This is going to be another controversial video because of where it comes from: Paul Joseph Watson. Yeah, I know, he’s another far right mouthpiece. He was Alex Jones’ British buddy over on Infowars, which pushed just about every bizarre conspiracy known to humanity. He was one of the celebrity rightists who broke UKIP, along with Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meacham and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin. When those three joined the party, all the genuine anti-racists left. Party collapse followed, as well as refounding as the Brexit party, now Reform or whatever.
But here Watson makes a perfectly valid point. It’s in response to Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip, torpedoing his career by telling Whites to stay away from Blacks. He said this in response to a poll which found that just under 50 per cent of Blacks thought it wasn’t okay to be right, or didn’t know if it was or wasn’t. He took this as showing that this proportion of the Black American population hated Whites. He therefore told Whites to stay away from Blacks, even though just over 50 per cent of Blacks had no problems with Whites and ‘don’t know’ doesn’t necessarily translate to ‘hate Whites’.
What Watson objects to in this video is that Critical Race Theorist and anti-racist activist, Robin DiAngelo, says much the same thing from the Black perspective but doesn’t suffer the same consequences as Adams. He presents a clip of her saying that Blacks need their own separate spaces away from Whites. Now this attitude ain’t new. I encountered it years ago in the editorial/ ‘things you should know about’ column in the newsletter of the Black and Asian Studies Association newsletter, no. 31 or perhaps 32, c. 2002, when I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. I wasn’t impressed. One of the columnists for the Financial Times had reviewed a book on the Empire and post-war immigration, and, if I recall correctly, had criticised it for saying nothing about what it called ‘reverse colonisation’ and ‘liberal apartheid’. Liberal apartheid is the system of goods and services set up exclusively to benefit Blacks and ethnic minorities. The call for separate Black spaces, however well meant, is effectively a call for a return to segregation. When coupled with an opposition to restrictions on non-White immigration, as was also expressed in the same column, it becomes effectively a form of colonialism in which Whites are to be excluded from certain spaces for the benefit of non-White immigrants. I don’t doubt, though, that those making these demands wouldn’t see it like that and would be terribly offended by the very idea. Nevertheless, it’s there, and it’s causing further racial division and conflict. But it’s seen as acceptable because the people advocating it come from the left and do so on the part of an underprivileged ethnic minority.
Okay, we all know exactly who Paul Joseph Watson is and what he stands for. He’s the far right YouTuber and conspiracy theorist who was fellow conspiracy nutter Alex Jones’ British buddy over on Infowars before he split with him and returned to Blighty. He, along with Sargon of Gasbag and Count Dankula, brought down UKIP when they joined at the invitation of Gerald Batten. All the genuinely liberal, anti-racist members, who just hated the EU but not immigration and people of colour, complained and left, and the party imploded. But here the old adage about stopped clocks being right twice a day is probably right. And I’m going to give him his due credit.
Remember the brouhaha last year when someone blew up the Northstream pipeline or whatever it’s called, carrying Russian oil into Europe? Fingers have been pointed very firmly at Putin and Russia. But according to Watson, the American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has found instead that it was the Americans. The bombs were supposedly planted during a NATO exercise in July last year by divers, and then detonated three months later by a sonar buoy. The purpose was to increase Europe’s dependency on American oil and prolong the war in Ukraine.
I don’t believe in the conspiracy theories peddled by Infowars, stupid, tabloid tales of 4-dimensional aliens, or demons, and how Barack Obama is the antichrist and Hillary Clinton a cyborg, the Democrats are imprisoning children in pizza parlours to be raped and abused at their conventions and the rest of the nonsense. But real conspiracies do exist, and Lobster has been covering them since the magazine was founded in the 1980s. This has the ring of truth about it, especially as the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine which ousted the pro-Russian president was arranged by the American state department and the National Endowment for Democracy. And then there’s the story that the Ukrainian president was about to negotiate a peace deal until Johnson turned up to encourage them to carry on fighting. And it’s been confirmed that the Iraq invasion was about the West stealing the country’s oil. The information about the pipeline also comes from Seymour Hersh, who I think is a very well respected journalist rather than some kind of right-wing mouthpiece and fearmonger.
Watson’s therefore, in my opinion, right about this one, and also right about the way the story has been overshadowed by the reports of the Chinese spy balloons. It’s a pity that only people like him are noticing this.
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.
I just caught the headline of a video on YouTube, which I think was posted by GB News. They’ve been plugging Reform’s head honcho, Richard Tice, who has been claiming his party would beat the Tories and Keir Starmer at the next election. I’m doubtful of that, as no matter how Tice may talk the party up, Reform is basically the reheated leftovers of UKIP. And despite the way Farage and his party were hailed by the media as a threat to the mainstream, traditional parties, like the SDP in the 1980s it significantly failed to break the mould of modern politics. Indeed, UKIP imploded when Farage bailed out and he was replaced by Gerard Batten, who invited far-right YouTubers Mark Meacham and Carl Benjamin to join. All the genuinely anti-racist members left, the Swindon branch protested against Benjamin being appointed their candidate for the parliamentary elections and the Gloucestershire branch broke away altogether.
From the headline it appears that Tice is now blaming low wage immigration for keeping wages low. He may have a point, in that plentiful unskilled labour means that employers don’t have to worry about offering high wages to attract workers for those jobs. But this seems to be part of a general Brexiteer, right-wing accusation that elite liberals are in favour of mass immigration as it provides them with a source of low paid labour. You find this attitude stated every so often, but there’s never any evidence cited for it, and I’ve never come across it from the left. I have come across the assertion, stated in a book published nearly 20 years ago attacking the Neo-Cons, Confronting the New Conservatism, that the Neo-Cons of both the left and the right are in favour of affirmative action programmes, so long as they don’t affect their children. I’ve also seen the argument that immigration is good for the country because on average immigrant workers pay more in tax than they take in benefits – contrary to what you’d hear from the right – and so support the state and welfare system with their taxes. Also, they do the jobs White British tend not to want to do.
So if immigrants aren’t responsible for low wages, who is? Easy – Margaret Thatcher and the Tories. Thatcher preached wage restraint and freezes in order to keep inflation low. This is leading to millions of working Brits, of all colours, now earning literal starvation wages, well below the rate of inflation. Many families are only keeping their heads above water through food and warm banks, where they have a choice between eating, heating their homes or paying the rent or mortgage. The Tories in particular have offered pay rises well below the inflation rate, so that they are in fact cuts. Hence the current wave of strikes as workers are fed up with it. Also, the 19th century classical economists from whom the Tories take their ideas recommended that the government should keep ‘a reserve army of the unemployed’ in order to keep wages low by providing a ready source of labour. I’ve got a feeling Blair and Gordon Brown had much the same idea when they talked about the need to keep the labour market fluid.
It is Thatcherism that’s really responsible for the mass impoverishment of this country’s working people. Tice is merely trying to divert attention away from this by playing the race card against immigrants. Don’t vote for him, and don’t vote for the Tories.
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