Has Sadiq Khan Used an Eid Festival to Block an Iranian Pro-Democracy Rally?

Mahyar Tousi is another right-wing YouTuber I don’t have much time for, although he isn’t as annoying smug as Michael Heaver. Tousi’s another staunch Brexiteer and strong supporter of the Tories against anything left. But a few days he ago he posted a piece which should raise questions for anyone interested in democracy and free speech, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they’re on. According to Tousi, a group of dissident Iranians had planned to organise a march and demonstration this week in support of the pro-democracy movement in Iran. They hoped to tell the British government to cut all ties with the Islamic Republic because of its treatment of protesters. They wrote to Khan about this, but didn’t receive a reply. Then Khan announced that the area would be occupied by a special event celebrating Eid al-Fitr, the official end of the Ramadan fast. This was despite Ramadan having ended last week, and Khan having already staged an event to mark the occasion. Cutting off ties with Iran is opposed by the British government because it would leave the Brits in Iran without any official assistance if they got into trouble with the authorities. Tousi was also annoyed at Khan’s refusal to meet an Iranian hunger striker, who has been on the streets campaigning for this for about 50 days or so. Although the man is obviously in a poor condition, his life is being looked after by local doctors, who come out to check on him.

Now Sadiq Khan is very much a target of right-wing ire. Much of this is part of the culture wars. The far right see him as a Muslim determined to islamicise the capital and erase its White inhabitants and their traditional culture. This is due to Khan’s decision to rename streets to make them reflect the capital’s more diverse population, the erection of the statue to a leader of an anti-British rebellion in Malawi and the fireworks and lights celebrating Ramadan but not the Christian festival of Easter. Underneath that, the real reason is that Khan’s Labour and the Tories obviously want to get rid of him and replace him with their own candidate.

Tousi’s particularly sensitive to the issue of the Iranian protests. His family are Iranian, and from what he says, I think they came here to escape Khomeini and the new Islamic theocracy. I think it’s why he’s particularly suspicious of Islam and is determined to preserve British democracy, as he sees it, against encroachment from hard-line Islam.

I think the government is right and that cutting diplomatic ties with Iran would be a severe mistake. It would leave Brits in the country vulnerable. On the other hand, given the massive incompetence of Boris Johnson and the Foreign Office in getting Mrs Zaghari-Radcliffe freed, you wonder what help the British government would be at all to anyone falsely imprisoned by the mullahs.

Tousi also criticises the government for its refusal to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation. The Revolutionary Guard are the elite soldiers of the Islamic State, there to preserve the Islamic theocracy. Comparisons with the Third Reich are glib, but I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to compare them to the Third Reich’s Waffen SS. Tousi talked about how an expatriate dissident Iranian broadcaster had been forced to move from Britain to America because Britain had not defended it from attempts by the Revolutionary Guard to close it down by attacking and kidnapping its employees. Here I think he has a point. Britain should be able to protect its citizens and resident aliens from such attacks, just as we should have been able to protect Russian dissidents from Putin’s assassins.

It looks to me that there has been a decision to stop the Iranian marchers, but I wonder if it was Khan’s alone. It seems to me that any decision to block it may have been done in conjunction with the government rather than just being Khan’s. Whoever took the decision, it is another attack on democracy and the right to protest.

Which the Conservatives have already done many times already on domestic issues.

Donors Abandoning Conservatives as Not Conservative Enough

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.

Mahyar Tousi: Iran’s Democrats Are Winning and the Theocrats Are Getting Ready to Run Away

I’ve blogged about Mahyar Tousi before. He’s a British Asian YouTuber with very right-wing views, a true-blue Tory Brexiteer of pretty much the same hard right views as the Lotus Eaters. But today he said something interesting about Iran. The country’s been rocked for several months now by protests and demonstrations celebrating women and freedom against the theocracy. This was spurred after the appalling death in police custody of a young woman, who’d been arrested for not wearing a hijab, or not wearing one properly. Iran’s a great, ancient and highly civilised country, and its young people have taken to the streets. According to Tousi, the protesters are demanding the the republication of its constitution before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the installation of the Crown Prince, the son of the last Shah, as the head of state. I think Tousi himself is Iranian, as he talks about how the country was a constitutional monarchy and had a bill of rights thousands of years ago. Well, the Shah was a tyrant who tortured, imprisoned and murdered his political enemies, but yes, ancient Persia did boast of its justice. In one of his monuments, Cyrus the Great or perhaps Xerxes wrote, ‘It is not my will that the strong oppress the weak. It is not my will that the weak oppress the strong.’ I’ve also come across papers on the web arguing that Persian women had full equality with men and citing instances where ladies led armies into battle.

And the democrats seem to be winning. Or at least have got the mullahs seriously rattled. So rattled that the head of state transferred $4 billion to his bank account in Venezuela. It looks like the mullahs are preparing to scarper over there if they get toppled, just as the remaining Nazis fled to Argentina and South America following the defeat of the Third Reich.

But he also mixes this up with conspiracy theory. Like Alex Jones and people like Godfrey Bloom, he spouts about the secret machinations of the globalists. In this instance, he claims that Iran’s protests are anti-globalist. The late Ayatollah Khomeini was installed by the CIA and other American secret agencies because the Shah was becoming an equal player and threatening their dominance. They also wanted to support the Islamic Revolutionaries in order to prevent them being supported by the Soviets, and so the Russians gaining the new regime’s support and goodwill. This lasted all of a day until the Revolutionaries turned very firmly against the West. Tousi talks about the possibility that others will try and interfere in the ongoing revolution and that any western interference will be seized upon as evidence of hostility and malign intent by the mullahs. He therefore urges his viewers not to interfere and let the Iranian people free themselves.

I don’t know where Tousi got the idea that the Shah was toppled by the CIA. We studied the Iranian Revolution in Islam when I was at college in the 1980s. The evidence then was that the Americans and the rest of the world were completely unprepared for the Islamic Revolution until nearly the very last moment. The only people who knew that a revolution was coming was the Tudeh, the Iranian Communist party, and they deluded themselves that it would be a communist revolution. When it did break out, the CIA issued a report saying that the Ayatollah Khomeini would govern Iran as a peaceful, nonviolent spiritual leader like Gandhi.

If only.

My reaction is to doubt Tousi on this, as Iran is full of conspiracy theories. One of these even holds that Khomeini was in reality British and his true surname was Williams, and there are even slightly blasphemous jokes about it. But it might be right. In any case, I strongly feel that Tousi is also right when he says that the Iranians should be left free to make their own revolution and destiny. Other Iranian dissidents, such as Shirin Ebadi, who has radically different views to Tousi, have said the same. She has attacked the Iranian regime for its oppression of Iranian workers. I’m sure both of them are right, as it was western interference in Iranian affairs – the overthrow of the last democratic Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, by Britain and the CIA, that led to the Shah’s brutal autocracy against whom the Iranians understandably revolted.

Tousi is also looking forward to the Mullah’s overthrow, because of their support for the Palestinians and Hamas. He thinks that if they go, there could be peace in the Middle East. Well, there might, but it looks like the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians would then go unchecked.

It will be interesting to see what develops.

GB News No Longer Paying Guests As Ratings Fall

‘Oh dear. How sad. Never mind’, as Sergeant-Major Shutup from It Ain’t ‘Alf ‘Ot Mum used to say. Mad Brexiteer Mahyar Tousi put up a video yesterday gloating over the continued demise of GB News and boasting about how his own YouTube channel now has more average viewers than the ‘old media’ TV stations. People are continuing to switch off GB News, and so Angela Frangopoulos, the station’s chief Dalek, has ruled that guests will no longer be paid fees for appearances. Regular guests will be paid a flat rate, which sounds like it’s basically just expenses, but it looks like they’re expected to find their own transport and be prompt and prepared for their appearance. Tousi points out that this isn’t a good idea, as guests and contributors should be paid for their expertise and broadcasters are in competition for them. This included GB News, which used to pay them well.

He then talks about the poor average ratings of these channels. The BBC is at the top with 100,000 average views. Next highest is Sky News. GB News is below them, and right at the bottom is Talk TV, which Tousi describes as only half a station that’s only on for part of the day. His channel has 300,000 views or followers, which shows how YouTube channels are eating the old media alive. Which is true, but I wish it didn’t include right-wing channels like Tousi’s.

As for GB News, I think this was supposed to be a rival to the ‘woke, wet BBC’. Their ratings have been steadily going down since they were launched. Many of their programmes have zero people watching. They tried to improve matters by bringing on Farage, and he did boost their rating – but only for his show. Once Farage’s programme had ended, people went back to not watching. This dire situation probably explains why they’ve now hired Lozza Fox and are hiring Jacob Rees-Mogg. Speaking personally, Mogg is one of the last people I want to see on TV, but for some reason the man who comes across very much as wanting to send small children back up chimneys is a great, molten hero of the Tory voters. And I definitely do not want to see any video with Nana Akua complaining about the health service and subtly hinting that it should be privatised.

And this isn’t all of the channel’s problems. Libertarian Islamophobe Mark Steyn left/ was given the heave-ho because of his remarks about the Covid lockdown and vaccination, and the channel is ordering its staff to keep any anti-vaxxer views they may have to themselves. This has outraged all the right-wingers who think that it should have been better to have kept Britain open, risking more people catching the disease and who think that there’s something in the vaccine itself that’s harmful. I think the YouTuber Paz 49 is one of these, as he threw a strop when Reform’s Richard Tice advised people to get the jab.

The internet is taking over, but rather than people watching GB News or Tousi’s right-wing rants, I’d rather people looked at left-wing YouTubers like A Different Bias, Novara Media, Maximilien Robespierre and so many others. As they are presenting a genuinely different view of this country and its politics, which is far more informative than the nonsense spouted by the privileged individuals spouting populist nonsense against the NHS. welfare state and the Channel migrants.

Spat Between UKIP and Reform as Tice Refuses Offer of an Alliance

This comes from a video by right-winger Mahyar Tousi on YouTube. UKIP has been trying to organise some kind of alliance with the other right-wing populist parties and splinter groups. They have said that if they join this alliance they can keep their leaders and independence under an agreement intended to bring all these groups an electoral victory which would be beyond them as individual, separate groups. To join this proposed alliance, all that was necessary was that 95 per cent of the parties’ views should be the same. Today UKIP’s deputy fuehrer, Rebecca Jane, announced that the only one of these smaller right-wing parties to have ignored the Kipper’s overtures was Reform. She stated that it because its Duce, Richard Tice, believed that he could challenge the other parties alone. This was a mistake. She also criticised him for criticising the Tory MP, Andrew Bridgen, who had been thrown out for attacking the Covid compulsory vaccination programme. Tousi himself declared that this was splitting the right, and that it was all a clash of personalities rather than any real disagreement over policies..

I was surprised that UKIP was still going. I thought it had absolutely collapsed and been wound up following the departure of Nigel of Farage, his replacement by Gerard Batten and the entry into the party of Count Dankula, Carl Benjamin and Paul Joseph Watson. I also thought that whatever remained of the party had been reconstituted as Reform, but that’s evidently not true. As for these parties remaining separate and splitting the right, I am more than happy to see that continue. From what I’ve seen, they’re all hard right, Thatcherite parties, who’d continue the Tories’ attack on the welfare state and NHS. The only difference I can see is that they’d be more overt about it. And that is quite apart from their aggressively anti-immigrant policies.

I therefore think it’s no bad thing that these right-wing, populist parties are divided. Labour’s not perfect, but I want them to gain power and overturn 12 wretched years of Tory misrule. And these parties splitting the vote between hopefully makes that easier.

Leaked Report Reveals Prevent Funding Used for Islamist Groups, and More Focussed on Tackling White Fascism

This obviously isn’t something you want to hear, but it needs to be recognised and the problem tackled properly. A few days ago the Shawcross Report into the operation of the Prevent programme was leaked to the press. The Prevent programme was the scheme launched by Blair as part of the ‘War on Terror’. It was set up to identify and deradicalize people, like schoolchildren, who were being drawn into Islamist terrorism. The report has been repeatedly delayed from fears that some of the individuals discussed in it would sue. It found that instead of the money being used to deradicalize people, it was instead being used by Islamist groups to fund their activities and propaganda. This included one group, who called on Muslim soldiers in the British army to disobey orders. Which is mutiny. Furthermore, the programme was more focussed on identifying and punishing White nationalists in contrast to the other anti-terrorism organisations. Of course, the report was immediately denounced as ‘harmful to community cohesion’ and racist and islamophobic.

Unfortunately, I am not remotely surprised. Private Eye a long time ago quoted a passage from Ed Hussein’s book, The Islamist, in which he described watching a long line of Muslim clergy and community leaders entering No. 10 to reassure Blair that they were all moderates and were doing their bit to tackle extremism in their communities. And he knew that every one of them was lying, and that they were all Islamist radicals. A friend of mine used to help teach Islam at university. One year his university arranged to host an interfaith conference between Christians and Muslims. He told me that the Muslim delegates were all jihadis. As for the misplaced focus on White fascism, I think this is a result of repeated criticisms from the Muslim community. Before the BNP finally collapsed, whenever the subject of tackling Muslim radical organisations was raised someone from one of the main Muslim organisations would indignantly retort that this was racist and islamophobic, and that they should ban the BNP instead. The Prevent programme has come under repeated attack from Muslims for supposedly being racist and Islamophobic. And whenever Muslim bigotry is exposed, as in the 2007 Channel 4 programme, Undercover Mosque, there are inevitably the same defensive claims about harming community cohesion. This is despite the fact that community cohesion was harmed the moment someone took the decision to invite the preachers of hate in. Simon Webb, who has very far right opinions himself, stated in one of his videos that the focus on tackling White extremists rather than Muslim was an attempt to mislead the public into believing that there were more of them and they were a bigger problem than the Islamists. Even allowing for Webb’s own views, I think he has a point. White fascists have used violence and terrorism. In the 1960s they bombed a couple of synagogues in London. Many of us still remember the mass violence between far right football hooligans and Black and Asian youths in the 70s and 80s, and the racist murder of Black kids has inspired pop songs attacking the hate and violence like ‘Down in the Subway’. In the 90s there was a bombing campaign by a member of the National Socialist party against Blacks, gays and Asians, in which nail bombs were planted in three pubs. People are very aware of the threat from White racial terrorists. Targeting these groups is also easier because it will have greater support from the left from the kind of people, who would suspect that a programme targeting Black or Asian terrorists is persecuting them unfairly. The police and local authorities, who refused to tackle the Pakistani grooming gangs in Rotherham and elsewhere did so because they didn’t want to start riots. I think the same attitude is behind the skewed focus in the Prevent programme. I think there is a reluctance amongst the political class to tackle ethnic minority criminality and extremism because of memories of the race riots of the 60s, 1981/2, and Oldham more recently, and a determination to prove Enoch Powell wrong in his lurid predictions of racial violence in the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

Islamism is a real danger, but the proportion of people who hold Islamist views are trivially small. Only about five per cent of the Muslim population, according to the polls, want to be governed by shariah law. There are far greater numbers who support British democracy and values, albeit often moderated. This is why the Lotus Eaters, in order to show that the Muslim community rejects British traditional values, concentrated on single issues like Muslim disapproval of homosexuality and singing the national anthem. There is genuine opposition to Islamism and the preachers of hate from other parts of the Muslim community here in Britain. Back in the ’80s and ’90s Muslims organised their own demonstrations against the protests and hateful preaching of the extremists demanding the death of Salman Rushdie. Ed Hussein in his recent book states that his fathers’ generation came to Britain because they believed in our country and its values. I’ve heard other Muslims say that their parents came here to enjoy the freedom and opportunities they were denied in their own country. Mahyar Tousi, a true-blue Tory Brexiteer, said something similar in a recent video of his on the channel migrants. He stated that second and third generation British Blacks and Asians were against further immigration, not because they were traitors to their own kind, but because their parents and grandparents had come to this country to share and support its values and were concerned that later migrants did not share these. Tousi’s a libertarian Tory, who’d sell off the health service if he could, but he does have a point. Some of the Muslims in Hussein’s recent book stated that much of the violence and criminality their communities now suffered from came from recent migrants, like asylum seekers from war-torn parts of the world, who could not adapt to peace nor fully accept that they were not under threat from the state. One of the issues connected with immigration identified by one genuinely moderate imam, writing in the Financial Times in the ’90s, was that the shortage of home-grown Muslim clergy meant that bigoted preachers from Pakistan were being allowed in to rectify this shortage.

We really need to tackle the problem of Muslim radicalisation properly and squarely, without listening to reassuring blandishments and assurances of peace and cooperation from those who don’t believe remotely in it. And we can do so by strengthening and listening to genuinely moderate, liberal Muslims voices and supporting their protests and initiatives against such hate.

Reform Party Launch Attack Ad against Tory ‘Consocialists’

Mad ultra-brexiteer Mahyar Tousi is highly delighted with the latest promotional film from Richard Tice and the wretched Reform Party. He showed it on one of his videos earlier today or yesterday. The film shows a hammer striking a piggy bank with the message that pensions are being hammered. It then talks about how Brits are being hit by Tory austerity and that the country is paying the price for 12 years of failed Tory policies. This is because Rishi Sunak and the rest are ‘Consocialists’. The Reform Party, however, offer growth and prosperity based on lowering taxes and eliminating waste. But note the contradiction – lowering taxes and cutting waste is Tory policy, and it translates into lowering taxes for the rich and cutting services, particularly the welfare state. So, what’s all this bilge about ‘Consocialists’? I can only think it’s because when Covid hit, suddenly the Tories had to put cash into the economy to support the businesses that were closed and the people that couldn’t work due to the lockdown. And the Tory hard right, which includes Tousi and the others the ad is aimed at, have bitterly resented it ever since. I think if they’d had their way, they wouldn’t have initiated the lockdown but carried on with the nonsense about herd immunity. Which means letting the old and weak die in order to allow the rest to become immune to the disease. But the nonsense of ‘Consocialism’ also harks back to Farage nonsense about ‘Liblabcon’ and how they were all the same, with only UKIP being different.

No, the Tories are not socialists. They have cut welfare provision to the point where, for many of the most vulnerable people, it no longer exists. That’s why people are being forced to use food banks. The Tories fully support private industry and are covertly trying to privatise the NHS and convert it into a system of private healthcare funded through private health insurance like America’s. They were also behind the privatisation of the utilities, which has been a disaster. Privatisation has not brought greater investment, just further cuts to services in order to boost boardroom pay and shareholder dividends. As for tax, they have cut taxes – for the rich. These are all policies that Tice and his vile crew will follow if in they get into government. And the results will be the same: abysmally poor public services, mass poverty and ill health with a privatised health service.

The Tories and Reform are just two branches of the same party. Don’t vote for them.

Are Tory MPs Preparing a ‘No Confidence’ Vote Against Sunak Already?

Just found a video by mad arch-Brexiteer Mahyar Tousi claiming that this is the case. I haven’t watched it, so it might not be true. But if it is, it’s quick. Truss at least had nearly two months before the Tories went into meltdown and threw her out. Sunak’s only been in the job for about a week. There really can be no argument – we must have a general election. Now!

Number of Tory Party Members Resigning Crashes Their Website

This ought to cheer a few of us up following the imposition of yet another unelected Tory prime minister. Mad right-wing Brexiteer Mahyar Tousi reported on one of his videos today that so many grass roots members of the Tory party are fed up with not being allowed to have their say in the selection of the new PM, that they’re resigning en masse. And so many of them were going on the Tory website looking for ways they could resign their memberships, that they crashed it. Apparently, they have nothing against Sunak himself, just that the party prevented them from the process of selecting who they wanted as prime minister. Richard Tice, fuehrer of Reform UK, formerly the Brexit party, is making the most of this crisis in the Tory ranks. He’s emailing former Tory members to join his wretched crew and says that Reform is planning to stand 500 candidates at the next election. As for Tousi himself, he reckons that this means trouble for the Tories, although they could just win the next election as Sunak prints money to give as handouts. That comment shows you how right-wing and out of touch Tousi is.

I’m not surprised the Tory grassroots are angry. Tousi admits that there aren’t many advantages to being a party member. You do get to go to the Tory party conference, though that costs extra, and there are one or two other perks. But there were grumblings from ordinary Tory members a little while ago about how they felt sidelined by the leadership in favour of the big donors. Now it seems that anger has come to head with the selection of Sunak by the parliamentary party in a process that excluded regular Tory members. Let’s hope a few other party leaders learn a few lessons here about the folly of ignoring the grassroots party, eh Starmer?

Farage in Desperate Bid to Be Relevant Again with Calls for New, Unified Right-Wing Party

Just been looking at a couple of videos put up by the arch-right-wingers Michael Heaver and Mahyar Tousi. From them it seems that Richard Tice and his wretched Reform party are claiming that Tory party members and councillors are defecting to them. They’re also planning to put up MPs in every constituency come an election. Farage has also come out of the woodwork once more to urge the formation of a new, unified right-wing party to fight the Tories. It looks like he wants to be the head of a party once more and return to politics. I somehow doubt that will happen. I can’t see either Tice in the Reform Party or Laurence Fox for Reclaim casually uniting their parties and taking second place to Nige. But I can well believe the Tories are losing some members to Reform, as they believe Truss has gone back and is trying to remove the Brexiteers from positions of power. Well, if I had my way, all the Tories would be removed from power.

Get the Tories out now!