I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Private Eye. Mostly I like it, but today I find myself wishing there was another satirical magazine around, one that wasn’t captured by the political-media complex. One that genuinely was subversive, crusading and really brought you the news that the papers and the lamestream media wouldn’t, and didn’t want you to know about. Because Private Eye is establishment. Its founders were all public schoolboys, as is its current editor, Ian Hislop. And yesterday it showed.
It ran an article on the imminent departure from politics of Diane Abbott for her letter to the Absurder stating that Jews don’t experience racism, and when they do, it’s like the prejudice against people with ginger hair. Unlike Blacks, who were enslaved and forced to the back of the bus under segregation. She ignored the Holocaust and the fact that across parts of Europe and America various institutions, like the universities, set limits on the number of Jews they would take in case they became dominated by Jews. I’ve also heard from people of Jewish heritage that California at one time wouldn’t allow Jews to own property. Abbott is completely wrong, as she’s been told by everyone.
I don’t believe, though, that Abbott is an anti-Semite. She just doesn’t believe anyone except people of colour, and that means primarily Blacks, suffer racism. And she doesn’t want racism by non-White ethnic groups discussed, because ‘they’ would use it to ‘divide and rule’. Aside from which, as Tony Greenstein has shown citing the stats, there isn’t a lot of anti-Semitism amongst severely normal Brits. 77 per cent of British people have positive views of the Jews. Five per cent hate them, and the reminder don’t care one way or another. Given those stats, it’s easy to see how she forgot about the real persecution Jews have historically suffered.
But this was not enough for the writer of the article on Abbott’s coming fall. The anonymous author, styling himself ‘Steeplejack’, said that her views were normal for Corbyn and his faction. He then quoted some Communist who said that Corbyn never really sympathised with the Jews because of their wealth. Okay, according to the stats 60 per cent of British Jews are upper-middle class. This section of the Jewish community doesn’t vote Labour. They’re Conservatives, as shown by Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, nipping round to No. 10 to congratulate Tweezer on her elevation to Prime Minister. The liberal parts of the community generally vote Lib Dem, according to the same stats, with only a few voting Labour. And some parts of the Jewish community are very right-wing, like the two per cent who voted for the National Front in the 1970s. ‘Steeplejack’s’ article believed that it was quite right that Abbott was going to be retired and that Corbyn had been effectively purged from the party, and ended with the announcement that they were coming after John McDonnell next.
You’ll note that at no time does the article mention that Corbyn had and continues to have the strong support of that part of the Jewish community that hasn’t become entranced by the Tories. They didn’t quote anyone from Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas or the Jewish Socialist Group. Because they are the wrong sort of Jews. They’re all evil self-haters and anti-Semites because they support him and criticise Israel. They didn’t go to Shraga Stern for comment, who welcomed Corbyn into his synagogue. Stern’s a Haredi Jew. Their theology holds that Israel will only be restored with the return of the messiah. Until then, Jews should stay patiently in exile, working for the good of the wider community. The Haredi community has a strong respect for Corbyn as he stood by them when they opposed the commercial development of their historic cemetery. But again, the wrong sort of Jews.
Now we come to the question of the identity of ‘Steeplejack’. The last of the Eye’s correspondents pushing this nonsense was outed as a Blairite Guardian hack. I don’t know who this guy is, but the pseudonym suggests he fancies himself in the mould of Fred Dibnah, the steeplejack and broadcaster. Dibnah was very good at explaining industrial history and Britain heritage of invention, but he had very reactionary views. He didn’t believe that women should go out to work, for example. ‘Steeplejack’s’ monicker suggests he is similarly right-wing, though probably not to that extent. And he’s almost certainly another establishment journalist.
Which is what is wrong with Private Eye. You get the views of the lamestream media. It’s critical, but only up to a certain extent. The magazine thus pushed the line that Starmer was an anti-Semite for all it could, because that was what the establishment was saying, and the magazine and its editor and contributors shared the same fears of a socialist revival. It also won’t tell you that the current Ukrainian president, Volodomyr Zelensky, is a quasi-dictator very much in the same mould as Putin. Because Zelensky’s on our side against Russia, and so the people must not know that the Orange Revolution was stage managed by Obama’s Victoria Nuland at the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. Private Eye aren’t anti-establishment, just a slightly critical section of it.
John McDonnell and the Socialist group of MPs are one of the very few things keeping me in the Labour party. And now it’s clear Starmer wants to purge them, with the support of the media and goblins like Private Eye.
This is going to be controversial, but I think this video is important as it exposes the biases and distortions in the official reportage of the Pakistani grooming gangs and the fear of being accused of racism that allowed them to get away with their crimes for decades. I’m very much aware that the New Culture Forum is part of the free market fanatics, the IEA and that GB News is a Conservative media outlet pushing the culture war issues because the Tories don’t really have anything else to use to boost their image. But this is a very, very real issue, and the ingrained refusal to investigate and prosecute these men because of their religion and ethnicity has led to the horrific abuse of 1,500 + extremely vulnerable girls in Rotherham alone. And it also demonstrates how this scandal has its deeper roots in the refusal to tolerate anything that contradicted the multicultural dogma that states that ethnic minorities and immigrants somehow automatically adopt British culture and values when they immigrate to this country. These men didn’t, and the interviewees state that this was partly due to the nature of chain migration itself and the backward culture of the region from which most of the groomers came – the Mirpur region of Pakistan.
The video is part of a new series, ‘Deprogrammed’, being launched by the NCF, Presumably the title means that its against the supposed falsehoods with which we’ve been programmed like robots by the lamestream media. The video features Harrison Pitt, a writer for the European Conservative, interviewing Evan Rigg, a Canadian freelance journalist, and Charlie Peter, a presenter on GB News who produced a documentary on the Pakistani grooming gangs. It begins with Sajid Javid’s 2018 investigation of the gangs. Despite expectations, this turned into a whitewash as the Tories were sensitive about race in the wake of the Windrush scandal. It therefore concluded that the majority of abusers and gang members were White men. The report was originally withheld from publication and it took an internet petition with 180,000 signatures to get it released. In fact, the report on which Javid’s report was based contradicted its findings. It stated that the collection of statistics for ethnicity had been so poor, it was impossible to say which race the majority of offenders was composed of. What evidence there is stated that White men constituted 30 per cent of offenders, and Asians 28 per cent. This was despite Whites constituting 85 per cent of the British population and Asians 8 per cent. By these statistics, Asians are massively overrepresented as groomers and abusers.
Peter’s stated that one effect of his documentary was that it had helped changed the law. The news about the gangs in Rotherham had first been broken a decade ago by Andrew Norfolk, after which more reports from other towns flowed in. However, these reports were mealy-mouthed and heavily censored. More documentation on the ethnic composition of the gangs is needed, along with the imprisonment of their members. Many of those convicted served only light sentences and returned to the same areas in which their victims were living afterwards because of a reluctance to send offenders to Britain’s overstretched and crowded prisons. He supported the launch of Cruella’s National Crime Agency taskforce because local authorities and police forces and had been too mired in political corruption. The problem was that these organisations prioritised community cohesion and multiculturalism over the safety of women and girls. The girls were further regarded by politicians and the media as belonging to the underclass, wild girls whose unsafe lifestyle brought their abuse on themselves. There was the further problem in that it had gone on for decades, but the people who initially talked about it were far right. In fact, they were often ordinary, decent people who were branded far right because they talked about this taboo topic. When patriotic, decent, socially conservative members of the left spoke about it, they were bullied and harassed. Anne Crier was ignored when she spoke out in 2003. Jack Straw was pilloried for complaining about it, and Sarah Champion was similarly removed from Labour’s front bench for the same reason. Peters therefore considered Braverman very brave for taking on the rape gangs. He was struck by her comments that the truth wasn’t racist as something that needed to be said to defend a government policy.
The abused girls were targeted because they were White. This was a result of mass migration, which had produced a very insular and clannish community. The immigrants involved came from the very backward Mirpur and Kashmir regions of Pakistan. It was chain migration operating through first cousin marriage. This prevented these communities from establishing links with the wider community and entrenched the traditional gender power structures that gave men immense power and control over women. It also meant that these abusers were extremely difficult to catch because family members did not want to inform on each other. This occurred at the same time the social solidarity of the wider community was declining due to the economic devastation of local industries and a process of social atomisation. Sexual behaviour became more licentious during the ’90s and Noughties, when it became acceptable to go out of an evening for casual sex. But this was also contrasted with the moral conservatism and judgmental attitudes of the tabloid papers.
The emergence of the Pakistani rape gangs flew in the face of the classical liberal doctrine that held that relentless waves of unwanted migrants would not lead to the destruction of social bonds, and especially the left-wing mantra that ‘diversity is strength’. Peters here contrasts the state of three of the countries with the highest rates of diversity – Liberia, Congo and Papua New Guinea, with very homogenous societies like Denmark, Japan and South Korea. Nevertheless, the assumption is that the more Britain becomes diverse, it can still function like Denmark and the other two nations. It’s assumed new immigrants will assimilate, but assimilation only goes so far. The Canadian journalist remarked that although he comes from a very similar nation, he will never be British. How will people from very different cultures like Liberia do so? Will it be their children or grandchildren who become British? Some migration is needed for countries to remain dynamic. The problem in Rotherham was that it was too much, too quickly and unwanted. And as the new immigrants could join the electorate after a few years, this resulted in the creation of a new electorate without the consent of the old one.
He then discusses the noxious activities and careers of some of those involved in the gangs and the suppression of action against them. One of these ratbags was Maruf Hussein, Rotherham’s Community Cohesion Officer, who refused to accept the reports that 1,500 + girls were being molested. The gangs were also assisted by White female converts to Islam, such as Shifra Ali. Ali set up a bogus taxi hotline which was supposed to supply taxis to take the girls to school. She died in 2009, unfortunately, before she could face justice. After Hussein resigned, he rebranded himself as an anti-racism activist. It has also been alleged that Hussein also launched a failed accusation of racism against a Labour colleague on the council for expressing concerns about the grooming gangs. He was then found working for NHS England as a diversity and inclusion officer. on £49,000 p.a. It is a disgrace that the doctrine of diversity hasn’t been harmed and even been strengthened by it, because it showed how such monstrous crimes could be ignored through censorship and lies. Once again the 2020 report is mentioned for its conclusion that the majority of abusers were White men. It showed that the ‘blob’, the right-wing name for the obstructive civil service and the diversity industry could spin the gangs as a White problem. This is despite the fact that there were 19 trials in which the gangs were composed only of Pakistani men. And while the police may not collect statistics on ethnicity, the names are included in the trial records. Further studies have also shown that Pakistani men dominate this issue. But the blob, Sayeeda Warsi, the Guardian and parts of the government will accuse you of racism if you talk about this.
The conversation then goes back to 2015 and comparison with the way the continental countries such as Germany were able to combat the Syrian rapists in Cologne and other cities. The interviewees make the point that Syria isn’t the same as Mirpur and Kashmir. England also has a particular nervousness when it comes to migration and accusations of racism. Peters then goes back to 1870 and Gladstone’s violent denunciation of the Turks’ atrocities in eastern Europe. His comments, if made now, would result in his being thrown out of every political party except, perhaps, Reform and the SDP. And there is the problem of the ethnic composition of constituencies affecting what their politicians are prepared to say about particular issues. Would Gladstone have made his comments, if his constituency had included a large Turkish population? He mentions the comments Tracey Brabin, the mayor of West Yorkshire, made three weeks ago on the Daily Politics. Brabin dismissed Cruella’s comments about the grooming gangs as ‘dog whistles. This is two years after a teacher in Batley was forced into hiding for showing cartoons of Mohammed in class as part of a lesson on free speech. It’s also just a few weeks after the controversy when an autistic boy scuffed a Quran, and his mother was dragged before the local mosque to beg its congregants’ forgiveness in what is described as a ‘Maoist struggle session’. Present at this kangaroo court was a police inspector urging restraint. Peters saw parallels here with the grooming gangs, especially as Maruf Hussain had also spoken to the police. If Brabin cannot tell the truth about these problems, what else will she cover up?
The video ends with a discussion of what ordinary people can do. They state that there are good resources out there about what people can do if they feel their children are being abused. The NSPCC is one, although they have reservations about them because of the charity’s statement that different communities should not be singled out. They are particularly impressed with Maggie Oliver and her campaign and organisation against the gangs.
Peters is questioned about the response by the working class to the documentary. Did they regard him as a hero? Peters replied by stating that he was only a documentary film-maker and not a hero. The real heroes were the survivors of the abuse, who put their lives at risk to talk to him. He was immensely grateful to them. It was easier talking to them and editing their accounts than talking to politicians as there was no waffle. As for Braverman’s proposed actions, the proof would be in the pudding. He would be very impressed if the offenders were imprisoned and deported. The survivors were cautiously optimistic, and Peters said he would be there to hold the government to account if it failed them.
A few days ago I found a video posted on YouTube by Laurence Fox’s Reclaim the Media. This was a short piece of part of a debate he’d had about racism with Ash Sarkar, one of the women of the left-wing internet news and comment channel, Novara Media. This was about whether Whites could experience racism. Sarkar denied that they could, because they enjoyed White privilege. She maintained this stance even when Fox raised the issue of White working class boys, who perform worse academically than Blacks and other ethnic minorities and girls. I’m not surprised Sarkar continued to maintain this view. Novara have posted a couple of videos denying that White working class boys are underprivileged compared to other ethnic groups, and even that the White working class constitutes an ethnic group at all. Sarkar has said very proudly that she’s a communist, particularly when she was exasperated by the attitude of one of the TV hosts interviewing her. But it’s not entirely the Communism of classical Marxism, which saw class as the motor of history and oppression. It’s partly the postmodernist revision of Marxism of Critical Race Theory. This replaces class with race, declaring that Whiteness is a bourgeois quality that ensures that Whites enjoy a privileged position denied to people of colour. This attitude comes partly from the intersectional Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School. Frustrated by the failure of the American working class to rise up against capitalist, Marcuse instead urged radicals to look to the ‘people of the ghetto’, groups traditionally confined to the margins of American society. This included Blacks, gays and feminists. CRT denies that Whites can experience racism through a highly contrived redefinition of the term. In their view, racism = prejudice + power. In bourgeois western society, Whites have a power denied to Blacks. Therefore they cannot suffer racism. This is profoundly wrong and in itself deeply racist. It also has highly dangerous implications that may encourage, or at least demand that a blind eye be turned to real racist violence against Whites.
The term ‘privilege’ suggests aristocratic ease, of the type enjoyed by David Cameron. Before he became prime minister, this Eton-educated aristo certainly didn’t have to worry about getting a job. He was actually approached by the Crown to work for it. But the vast majority of White Brits don’t have this privilege, and especially not those at the very bottom of society. One of my old schools had an annex for its first year pupils in a run-down area of Bristol. This was in a grimy back street called Boot Lane, at one end of which was a public toilet frequented by tramps. These were men who enjoyed absolutely no social advantages at all, and their life expectancy was no doubt extremely limited. The life-expectancy of the homeless, I’ve heard, is about three years. Sarkar, by contrast, is middle class and university educated, as is her fellow presenter Dalia Gabreal. Gabreal, who also promotes the nonsense of White privilege, is the co-editor of an anthology of postcolonialist texts. They enjoy a privilege denied to the White underclass, but it’s a privilege that they, imprisoned by Critical Race Theory, cannot acknowledge.
The idea of White privilege also glosses over and ignores the fact that previous generations of working class Whites could be victims of grinding poverty until very recently. Examples of this can be found on YouTube in a series of videos about poverty in Britain in the 1970s. Whether Sarkar, Gebreal and the others of Novara realise it or not, the idea White privilege plays down this poverty, which could be extreme with the bland attitude that however tough it could be for Whites, it’s worse for Blacks. On average, this is true, but not always. While Novara has shown a deep concern for working class poverty and exploitation, the constraints of Critical Race and Postcolonial Theory means that it is unable to recognise or accept the fact of anti-White racism nor that Whites do not uniformly enjoy privilege.
While it comes from the Marxist left, Critical Race Theory’s view that whiteness is intrinsically oppressive is very much of the same type of ideological racism as fascism. This divides society into the race or nation and its oppressors. In the case of the Italian fascists, the true nation was that of Italy and its people. In Nazism it was Germany, and the enemies were the Jews. This binary opposition Noel O’Sullivan, a Conservative historian of fascism, traces back to the new style of political activism that began with the French Revolution. This divided France into the authentic nation of the ‘tiers etat’, the third estate – the common French people, and their oppressors, the aristocracy and clergy. He quotes one French revolutionary who made this very plain, as well as his intention to shoot the country’s noble oppressors. O’Sullivan makes the point that this opposition can be applied to other groups, as demonstrated in the magazine of a radical feminist group, Medusa. This declared that only women were human, and men were an inferior species. Critical Race Theory revises this racism so that the authentic, oppressed nation are Blacks and other people of colour, while the racial oppressors are White.
This attitude is extremely dangerous. The critics of Critical Race Theory and other postmodernist ‘isms’, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsey and Helen Pluckrose, submitted a number of spoof papers making extreme claims to various postmodernist academic journals. One of these incorporated quotes from Mein Kampf, but with ‘Whiteness’ substituted for Jews. This was accepted. There have been a series of controversies over the other side of the Pond in which Black academics have announced on TV programmes or internet meetings that they want Whites to become extinct. And there has been real racial violence against Whites. Thomas Sowell describes a few in his book, Race and Culture, noting that the mainstream media either does not cover them, or if it does, the report is framed so as to exonerate the attackers. They acted as they did as a result of the oppression of White America. Racial violence against Whites isn’t confined to America. Over twenty years ago the number of racist murders of Whites was nearly equal to that of ethnic minorities, and the level of racist abuse and attacks against Whites exceeded those against other demographics. This was covered by the mainstream media until the BNP sought to exploit it. But many Black and ethnic minority activists do not want racism against Whites recognised. At a conference of Black and ethnic minority activists a few years ago, three of them criticised the government for including anti-White racism in official statistics. In their view, only racial abuse and violence against ethnic minorities deserved to be counted. Critical Race Theory’s contrived redefinition of racism does the same: it is intended to deny that Blacks can be racist.
Critical Race Theory is also dangerously defective in its Eurocentricismt It assumes that only White Europeans and their descendants in America and the New World can be racist. It ignores the fact that other cultures have also traditions of racial hierarchies and ingrained prejudice. For example, Muslim Arabs also developed ideas of the inferiority of Black Africans on the one hand and White Europeans on the other. India and China also have their own ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. Western Blacks have also developed a distinct racist ideology in Afrocentrism. There is a series of Afrocentric works promoting the idea of White inferiority in vicious, splenetic terms. At the same time, Black Muslim sects like the Nation of Islam and Ansaaru Allah also hold that Whites are racially inferior oppressors, who are due to be annihilated by God at the coming apocalypse. I’ve also come across British Muslim texts that are explicitly colonialist. One of these argued that just as the British allowed other peoples to enter their colonies and keep their laws and customs as a way of populating their territories in North America, so Muslims should be allowed to form autonomous communities in America and Europe. These forms of Black and extra-European racism are largely unknown to most western people, and there is real opposition to discussing them. The Labour politician, Diane Abbott, has said several times that discussing the different forms of racism amongst ethnic minorities would allow ‘them’ to ‘divide and rule’. But these tensions between different ethnic groups in Britain outside the Black/White dichotomy exist and have led to riots. A few months ago, there was rioting in the north of England between Muslims and Hindus. The acceptance of the idea that only Whites can be racist among liberal Whites has also been assisted by the idea of the Noble Savage. This goes back to the 17th century, and views primitive, non-European societies as somehow nobler and more virtuous than western civilisation. It is also a product of the tradition of European and indigenous opposition to imperialism. This concentrates on the horrors of western imperialism but similarly ignores those of other imperialist regimes, such as the Ottoman Empire. The refusal to accept that other peoples are also capable of terrible racism, and the idea that only White racism is to be tackled, led to the police and authorities turning a blind eye for twenty years to the Pakistani grooming gangs.
I find the denial of anti-White racism, and the bitter racism of some Black activists deeply worrying. Because Critical Race Theory declares that all Whites enjoy such privilege and that the level of racism in society remains constant, it comes very close to the old accusation that all Whites are racist. While I doubt very much that it’s supporters would see it as such, it is very close to racial essentialism of the type that causes anti-Semites as intrinsically hostile to Whites. I am very much afraid that this will encourage anti-White attacks and pogroms, but there will be no action taken or condemnation of these because of the racial attitudes promoted by CRT. Sarkar, Gebreal and the rest of Novara doubtless believe that they are sincerely anti-racist and they probably are so in their personal relationship with Whites. But they, along with numberless others of the same views, hold a twisted redefinition of racism that legitimises racism and violence against Whites, while denying that this is possible at all.
I didn’t watch Have I Got News For You last Friday. I’ve gone off the programme. It’s definitely past it’s sell-by date, in my opinion. Not only is it not as funny as it was when it first appeared in 1990 or thereabouts, I’ve got sick and tired of its right-wing bias.
Right-wing, when the Tories have also moaned about the Beeb being full of ‘woke’ lefties? Yes. A few years ago it was denouncing Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, despite the fact that the Maidan Revolution was a very carefully planned piece of regime change by the Americans using the National Endowment for Democracy. The regime they had installed was definitely pro-western, and supported by real Nazis, who were goose-stepping around in uniforms taken from SS auxiliary units in the Second World War. And it seemed to me that the Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainian population were being victimised, so under international law Putin, thug though he is, had every right to invade to aid them. But you didn’t hear this from the Beeb, and especially not on Have I Got News For You. Just more propaganda from the American and British establishments.
Ditto with the programme’s attitude to Corbyn. I stopped watching it because week after week, all you heard from Have I Got News For You was them pushing the anti-Semitism smears. Corbyn was an evil anti-Semite, and the Labour party was a foul, seething cauldron of anti-Jewish hatred. It was the standard media line, and shows the groupthink of the lamestream media. And it was the same on Friday, I gather.
According to a video put up yesterday by right-wing Youtuber and radio host, Alex Bellfield, the programme had included a comedian, Fintan Torbin/Toibin/Tobin, oh, whoever. Torbin was definitely a supporter of Starmer, and said that just when Labour looked like becoming a serious opposition, back came Corbyn. He then compared his supporters to fans of Bob Dylan, whom he considered to be just as infuriating. He said that they should all be killed by bombing Glastonbury. I’ve got a feeling this might be a reference to an incident at the festival a few years ago when the Labour leader appeared on stage, and was roundly greeted by the audience. That’s clearly rankled Blairites like Torbin for a very long time. It also makes you wonder about his hatred of Dylan. I can’t say I’m a fan of him, and some of his stuff is undoubtedly overrated, I’m sure. But it’s a bit much to talk about killing his fans.
Torbin’s joke is a clear example of Beeb anti-left wing bias. But not to Bellfield, who has a bitter hatred of the corporation. He has some kind of personal vendetta against them too, and so makes videos claiming that it’s full of ‘woke’, Guardian-reading lefties. pushing minority identity politics and gender confusion on the young. Now I think he’s right in that the Beeb does back, or wishes to be seen to back, anti-racist, feminist and pro-gay and trans policies. But when it comes to working class politics as a whole, the opposite is the case. It is very solidly pro-Tory, anti-Labour and anti-trade union, and has tireless and relentlessly pushed austerity, as the Kushner brothers have pointed out in their excellent book, Who Needs the Cuts?
Torbin’s unfunny joke obviously provoked outrage from the viewing audience. Bellfield considers this hypocritical, considering that Jo Brand was allowed to get away with a joke about stabbing Nigel Farage. Well, the arch-Blairite Labour MP Rachel Reed also made a comment about stabbing Corbyn in the front, but I don’t see Bellfield getting upset about that. Which shows just how partisan he is. He claimed that the outrage at Tobin’s joke was another example of the hypocrisy of the Beeb against right-wingers. He’s wrong. I think the Beeb, or at least the host, Victoria Coren-Mitchell, may have been genuinely surprised at the strength of the reaction against it. It seems to me that, considering their long record of pushing the anti-Corbyn line, the Beeb invited Torbin on because they knew he hated Corbyn and would make a suitable joke or comment about him. They just didn’t expect that a large, vocal part of the audience would take issue with it.
Just as the sheer strength of support for the Labour leader is causing problems for Starmer and the Blairites, who clearly hadn’t expected such opposition to their attacks on Corbyn and attempts to purge his supporters.
Mike’s put up a number of pieces discussing and criticising Starmer’s demand that Labour MPs abstain on the wretched ‘Spycops’ bill. If passed, this would allow members of the police and security services to commit serious offences while undercover. Twenty Labour MPs initially defied him and voted against it, with several resigning in protest from the shadow cabinet. The Labour whips’ office has also broken party protocol to issue written reprimands to the rebels. If they defy party discipline, they will face a reprimand period of six months, which will be extended to twelve if they continue to break the whip. These letters have also been shared with the parliamentary committee, a group of backbench MPs elected by the parliamentary Labour party and currently dominated by the right. This committee will decide whether or not to inform the rebel MPs’ constituency parties and the NEC. The information could then be considered if an MP seeks reselection in preparation for a general election. As one MP has said, it’s intimidation, pure and simple. And a number of those MPs, who received the letters, are talking to union officials.
Starmer’s conduct shouldn’t really be a surprise. He’s a Blairite, and Blair’s tenure of the Labour leadership was marked by control freakery as he centralised power around himself and his faction away from the party’s ordinary members and grassroots. But Starmer is also very much an establishment figure. He was, after all, the director of public prosecutions. In this video below, comedian and presenter Lee Camp raises important and very provocative questions about Starmer’s connections to the British establishment and the deep state. Camp’s the presenter of a number of shows on RT America, which are deeply critical of the corporate establishment, and American militarism and imperialism. The video’s from their programme, Moment of Clarity. The questions asked about Starmer are those posed by Mac Kennard in an article in The Gray Zone. RT is owned by the Russian state, as it points out on the blurbs for its videos on YouTube. Putin is an authoritarian thug and kleptocrat, who has opposition journalists, politicos, activists and businessmen beaten and killed. But that doesn’t mean that RT’s programmes exposing and criticising western capitalism and imperialism and the corrupt activities and policies of our governments aren’t accurate and justified.
Camp begins the video by explaining how there was a comparable battle in the Labour party over Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership as there was in the American Democrat party over Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for the presidency. Just as Sanders was opposed by the Democrats’ corporate leadership and smeared as a Communist in a neo-McCarthyite witch hunt, so Jeremy Corbyn – a real progressive – was opposed by the corporatists in the Labour party. He was subjected to the same smears, as well as accusations of anti-Semitism because he supported Palestine. Camp states that there are leaked texts showing that leading figures in the Labour party were actively working to undermine him. Jeremy Corbyn has now gone and been replaced by Keir Starmer, about whom Kennard asks the following questions:
1. why did he meet the head of MI5 for drinks a year after his decision not to prosecute the intelligence agency for its role in torture?
Camp uses the term ‘deep state’ for the secret services, and realises that some of his viewers may be uncomfortable with the term because of its use by Trump. He tries to reassure them that the deep state, and the term itself, existed long before Trump. It’s just something the Orange Generalissimo has latched onto. Camp’s not wrong – the term was used for the network of covert intelligence and state law enforcement and security services long before Trump was elected. Lobster has been using the term for years in its articles exposing their grubby activities. More controversially, Camp believes that the deep state was responsible for the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. JFK was supposedly assassinated because he was about to divulge publicly the deep state’s nefarious activities. This is obviously controversial because the JFK assassination is one of the classic conspiracy theories, and one that many critics of the British and American secret states don’t believe in. It may actually be that JFK really was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone gunman. But Camp’s belief in this conspiracy theory doesn’t on its own disqualify his other allegations and criticisms about the secret state.
2. When and why did Starmer join the Trilateral Commission?
The Trilateral Commission was set up in 1973 by elite banker David Rockefeller as a discussion group to foster greater cooperation between Japan, the US and western Europe. According to Camp, it was really founded to roll back the advances of the hippy era as the corporate elite were horrified that ordinary people were being heard by governments instead of big businessmen. They looked back to the days when President Truman could listen to a couple of businessmen and no-one else. The Commission published a paper, ‘The Crisis of Democracy’, which claimed that democracy was in crisis because too many people were being heard. Ordinary people were making demands and getting them acted upon. This, the Commission decided, was anti-business. They made a series of recommendations themselves, which have since been implemented. These included the demand that the media should be aligned with business interests. Camp states that this doesn’t mean that there is uniformity of opinion amongst the mainstream media. The various media outlets do disagree with each other over policies and politicians. But it does mean that if the media decides that a story doesn’t fit with business interests, it doesn’t get published. The Commission also wanted the universities purged of left-wing progressives. The Commission’s members including such shining examples of humanity and decency as Henry Kissinger and the former director general of US National Intelligence, John Negroponte.
3. What did Starmer discuss with US attorney general Eric Holder when he met him on November 9th, 2011 in Washington D.C.?
Starmer was the director of public prosecutions at the time, and met not just Holder, but also five others from the Department of Justice. This was at the same time the Swedes were trying to extradite Julian Assange of Wikileaks infamy. Except that further leaked documents have shown that the Swedes were prepared to drop the case. But Britain wanted him extradited and tried, and successfully put pressure on the Swedes to do just that.
4. Why did Starmer develop such a close relationship with the Times newspaper?
Starmer held social gatherings with the Times’ staff, which is remarkable, as Camp points out, because it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch like Fox News in America.
Camp goes on to conclude that, at the very least, this all shows that Starmer is very much a member of the corporate establishment, and that the deep state has been working to assure that same corporate elite that he’s safe, just as they worked to reassure Wall Street about Obama. At the time Obama had only been senator for a couple of years, but nevertheless he succeeded in getting a meeting with a former treasury secretary. But now the corporate establishment in the Democrats and the Labour party has won. Jeremy Corbyn has been ousted and replaced with Starmer, while Sanders can’t even get a platform with the Democrats. This is because the Democrats have surrendered the platform to the Republicans because Trump contradicts himself so much they just can’t follow him.
While these are just questions and speculation, they do strongly indicate that Starmer is very much part of the establishment and has their interests at heart, not those of the traditional Labour party. His closeness to the Times shows just why he was willing to write articles for the Tory press behind paywalls. His role in the British state’s attempt to extradite Julian Assange and meetings with Holder also show why Starmer’s so determined not to oppose the ‘spycops’ bill. He is very much part of the British state establishment, and sees it has his role and duty to protect it and its secrets, and not the British public from the secret state.
As for the Trilateral Commission, they’re at the heart of any number of dodgy conspiracy theories, including those claiming that the American government has made covert pacts with evil aliens from Zeta Reticuli. However, as Camp says, his membership of the Commission does indeed show that he is very much a member of the global corporate elite. An elite that wanted to reduce democracy in order to promote the interests of big business.
As a corporate, establishment figure, Starmer very definitely should not be the head of a party founded to represent and defend ordinary people against exploitation and deprivation by business and the state. Dissatisfaction with his leadership inside the Labour party is growing. Hopefully it won’t be too long before he’s ousted in his turn, and the leadership taken by someone who genuinely represents the party, its history and its real mission to work for Britain’s working people.
Here’s another interesting question posed by the changing policies of the Italian Fascist state towards industry and the financial sector. Fascism celebrated and defended private industry as the essential basis of the Italian economy and society. When Mussolini first took power in the early 1920s, he declared that Fascism stood for ‘Manchester School’ capitalism – privatisation, cuts to public services and expenditure and the lowering of wages and welfare benefits. But this changed with the development of the Fascist state through the establishment of the corporations – industrial organisations combining the employers’ organisations and the trade unions, which were supposed to take over the management of industry – autarky, which aimed to make Italy self-sufficient and the movement to a centrally planned economy.
This was partly achieved in the early 1930s when Mussolini set up two state institutions to buy out the Italian banks following the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression. These not only bought out the banks, but also the industries these banks owned and controlled, so that the Italian state ended up owning just under a fifth of the Italian economy.
This is described in a passage in the article ‘Industry’ in Philip V. Cannistraro’s Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press 1982). This runs
Two public agencies were created to save banks and crucially affected industries: the Istituto Mobiliare Italiano (IMI) on November 13, 1931, which was to control credit; and the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI) on January 23, 1933. IRI was by far the more radical solution, for it purchased all the shares of stock in industrial, agricultural, and real estate companies previously held by banks. (The banking law of 1936 prohibited banks from extending long-term credit to industrial concerns). Although the industrialists fully expected a return to “normalcy” and to private enterprise after the crisis had passed, Mussolini had successfully created an instrument for the permanent intervention of government in the economy. By 1939 IRI controlled a series of firms representing 44.15 percent of the capital of Italian stock values and 17.80 percent of the total capital of the country – hence, the Fascist government controlled a proportionately larger section of national industry than any other government in Europe except the Soviet Union. (p. 278).
This allowed the government to interfere and restructure the Italian economy leading to the expansion of the manufacturing economy and a reduction in imports. On the other hand, poor government planning and an inefficient bureaucracy meant that Italian domestic manufactures were frequently inferior and the country had a lower growth rate than many other western European countries.
But this contrasts very strongly with policy of Britain and America to the financial sector after the 2008. The banks were bailed out with public money, but were not nationalised and the government has continued with its ‘light touch’ approach to regulation. Meaning that the banks have been free to carry on pretty much as before. Public spending, especially on welfare, has been drastically cut. Despite the Tories claiming that this would boost the economy and they’d pay of the debt within a couple of years or so, this has very definitely not happened. In fact, the debt has massively increased.
This has added to the long term problems of Britain’s manufacturing industry. Left-wing economists have pointed out that Britain’s domestic industries suffer from a lack of capital because the financial sector is geared towards overseas investment. A situation that has no doubt got worse due to globalisation and the personal investment of many Tory and New Labour MPs in foreign industry and their savings in offshore tax havens. British industry has also suffered from the ignorance and neglect of successive prime ministers from Maggie Thatcher onwards. Thatcher couldn’t understand that her policy of keeping the Pound strong would damage British exports, and in any case did not want to rescue failing British industries. They were either to be allowed to go under, or else sold to foreign companies and governments. Tony Blair went further, and believed that manufacturing industry’s place in the British economy could be successfully taken over by the financial sector and the service industries.
But this has also been a failure. Ha-Joon Chang in his 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism has pointed out that manufacturing industry is still very much of vital importance. It’s just that it has grown at a slower rate than the other sectors.
Fascist Italy was a totalitarian dictatorship where Mussolini ruled by fear and violence. There was no freedom of speech or conscience in a system that aimed at the total subordination of the individual, economy and society. Mussolini collaborated with Hitler in the persecution of the Jews, although mercifully this wasn’t quite so extreme so that 80 per cent of Italian Jews survived. The regime was aggressively militaristic aiming at the restoration of a new, Roman-style empire in the Mediterranean. Albania, Greece and Ethiopia were invaded along with Tripoli in Libya and Fascist forces were responsible for horrific atrocities as well as the passage of race laws forbidding racial intermixture with Black Africans.
It was a grotesque, murderous regime which was properly brought to an end by the Allied victory of the Second World War. It must never be revived and Fascism must be fought every where. But it does appear that Mussolini’s policy towards the banks and industry was better than that pursued by our supposedly liberal democracies. But the governments of our own time are also becoming increasingly intolerant and authoritarian. The danger of our country becoming similar repressive dictatorship under Boris and the Tories is very real.
We desperately need the return to power of a genuinely socialist Labour government, committed to investment in the welfare state and public services with a nationalised NHS, a mixed economy and positive commitment to democracy and freedom of speech rather than the illusion maintained by the mainstream media and Tory press.
And that will mean overturning over three decades of Thatcherite orthodoxy on the banks and financial sector, just as Mussolini changed his policies towards them with the aim of restoring and expanding Italian industry.
Ho ho! Zelo Street yesterday published a very interesting and amusing article about the continuing decline of the lamestream press. Jim Waterson, a hack at the Guardian, posted a series of tweets about the latest circulation figures for British newspapers. And they aren’t encouraging. Zelo Street has said for the past couple of months that the press has been badly hit by the lockdown. People simply aren’t buying papers. It’s why the Murdoch rags, inter alia, have been pushing for the lockdown to be lifted and actually took to implore their readers and internet followers to #buyapaper. They’re not remotely interested in the welfare of the great British public. But they are worried about falling sales and what Murdoch and the other chief inmates of News International will do about them – like start laying people off.
Waterson tweeted that, although the newspaper sales figures were supposed to be out that day, the industry had insisted that they should no longer be published. The monthly ABC sales charts have also been permanently stopped because they give a ‘stimulus to write a negative narrative of circulation decline.’ Which in English, rather than the garbled version spouted Newslink’s yuppie manager in the comedy series Drop the Dead Donkey, means that it encourages people to write about how the press is in trouble. Nevertheless, most of the papers did publish their figures. The exceptions were the Times, Sunday Times, Torygraph and the Scum. And the paper with the highest circulation was the Daily Heil, with 944,981 copies sold.
Well, as the character, Gus, once said, I’ll just throw that into your intellectual wok and see if it stir fries.
Zelo Street points out that this is the first time no newspaper has sold less than a million a copies. It also suggests that this has happened to the Sun, which is why the super, soaraway Current Bun is not publishing its figures. It’s possibly been supplanted by the Heil for the first time in 40+ years. The Street also argues quite reasonably that both the Heil’s and Scum’s Sunday editions will have worse sales than the dailies. This means that the press is in terminal decline and we’re entering the endgame.
Novara Media’s excellent Aaron Bastiani put an additional boot into the Murdoch title’s shame. If newspapers won’t publish their sales figures, then the Beeb shouldn’t review their front pages every morning. Unless we know these papers’ reach, it’s just giving them free advertising.
Good point.
Zelo Street also states that the press is probably going to lose even more readers when they work out that the papers they support wanted the lockdown lifted for the sake of their own profits, not out of concern for the public’s wellbeing. A number of may well die from Coronavirus infections picked up when the papers told them that the disease was nothing to worry about. And their survivors will put two and two together and decide not to continue supporting them. Or even bringing a class lawsuit against them.
My guess is that the reason the Torygraph and the Murdoch rags aren’t publishing their sales figures is partly economic. Apart from being embarrassed at how pathetically their mighty organs are doing, they’re also afraid of repercussions from advertisers. If they find out how low the newspapers are selling, they may well want the advertising rates reduced. This will mean a further drop in these newspaper’s income. Which means greater losses, and the threat of even more redundancies.
To many people it will come as absolutely no surprise that the Times and the Torygraph are in such a mess. Private Eye have covered many times their problems and falling circulation in its ‘Street of Shame’ column. In the case of the Torygraph, it’s problems are due to bad corporate management, including a devotion to internet gimmicks rather than solid news reporting and deliberately altering news content in their interests of the advertisers. This last policy so infuriated Peter Oborne that he left the paper and went instead to the Heil, making his own criticisms of it very public. There have already been redundancies and cutbacks, but these have failed to halt the paper’s continuing decline. The Eye has also said that the Times’ sales are now so low, that if it were any other paper it would either have been folded or put up for sale by its management years ago. But it’s the British paper of record, and so allows Murdoch to grab a place at the government table because of its prestige. Which means that if its circulation is so low that there’s no reason the Beeb, or anyone else, should take any notice of it, Murdoch’s ability to influence government decisions, even to act as kingmaker in his decision which party to support, is severely damaged.
Ditto with the Scum. It certainly didn’t have the Times‘ prestige or even its journalistic standards – indeed, it’s a matter of debate whether the scabrous rag had any standards at all. But it was Britain’s leading newspaper with a huge circulation, and more visibly influenced British politics through its shrill trumpeting of everything Thatcher and the Tories ever did, until Murdoch decided to flirt with New Labour. Now that’s also been seriously damaged.
Zelo Street is right in that these newspapers still have an influence beyond their print sales through their online presence, but there are problems here as well. Many of their articles are behind paywalls, which means that many casual readers won’t read them because they won’t want to pay or subscribe to the wretched rags. And if they are free, then it comes from money made from print sales. Which mean that when those go down, the paper’s ability to put up their articles free on the net also declines. The situation does not look good.
I’ve no sympathy for any of these foul rags. I suppose it’ll be a shame if the Times folds, after lasting for nearly 300 or so years. But as it, its Sunday counterpart and the Scum are just rightwing, Tory propaganda rags that lies, smear and libel decent people with absolutely no compunction, as far as I’m concerned it deserves to go under. Britain will be better off without them.
And while we’re on the subject, what about the sales figures for Private Eye? I know it’s a magazine rather than a newspaper, but much of it is news. My guess is that it’s circulation is also falling in line with the rest of the press. It’s hostility and snide remarks about left-wing news sites and internet organisations like The Canary and The Skwawkbox also seem to suggest that it’s afraid of their competition. Private Eye does publish some very good stuff, but it has also promoted the Blairites and the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn’s Labour party, as well as other material which is utterly wrong. So I have very mixed feelings about it.
As for the rest of the press, their mostly right-wing propaganda rags, and so absolutely nothing worthwhile will be lost if they go under as well.
The Sunday Times seems to have caused a massive ruckus today in its piece about Boris Johnson’s abject failure to tackle the Coronavirus when it first emerged. He didn’t take it seriously, and delayed taking any action at all for too long. Two weeks were wasted by his refusal to impose a lockdown until the very last minute. He also wasted five weeks in which he simply didn’t turn up at the Cobra meetings about the emergency. As Zelo Street remarks in his piece about the scandal, this means that during the time he wasted, Johnson ‘went on a killing spree, as sure as if he’d emptied an Uzi into all those poor souls.’
This material isn’t anything new. Mike points out in a couple of his articles today that he had put up posts detailing Johnson’s catastrophic lack of action about the virus on several of the pieces he put up on his personal blog.
The Sunday Times’ article was hidden behind a paywall and Murdoch’s goons are angry that Owen Jones copied the article’s salient points and issued them as a series of Tweets, so that people don’t have pay to see it. A series of hacks consisting of Oliver Kamm, Polly Vernon, Caitlin Moran and Hadley Freeman have moaned about the newspaper not getting its money for the article. They complain that it’s not about giving Murdoch a profit, but allowing the newspaper to continue publishing more quality articles like it. Quality journalism in Murdoch rags is, as Spock’s father says of Klingon justice in the conclusion to the Star Trek film, The Search for Spock, ‘an interesting point of view’. The Sunday Times is the newspaper that libeled Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, and has libeled so many others from the left over the years. It was the Sunday Times, back in the 90s, that was successfully sued by former Labour leader Michael Foot after it wrongfully claimed that he was a KGB spy codenamed ‘Comrade Boot’. Mike has pointed out that all the information was already available on the net long before, and all he needed to do to produce his articles was to collect it and write it up. Zelo Street has also made the point that the Guardian and FT also put out free articles on line. The Sunset Times was also edited by years by John Witherow, who is notorious for using illegal information gathering. And asking people to provide their personal information to Murdoch’s crew to read the articles and others like it is just too much. He acidly comments that ‘they sup some strong stuff in that media bubble.’
Nevertheless there was one aspect about Johnson’s conduct discussed in the Sunset Times article that I found particularly shocking. This was BoJob’s own immense laziness. It appears that Johnson didn’t attend crucial meetings about the virus and dithered because, quite simply, he couldn’t be bothered to get off his well-fed, Eton-educated rear end. The paper quotes one government adviser as saying
“what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be”.
As Zelo Street points out, the explodes the well-crafted Tory spin that Johnson has been working so hard, that he became exhausted and thus came down with the virus. The Street also says that the article has upset the government, and they’ve already set the spin machine going, with Michael Gove appearing on the Andrew Marr Show this morning to rebut it. The delays in tackling the virus mean that many more people have contracted it than would otherwise have done, and many of these have died, or soon will. And the Tory press is again lying to us about how hard Johnson is working. But the real reason Johnson was taken ill is that he was overweight and unhealthy.
The government’s reputation will take a hit from these revelations, but the real damage will be done to that of the press. ‘It is’ Zelo Street says, ‘the craven, courtier, client stenographers of our free and fearless press who will be exposed as preening, shameless, selfish and unprincipled propagandists.’
As for Johnson, he concludes ‘Some of us knew he was worse than useless. This knowledge is slowly, but surely, spreading to others. If only it was as contagious as the Coronavirus.’
Alternative news sites like Mike’s have been telling you this for months, if not years. But now some people have only woken up to how bone idle, incompetent and utterly, utterly unfit to run our great country because, after months of inaction, the Sunset Times has come out and said it.
I’ve blogged many times about how Mike, Zelo Street and other left-wing news sites have got the story before the lamestream media. This is another example. If you want reliable news and informed comment, go to them. Murdoch simply gives you right-wing propaganda and all too often, along with the rest of the press, simply follows them.
Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin in their book Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support For The Radical Right in Britain (Abingdon: Routledge 2014) argue that UKIP’s brief appearance as a new political force was due to it developing strong working class support. It articulated the frustration with contemporary politics of the people left behind. These were generally older, less educated workers, marginalised through de-industrialisation and social change, particularly immigration and European integration. They write
UKIP’s revolt is a working-class phenomenon. Its support is heavily concentrated among older, blue-collar workers, with little education and few skills; groups who have been ‘left-behind’ by the economic and social transformation of Britain in recent decades and pushed to the margins as the main parties have converged to the centre ground. UKIP are not a second home for disgruntled Tories in the shires; they are a first home for angry and disaffected working-class Britons of all political backgrounds, who have lost faith in a political system that ceased to represent them long ago.
Support for UKIP does not line up in a straightforward way with traditional notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’, but reflects a divide between a political mainstream dominated by a more financially secure and highly educated middle class, and a more insecure and precarious working class, which feels its concerns have been written out of political debate. In a sense, UKIP’s rise represents the re-emergence of class conflicts that Tony Blair’s New Labour and David Cameron’s compassionate Conservatism submerged but never resolved – conflicts that reflect basic differences in the position and prospects of citizens in different walks of life. Before the arrival of UKIP, the marginalisation of these conflicts had already produced historic changes in political behaviour. Blue-collar voters turned their backs on politics en masse, causing a collapse in electoral turn-out to record lows, and fuelling a surge in support for the extreme right BNP, making it briefly the most successful extreme right party in the history of British elections. Since 2004, Farage and his foot soldiers have channelled the same social divisions into a far more impressive electoral rebellion….
(T)he potential for a political insurgency of this kind has existed for a long time. Its seeds lay among groups of voters who struggled with the destabilising and threatening changes brought in by de-industrialisation, globalisation and, later, European integration and mass immigration. These groups always occupied a precarious position on Britain’s economic ladder, and now, as their incomes stagnated and their prospects for social mobility receded, they found themselves being left behind.
Many within this left-behind army also grew up before Britain experienced the recent waves of immigration and before the country joined the EU, and their political and social values reflect this. This is a group of voters who are more inclined to believe in an ethnic conception of British national identity, defined by birth and ancestry, and who have vivid memories of a country that once stood independent and proudly apart from Europe. They also came of age in an era where political parties offered competing and sharply contrasting visions of British society, and had strong incentives to listen to, and respect, their traditional supporters. Shaped by these experiences, today these voters look out at a fundamentally different Britain: ethnically and culturally diverse; cosmopolitan; integrated into a transnational, European political network; and dominated by a university-educated and more prosperous middle class that hold a radically different set of values, all of which is embraced and celebrated by those who rule over them. This is not a country that the rebels recognise, nor one they like. (pp. 270-1).
Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters believe that the defeat in the recent general election was primarily due to Brexit and Boris Johnson’s presentation of the Tories as the party that would ‘get Brexit done’. Craig Gent, in his article for Novara Media, ‘Learning the Lessons of Labour’s Northern Nightmare Will Take Longer Than A Weekend’ argues that the northern communities, who turned to the Tories were those which voted for Brexit. He writes
The bare facts are these: Labour’s election campaign did not look the same across northern towns as it did on left Twitter. Swathes of towns that said they wanted Brexit in 2016 still want Brexit. Those towns by and large felt patronised by the offer of a second referendum, a policy whose public support has always been inflated by the gaseous outpourings of its most ardent supporters. And two years on from 2017, the novelty of Corbynmania had thoroughly worn off, with his increasingly stage-managed media appearances beginning to rub people up the wrong way.
It’s also been argued that working class voters turned to the Tories in the north and midlands because the Leave vote was primarily a rejection of the political establishment, and in those areas, Labour was the political establishment.
Some of the features of UKIP’s working class supporters obviously don’t fit those, who voted Tory last Thursday. The people voting for Johnson weren’t just the over-55s, for example, and so wouldn’t have had the glowing memories of Britain before we entered the EU, or EEC as it then was. And it should be remembered that UKIP was never as large or as powerful as its supporters and cheerleaders in the lamestream media presented it. But clearly there are a large chunk of the British electorate, who did feel ignored by Labour’s Blairite leadership and shared their elders’ impressions of a Britain that was powerful and prosperous outside the EU, and which had been actively harmed by its entry.
But Boris won’t do anything for them, except possibly make a few token gestures towards improving conditions for those communities. It will mean hard work, but Labour can win those communities back.
But it means not taking them for granted, as Gent’s article states, and building a solid working class base once again through community activism and campaigning.
And not leaving them behind to concentrate on marginals and Tory swing voters, as New Labour did.
The election’s on, the Tories are clearly scared of Corbyn, as they’re lying and publishing fake news, and almost inevitably, they’re trying to revive the old anti-Semitism smears. According to Zelo Street, the Scum’s deputy political editor, Matt Dathan, published a piece claiming that ‘life-long Labour supporter’ Maureen Lipman has left the Labour party. Apparently she’s recorded a mock version of her adverts for BT, in which she attacks the Labour leader’s economic plans and accuses him of having an ‘ology’ in extremism. This isn’t news. Lipman left the Labour party way back in 2014 when its leader was Ed Miliband. Who was Jewish. She was furious at his backing for a symbolic vote in the Commons recognising Palestine as a state.
Tom London, who is Jewish, tweeted back a reply to Dathan putting him right:
“I remember Maureen Lipman very publicly protesting and leaving the Labour Party when it was led by (the Jewish) Ed Miliband, in protest over his policy on Israel/Palestine. This policy reflected Miliband’s absolutely proper concern for Palestinian human rights”.
Socialist Voice also reminded people how she had left the Labour party back then under Miliband, who was also himself the victim of anti-Semitic attacks in the Tory press.
And the tweeter Darius Faruz also pointed Lipman’s double standards in her attacks on Labour, while she was silent about the greater amount of racism rampant in the Tories:
“Maureen Lipman stays SILENT on the greater levels of antisemitism in the Tory party? Silent on the Conservative party of #Windrush, dog whistle racism … Silent on Johnson’s Islamophobia – letterbox / bank robbers, watermelon smiles, picaninnies”.
But she had the support of Mike Gapes, Michael Gove, the mainstream media and the Scum. Almost like the latter three were all connected, as another tweeter pointedly observed.
There was a time when I liked and admired Maureen Lipman. She’s an extremely talented comic actor, and I’ve enjoyed her performances about another great British actor and comedian, Joyce Grenfell. But here she shows real moral squalor. She left the Labour party when Miliband moved slightly further left than the old Blair and Brown regime. Which means she’s quite happy seeing Britain’s public services delivering poor service in order to boost the profits of the private companies that own them. She’s quite happy to see the NHS, schools and colleges privatised, with students lumbered with crippling debt. With increasing numbers becoming homeless and house prices at unaffordable levels to create a ‘generation rent’. With wages so low the majority of people using food banks are actually in work. And a brutal sanctions regime that has seen tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people thrown into despair and poverty, because they’ve been declared ‘fit for work’ when they are anything but, or the Jobcentre decided they were going to cut of their jobseeker’s allowance on some flimsy excuse.
She’s ignored the way Corbyn has stood up for Britain’s Jewish community, and has enjoyed the support of many of its members. Like Jewdas, Jewish Voice for Labour, the Jewish Socialist Group and the Haredi community. No, he – and Ed Miliband before him – are terrible anti-Semites because they recognise the Palestinian people’s right to their own state. Or want to end the decades-long system of apartheid, land seizures and aggressive expropriation and colonisation in Israel itself. An apartheid which viewed the mizrahim – the indigenous Jews of the region – scarcely human.
She’s just another shabby ultra-Zionist, no different than the other fanatics and smear merchants. Zelo Street concluded their article about this sorry episode with
‘Maureen Lipman slagging off Labour is old news. And tediously predictable with it.’
Absolutely. And with her absolute lack of any genuine concern for Britain’s working people, and skewed hypocritical attitude on racism, I doubt many people miss her in the party either.
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