and strengthen the ability of the unemployed to bargain for higher wages. It is only when workers really have an effective ability to bargain that employers are either forced to pay a living wage, or decide that the job is unnecessary and the potential productivity too low. Standing concludes from this that ‘The reality is that the utilitarian mindset does not care about the precariat’.

Workfare Labour Replaces Genuine Workers

If the jobs performed under workfare were genuine and productive, it would be unfair to workers in those jobs, and to the short-term unemployed, as the government-subsidized labourers supplied under workfare would replace existing workers, or stop them hiring other unemployed people. In 2011 Tesco collaborated with the Jobcentres to create 3,000 unpaid placements for those on workfare, who would work for the company for four weeks. Homebase and Asda were also keen to use such unpaid labour. As was Poundland, which also announced that it was taking on benefit claimants, though it denied that this would affect their existing recruiting activity. Whatever those companies said, clearly their use of cheap workfare labour was replacing paid workers and stopping the unemployed from getting permanent jobs with those companies.

Kipper Councillor Says Bristol Elected Mayor ‘Looks Like Scruffy Little Asylum Seeker’

I found this story in today’s Bristol Post , ‘UKIP councillor claims George Ferguson looks like a ‘scruffy little asylum seeker’ through the Hope Not Hate site. Michael Frost, who became UKIP’s first ever councillor in Bristol, representing Hengrove, made the remark when speaking on community radio. He was on BCfm radio’s Politics Show.

He apparently said that “I think the way he presents himself, to dignitaries and places that he has to go and people he has to see, he looks like a scruffy little asylum seeker, who’s got dressed in a pound shop. I’m appalled by his appearance.”

Ferguson himself laughed off the remark, but observed that it was insulting to asylum seekers. He also said that Frost should ask himself, if foreign heads of state really thought he was that scruffy, why he got such good feedback.

Tim Malnick, a Green councillor, who was on the show with Frost, was also offended by the comment. He said he was sorry, but the metaphor of an asylum seeker as scruffy was ‘stereotypical’.

Frost apparently has responded in turn, by describing Malnick as ‘looking like an asylum seeker’.

The story can be read at: http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/UKIP-councillor-slams-George-Ferguson-looks-like/story-26438061-detail/story.html

Frost, according to the article, is also a candidate in the parliamentary elections for UKIP for north-west Bristol. Let’s hope the people there have the good sense not to elect him. He sounds utterly crass and charmless. He makes a comment he should realise would be inflammatory and seen as racist, and when he’s criticised for it, he makes the insult again.

As it stands, a lot of people in Bristol do think Ferguson is scruffy. Ferguson strides about in red trousers, including for funerals, when he adopts a ‘dark claret’ pair. Many of the people I know, especially the older generation, feel that this especially shows a lack of respect, and Ferguson should wear a more conservative colour.

The elected mayor is also far from my favourite local politician. He’s a former Lib Dem, who suddenly decided he was an independent, when it came to standing in the elections for mayor. He seems to be a supporter of all the neo-liberal twaddle about cuts, and last Christmas pushed through £90m of them. He denied that they would have much of an impact, however, and told Bristolians that we ‘shouldn’t be afraid of them.’

However I or anybody feel about Ferguson and his wardrobe, Frost was wrong to compare him to an asylum seeker. It shows the contempt for immigrants and the global poor characteristic of the Kippers. And it also shows the party’s contempt for their opponent’s views and general insensitivity when Frost repeated the insult about the Green councillor. It both shows that Frost doesn’t think he’s said anything wrong, and that he just doesn’t care if he has and has no reservations whatsoever about showing his contempt for those who do.

The ward he represents, Hengrove, is just down the road from me. It’s like Stockwood, the other area of south Bristol that John Langley, the porn star, hopes to win for the Kippers. Both areas are normal suburbs. Their populations are mostly White, but there are some Black and Asian people there.

I raised the issue of the large numbers of people voting for the Kippers in Hengrove, when Mike and I met the local Labour candidates for my part of Bristol. I was worried, as this has never been an area, which showed much support for the NF or other goons from the Fascist right. She said that from her experience of talking to people on doorsteps, the driving motivation for them voting for the kippers was job insecurity.

Presumably, the people there have, or had, bought into all that nonsense UKIP had spouted about not being like ‘LibLabCon’, and having some alternative economic views. This has led a lot of their prospective supporters to imagine that they were somehow a centrist party. I’ve even reblogged material from the Angry Yorkshireman, that showed that most of their members were almost as left-wing as Labour regarding nationalisation and state intervention.

Except that the party isn’t. It’s been described as ‘the Tories on steroids’. They are even more committed to deregulation and privatisation, including the NHS, as the Tories. They are also very firmly in favour of destroying the remaining shreds of the welfare state and basic workers’ rights like sick pay, paid maternity leave and paid holidays.

As for international relations, while they object to immigration and the EU, they have no objection to international agreements like the TTIP, which would be used to lock in the privatisation of the NHS, and allow big business to sue national governments if they pass legislation harming their profits.

Like Veolia did a few years ago when they used a similar trade agreement to sue the Egyptian government, when it raised the minimum wage for its people.

The Kippers don’t represent the workers, and they don’t represent the small businesspeople, who would lose trade if we were taken out of European Union. Any trade we did then, would have to go through the tariff barriers intended to stop the EU being flooded with cheaper produce from elsewhere in the world. Which would then also mean us.

No, the Kippers stand solely for big business, as well as racial bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-feminism and a bitter hatred of gays. And the people of Bristol are very well aware of it. I was talking to one of my uncles today about the election, and he described Farage as ‘that Britain for the Whites guy.’

Exactly. And Michael Frost’s comments bear out this image of racial hatred and intolerance. Bristol is a large, multicultural city, and hopefully the Kippers and their intolerance will not find much support on Thursday. Frost’s comments show you why they, and not asylum seekers, should be kept out.