Friday evening Extinction Rebellion took it upon themselves to blockade three print works owned by Murdoch in Merseyside, Hertfordshire and Lanarkshire. The works didn’t just print the Scum and the Scottish Scum, but also the Daily Heil, the Torygraph and the Evening Standard, which are respectively owned by Lord Rothermere, the weirdo Barclay twins and Evgeny Lebedev. The response of the press and indeed the political establishment have been predicted. Priti Patel for the Tories and Labour’s Emily Thornberry have both condemned the blockade as an attack on democracy. As has Keir Starmer, which shows his completely lack of scruples. He’s previously talked about how he was involved in protests against the Murdoch press. But like Blair, he’s desperate to get Murdoch and his empire of filth and lies on his side. Dawn Butler did issue a Tweet supporting Extinction Rebellion, but Starmer showed his true, Blairite authoritarianism and made her take it down.
I’m not a fan of Extinction Rebellion. Their cause is right and just, but I disagree with their tactics. Their strategy of blocking streets, including roads to hospitals, is dangerous and seems designed to annoy ordinary people and cost them support. But this time I think they’ve done the right thing. They’ve released a series of statements on social media pointing out that, contra to the nonsense the press and our leading politicians are saying, we don’t have a free press. Mike and Zelo Street have put up a couple of articles reporting this, and making the same point. The newspapers are owned by a very small number of billionaires. Five newspaper magnates own 83 per cent or so of the British press. And they don’t hold the government to account. Rather they act as propaganda outlets for the government. Mike has a quote from Lord Beaverbrook in which he openly said so. John Major when he was in power used to discuss with his cabinet how they could reach the British public with the help of their friends in the press.
Press and media bias against Labour was on the factors which lost the party the elections against Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s. Several books were published then analysing the media bias and the false reporting. These also made the point that the press was in the hands of a corporate oligarchy, and that they were part of great conglomerations which extended into other industries. As a result, certain issues were very definitely not reported. The Observer didn’t report on the savage crackdown on a mining dispute in Zimbabwe, because its proprietor, Tiny Rowland, was negotiating with Mugabe for a mining concessions.
But the problem of a hostile capitalist press also goes back much earlier to the emergence of organised labour, the socialist movement and then the Labour party in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And Sidney and Beatrice Webb made a few suggestions on how this could be overcome in their book, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain. They recommended that, in line with other industries, they should be transformed into cooperatives, owned and managed by their readers. They write
We hazard the suggestion that here may be found the solution, in the Socialist Commonwealth, of the difficulty presented by the newspaper press. Although Socialists foresee a great development of official journals of every sort, in all the arts and sciences, industries and services, and in different parts of the country (published by authority, national, municipal or cooperative, vocational or university, and often posted gratuitously to those to whom the information is important), probably no Socialist proposes that the community should have nothing but an official press. At the same time, the conduct of a newspaper with the object of obtaining a profit – even more so the conduct of newspapers by wealthy capitalists with the object of influencing the public mind; or the purchase by such capitalists with ulterior objects, of one newspaper after another – appears open to grave objection, and obviously leads to very serious abuses. Especially during the stage of transition from a predominantly capitalist to a predominantly Socialist society, it may be necessary to prohibit the publication of newspapers with the object of private profit, or under individual ownership, as positively dangerous to the community. But this does not mean that there should be no unofficial journals. All that would be forbidden would be individual or joint-stock ownership and commercial profit. The greatest newspaper enterprises could be converted into consumers’ Cooperative Societies, in which every purchaser, or at any rate every continuous subscriber, thereby automatically became a member, casting one vote only, periodically electing a managing committee by ballot taken through the newspaper itself, and the managing committee exercising (with due participation in the management of the vocations concerned) entire control over the enterprise, but being required to devote any surplus of receipts over expenditure to the improvement of the newspaper itself, and being forbidden to distribute any part of it, either in dividends or in excessive salaries, or to individuals at all, otherwise than by way of reduction of the price for the future. It would certainly not be the wish of Socialists to prevent any group of readers from having (with the criminal law) any newspaper that they desired; and the form of a consumers’ Cooperative Society seems to make possible the utmost variety in independent journalism without dependence on capitalist ownership or the unwholesome stimulus of private profit. With periodicals limited to those owned, either by public authorities of one or other kind, or by consumers’ Cooperative Societies – ownership by individual or joint-stock Capitalism being entirely eliminated – the transformation of journalism into an organised and largely self-governing profession, enjoying not only independence and security but also a recognised standard of qualification and training, and a professional ethic of its own, would be greatly facilitated. (pp. 270-1).
I’m not sure the content of the mainstream press would necessarily change if they were transformed into consumer’s cooperatives owned and managed by their readers, as the readers of the Scum, Torygraph and Heil seem to enjoy the lies and hate these rags publish. On the other hand, it would solve the problem of the individual capitalist or company dominating press if the management of these firms were run by their readers, who elected and appointed them. You can just here the screams of Murdoch and co if that was suggested. Let’s do it!
I also note that trials in France have started of those accused of assisting the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre by Islamist terrorists. When the attack occurred, people all over France and the world showed their solidarity with the victims by marching under the banner ‘Je Suis Charlie Hebdo’. Now the Murdoch press and other rags are being blockaded and demonstrated against. So I’d to show where I stand on this issue:
Five years ago in 2015 the then leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, outraged the press barons in Fleet Street by suggesting the abolition of non-dom tax status for people actually living in the UK. This frightened them, as many of them, such as Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the I and Evening Standard, David and Frederick Barclay, the weirdo owners of the Torygraph, and Heil owner Viscount Rothermere, also avoid paying British tax through non-dom status. There was therefore a flurry of articles in their papers scorning Miliband’s suggestion and declaring that if it came in, it would bankrupt Britain by forcing all the millionaires in London and elsewhere to flee the country. And the papers certainly did not tell their readers that there was more than a bit of self-interest behind their attacks on Miliband.
Private Eye, which, according to editor Ian Hislop, skewers humbug, therefore published an article in their ‘In the Back’ section, ‘Street of Sham’ in the issue for 17th to 30th April 2015 attacking this fine display of gross hypocrisy. The piece ran
So consuming was the Tory press’s rage at Ed Milibands’s plan to make Russian oligarchs and gulf petro-billionaires in London liable for the same taxes as British citizens, its hacks forgot to declare their interest.
“London backlash over Ed’s non-dom attack,” boomed the front-page of the London Evening Standard, as if a mob had descended on Labour HQ to defend London’s much-loved oligarchs and hedge-fund managers. “Attacking non-doms could backfire on us,” continued an editorial inside. Sarah Sands, the Standard’s Uriah Heepish editor, did not risk her career by saying who the “us” included – namely her boss, Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian who last year dodged the Eye’s repeated questions over his own domicile.
Silence infected the Telegraph too, where not one of the reporters who warned that Labour’s “cataclysmic” decision would drive away “tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and business leaders” mentioned that their owners, the weirdo Barclay twins, reside in Monaco and the Channel Islands to avoid British tax.
Instead they quoted James Hender, head of private wealth at Saffery Champness accountants, who warned that the rich may leave. The Telegraph didn’t tell its readers that Hender boasts of his long experience ensuring that “the most tax efficient strategies are adopted for non-UK situs assets” for his non-dom clients.
It was the same at the Mail, which failed to declare that its owner, 4th Viscount Rothermere, is treated by the tax authorities as a non-dom. And at Sky, political editor Faisal Islam reported that “Baltic Exchange boss Jeremy Penn slams Labour non-dom plans” without declaring that his owner, Rupert Murdoch, does not pay UK tax and that Penn acts for super-rich shipping owners.
Jolyon Maugham QC, who has advised Labour and the Tories on tax reform, tells the Eye that any reader silly enough to believe the Tory press and tax avoidance industry should look at what they said in 2008, when Labour introduced the first levies on non-doms.
Back then the Mail then said the central London property market would crash as non-doms sold up and moved to Switzerland. In fact, between Labour introducing the levy and 2014, prime central London property prices rose 41 percent. At the end of 2014, Knightsbridge estate agent W.A. Ellis said 54 percent of sales were to overseas buyers.
The Mail was equally certain the City would suffer. On 8 February 2008 it cried that the levy “risks the City’s future”. The British Banking Association warned of “a devastating blow”. The Telegraph of 12 February 2008 said that “the country’s wealthiest individuals are being bombarded with leaflets and letters explaining how easy it would be to relocate to Switzerland, Monaco and a host of other countries”. Not to be outdone, Mike Warburton, senior tax partner at accountants Grant Thornton, said the levy was the “final straw”.
If a word of this had been true, there would be no non-doms left for Milband to tax. As it is, there are 115,000 because, as Maugham says, London remains a “very nice place to live, if you’re wealthy. And that won’t change.” Or as the Financial Times put it: “The many advantages of London as a financial centre do not dissolve simply because of a change in a hitherto generous tax treatment of resident non-domiciles.”
The pink ‘un has only recently realised the iniquity of the non-dom rule, with an editorial last month calling for its abolition. Editor Lionel Barber modestly claims some credit for Miliband’s stance. But as editor for almost a decade, why was he so late to the party? Surely not because, until 2013, FT owner Pearson was run by US-born Dame Marjorie Scardino, who would certainly have qualified for non-dom status and whose London flat, the Eye revealed, was owned via an offshore company?
The Daily Mail’s owner, Lord Rothermere, is a particularly flagrant tax dodger in this regarded. The current Rothermere inherited the status from his father, who really was not resident in the UK. He lived in Paris. But Rothermere junior appears very much to have made Britain his permanent or at least primary residence. He has a parking space in London, and the Eye reported a few years ago he was extensively renovating his stately home in the West Country.
The non-dom tax status, offshore banking and other ways used by the corporate and super rich to avoid tax are part of the reason for the increasing impoverishment of everyone else. They aren’t paying their fair share of the tax burden, but receiving massive tax handouts instead. Thus the NHS and other important services are deprived of money. The tax burden is then passed onto ordinary, working people. This reduction in taxes for the rich used to be justified under Thatcher with the argument that the money the rich saved would somehow trickle down to the rest of us. This hasn’t worked. It doesn’t encourage the rich to open any more businesses or employ more people. The money just sits in their accounts earning more interest.
It also doesn’t the rich closing businesses and laying people off either. This was shown a year or so ago in America, when one of the corporate recipients of the Republicans’ tax cuts closed a branch or a factory, laying hundreds of workers off.
And the purchase of London property by foreigners is also a further cause of poverty. Ordinary people in the Smoke can’t afford to buy homes as rich foreigners – not asylum seekers or migrants – push property prices up far out of their reach. Some of these homes are simply left empty as an investment in what is known as ‘land banking’. This has a knock-on effect for the rest of the UK. Here in Bristol property prices have also risen to extremely highly levels through Londoners forced out of the capital relocating to the city. And in turn, some Bristolians are looking for cheaper homes elsewhere in places like Wales.
London still is a ‘very nice place to live, if you’re wealthy’, but the tax cuts which make Britain so comfortable for the global rich are causing poverty, misery and homelessness for everyone else.
And this is applauded and cheered by hypocritical press magnates and editors.
Yesterday’s I (2nd January 2020) also ran this report on the candidates for the Labour leadership by Jane Merrick, ‘Labour ‘foisted Remain on working class’. This runs
One of the architects of Labour’s historic election defeat has claimed that the party’s attempt to “foist Remain” on working class communities was responsible for last month’s result.
Ian Lavery, the party’s chairman and general election campaign coordinator, denied that Jeremy Corbyn’s policies contributed to the losses.
Mr Lavery is among several Labour MPs considering running to succeed Mr Corbyn. Ahead of nominations opening next week, speculation is mounting that Jess Phillips, one of the most widely recognised MPs among the general public, is about to announce her candidacy.
Yesterday she tweeted: “2020 starts with fire in my belly and I promise that won’t change.”
I’m a Remainer, but Lavery’s right: all the northern and midland communities that voted for Boris were Leave areas. Labour’s manifesto promises for the nationalisation of rail, water and electricity, strengthening the welfare state, restoring workers’ rights and union power, were actually well-received and polled well. But they’re a threat to the upper and upper middle classes, including media barons like Murdoch, the weirdo Barclay twins and Lord Rothermere, so the Tory press is doing its absolute best to try and discredit them.
And the I unfortunately is also following this line. It has always backed the ‘Centrists’ in the Labour, for which read ‘Blairites’ and ‘Thatcherite entryists’, who stand for more privatisation and the destruction of the welfare state. But they pretend – mostly – to be more ‘moderate’ than the Tories. The I’s also been promoting female candidates for the party leadership, and loudly denouncing opposition to them as ‘misogyny’. It’s noticeable in all this that the women, who’ve thrown their hats into the ring are all Blairites, and so the election of someone like Phillips would just be a liberal disguise for the right-wing policies underneath. Just like Hillary Clinton over the Pond is right-wing and militaristic, and therefore very establishment. But she was claiming that, as a woman, she was somehow an outsider, and the people, including women, who back Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for the presidency instead were just misogynists.
At the moment the I’s backing Lisa Nandy, who appears to be another wretched Blairite.
Lavery, however, is working class, and so a far better spokesman for those areas and people that have suffered from the neoliberalism the Tories and their pet press have pushed on us.
Earlier today I put up a piece about an article in the I newspaper about the claim by a charity, the Hansard Society, that British people were increasingly demanding a more authoritarian leader, who could override parliament. This is obviously dangerous, as at the end of such anti-parliamentary sentiments lies authoritarian political strongmen like Vladimir Putin outright dictatorships, like those of Hitler and Mussolini. I speculated that, if the findings are correct, they’re probably due to Tweezer’s supporters getting impatient with parliament blocking her wretched, worthless Brexit deals.
It turns out I may well have been right. Brexit is involved. And so, unfortunately, is that curse of the modern press, Rupert Murdoch.
No sooner had I put my piece up then I found that the good fellow behind Zelo Street had put up a similar article based on articles about the Hansard Society and its wretched poll in the Times and the Guardian. The Thunderer’s article had the headline, ‘Brexit-weary Britons long for political strongman’, contained the following ominous statements
In findings that suggest large parts of the country are ready to entertain radical political change, nearly three quarters of people felt that the British system of governing needed ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ of improvement.
More than four in ten thought that the country’s problems could be more easily solved if ministers ‘didn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament. The findings come two days before Theresa May returns to Brussels to ask the EU for another Brexit extension.
The Street says that it is no accident that the mythical desire for a political strongman is here linked to Brexit, and that the only surprise is that the Scum hasn’t received its orders to put the same demand in cruder terms. The article then goes on to discuss the Groan’s treatment of these findings, which is hostile, and quotes Rose Carter of the anti-racism, anti-religious extremism organisation, Hope Not Hate. She says
We are facing a crisis of political mistrust. And when people do not trust traditional political systems, they look elsewhere. That’s when support for political extremes grows.
The Street then goes on to describe how political strongmen look good, until they’re actually put to the test, and goes on to give examples. These aren’t just the obvious cases of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, but also the Greek Colonels, who left Cyprus partitioned, Salazar in Portugal, who left his country poor and illiterate, General Franco in Spain, who brought some people prosperity in the 1960s, but from a very low base; General Pinochet and his legacy of death and division in Chile; and finally Vladimir Putin in Russia. His gangster regime has brought some people prosperity, but only recently has the Russian economy started growing.
But, as the Street’s article notes, the Dirty Digger likes Donald Trump and his authoritarian style of government, as he mistakenly thinks that the Orange Generalissimo gets things done. The Street therefore concludes that, once again, Murdoch is debasing politics for his own ends.
Murdoch’s selfish demand for the curtailment of parliament’s powers and the establishment of the Prime Minister as some kind of quasi-dictator isn’t quite as extreme as Lord Rothermere’s support of Adolf Hitler and Oswald Mosley in the 1930s and the Daily Mail’s infamous headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. Nor is it quite like Mussolini, who was the editor of a radical newspaper, the Popolo d’Italia, which he used to promote Fascism and his personal dictatorship. It’s far more like Berlusconi, who used his vast media empire to promote his political ambitions. It wasn’t a military dictatorship, like Mussolini’s with paramilitary thugs running berserk and the banning of other political parties. But then, as the author of the book, The Dark Heart of Italy stated on a radio interview about his book on Berlusconi’s Italy, this new form of Fascism didn’t need them. Unlike Berlusconi, Murdoch hasn’t put himself forward for political office. But he has been instrumental in framing policy in several governments, most notoriously in Blair’s, where one minister described the Digger as almost being like a hidden member of the cabinet, so concerned with Blair to have his approval.
This makes Murdoch a real threat to British democracy. There are reasons why the monopolies and mergers commission sought to prevent newspaper proprietors owning too large a portion of British media, and why many people, including many Tories, were not in favour of the Digger getting hold of the Times. But they were overruled by Thatcher, and have been overruled by other Prime Ministers ever since, eager to grant Murdoch an ever-increasing share of press and television broadcasting in order to gain the support of his squalid empire. And Murdoch’s own political views are directly opposed the welfare of Britain’s working people. They’re pro-privatisation, including that of the NHS and education, because he’s moving into educational publishing. He wants low taxes, less government regulation, and, surprise, surprise, a minimal welfare state. And now he’s shown himself to be an outright enemy of parliament and the British democratic tradition it represents.
Murdoch has no right to demand this. He isn’t British, but a foreigner. He’s actually an American citizens, as the Americans have the good sense to pass regulations stopping foreigners possessing a controlling interest in the newspapers and utilities. Which is something we should have done long ago. John Major back in the 1990s finally came round to realising that Murdoch’s squalid empire should be broken up, but by that time Murdoch had ditched him and was putting his weight behind Tony Blair, who more than willingly returned the favour.
Murdoch and his wretched papers have been bad for Britain, bad for British politics, bad for its working people, and now have begun an attack on the democracy. This can’t be allowed to continue, but I fear that with his newspapers now so powerful, too many people have been brainwashed by him to make this possible.
This is a video I’ve just uploaded to my YouTube channel attacking the suspension of Chris Williamson and the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour Party by the Blairites, and the political and media establishment.
Here’s the blurb I’ve put up for it:
In this video I attack the campaign of lies and smears against Chris Williamson, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party. They are not Trotskyites, Communists or anti-Semites, as alleged, but members and supporters who believe in its traditional policies and values before Blair and his Thatcherite ‘modernisation’. Many are also smeared because they believe in Palestinian rights against the brutality of the Israeli state. So there is a campaign by the Israel lobby of smearing them as anti-Semites. Those accused and suspended have been decent, anti-racist non-Jewish people like Williamson and Marc Wadsworth, and self-respecting Torah-observant and secular Jews, like Jackie Walker.
I state that Williamson was right when he said that Labour was the most anti-racist party, and that they had given too much ground to claims of anti-Semitism. Because in many cases they weren’t real claims, but smears. Labour is now the biggest Socialist party with a membership of 500,000, far larger than the Tories. And that frightens Labour’s opponents. These include the Blairites in the Labour party and the Israel lobby. The Blairites fear Corbyn and his supporters because they, the Blairites, stand for Thatcherism – privatisation, including that of the NHS, and the destruction of the welfare state. This has led to mass poverty, a quarter of a million people using food banks, 3.5 million children in poverty, mass starvation and people stealing food from supermarkets because of problems with Universal Credit. And this is also what the people, who split from Labour, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Ann Coffee, Mike Gapes stand for. The Blairites are not ‘Centrists’ nor Social Democrats.
Corbyn’s supporters, on the other hand, have been smeared as Trotksyites and Communists. They are neither. Corbyn’s policies are actually closer to the Social Democratic politics of the 1970s as set down by Anthony Crossland. These were the nationalisation of the utilities, strong trade unions, progressive taxation and social mobility. He believed these would bring the benefits of nationalisation without having to go beyond the nationalisation of the utilities or bring about industrial democracy. The Labour manifesto demands the nationalisation of the rail and water industries, strong trade unions and workers’ rights. It also wants working people and employees on company boards. Which is more radical than historical Social Democracy, but not that much more extreme, as the Labour left were considering it in the 1970s.
The Israel lobby and the Jewish establishment are also keen to attack Corbyn and his supporters because they support the Palestinians. But this does not mean hatred for Israel or the Jewish people. It’s the Israeli state which makes people believe it does. And Corbyn has the support of many Jews – Jewish voice for Labour, for example, and spent the Passover Seder with the Socialist Jews of Jewdas. But these are the wrong type of Jews – Jewish socialists. The type of Jews, who, at the beginning of the last century, the right of the Tory party and groups like the British Brothers’ League were telling people were a threat, because they were going to bring with them Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, and throw millions out of work. And the newspapers now repeating this today, like the Daily Mail, were responsible for these smears then. Lord Rothermere was a fan of Hitler.
I point out how false these claims are with the example of Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth. Walker’s a proud lady of colour, whose mother was a Black American civil rights worker with some Jewish blood, and her father was a Russian Jew. And Russian Jews know about anti-Semitism – Russia is the only country where you can buy the vile Protocols of the Elders of Zion on street kiosks. But she’s been smeared as an anti-Semite. As have so many other secular and Torah-observant Jews, some of who are the children of Holocaust survivors, or lost family in the Holocaust.
Then there’s Marc Wadsworth, who was smeared because he embarrassed Ruth Smeeth. They tried to smear him as an anti-Semite, because that’s how the press told it. But he wasn’t. Wadsworth’s a Black anti-racism campaigner, who worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1990s to frame stronger legislation against anti-Semitism when the BNP were beating Jews up around the Isle of Dogs. When the anti-Semitism accusation wouldn’t stick, they changed it to ‘bringing the Labour party into disrepute’. But he hadn’t. It was Smeeth, who had brought the Labour party into disrepute with her false accusations.
As you can see, this is quite an angry, impassioned piece. But this is a glaring injustice that infuriates me. I want this witchhunt, which I compare to that of 17th century Salem or McCarthyism, as Jackie Walker has said, to end.
The conspiracy magazine, Lobster, has posted a very interesting review by their long-term contributor, John Newsinger, of a new book about Rothay Reynolds, a Daily Mail reporter, and the paper’s relationship with the Nazis in Germany and at home with Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. The book’s by Will Wainewright, and entitled Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany.
Reynolds was a British journalist, who had begun his career reporting on Tsarist Russia. During the War he worked for MI7, another British secret agency, before joining the Daily Mail and covering events in Germany. In 1923 he interviewed Hitler when the Nazis were still a small, fledgling party. The future Fuehrer struck him then as remarkable ‘only as an odd type of unbalanced fanatic’. It also wasn’t really an interviewed, as Hitler simply subjected him to a long diatribe, like one of his rants at public meetings. He met and interviewed Hitler again in 1930, when the Nazi party had grown to become a mass movement on the verge of gaining power. At the same time, Lord Rothermere, the proprietor of the Fail, gave his full support to Hitler and his vile movement. Newsinger writes
Rothermere had already declared his support for the Nazis in the Daily Mail’s pages. His own article celebrating the Nazi electoral success, ‘A Nation Reborn’, had appeared in the Daily Mail on 24 September and was actually reprinted in the Nazi newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter. Hitler told Reynolds that he was amazed that a foreigner like Rothermere ‘should understand what we have in our hearts’. The two men were to correspond regularly throughout the 1930s, meeting on a number of occasions, and Rothermere actually sent Hitler a photograph of himself in a solid gold frame as a testimony to their friendship.
At the same time, Rothermere was also a keen supporter of Mosley and his crew, publishing the infamous headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ So keen was Rothermere on them, that for a time he ordered his journos to wear black shirts in the office in solidarity with them. Eventually Rothermere switched position and abandoned them. The usual explanation is that Rothermere was horrified at their violence. Newsinger himself states that a more plausible reason is that the British capitalist class realised they didn’t have to use Fascism to keep the lower orders down, and could rely on the Tories to do it for them. He is also convinced that if the British left had presented a real threat, Rothermere would have been unhesitating in his support for Fascism and its violence and anti-Semitism.
Reynolds himself was horrified by the Nazi’s destruction of democracy, civil liberties and their persecution of the churches and Germany’s Jews. He persevered, trying to write for the Fail while at the same time retaining his journalistic integrity. But it was too much. He resigned, and wrote a book condemning Hitler and his thugs, When Freedom Shrieked, which was published by the left-wing publisher, Victor Gollancz. By this time Reynolds’ own work at the Heil was being increasingly ignored. The break finally came with Kristallnacht, the Nazis’ attack on Jewish businesses. Reynolds resigned, left Germany, and returned to England to write his book.
There are questions why Reynolds stuck it out so long at the Mail. One suggestion may be that Reynolds was a close friend of the MI6 head of station in Berlin, although Wainewright doesn’t believe he was a spy.
Reynolds then joined the Torygraph, where he became its Italian correspondent. After the War broke out he fled to the Middle East, and eventually died of malaria in Jerusalem in 1940.
The article is interesting for showing just how strong Rothermere’s support for the Nazis was. Even after he abandoned Mosley and the BUF, he still continued to support Hitler. And the wretched newspaper has continued published extreme right-wing, bitterly xenophobic material to this day. Its now one of the rags trying to smear Corbyn and his supporters as an anti-Semite, which is a matter of the grossest hypocrisy given the newspaper’s own history of racism and anti-Jewish bigotry.
This is another video I found on YouTube, this time of the protest DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) held on Wednesday, which closed down Westminster Bridge. It shows them moving along one of the roads to the Bridge and then crossing it with their banner proclaiming ‘No More Deaths From Benefit Cuts’, and chanting the same. One of the organisers, a large lady in a motorised wheelchair, gives a ‘hello’ to Theresa May, pointing out that she is now in Prime Minister’s Questions. She then reads out a message from another woman, Chrisman, who couldn’t be there, about the death of yet another disabled person, a man, who was put on the work group, despite the fact that he was so ill he could hardly walk. Apart from the speaker, several of the protesters are in motorised wheelchairs. There is a group from a women’s disability organisation, Winvision, which is for women with invisible visible disabilities. Someone else is banging a drum, and there is also a man carrying around a fake coffin, obviously to symbolise the huge numbers of people that have been killed by New Labour and Tory benefit cuts.
The video also shows the rozzers turning up to tell the protesters, who sat down on the Bridge to hold their protest, that they are causing an obstruction. They don’t want to arrest them, but if they continue, then the police will do so. Several people were arrested, including one young man, who is seen being taken away with a police officer holding both his arms.
Mike over at Vox Political blogged about this protest earlier this week, and I also wrote something. DPAC have been very active campaigning against the cuts for quite a few years now. While I’ve no doubt that travellers on the bridge were cussing them that morning, DPAC had every right and reason to protest. The work capability test and the cuts to benefits are forcing millions into mass poverty. Mike spent something like two years fighting with the government to get the figures for the number of people, who have died as a result of being found ‘fit for work’. I’ve forgotten the precise figure, but it’s several thousand. And well over 500 people have died of starvation, or killed themselves in despair, after being thrown off benefit. These victims have included an elderly couple, a young mother, and a diabetic man. Stilloaks over on his blog has compiled a comprehensive list, with accompanying biographies, of the victims.
The government’s repeated refusal to give the correct figures for the numbers of people, who’ve died and their suppression of repeated internal reports showing that their policies are literally killing thousands has given many disabled people, carers and ordinary members of the public the impression that the government is consciously committing mass murder comparable to the Nazis’ campaign against the severely disabled in Germany. Mike over at Vox Political has called it ‘chequebook genocide’. Jeffrey Davies, one of the commenters on this blog, has referred to it as ‘Aktion T4’, using the Nazi codename for their mass murder of the disabled.
The work capability test was introduced by Tony Blair and New Labour, using a scientifically discredited model of disability, under the explicit view that people claiming disability benefit and long-term sickness were ‘malingerers’. Blair and Brown should also share some of the blame for these deaths. Ed Miliband told his shadow cabinet that they should abstain on a vote on benefit cuts, so the Labour party wouldn’t be attacked by the press for being soft on welfare scrounging. Jeremy Corbyn gave his support to the protesters. Owen Smith, unsurprisingly, refused.
And as so much of the hate against the poor, the unemployed and the disabled for being on benefits is driven by the vile right-wing press in this country, we should also have no hesitation in blaming Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, his proprietor, Lord Rothermere; Richard Desmond, the owner of the Express and his editors; and Rupert Murdoch and the editors of the Scum and the Times, for their part in causing the organised deaths of so many vulnerable people. Thanks to their hysterical lies and abuse, the majority of people in this country really believe that the majority of people on benefits are frauds, despite the fact that the real figure, as revealed by the government itself, is just 0.67 per cent.
May and the Tories should not be in government, and Smudger, Bomber Benn and the rest of New Labour should not be in any positions of power in the Labour party. If there was any justice, those responsible for this toxic policy and the deaths it has caused should be in the dock being prosecuted for their crimes against humanity, as should Murdoch, Dacre, Desmond, Rothermere and their assembled hacks as their willing collaborators.
Yesterday evening, Mike put up a piece critiquing an article published in the Daily Mail by a Jewish Labour donor, Michael Foster attacking Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in Momentum. Foster described them as the Sturm Abteilung, the radical, paramilitary branch of the Nazi party that was all wiped out by the SS in the Night of the Long Knives. He then further compared them to the Nazis by stating that they were all blindly following Corbyn with cult-like devotion. The Corbynistas had no policies of their own, and were just divisive. If you disagreed with them, you were excluded and briefed against. He also moaned that if you were a Jewish donor like him and made complaints about anti-Semitism, you were accused of conspiring to make false allegations in order to damage the Left.
Mike drily observes that all this makes a change from the usual ‘rebel Trot’ nonsense. He also makes the very good point that it is highly ironic for the Heil to start denouncing others as Nazis, considering that Lord Rothermere published the infamous article ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, and praised Hitler for his policies against the Jews. He was also very firmly against Jewish immigration to Britain, running articles about how we needed to be protected from criminal eastern European Jewish immigrants flooding into Britain. Which is pretty much what the Heil is saying today, only it’s dropped the anti-Semitism, and eastern Europeans are only the latest of the immigrant groups to exercise the Heil’s intolerance. Mostly it rants about Blacks and Asians. One of its regular contributors, Melanie ‘Mad Mel’ Philips, is particularly vehement about the Islamic threat. And then of course, there’s its reactionary views on sexuality and gender – its bitterly homophobic, and very definitely sees a woman’s place as being in the home, rather than at work. So it’s actually in no position to accuse anyone of racism.
Mike in his article makes a point for point rebuttal. He points out that the Corbynites have very well-defined policies. As for isolating and briefing against dissidents, that’s what Blair and his coterie did to those MPs they deemed were ‘off message’. Or looked like they were going to upstage the Dear Leader in the nation’s affections. One of those, who got it, if memory serves me correctly, was Mo Mowlam.
Mike also makes the point that the anti-Semitism allegations were weapons against Corbyn, but asks rhetorically if anyone had personally accused Foster. Obviously, they haven’t, as Foster puts his statement about anti-Semitism in the conditional ‘If, like me, you are a Jewish donor’ – suggesting that no-one has.
Mike states that Foster sounds like a sad, embittered Blairite, and concludes that if he’s reading his article, the best thing Mr Foster can bring to the discussion next time is silence.
Foster’s article is a reassertion of the old smear that Momentum is anti-Semitic, and Foster describes himself as a ‘Jewish donor’. But what comes across is that the real reason for Foster’s anger is once again the threat Corbyn poses to the massive support Blair gave the Zionist lobby and their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
I’ve pointed out time and again that very many of the people accused of anti-Semitism by the Blairites – let’s call them what they are – were no such thing. Very frequently they were Jews or people of Jewish heritage with a proud history of anti-racist, anti-Fascist campaigning behind them. Men and women like Jackie Walker, whose mother was a Black civil rights activist, and father was a Russian Jew. A woman of colour whose partner was also Jewish. Red Ken in his book, Livingstone’s Labour, bitterly criticised racism of all stripes, including anti-Semitism, and the Labour party’s policy of recruiting Nazis guilty of the most appalling crimes during the Holocaust as part of the Cold War against Communism. Last week or so I blogged about a piece by Tony Greenstein, another Jewish Labour party member, who had also been suspended on charges of anti-Semitism. This was despite the fact that he was a member of the Jewish Socialist group in the Labour party. His crime was like the others: he dared to criticise Israel.
Tony Blair was very close to the Labour Friends of Israel group, and the Zionist lobby, through Lord Levy. Blair met Levy through the offices of one of the pro-Israel groups, and Levy was instrumental in getting the Israel lobby to fund Blair. This gave him the financial independence he needed to attack the unions and the Labour grassroots. Lobster’s done a series of articles describing this. And the Israel lobby is very defensive at the moment, because the Boycott, Divest and Sanction campaign, which includes many Jews, is having an effect on forcing Israeli businesses to leave the occupied West Bank, if they want anyone to buy their goods. The response of the Zionist lobby has been to label them anti-Semites, and make the usual hysterical accusations comparing them to the Nazis. I’ve put up pieces here, including videos by Ilan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein, both bitter critics of the Israeli state’s persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. These scholars have stated that the Israel lobby smears anyone who dares criticise Israel of being an anti-Semite. Mr Foster’s rant in the Heil is another of these.
Saturday evening I put up a video by Catherine Love, in which she explained that Corbyn had been criticised and closed down by the Conservatives, as he had dared to go to Palestine to try to arrange peace talks with the Palestinians, and this was interfering with theirs. This sounds like the Tories were upset, as the Palestinians a decade or so ago did offer a peace deal, which would recognise Israel if it retreated back to its 1967 boundaries. Both nations would share Jerusalem. This was rejected out of hand by the Israelis.
And we’re also backing Israel, as are the Americans. So does the Heil, despite it’s historic anti-Semitism pre-WW II. A few years ago it ran an article describing the foundation of Israel, including extracts from the diary or letters of a Jewish girl from London, who was one of the new settlers after the War. She was excited at the Jews finally having their own country. Except that it wasn’t. It was the Palestinians. The Jews, who came to settle it were Europeans and Americans, and they had absolute contempt for the Mizrahim, the Arab Jews already in the Middle East. In the 1960s Israel expelled about 60,000 indigenous Palestinian Jews because they were culturally indistinguishable from Arabs. And this was only part of the long history of the Israeli state’s policy of ethnic cleansing towards the indigenous population.
This is what looks to me as the real political reason behind the article. It’s an attempt to smear as racist and anti-Semitic decent people, who are campaigning against Israel because it, not they, is racist and colonialist.
One of the perennial complaints by the Right is that anyone who goes on strike for more pay, better working conditions or shorter hours is, by definition, either lazy, greedy or both. It was the accusation that the Republicans in America flung at striking teachers a year or so ago, and it was pretty well parroted by the Daily Heil over here, when it decided to have a go at public sector workers and their pensions. Now I noticed from reading Mike’s blog that the Scum has decided to wade in against the junior doctors.
I found this passage in Kropotkin’s essay, Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles, where he attacks the notion that the workers are lazy. In particular, he takes great issue with this claim when it comes from writers, whom he states don’t work nearly as hard as the working people they criticise. Here it is:
As to the so-often repeated objection that nobody would labour if he were not compelled to do so by sheer necessity, we heard enough of it before the emancipation of slaves in America, as well as before the emancipation of serfs in Russia: and we have had the opportunity of appreciating it at its just value. So we shall not try to convince those who can be convinced only by accomplished facts. As to those who reason, they ought to know that, if it really was so with some parts of humanity at its lowest stages – and yet, what do we know about it? – or if it is so with some small communities, or separate individuals, brought to sheer despair by ill success in their struggle against unfavourable conditions, it is not so with the bulk of the civilised nations. With us, work is a habit, and idleness an artificial growth. Of course, when to be a manual worker means to be compelled to work all one’s life long for ten hours a day, and often more, at producing some part of something – a pin’s head, for instance; when it means to be paid wages on which a family can live only on the condition of the strictest limitation of all its needs; when it means to be always under the menace of being thrown tomorrow out of employment – and we know how frequent are the industrial crises, and what misery they imply; when it means, in a very great number of cases, premature death in a paupers’ infirmary, if not in the workhouse; when to be a manual worker signifies to wear a lifelong stamp of inferiority in the eyes of those very people who live on the work of their ‘hands’; when it always means the renunciation of all those higher enjoyments that science and art give to man – oh, then there is no wonder that everybody – the manual worker as well – has but one dream: that of rising to a condition where others would work for him. When I see writers who boast that they are the workers, and write that the manual workers are an inferior race of lazy and improvident fellows, I must ask them: Who, then, has made all you see about you: the houses you live in, the chairs, the carpets, the streets you enjoy, the clothes you wear? Who built the universities where you were taught, and who provided you with food during your school years? And what would become of your readiness to ‘work’, if you were compelled to work in the above conditions all your life at a pin’s head? No doubt you would be reported as a lazy fellow! And I affirm that no intelligent man can be closely acquainted with the life of the European working classes without wondering, on the contrary at their readiness to work, even under such abominable conditions.
(Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism: It Basis and Principles, in Peter Kropotkin, ed. Nicolas Walter, Anarchism and Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles (London: Freedom Press 1987) 53-4).
The editor of the Scum is an old Etonian. The proprietor of the Daily Heil, Lord Rothermere, is a multi-millionaire tax avoider. And I doubt very much that the Heil’s editor, Paul Dacre, comes from a working class background either. They have no right to despise the working classes as lazy. As for the junior doctors, Mike has posted up extensive pieces from them showing that this is most certainly not about extra pay. They are very much concerned about patient safety, and their ability to give potentially life-saving service after working long hours. And if some medical professionals are better than most of us, it’s because they should be rewarded for the immense skill required of them, and the heavy responsibility they bear. No-one will die tomorrow – at least, I hope not – if the sports writer in the Scum is in no fit state to write his column. Someone might very well die, however, or suffer terrible ill-health, if a responsible doctor makes a poor decision due to lack of sleep, or is forced to do one job too many because of the need to find ‘savings’ through staff cutbacks. And no-one would suffer tomorrow either if Jeremy Hunt and the rest of his wretched crew were booted out of office. Rather the opposite!
I found this feature on in Private Eye’s issue for the 17th-30th April 2015 on how Yevgeny Lebedev, the former owner of the Independent, the Barclay twins, who own the Telegraph and Lord Rothermere all use their non-dom tax status to avoid paying British tax.
Non-Dom Press Barons
Street of Sham
So consuming was the Tory press’ rage at Ed Miliband’s plan to make Russian oligarchs and gulf petro-billionaires in London liable for the same taxes as British citizens, its hacks forgot to the declare their interest.
“London backlash over Ed’s non-dom attack,” boomed the front-page of the London Evening Standard, as if a mob had descended on Labour HQ to defend London’s much-loved oligarchs and hedge fund managers. “Attacking non-doms could backfire on us,” continued an editorial inside. Sarah Sands, the Standard’s Uriah Heepish editor, did not risk her career by saying who the “us” included – namely her boss, Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian who last year dodged the Eye’s repeated questions of his own domicile.
Silence infected the Telegraph too, where not one of the reporters who warned that Labour’s “cataclysmic” decision would drive away “tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and business leaders” mentioned that their owners, the weirdo Barclay twins, reside in Monaco and the Channel Islands to avoid British tax.
Instead they quoted James Hender, head of private wealth at Saffery Champness accountants, who warned that the rich may leave. The Telegraph didn’t tell its reads that Hender boasts of his long experience ensuring that “the most tax efficient strategies are adopted for non-UK, situs assets” for his non-dom clients.
It was the same at the Mail, which failed to declare that its owner, 4th Viscount Rothermere, is treated by the tax authorities as a non-dom. And at Sky, political editor Faisal Islam reported that “Baltic Exchange boss Jeremy Penn slams Labour non-dom plans” without declaring that his owner, Rupert Murdoch, does not pay UK tax and that Penn acts for super-rich shipping owners.
Jolyon Maugham QC, who has advised Labour and the Tories on tax reform, tells the Eye that any reader sill enough to believe the Tory press and tax avoidance industry should look at what they said in 2008, when Labour introduced the first levies on non-doms.
Back then the Mail then said the central London property market would crash as non-doms sold up and moved to Switzerland. In fact, between Labour introducing the levy and 2014, prime central London property prices rose 41 per cent. At the end of 2014, Knightsbridge estate agent W.A. Ellis said 54 per cent of sales were to overseas buyers.
The Mail was equally certain the City would suffer. On 8 February 2008 it cried that the levy “risks the City’s future”. The British Banking Association warned of “a devastating blow”. The Telegraph of 12 February 2008 said that “the country’s wealthiest individuals are being bombarded with leaflets and letters explaining how easy it would be to relocate to Switzerland, Monaco and a host of other countries”. Not to be outdone, Mike Warburton, senior tax partner at accountants Grant Thornton, said the levy was the “final straw”. If a word of this had been true, there would be no non-doms left for Miliband to tax. As it is, there are 115,000 because, as Maugham says, London remains “a very nice place to live, if you’re wealthy. And that won’t change.” Or as the Financial Times put it: “The many advantages of London as a financial centre do not dissolve simply because of a change in a hitherto generous tax treatment of resident non domiciles.”
The pink ‘un has only recently realised the iniquity of the non-dom rule, with an editorial last month calling for its abolition. Editor Lionel Barber modestly claims some credit for Miliband’s stance. But as editor for almost a decade, why was he so late to the party? Surely not because, until 2013, FT owner Pearson was run by US-born Dame Marjorie Scardino, who would certainly have qualified for non-dom status and whose London flat, the Eye revealed, was owned via an offshore company?
So there you are. Fleet Street’s extremely rich proprietors, with the exception of the Financial Times, take the view that, in the words of the ‘Mayflower Madam’, the brothel owner arrested for tax evasion in New York now over a decade ago, paying tax is only for the ‘little people’. And they have no qualms about getting rich, while shifting the tax burden on to the poor and demanding low wages and zero-hours contracts. All the while proudly declaiming their patriotism, like the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch, resident in America. So much for real patriotism.
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