Civil Servants Were Afraid Impressionist Bremner Would Bring Down John Major

Before the serious stuff, here’s a bit of fun news. Last Thursday’s I for 2nd January 2020 reported that Rory Bremner’s impressions of former prime minister John Major were so good, he would bring down the government. Bremner had been phoning up various rebellious backbench MPs as Major, and the head of the civil service at the time, Sir Robin Butler, was afraid he’d get hold of the budget. In the article ‘Bremner almost brought down John Major’, Adam Sherwin wrote

Whitehall’s top civil servant feared that Rory Bremner could brind down John Major’s government because the comic’s impersonation of the Prime Minister was so convincing.

Sir Robin Butler, then cabinet secretary, called Michael Grade, the chief executive at Channel 4, to express his concerns after the impressionist made a prank call to a rebellious backbench Tory MP.

Sir Robin feared that Bremner’s impression of Mr Major was so accurate that he would be able to trick then-chancellor Kenneth Clarke into leaking advance details of the Budget.

The could have been devastating to Mr Major, who was steering an administration with a fragile majority.

The prank calls, made in 1993, were intended for use in the comedian’s series, Rory Bremner, Who Else? But Sir Robin stepped in after Bremner fooled Sir Richard Body, one of the Eurosceptic Maastricht rebels who were known as “the bastards”.

Speaking to the Media Matters podcast, Lord Grade of Yarmouth revealed that Sir Robin told him: “We have a bit of a problem. Your Mr Rory Bremner. He’s very good at impersonating the Prime Minister. He’s been ringing MPs.

“We don’t have a problem with that. But the issue we have is that, he’s so good, he could ring the chancellor and get the Budget.”

Lord Grade said he told Sir Robin: “Oh, I get the point. Leave it with me.” Bremner’s team agreed not to air the call, which Sir Robin said was a “great relief”. Lord Grade, who faced controversy over prank calls made by Chris Morris for Brass Eye, later sent Sir Robin a tape of the call.

Bremner has confirmed ringing the MP. “We hadn’t got a script, we were just making it up. It went very well,” he said. “John Major said ‘well this is very funny but it could get quite serious’. So there was this hunt going on.”

Bremner also called Margaret Beckett pretending to be Gordon Brown in 2005, and discussed Cabinet appointments. Lawyers vetoed its broadcast.

Bremner’s series on Channel 4, Rory Bremner: Who Else? and later Bremner, Bird and Fortune with John Bird and John Fortune, who later had their own series, The Long Johns, were hilarious, but they were also very sharp, very serious satire. Amongst the impressions they made serious, factual points about the issues of the day, quoting real statistics. I can remember they were particularly sharp on attacking the government’s and papers’ vicious and misleading policies and statements over immigration. And they also tried to stop the Iraq invasion by sending that up and arguing against it.

The three also published a book during Tony Blair’s tenure of 10 Downing Street, You Are Here, attacking his policies of privatisation and the Public-Private Finance Initiative deals, which were grossly inefficient and which took power away from people and put it squarely in the hands of the corporate bosses, who donated so handsomely to Blair.

Now that the Blairites are trying to seize control of the Labour Party again, I’ll have to dig that book out to show how treacherous their claims and politics are. 

Protests against UKIP Racism at their Party Conference

A few days ago, on the 21st and 22nd September, 2018, UKIP held their annual party conference at Birmingham’s International Convention Centre. The event was billed as the party’s 25th birthday celebration.

The Kippers’ were expected to launch their new manifesto at the conference, copies of which were to be given out to everyone attending. The party announced that they would have “brand new policies on the economy, housing, taxation, policing, the foreign aid budget and many other important areas, all designed with the key principle of putting our people first”.

Hope Not Hate have pointed out that Batten himself is a long-time anti-Muslim activist, and since he became the party’s new fuehrer in February has taken it even further to the right. The anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organization said that the manifestos would indicate whether Batten was putting his islamophobic rhetoric into policies.

The conference was also going to include three other extreme right-wing personalities. These were Paul Joseph Watson, Carl Benjamin, alias ‘Sargon of Akkad’, and Mark Meechan, alias Count Dankula. Watson used to be the British best mate of Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist, on his channel, InfoWars. He seems to have gone his own way and is now putting out his videos on YouTube. According to Hope Not Hate, in 2013 Watson declared that the 7/7 bombings were a false flag event, and that Media Matters also reported Watson’s extreme views on race. He claims that liberals are anti-science, because they don’t accept that people from Africa and the Middle East have lower IQs and are more aggressive. Benjamin, or ‘Sargon’, is a Sceptic who has decided that his mighty intelligence has allowed him to perceive how false feminism is, and posts videos on the internet attacking it. Which suits UKIP, some of whose members have extremely misogynist and reactionary views about women. As for Count Dankula, he’s the idiot that got tried and convicted of anti-Semitism ’cause he taught his girlfriend’s do to do the Nazi salute.

The conference was also due to vote on whether to accept Tommy Robinson, the former founder and leader of the EDL, as a member. Robinson had been banned under the party’s rules forbidding former members of the BNP and EDL from joining the party. Despite Batten’s support, the vote was cancelled by Tony McIntyre under a legal technicality. But Robinson’s supporters were still expected to turn up at the conference to make their views known.

See: https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2018/09/21/watch-ukip-conference/

There were mass protests against the party and its racism outside the conference. Yesterday, RT UK put up this video of the demonstration on YouTube. The video show protestors chanting ‘We are here to say racist UKIP go away’. They hold placards denouncing UKIP’s racism and also saying ‘Refugees’ welcome. One elderly lady tears up one of the placards, saying ‘That’s what I think of them.’ Presumably she’s an irate Kipper, not a member of the protesters.

The video shows one man talking to the camera, who states that

UKIP is becoming increasingly irrelevant in British politics. I think that’s why they’re clutching at straws, trying to court the Far-Right to try and rebuild their ranks because they are really on the margins of politics with very few supporters.

Another man say that

Since the Brexit referendum, where they were very important and very influential, they have declined and have internal squabbles and a much more smaller organization, and they’ve been associating themselves with Far-Right demonstrations against Muslims.

A third man gives his opinion on the Kippers, saying

Gerard Batten has taken UKIP to the extremes of the Far-Right, the fact that he wants Tommy Robinson to be in his organization speaks volumes.

It’s significant that Tommy Robinson is still a controversial figure for the Kippers, despite the very public islamophobia and racism of some of their members. But Robinson has been welcomed in Israel, and the Blairite MPs and Marie van der Zyle, below, of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, were more than happy to attend the fake protest against anti-Semitism organized by the North West Friends of Israel. Who are firm friends of Tommy Robinson and the EDL.

Yes, it is childish, but I’m still not sick of this joke yet.

This shows very clearly just how racist and islamophobic the Blairites and the Board are, when even UKIP is more liberal and anti-racist.

Redacted Tonight: Mainstream Media Pushing War in Syria Hiding Connections to Arms Companies

This is another very incisive little clip from Redacted Tonight, a satirical politics show on RT. In this clip, their reporter John F. O’Donnell discusses disclosure, or rather, the absolute lack of it in the mainstream media when it comes to the connections of their contributors and presenters to arms companies when pushing for war in Syria. Media Matters, a media monitoring group, has criticised the way the Washington Post allows Ed Rogers to write for them urging more intervention in Syria and the Middle East, without mentioning that he is a lobbyist for Raytheon, the arms company that manufactures the Tomahawk missiles using in Trump’s airstrike last week. Fox News had retired American army general, Jack Dean on their show, who praised Trump’s air strike for showing that ‘American leadership is back’. But Fox News did not tell its viewers that Dean is on the board of General Dynamics, which makes the launching systems for the same missiles.

And guess who else also personally profited from launching the missiles? Yep, it’s Mr ‘Drain the Swamp’ himself, Donald Trump, now the biggest monster in it, according to the Young Turks. According to FCC records for last year, 2016, Trump also had stock in Raytheon, whose own stock has risen $5 billion since the attack.

War is business, as the saying goes, and under Trump, business is good.

These points are made in a humorous way by O’Donnell, who contrasts the media’s lack of disclosure with his own, as he makes coarse jokes about his bizarre sex practices, inability to impress a girl he fancied, and how he backed a friend’s lame business venture.

Secular Talk: Trump Cuddles Up to White Nationalists

More real Fascism from Donald Trump. In this piece from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski discusses a report from Media Matters that Trump has given press passes to his rallies to the White Nationalist radio show The Political Cesspool. The Political Cesspool also boasts that it will soon hold an interview with Donald Trump junior.

Civil Rights groups have attacked The Political Cesspool for its support for anti-Semites, Holocaust-deniers and White Supremacists, like David Duke, a grand wizard of the KKK. The Political Cesspool on its website says that it is a ‘pro-White group’, which seeks to raise the White birth rate above replacement level, denounces racial intermarriage as ‘White genocide’, and declares that ‘slavery is the best thing that happened to African-Americans’. The programme’s host, James Edwards, has declared that MLK’s dream ‘is our nightmare’. Kulinski recounts that they had Joshua Turner, a former Neo-Nazi skinhead on his show. Turner is reformed, and now fights against and helps others to fight Neo-Nazism. Turner said they way White supremacists hook the young and impressionable is by saying they’re not anti-anything, they’re just pro-White.

Kulinski makes the point that you could defend Trump granting press passes to Edwards and his fellow storm troopers on the general grounds of press freedom. Everyone should be able to come to these events and ask questions, even those from the viler end of the political spectrum. But Trump does not support press freedom. One the Young Turks’ reporters, Jordan Cheridan, was bounced from a Trump rally because the guards recognised him, and threw him out. And its happened to others.

Kulinski also points out that Trump retweeted Neo-Nazis twice, because he agreed with the sentiments. He thought the statistic, that Blacks were killing Whites, was true. It’s also obvious from his other policies that Trump is a White Nationalist. He statement that he’ll build a wall with Mexico, repatriate 11-12 million immigrants, despite the fact that many have made a life in America and are productive citizens, his proposed ban on Muslims, his support for torture ‘even if it doesn’t work’, and intention to attack and kill civilians. These should have already convinced people that Trump is a White Supremacist, and this latest news should clinch it.