It seems I’m not the only one on the left concerned about the rise of ‘wokeness’ and the detrimental effects it’s having on politics and culture. Looking for various books on Amazon yesterday I found Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke, by Umut Ozkirimli. The blurb for the book runs
‘Right now, someone, somewhere is being cancelled. Off-the-cuff tweets or “harmless” office banter have the potential to wreck lives. The Left condemns the Right and the bigotry of the old elites. The Right complains about brain-dead political correctness. In reality, both sides are colluding in a reactionary politics that is as self-defeating as it is divisive. Can the Left escape this extremism and stay true to the progressive ideals it once professed?
In this provocative book, Umut Özkırımlı reveals how the Left has been sucked into a spiral of toxic hatred and outrage-mongering, retreating from the democratic ideals of freedom and pluralism that it purports to represent. Exploring the similarities between right-wing populism and radical identity politics, he sets out an alternative vision. It is only by focusing on our common humanity and working across differences that the Left will find a constructive and consensual way back from “woke.” ‘
The potted biography for Ozkirimli states that he ‘is a Senior Research Fellow at IBEI (Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals), a professor at Blanquerna, Ramon Llull University, and a Senior Research Associate at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). He is the author of the acclaimed Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, currently in its third edition. His writings appear frequently in The Guardian, openDemocracy, Times Higher Education, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, among others.’
I remember a piece in Lobster from over a decade ago where editor Robin Ramsay attacked postmodernism and the new identity politics. He felt that it had arisen in the 1990s as a substitute for the traditional class politics of the left as it retreated and rejected traditional socialist policies. He was particularly critical of its use or promotion by Tony Blair. To be fair, I’m not sure Blair was particularly woke. I think there was more noise about multiculturalism than anything really substantial during Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. This included, if remember properly, one song which started out as standard pop but then included traditional Indian musicians and dancers along with other musicians and performers from ethnic minorities in one pop contest. But Blair is also quoted as saying that multiculturalism is a failure, and I’m quite prepared to believe that this is the old warmonger’s real view. I note that Ozkirimli doesn’t attack pluralism, just radical identity politics, which seems fair and moderate. With the Conservatives turning to cultural issues and particularly attacking ‘wokeness’ and multicuturalism, this might have some important insights into how the left can free itself from radical identity politics without succumbing to the reactionary nationalism being promoted by the Nat Cons.
Tony Greenstein is a Jewish British critic of Zionism and the state of Israel’s decade’s long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and its grotesque propaganda campaigns to stifle any criticism, no matter how mild. Tony’s put up an excellent piece about the furore over Diane Abbott’s letter to the Absurder and her suspension from the Labour party. Tony makes an excellent case that the real reason for Abbott’s suspension and the howls and denunciations against her, it hasn’t been because she’s an anti-Semite. One of the groups pushing for her expulsion from the party is the Community Security Trust, which has very deep links to Mossad and has even invited Cruella Braverman to one of its dinners. It also claims to be in the spirit of the heroic 43 and 62 Groups of Jewish ex-servicemen who took the battle to Mosley’s fascists when they tried to come back after the War. While the CST wants to bask in their reflected glory, it has done nothing to physically challenge real fascists on Britain’s streets. What many Brits will find equally shocking is the revelation that the 43 and 62 groups weren’t brought down by their Nazi enemies, but by a concerted campaign by the cops. Shocking, but unfortunately not surprising. Lobster published an article a few years ago describing how the cops frequently had sympathies with Mosley’s gang, and would refuse to arrest them. Even when they were deliberately performing openly provocative acts like publicly making the toast ‘PJ’, which stood for ‘Perish the Jews’. I want to give a fuller treatment of Tony’s article tomorrow.
But Tony has also written a book about the noxious links between Zionism and the Holocaust. He’s blogged about these links again and again, showing his encyclopaedic knowledge of this very carefully concealed part of Zionist history. The book’s Zionism During the Holocaust: the Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation. The review of it on Amazon runs:
‘”Tony Greenstein offers a comprehensive and incisive analysis of the indissoluble nexus between anti-Semitism and Zionism. This connection is exposed in its ugliest form during the Holocaust. You can trust a courageous and committed fighter against anti-Semitism, such as Tony, to guide us through this particular dark moment when Zionism and antiSemitism interacted in Europe’s darkest hour to educate us about its historical manifestations and implications for our time.”
Ilan Pappe, Professor of Middle East History, Exeter University
“This book is essential reading. Understanding the politics of the thirties and forties is essential if we are to ensure the horrors of World War Two never happen again. Tony Greenstein’s detailed reference to original sources leads to conclusions that cannot be ignored.”
Ken Loach, socialist film maker
“In this timely scholarly polemic Tony Greenstein authoritatively demystifies Zionism, convincingly depicting its long obscured and misunderstood connections with anti-Semitism, especially during its horrifying climax in the Holocaust. Essential reading for anyone that wants to understand Israel as a state built upon the premise of Jewish supremacy and sustained by a cruel apartheid regime to deny basic rights to the Palestinian people in their own country.”
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University and Chair of Global Law, Queen Mary University London
“The present book is about the entire history of this relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism. Tony’s encyclopaedic familiarity with the dispersed relevant publications and his achievement in arranging the vast material in a coherent account are second to none.”
Emeritus Professor Moshé Machover, King’s College, London University
“This is a work of remarkable historical scholarship and analysis, its subject matter is as telling and relevant today as it ever was.”
Dr Derek Summerfield, Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer King’s College, University of London
“Greenstein’s book, meticulously researched and liberally peppered with quotations from original sources, will make uncomfortable reading for anyone who feels a sneaking sympathy for Zionism”.
Dr. Susan Blackwell, Dept of Languages, Literature and Communication, University of Utrecht
“The historical relationship of Zionism with antisemitic and racist regimes and movements has been an area long neglected by normative research, influenced as it is by Zionist assumptions; this is why Tony Greenstein’s book is so crucial, further developing the pioneering work by Lenni Brenner. Greenstein work is epic in scope, shedding light on dark corners, covering an immense historical, geographic, political and discursive arena; It provides an updated, comprehensive account and evaluation of Zionism’s complex interrelation with, as well as its uses and abuses of the Holocaust.”
Professor Haim Bresheeth, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
“In this substantial, detailed and scrupulously referenced account, the history of Zionist policies and practices before, during and after the Nazi Holocaust is examined in all its awfulness. Greenstein will no doubt be vilified by predictable opponents, but he offers a powerful alternative to the way most people would think about Zionism, given its current status as beyond criticism, on pain of accusations of anti-Semitism.”
Patrick Williams, Emeritus Professor, Nottingham Trent University’
You won’t be surprised that Tony’s also been smeared as an anti-Semite and expelled from the Labour party. I also doubt you’ll be surprised by the fact that one of the figures spitting hate at Abbott is Steven Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who believes Islam is a threat to western civilisation, along with socialism and the trade unions. He and his wretched rag were among the chief figures behind the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.
This isn’t about anti-Semitism, nor anti-racism. Starmer and his faction within the Labour party aren’t remotely concerned with racism when it’s directed against Blacks, Asians and Muslims. In fact the Labour right have been credibly accused of doing it themselves. Abbott was, I believe, one of the Black MPs and activists they bullied.
This is about purging the left and critics of Israel under the false pretext of fighting anti-Semitism.
This is another headline I caught from either Mahyar Tousi, Michael Heaver or one of the other hard-right Tory vlogs. I didn’t watch the video, as it seems to me all too credible that some extremely right-wing donors to the Tories may be withdrawing their support. If you look at the comments for many videos put up by the Brexiteer hard right, you find people complaining that the Tories are high-spending ‘Consocialists’ supporting the welfare state, high tax rates and promoting un-Tory policies like diversity and the transgender craze. There is very definitely a feeling among these people that the Tories are not Conservatives, or not conservative enough. Hence they state they’re going to support Reform or one of the right-wing populist parties. You even find the ludicrous claim that somehow Sunak’s Tories are ‘Communists’, as shown by a caller to Julia Hartley-Brewer’s show. The caller confused ‘communism’ with authoritarianism, which shows how little the British public really knows about Marxism and how effective it is as a term of political abuse.
This could pose problems for the Tories, as, like Starmer’s Labour party, they’ve been ignoring their membership in favour of donors for a long time. Ordinary grassroots Tories have complained and the membership of the party has declined., so this could put a financial squeeze on them. I remember Robin Ramsay in old issue of Lobster making the point that such policies had decimated political membership in America. The number of activists in each state was tiny, perhaps as low as two or so, because the parties had ignored ordinary membership recruitment to concentrate on the interests of the donors who set up PACs to fund individual politicians. This was a decade before Corbyn over here and Sanders in America and the explosion of political activism that followed them. The observation is therefore somewhat out of date, but the point remains.
My concern is that Starmer will try to hoover up these right-wing donors for the Labour party, just as Tony Blair did when donors and Tory-supporting businessmen and news magnates, like Murdoch, switched their support from the Conservatives to Labour. Blair was already a Thatcherite infiltrator, but the funding and support of these donors helped him continue Conservative policies, as well as reward the donors and their senior executives with positions in government. As a result, actual political engagement in Britain fell. People felt disenfranchised as it seemed whatever party you voted for, you got the same policies.
I can see this easily coming back with Starmer, accompanied by the alienation and anger this caused when Blair did it.
Here’s another report on the massive failings and sheer contempt for democracy and proper political conduct by the Tories. It focuses particularly on Rishi Sunak, a multi-millionaire from the hedge funds, who’s married to a tech millionaire. He therefore has absolutely no clue about how his policies are harming ordinary, working Brits.
‘Dear David,
Rishi Sunak has now been PM for nearly six months. Hardly the fresh start we were promised, his premiership has been stained by the same non-stop cycle of scandals, investigations, and inquiries that embarrassed the country under Truss and Johnson.
The Raab inquiry; Scott Benton’s cash-for-favours scandal; Sunak paying Johnson’s legal fees; Richard Sharp and the BBC; Matt Hancock’s leaked texts; Keeping the illegal Rwanda flights plans alive. Sunak is not just trapped by the ineptitude and corruption of his predecessors – he’s completely embroiled in their insular and out of touch world.
This week, a new scandal dropped that once again calls into question Sunak’s now infamous promises for “integrity, accountability and professionalism at every level”.
The PM failed to declare shares held by his wife, Akshata Murty, in a childcare agency that will receive a big boost from the government. Sunak and his wife stand to benefit from Jeremy Hunt’s budget, which offers payments to childminders of £1200 when they sign-on to childcare agencies like Murty’s Koru Kids (mentioned by name on the UK government website).
Following on from outrage about Mrs Murty’s non-dom tax status, her financial connections to Shell and Goldman Sachs, and Sunak family ties to tax havens in the Cayman and British Virgin islands – this simply reinforces Sunak’s image as a PM completely detached from the reality most people live in. Sunak is the first PM ever to come from the world of hedge-funds and venture capital – and (probably) the first to be married to the heiress of a global tech-giant.
Sunak never fails to display how out of touch he is. Whether he’s talking about his lack of “working class friends” or admitting that he’s taken money from deprived parts of the UK, he comes across as someone that lives in an entirely different reality.
This week, we saw it again with his “Maths to 18” plans. Downing Street reportedly had to ditch their social media campaign after the only spokesperson they could find for it later claimed Sunak’s maths education plan was “short-sighted, out of touch and grossly unfair on students.”
Westminster in 2023 is like a remote islet, growing more and more distant from our real lives and instead cuddling up to oligarchs, aristocrats, and billionaires. It’s a systemic problem that can only be resolved with serious reform. Merely voting in another party without a mandate to fix it is not enough.
It’s why I’m committed to ending FPTP, enforcing a strong and binding ministerial code, seeing off Tufton Street think-tanks, fixing campaign finance law, and bringing back our human rights in full force – and Open Britain is too. It’s the only way to bring this Westminster club back down to Earth.
All the best,
Matt Gallagher Open Britain’
Robin Ramsay of the conspiracy/ parapolitics magazine Lobster has repeatedly stated that the concentration on the financial sector by Thatcher and successive governments, including Tony Blair, has seriously harmed British manufacturing. And it’s not just the working class that are being harmed by the Conservatives. I came across a video today about how Britain’s small businessmen and women were also being harmed by the Tories’ promotion of big business above everything else. I’m not surprised. Margaret Thatcher always made much of her background as the daughter of a shopkeeper, while Ted Heath had the nickname ‘the grocer’. But for a long time now small businesses have been suffering from Thatcherite policies. Blair favoured the big supermarkets over small community shops, and that has also damaged communities. Small, local shops employ more people, and so when the big supermarkets moved into an area, when these shops closed down due to the competition, unemployment in the area also rose. Big businesses are also slow to pay their suppliers, and as these may be small businesses, they’re particularly in danger of going bust. There were demands on John Major’s government, I recall, to pass legislation requiring the big companies to pay their small suppliers promptly, but this disappeared. The statement that voting in another party without a mandate for reform won’t solve the problem is quite right. Starmer seems to me to be all too ready just to carry on Blair and the Tories’ policy of benefiting the financial sector at the expense of everyone else, just as Blair did.
For ordinary working and lower middle class Brits to benefit instead, this policy has to be attacked and discarded.
Okay, we all know exactly who Paul Joseph Watson is and what he stands for. He’s the far right YouTuber and conspiracy theorist who was fellow conspiracy nutter Alex Jones’ British buddy over on Infowars before he split with him and returned to Blighty. He, along with Sargon of Gasbag and Count Dankula, brought down UKIP when they joined at the invitation of Gerald Batten. All the genuinely liberal, anti-racist members, who just hated the EU but not immigration and people of colour, complained and left, and the party imploded. But here the old adage about stopped clocks being right twice a day is probably right. And I’m going to give him his due credit.
Remember the brouhaha last year when someone blew up the Northstream pipeline or whatever it’s called, carrying Russian oil into Europe? Fingers have been pointed very firmly at Putin and Russia. But according to Watson, the American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has found instead that it was the Americans. The bombs were supposedly planted during a NATO exercise in July last year by divers, and then detonated three months later by a sonar buoy. The purpose was to increase Europe’s dependency on American oil and prolong the war in Ukraine.
I don’t believe in the conspiracy theories peddled by Infowars, stupid, tabloid tales of 4-dimensional aliens, or demons, and how Barack Obama is the antichrist and Hillary Clinton a cyborg, the Democrats are imprisoning children in pizza parlours to be raped and abused at their conventions and the rest of the nonsense. But real conspiracies do exist, and Lobster has been covering them since the magazine was founded in the 1980s. This has the ring of truth about it, especially as the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine which ousted the pro-Russian president was arranged by the American state department and the National Endowment for Democracy. And then there’s the story that the Ukrainian president was about to negotiate a peace deal until Johnson turned up to encourage them to carry on fighting. And it’s been confirmed that the Iraq invasion was about the West stealing the country’s oil. The information about the pipeline also comes from Seymour Hersh, who I think is a very well respected journalist rather than some kind of right-wing mouthpiece and fearmonger.
Watson’s therefore, in my opinion, right about this one, and also right about the way the story has been overshadowed by the reports of the Chinese spy balloons. It’s a pity that only people like him are noticing this.
Things aren’t looking good for Alex Jones, the mad Texan conspiracist theorist behind Infowars. Jones has been using his YouTube channel and website to push some very nasty conspiracy theories about how the world, and especially America, are under attack from ‘the globalists’. These are evil Communist, feminist, trans businesspeople determined to set up some kind of global one-world totalitarian superstate on behalf of evil aliens or demons or whatever. He’s pushed often dangerous nonsense about various prominent and not-so prominent politicians, organisations and ordinary people. He claimed that Barack Obama was the anti-Christ, and was going to use the laws providing for government action in emergencies to force everybody into FEMA camps to enslave Americans. Hilary Clinton was also Satanic, and was some kind of cyborg or robot, at least from the waist down. She was also impregnated with the spawn of some demon or alien or mixture of the two. Quite often this stuff was just so over the top that it’s the subject of ridicule and laughter rather than alarm, as when he claimed that they were putting stuff in the water that was turning the frickin’ frogs gay. But often it wasn’t, and the effects of his rants were dangerous and distressing to their targets. One example is when he claimed that a Boston pizza parlour contained a dungeon, in which children were being kept, to supply to leading Democrat politician to abuse. It was a complete lie, but it resulted in a gunman walking in to free the captive children. After being shown round the business and persuaded that there was no dungeon and no abused children, he put down his gun and gave himself up to the cops. It’s a mercy no-one was killed. Jones has been hit by a judgement for $1 billion in damages for libelling the parents of the schoolchildren killed in the Sandy Hook massacre. Jones had claimed that the school shooting hadn’t really occurred and had just been staged in order to provide a pretext for the government to deprive Americans of their precious guns. The grieving parents were just ‘crisis actors’. The result was years of harassment by people, who had bought this offensive nonsense. They sued, the beak has found in their favour, and now Jones is crying that he’s bankrupt as a result. ‘Oh dear. How sad. Never mind’, as Sergeant-Major Shutup from It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot Mum used to say.
Jones has published a book, in which he attacks the World Economic Forum and its leader, Klaus Schwab, now the target of right-wing conspiracy theories about shadowy organisations trying to create the one-world superstate. Private Eye reviewed it in last fortnight’s edition for 18th November to 1st December 2022. And they very definitely weren’t impressed. This is what they had to say about it
‘Toxic Schlock
The Great Reset and the War for the World
Alex Jones
According to Alex Jones, the gravel-voiced US conspiracy-monger, the world is facing a “Great Reset”. That reset is, he writes, an attempt by a shady cabal of internationalists “to achieve an unprecedented amount of control over your daily life.” To make sure he has the reader’s undivided attention, Jones warns that the whole thing “is a war to control the future of human development and capture control of the human species.”
These evil internationalists are, according to Jones, a group of technocrats and money men who have swilled around the world stage for the last 80 or so years. These evil plotters have names such as Kissinger, Rockefeller, Yuval Noah Hariri and Soros (and yes, there is an unfortunate pattern to those names. Between them, these men have spawned and sustained a new global elite, at the centre of which is the World Economic Forum at Davos.
For anyone lucky enough to be invited, Davos is essentially as piss-up0 in a posh ski resort. Jones’ view is somewhat different. The man who runs the thing, Karl Schwab, may look like a common-or-garden egghead but, we learn, he is in fact a very evil egghead, bent on global destruction. “Schwab and his Davos gang are interested in wiping out every one of the previously existing social structures that have guided the development of countries and nations,” says Jones.
He quotes from one of Schwab’s books, singling out a passing reference to “more agile forms of governance”. The phrase sends Jones into a horrified tizzy. “What are these ‘more agile forms of governance’?” he demands to know. “Summary execution by firing squad without the demand of a trial?”
The globalists have no moral centre, says Jones, and seeing as “God was the original insurrectionist”, it is up to every decent, freedom-loving citizen to stand up to the evil Davos cabal. They will take away your cars and your petrol, restrict your food supply, invent fake pandemics, lock you in your home, turn all money into digital tokens so your bank accounts can be frozen and — oh but this book is just so exhausting. So, so exhausting.
If you have not heard of the author, lucky you. A preposterous, ranting fatso, Jones is from the internet’s nether regions. Essentially a man with a website – the idiotically named “Infowars” – he’s made his reputation by parping out a vast, toxic guff-cloud of paranoid nonsense about lefty plots. This book is a distilled version of his bizarre world view, in which every government employee is a Hitler, anyone who wants to improve society is a fascist and our future will consist of “Karl Schwab, or his downloaded brain, giving us all orders from his laptop.”
Jones, then, is a maniac. As nice as it would be to pull the lever and flush him into the septic tank of history, he is not so easy to dismiss. A glimpse at the back cover of this book reveals a set of glowing endorsements. “If Alex Jones is just a crackpot,” one reads, “why are the most powerful people in the country trying to silence him?” It continues: “Maybe Alex Jones is onto something.”
That glowing endorsement comes from Tucker Carlson, the star turn on Fox News (prop: Rupert Murdoch). Jones, you see, has powerful fans who’ve noticed the sizeable, Trumpy audience he’s built. They want to keep him onside.
The quote now looks somewhat embarrassing for Carlson – and Murdoch. For years, Jones promoted a vile conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook shooting, during which 26 people were murdered, most of them small children, had been faked. The grieving parents were actors, he said, and the whole thing had been staged to justify a left-wing attack on people’s gun rights. The parents sued and won. The court ordered Jones to pay damages of $1bn. That amount could rise farther.
So Alex, it turns out, is not “onto something”, and no one in their right mind should touch him, his website or this book with a bargepole. But this deranged nonsense does serve one purpose. It is a warning. The Americans are in the midst of a culture war, stoked by odious loudmouths like Jones and his buddy Carlson. The results include an increase in social division, the 6 January Capitol riots and a delusional young man attacking Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer.
There are people in the current Westminster government and on Fleet Street, who have flirted with the culture war – some even whipping off their undies and hopping straight into bed with it. But as this book makes clear, culture war, with its “us-and-them” rhetoric, is an attack on the stuff that holds societies together. As someone once nearly said: trying to win a culture war is like to trying to win and earthquake. Britain should stay well clear.’ (p. 30).
The problem is that there are real issues threatening freedom in the west and around the world. This includes governments and big corporations harvesting personal information from the internet, including our purchases, and using electronic banking to track the way we move our money. Corporations and clandestine interest groups really do exist and attempt to lobby governments to their own ends. The conspiracy magazine Lobster has been documenting all this for years.
Jones and his nonsense points people away from these real threats and replaces them with dangerous fascistic nonsense.
In my last piece I said that Lobster’s editor, Robin Ramsey, has a background in economics and that he said in one of his pieces for the magazine that the Tories recognised long ago that trickled down economics didn’t work. They still wanted to cut spending and punish the poor for being poor while giving lots of more money to the rich. They just had to find a better pretext for it. So they started arguing for their wretched policies on grounds of morality. Now Truss has gone back to the old trickle down argument. In the recent issue of Lobster, 84, Ramsey has a piece in his ‘View from the Bridge’ column, ‘All Trussed Up’ explaining why Thatcher’s economics policies didn’t work in the way she thought they did, and even despite her best efforts, and why this means Truss’ policies will fail. He writes
‘On the day that Prime Minister Truss made her announcement about dealing with the energy crisis here, The Times (8 September) briefly mentioned (on p. 39) that the Chancellor of the Exchequer was off to the City to discuss ‘Big Bang 2’ – further deregulation of the financial services sector. Centrally, I would guess, will be a change to the rules introduced after the financial crisis of 2007-9 which increased the amount of capital the banks had to keep in reserve. In other words, financial gambling is going to be encouraged again. The central question with this new government is this: do they really believe that this warmed-over Thatcherism will work? My guess is that they do; that they have spent too long in a free marketeer intellectual ghetto to understand even the Thatcher years. They have failed to grasp that Thatcherism didn’t work on its own terms: it did not ‘cure’ inflation and did not produce more economic growth than its predecessors. Mrs Thatcher’s ‘reforms’ were possible because her government had North Sea oil revenues to pay for mass unemployment; could sell off chunks of the public sector; and, despite her best efforts to kill it, had a manufacturing base three times as big as it is now. The new government has little oil revenue; a much diminished manufacturing base; and not much of the public sector left to be sold. It will be interesting to see how long it takes them to grasp that the horse they are enthusiastically flogging is dead.’
I had this mass email from Reeves ripping apart Queasy Kwarteng’s wretched minibudget. As much as I despise her as a true-blue Blairite, who vowed Labour would be harder on the unemployed than the Tories, she is right. Especially about trickle-down economics. Robin Ramsey, the head honcho of conspiracy site Lobster, has a background in economics. He pointed out that the Thatcherites had cottoned on to the fact that trickle-down economics was rubbish, and so were trying to justify their vile economics policies with arguments about morality. Trickle-down economics was recognised as bunk long ago, so it shows how threadbare Cheeselab Truss’ policies and ideas really are. And as terrible as I find Starmer, I’d far rather have him in No. 10 than Truss or another Tory.
‘David James, last week, the Tory government laid out their budget.
And with it, they crashed the economy by handing enormous, unfunded tax cuts to those who earn millions and the very richest companies.
Because of this, working people will be paying higher prices and higher mortgage rates for years to come.
This isn’t some global issue – it happened as soon as the government stood up last Friday. They’ve damaged the UK’s reputation for good.
Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have no one to blame but themselves. This was a crisis created entirely in Downing Street, a direct result of this government’s reckless decisions.
Labour is urging the Prime Minister to bring Parliament back as soon as possible and reverse their disastrous budget.
I have been clear: there should be no return to the failed idea of trickle-down economics – the theory where you make the rich even richer and hope that somehow, some of it trickles down to the rest of us.
Labour knows that growth comes from the talents and efforts of millions of people and thousands of businesses across our country.
As a government we will make different choices. Just this week, Labour set out our plans to deliver economic growth with our Green Prosperity Plan to guarantee a fairer, greener future for all.
After 12 years of the Tories lurching from one crisis to another, Britain deserves better.
Labour is ready to deliver it.
Thank you,
Rachel Reeves, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer’
Simon Webb today went full Mosley and put up a video asking, ‘What’s wrong with Fascism?’ He wanted to make a distinction between Nazism and Fascism. Fascism, he said, had been tarnished through its association with Nazism. But if you wanted to see a benevolent regime that was Fascist in all but name, he directed you to that of the Portuguese dictator Salazar.
But it isn’t just the association with the Third Reich and its attendant horrors that has turned decent people across the world against Fascism. It’s the fact that Mussolini’s fascists were also militant imperialists responsible for brutal atrocities in the nations they conquered, as well as those committed by the various Fascist juntas in Greece, Latin America and Indonesia.
Yesterday or the day before right-wingers like Paul Joseph Watson were also celebrating the electoral victory of the right-wing coalition in Sweden’s elections over their socialist party. This coalition included with the centre right party the Sweden Democrats, a far-right outfit. They’re obviously anti-immigration, but have a very unpleasant neo-Nazi past. According to Hope Not Hate, they used to wear Nazi uniforms as late as the ’90.
I didn’t watch Webb’s video about the Swedish election, whose title said that the Swedes had turned against immigration, the Italians were waking up and when would Britain follow? Mark Pattie did, and wasn’t impressed. He writes ‘Dear God! I did watch his recent video on the Swedish election result where he said “Why can’t we have a similar party here?”- and the anti-immigration party he mentioned? Ukip, 2015? No, he mentioned the bloody National Front getting 5% of the vote in 1974. Makes me think he would vote for Britain First in the next GE.’
I remember the National Front when they goose-stepping about in the 1970s, as well as the various other Fascist and Nazi outfits like the British Movement. And they were overtly Nazi and extremely violent. Michael Collins in his book Hate describes one of the attacks he took part in on an anti-racist meeting in the local library. This had young Asian women leaping out of upstairs windows to get away from them. Monica Ali gives a fictionalised description of the gang fights between White Fascists and Asian self-defence groups in her book, Brick Lane. Just to remind people what British Fascism looked like in the 1960s and 70s, here are a few pictures from British Fascism, 1919-1985. and the W.H. Smith History of the World.
Colin Jordan, Fuhrer of the World Union of National Socialists, with his wife, the daughter of fashion designer Christian Dior.
Skinhead supporter of the NF in the 1970s
And this is what the Nazis did to the Jews, aided by their collaborators in occupied Europe.
The Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp
I don’t know about Portugal, but Franco only kept out of the Second World War because of poverty. Even so, I think he wanted to send a few token Spanish troops with the Nazis in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Not everyone who wants to cut down on immigration is a racist or Nazi. And despite the rhetoric, the BNP and NF as Fascists have a trouble hanging on to members. Lobster published a piece in the 90s which I think quoted anti-racist researchers of the movement as saying that although they boasted of having 2,000 members or more, they actually had a very high membership turnover. In reality they only had 200 or so core members. The simple reason for this is probably that people aren’t interested or sympathetic to fascist ideology. People joined not because they wanted some kind of new British reich or dictatorship, but probably simply because they wanted an end to non-White immigration. When they were subjected to the Nazi or Fascist ideology, they left. And political scientists have noted that this common in other countries with Fascist parties as well. They do better when they get rid of the jackboots, the right arm salute and the calls for a dictatorship. The Alleanzo Nazionale was formed from the Italian neo-Fascist party, the Movimiento Sociale Italiano or Italian Social Movement. But they jettisoned the Fascist paraphernalia and became instead, so they claimed, a centre-right party. As such they joined Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition with the separatists of the Liga Nord and Berlusconi’s own Forza Italia party.
Whatever people’s feelings about immigration, the majority of normal people despise Fascism and its British parties. There should be absolutely no nostalgia for these brutal thugs.
Here’s another unusual claim from Simon Webb of History Debunked about the origins of the first wave of Caribbean immigration here in the 1940s and 50s, if some of the great readers of this blog will indulge me talking about him once again. I know how he and his very right-wing views really annoy some people. This morning Webb put up a video repeating the claim once again that the Windrush migrants hadn’t been invited by the British government, but instead took advantage of the cheap cabins available on the Empire Windrush to come to Britain to seek work. He then moved from this claim to discuss the advertisements London Transport had placed in the Caribbean for men willing to work as bus drivers over here. Citing the Runnymede Commission and something they say on their website, to which he provides a link, Webb claimed that this had been done, not because Britain needed the Labour but for the benefit of the Barbadian and Jamaican authorities. At this period in the 1950s, there had been high unemployment and civil unrest in those colonies, and the British government had made the appeal for workers their to relieve the political pressure by taking the hotheads to Britain. He also stated that the West Indian nurses that came over here were intended simply to study, then go back to their own countries taking their skills with them.
I’m not an expert on immigration or immigration policy, and this occurred well before I was born. But history matters, even when some of the claims about it come from people like Simon Webb. I always understood that there was a labour shortage, and that some sort of appeal for commonwealth workers had been made. Though this wasn’t necessarily for Black workers. I therefore left this comment on the video:
‘I’ve seen several stories in the press about the appeal for West Indian workers to come to Britain. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent a decade or so ago claimed that the British government had put out such a call, but that five Labour MPs had joined the opposition in voting against it. Another version I’ve heard is that the British government had put out a call for commonwealth workers, but were expecting them to come from the White colonies like Australia, New Zealand and Canada. They weren’t expecting the mass influx of Black and Asian migrants. Is there any way to get to the bottom of these stories and see whether they’re truth or myth?’
Webb claims that the story that Caribbean immigrants were invited here is a myth created by Blacks a little while ago, and uncritically adopted by Whites because it made them feel ‘warm and fuzzy’. But from pieces like Alibhai-Brown’s in the press, it seems to me that some kind of appeal had been made. I suspect that you would have to read through a lot of books and documents looking for the truth of these claims. However, I do wonder if any of the readers or commenters here know anything about this issue and so may be able to correct or refute it.
Some of the comments to Webb’s video are interesting as personal reminiscences of meeting Caribbean immigrants and hearing from them why they came here, as well as seeing films in the Caribbean advertising for workers.
53supermojo said:
‘n 1964/5 I went to Football Matches and stood generally in the same place and by same people at every game. Amongst them were a group of Bus Drivers and Conductors from Barbados. Sometimes they came to the Match in their work Clothing , having worked the Morning Shift. They were all friendly and well mannered. They told my older Cousin and his Workmates, that they came here because they were unemployed , they saw advert in local newspaper for people to come and work here. So someone must have known about that in Home Office ? They said they had been here for 3 to 4 years at time and moved from London Area up to West Midlands , they lived in ‘ Digs ‘ and had Girlfriends. If they are still here , they would be in their late 80s or 90s now !’
Gary Dennis commented
‘My parents and many of her friends and associates from Jamaica recalled seeing what that called ‘propaganda’ films encouraging them to come to Britain. It painted a romantic and quant image of Britain, which did exists but not for most people. If you know any elderly Caribbean people ask them about these films and adverts. When Jamaicans came they actually had not intent of staying beyond five year, they wanted to make a bit of money then go back. Life was not as they expected and most were unable to leave and therefore settled in and made the best of it. My suspicion was that my parents generation had been ‘invited’ – or more perhaps more accurately ‘an opening made’ – to undercut the cost of local labour. I believe this was the origin of racial tension but I have no evidence. I remember reading an article in Lobster Magazine where Harold MacMillan was heard to have said in conversation that he didn’t expect so many to come. I began to question the need for immigrants from the Caribbean when I began to take an interest in basic economics and started to question the premise that there was not enough labour available after the second world war. Obviously many people died but I understand that women had already taken up much of the slack in the workforce. I don’t claim to know the truth but there are some of us descendants of immigrants that also question the official narratives about immigration. We need to remember that some of these countries were British territories and these policies and actions would have been arrangements between Parliament and the Governor Generals of the countries and I suspect that the trigger for the movement of immigrants originates from these parties with Barbados only having got it’s independence in 1966 and Jamaica in 1962; well after Windrush. Jamaica had turned violent because of militant unionism during the 1930s and 40s escalating significantly in the 60s so I suspect the worry expressed by the governments was less to do with the welfare of the locals but the stability of the territory. The European Coal Community also took advantage of massive movements of cheap labour after the second world war. Is cheap labour the common theme here?’
I’ve heard that many migrants from what is now Pakistan and India also originally came here to work for a very limited time before going back to their home countries. It was chain migration, in which one set of migrants would move in after the last set had returned. According to this view, the great surge in Black and Asian immigration came after Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and the imposition of limits on immigration by Ted Heath, as there was a rush of people to come to this country before the gates were closed. So many migrants from south Asia came here with the intention of making enough money to go back to Pakistan or India again that one ethnographic study of the British Asian community I’ve come across was called The Myth of Return.
As for women taking on male jobs during the War, I understood that there was the expectation that after the War women would return to their domestic role, just as they did after World War II, and that this is largely what happened until the rise of second wave feminism in the 1960s.
Also interesting is this comment from david c:
‘Back in the 60’s, I worked at a well known clothing company, who were praised for their charitable efforts to give employment, to about 300 people from Mauritius, with an agreement from their government, so they could work in the basement of the shop, making clothes. Nobody mentioned that they were being paid about 50% less than the the rest of us.’
This looks like a nasty bit of exploitation under the cover of humanitarianism, which makes you wonder what else was going on.
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