PoliticalJOE Shocks Brits with the Cost of Healthcare in America

From their name, I should think that PoliticalJOE are a branch of JOE, those merry funsters responsible for the videos in which they poke fun at politicos and other celebs by editing their speeches and public appearances to make them look stupid. In this video an interviewer simply walks around a street asking ordinary Brits what they think is the cost of certain services and items we get free with the National Health Service. He then leaves them shocked and horrified when he tells them the real prices. They are:

Ambulance call out – $2,500

Inhaler – $250-350

2 Epi pens – $600

Cost of childbirth – $10,000-30,000

If you give birth by Caesarian section and want to hold your baby, it’s another $40

The contraceptive coil – $1,300.

He then concludes the video by asking the people answering his questions what they think of the NHS. One woman describes it as ‘the gift that keeps on giving’ and that she doesn’t want it to change. A young Black man agrees with him when he asks him ‘how grateful are you for the NHS’. He says he didn’t know just how much free healthcare we have, that $30,000 for a baby is outrageous and thanks the NHS. A young woman states that she’s speechless, and had no idea how expensive healthcare was in the US. She says ‘If you don’t have money, you’re fudged’. When the interviewer asks her what she thinks of the people, who are profiting off the sale of these medicines, she replies , ‘Ya bastards!… I think they should be stopped. Fuck Trump!’

One of those spoken to is a young Black American, who’s aware we get everything free over here. Well, not quite – we still have to pay for prescriptions. But he says that he’s fortunate to have health coverage through his parents’ insurance. He has to use an epi pen, but even with insurance it’s a couple of hundred dollars. And his condition is severe, but not quite life threatening. When he’s asked why the pens are so expensive, he replies that he doesn’t know, but there are only a few companies making them, so they can charge what they like.

The video’s been discussed on the American left-wing news sites Secular Talk and the Ring of Fire, because it’s such an indictment of the current American healthcare system based on private insurance. Those sites back the awesome Bernie Sanders and his campaign to give America Medicare for All, so that all Americans have free healthcare. Bernie describes some of the horrors of the American healthcare system in his book, Our Revolution. 40,000 people in the US die annually because they can’t afford medicine. In Virginia, people sleep over in the cars for that weekend in the month when the dentists offer free treatment.

A few years ago, the American private healthcare system nearly collapsed entirely. But the American public is still told that their healthcare system is the best in the world.

This is the system that Johnson and Trump wish to introduce to the UK.

Don’t be deceived by the lies. They do. Trump actually said that he wanted it on the table when negotiations started under Tweezer. And even without Trump, the Tories and the Blairites in the Labour party have been privatising the NHS by ensuring that more and more services are given to private healthcare providers. Johnson even made a speech in 2003 denouncing the monopolistic NHS, because of the way it discouraged private health insurance and refused to admit private healthcare. And he is’t the only one. Margaret Thatcher wanted the complete privatisation of the NHS. Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP for Dorset, would like it privatised. And the Tory right has several times tried to vote for increasing the number of NHS services for which charges would have to be paid.

And Nigel Farage has also said openly that Britain may have to move to an American healthcare system funded through private insurance.

The Tories are determined to privatise the NHS. This is why you cannot let them into power.

Before you vote Tory, think: can you afford the equivalent of $2,500 for an ambulance? And then vote Labour.

 

 

Johnson’s Brexit Deal So Bad That Brexit MEP Urges Us to Remain

Things are not looking good for BoJob’s Brexit deal, and they certainly aren’t looking any better for Farage’s wretched party. Farage has gallantly ordered his candidates to stand aside in constituencies, where the Tories have a chance of winning, not wanting to split the right-wing, Brexit vote. But this hasn’t satisfied BoJob’s crew, who will take a mile if you offer them an inch, and they’ve been screaming at Farage to give them the rest. The pressure they were placing on the remaining Brexiteers was so severe that Farage has complained that it was aggressive intimidation. He and his lieutenant, Tice, have also claimed that the Tories have been offering them and some of their members peerages if they stand down, which is illegal under electoral law.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/farage-and-tory-bribe.html

But not everybody has been as impressed with our clownish prime minister’s deal as Farage. Ben Habib, the Brexit Party MEP for London, is so massively unimpressed with it that when he appeared on Sophie Ridge’s show on Sunday, he stated that the withdrawal agreement was subjugation of the UK and much worse than remaining in the EU. He made it very clear that one of the reasons he believed remaining was far better than leaving as the latter would leave Northern Ireland bereft.

Mike’s article about this draws the proper conclusion, and urges Brexiteers to take Habib’s word for it, and vote against Johnson’s withdrawal bill.

Brexiters: take this Brexit Party MEP’s word for it and vote AGAINST Boris Johnson and his Tory Brexit deal

And many Brexiteers haven’t taken kindly to being told to stand down by Farage. Wayne Bayley, the prospective Brexit candidate for Crawley, was understandably annoyed. He and the other candidates had put their own money forward, and now they were told that they had wasted their money and that there would be no refunds. Farage made that very clear when speaking to Eddie Mair on LBC. Bayley stated that he had personally employed a full-time campaign coordinator on a two month contract, and had an outbuilding full of Brexit party leaflets and signs. He estimated that the Fuhrage owed him £10,000. Fed up with Farage’s treatment, he announced that he and others like him would be open to returning to UKIP:

“Hi [UKIP] there are a large number of EX Brexit Party candidates looking for a new home since Nigel has sold us all down the river in exchange for a peerage”.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/farage-on-roll-backwards.html

Other former Brexit candidates made it clear that they were considering suing. Essex Brexit announced on Twitter

“We are taking legal advice on the matter so cannot comment too much at this stage. What we will say however is there are many across the UK who have invested in the Brexit Party PLC and demands answers and refunds. Fast”.

The former prosecutor Nazir Afzal said exactly what this looked like – a pyramid scheme:

How many other Brexit Party Ltd candidates, promised a campaign have lost thousands like this guy … They paid to be considered, selected & contracted I presume … Should seek legal advice on claiming their losses from Farage & Co … Hallmarks of a pyramid scheme … All legal of course”.

The problem is that it may well be all legal. As another commenter on Twitter pointed out, the Brexit Party isn’t a party. It’s a company with Farage and Tice as directors. It has no members, no votes and no manifesto. Farage isn’t going to refund its 3,000 or so members their money, and by charging them a £100 membership fee has made himself a tidy £300,000.

But what is particularly annoying is that even as his party moves ever closer to dissolution, Farage was still being pandered to by the Beeb. Last week they invited people to join the audience at the first of the Question Time leader election specials which is being filmed today, 18th November 2019. And this would be on Farage. An annoyed Labour voter commented

“He’s not standing; his PPCs are probably getting legal advice to sue him; there probably won’t be a Brexit Party by the end of the week! But why is he, yet again, being given special privileges by the BBC? I swear you’d have had Hitler on QT!”

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/brexit-party-lawyers-called-in.html

We’ve seen this before. Buddy Hell over at Guy Debord’s Cat has commented on how the Beeb goes easy on the Far Right, and many of the left-winger bloggers noticed all too clearly that the Beeb seemed to be boosting Farage when he was head of UKIP. From their coverage you would have been forgiven for thinking that Farage was about to storm the nation’s polls and get into government, even though their gains were far more modest. He was certainly given much more favourable coverage than Labour. This is more evidence to back up the conclusions of the media academics at Cardiff, Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, very clearly shown by Tory Fibs’ graphic: the Beeb are massively biased towards the Right.

Even when that part is on the verge of breaking up, its members are considering suing their leader and defecting to another party, and others are urging everyone to vote against its only central policy.

 

Leave.UK and Boris Now Using Racism to Push Brexit and Get Votes

I suppose it was inevitable. I realise not everyone, who voted for the Leave campaign is racist by any means. A lot of working class and left-wing peeps voted to leave the EU no doubt because of the very real problems with it. Private Eye has been describing for years its corruption, its lack of democracy and accountability of its senior officials, and the high-handed way it deals with member states that don’t toe the line. Years ago it described how the-then president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, was aghast at the terms it presented him and his country for membership. He complained that his country hadn’t been treated like that for over thirty years. Which meant that he was comparing it to the way it had been pushed around when it had been a Soviet satellite. This drew an outraged reaction from two of the MEPs in the EU delegation, both of whom, I think, were left-wing. One of them was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, French politician, who had been a radical leader during the ’68 revolution. They screamed at Klaus that the EU was definitely democratic, and the architect and keep of peace after the Second World War.  Robin Ramsay, the editor of the conspiracy website Lobster, is an old-fashioned left-wing Eurosceptic. He objects to the EU because economic Conservatism and neoliberalism is built into it. He regards a strong nation state with nationalised industries as the best political and economic system and protector of the rights of working people. Tony Benn was the same, noting in one of his books the real harm membership of the EU actually did to our economy and industry.

But Benn was also realistic, and recognised that we were now also economically dependent on the EU, and that leaving it would also cause severe disruption and damage. 

All of which is not considered by the right-wing supporters of Brexit. They’re not interested in protected our nationalised industries, like what remains of the NHS, because they want to sell it off to the highest bidder. And that means, at the moment, Donald Trump. Thus for all their posturing, they were quite happy to see our railways owned by the Bundesbahn, the German state railway network, and our water by the French, and then the Indonesians. And our nuclear power stations built and owned by the French and Chinese. They’ve got no objections with other states and nations owning our infrastructure, as long the British state doesn’t.

And there is and has always been a nasty undercurrent of racism in the Right’s attitude to the EU. Now with the latest poster from Leave.UK it’s all out in the open. As Mike’s shown in his article, they’ve now put up a poster showing Chancellor Angela Merkel, with her arm raised in a quasi-Nazi salute, or what could be interpreted as one. And there’s a slogan ‘We didn’t Win Two World Wars to be Pushed Around by a Kraut’.

This is just pure racism, expressed in racist language. And the imagery is offensive and wrong. As Tony Greenstein showed in his article, the CDU had its share of former Nazis amongst its members. And incidentally, so was the Freie Demokraten, the German equivalent of the Liberal party. Back in the 1980s there was a massive scandal when it was revealed that neo-Nazis had all been infiltrating them. Even the odd member of the SPD has been outed as a former member of the Nazi party. But that doesn’t mean that the CDU, or any of the other German democratic parties are really Nazi, simply because they’re German. I think Merkel herself is genuinely anti-racist, and tried to demonstrate how far her country had moved from the stereotype left over from the Third Reich when she invited the million or so Syrian and North African refugees to settle in the Bundesrepublik. It backfired badly on her, as people, not just in Germany, were afraid their countries were going to be swamped by further Islamic migrants and the wave of 200 or so rapes by a minority of them provoked an vile islamophobic reaction. But Merkel herself, and her people, aren’t Nazis and aren’t engaged in some diabolical plot to dominate Europe by stealth. As I’ve blogged about endlessly, ad nauseam.

Mike’s article cites the comments from three continental papers, who I believe have rightly assessed the situation and BoJob’s shenanigans with the EU. They differ in that some of them think the Blonde Beast is aiming for a no-deal Brexit, or that, denied that, he wants a Brexit extension. But whatever the outcome, he wants most of all to blame it on the EU. Those nasty foreigners are responsible! He and the Tory press are trying to present it as though Boris and the Tories have done everything they can to secure a deal, and it’s all due to those horrible, intransigent foreigners, and particularly the Germans, that they haven’t. Thus they’re seeking to work up nationalist sentiments so that they’re voted back in with a massive majority, having seen their lead in the polls.

I can well believe it. It’s what they’ve always done.

I remember how the Tories became the Patriotic Party under Thatcher in the 1980s. Thatcher stood for Britain, and anyone, who opposed her and the Tories more widely was definitely not One Of Us. They were some kind of traitor. The Labour party was full of Commies and IRA sympathisers, as well as evil gays determined to corrupt our youth in schools. Thatcher represented Britain’s warrior heritage and island independence. She constantly and consciously harked back to Winston Churchill. Their wretched 1987 general election video showed Spitfires zooming about the skies in what Alan Coren drily called ‘the Royal Conservative Airforce’. Over the top of this an excited male voice declaimed ‘We were born free. It’s our fundamental right’. Actually, the quote comes from Rousseau’s Social Contract, and is ‘Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains’. Which is a far better description of the free trade, low tax world Thatcher wanted to introduce and her destruction of workers’ rights and the welfare state. Thatcher was our bulwark against domestic terrorism and the IRA at home – even though she was secretly negotiating with them – and the Communists and Eurofederalists of the EU abroad.

The Tories continually used the imagery and memories of the Second World War and the Empire to drum up support.

It’s a crude, nationalistic view of British imperial history. The idea that somehow we stood alone against Hitler during the Second World War is a myth, but one that all too many of us buy into. We survived and were victorious because we had the support of our empire. We were fed, and our armies staffed, by the colonies, including those in the Caribbean, Africa and India. If it hadn’t been for them and the Americans, we would have fallen as well.

And the history of the British empire and its legacy is mixed. Very mixed. I don’t deny that many of the soldiers and administrators that founded and extended it were idealists, who genuinely believed they were creating a better order and were improving the lives of their imperial subjects. But there was also much evil. Like the history of the Caribbean and the slave colonies in North America, or the treatment of the Amerindians and other indigenous peoples, like the Maoris or Aboriginal Australians. They weren’t noble savages, as portrayed in the stereotypes that have grown up around them. But they didn’t deserve the massacre, displacement and dispossession they suffered. The Irish patriot, Roger Casement, was a British imperial official, and was radicalised by the enslavement of South American Amerindians by the British rubber industry in the Putomayo scandal. This turned him against British imperialism, and made him an ardent fighter for his own people’s independence. To get a different view of the empire, all you have to do is read histories of it from the perspective of the colonised peoples, like the Indians or the slaves in the Caribbean. Or, for that matter, the horrific treatment of Afrikaner civilians in the concentration camps during the Anglo-South African ‘Boer’ War. In too many cases it was a history of persecution, dispossession and oppression, fueled by greed and nationalism.

Ah, but the British Empire stood for democracy!

It was largely founded before the emergence of democracy, which everywhere had to be fought for. And parts of the British imperial establishment remained anti-democratic after the Liberals extended the vote to the entire working class and women at the beginning of the 20th century. Martin Pugh in his history of British Fascism between the two world wars states that sections of it were not happy with the extension of the franchise in the 1920s, especially the diplomats and administrators in the Indian office, like Lord Curzon. It’s highly dubious how much of a patriot Churchill was. In the years before the outbreak of the Second World War, Orwell remarked in one of his press articles how strange the times were, with Churchill ‘running around pretending to be a democrat’. And there was a very interesting article years ago in the weekend edition of the Financial Times that argued that it was only because Britain needed allies during the Second World War, that the English Speaking Union appeared as one of the leading organisations in the spread of democracy.

But still we’ve had it drummed into us that the Empire was an unalloyed, brilliant institution, our country is uniquely democratic, and the Tories represent both and our national pride and heritage against the depredations of Johnny Foreigner.

Salman Rushdie and the rest are right. We need proper, balanced teaching about the Empire to correct some of these myths.

Supporters of the Labour Party and Remain campaign in response to the latest eruption of bilious racism and xenophobia have released their own posters. One shows Boris Johnson and has the slogan ‘We Didn’t Win Two World Wars to Be Pushed Around by a Fascist’. Another shows Nigel Farage with the slogan ‘We Didn’t Win Two World Wars to Be Pushed Around by a Fraud’. At the bottom is another legend, reading ‘Let’s Not Leave EU’.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/10/09/leave-campaigns-response-to-angela-merkel-is-racism/

They’re right. And the Tories and the Leave campaign are whipping up racism simply for their own benefit. If they get a no-deal Brexit, or win a general election, they will privatise the NHS, destroy what’s left of the welfare state. Our industries will be massively harmed, and whatever’s left of them will be sold to the Americans. 

It will mean nothing but poverty and exploitation for working people. That’s how the Tories use racism and xenophobia.

Don’t be taken in by their lies. Stand up for democracy and peace and harmony between peoples and nations. Get rid of Boris, Farage and Aaron Banks. And support Corbyn and Labour.

 

Tony Greenstein on Zionist Anti-Semitism

Last Wednesday Tony Greenstein, a veteran Jewish opponent of racism, Fascism and Zionism, put up on his blog a piece about how Zionists resort to anti-Semitic rhetoric when attacking their Jewish opponents. He made it very clear that this was because, in his view, anti-Semitism was at the very heart of Zionism.

The Hate Mail Directed at Jenny Manson, Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein

Greenstein began his piece with some very nasty examples of Zionist anti-Semitic hate messages sent to himself, Jenny Manson, the chair of Jewish Voice for Labour and Jackie Walker. Manson was left a vile message on her voice mail calling her a ‘f***ing Nazi bitch’, ‘Nazi cow’ and ranting that she should be burned in a gas oven, and should burn in hell, in acid. He points out that this disgusting rant mixed the Zionist accusation that non-Zionists are Nazis, with the real Nazi abuse that a Jewish person should be gassed like the innocent millions in the Holocaust. He compares this with another unpleasant message sent to Jackie Walker, which questioned whether she was really Jewish and that she should be put into a burning bin. He also put up the full text of a hate message he received, which called him a ‘traitorous b***ard’, ‘a left-liberal Jew’, ‘a cowardly traitor’, who should go back to the shtetls and ghettos under non-Jewish domination, and said that it was a pity that Hitler or the Angel of Death missed his house, that of his family, and Naturei Karta’s, the Jewish anti-Zionist organisation. Greenstein compared this with another message he’d received which denied the existence of the Holocaust. Greenstein states he passed on both of these messages to the Community Security Trust, which compiles lists of anti-Semitic incidents. They duly logged the second message, but refused to list the first, as they don’t include anti-Semitic incidents perpetrated by Jews. Discussing the reason for this omission, he quotes the Jewish American anti-Zionist, Aurora Levins Morales, who states in her book, On Anti-Semitism, that she gets anti-Semitic abuse from Zionists, because they really believe that the only way Jews can be safe is to have their own homeland where only they are the privileged people.

The Nazi Nicknames Adopted by Israeli Soldiers

Greenstein goes on to make the point that under the right circumstances, every people can become racists. It was, he states, inevitable that Jewish Israelis should develop the same mindset and attitudes as their Nazi oppressors. He cites articles in Haaretz and al Hamishmar from 1989 about Israeli army units that called themselves after Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor, who experimented on Jews and other human victims in the concentration camps; ‘Our Nazis’, for those squaddies in the IDF who liked to beat Arabs, and ‘the Auschwitz 10’ and ‘Demjanjuks’, after a sadistic concentration camp guard, who was just being tried. He also quoted a supporter of Lehava, the Israeli group that campaigns against racial mixing, who said that it was ‘unfortunate’ that Hitler attacked the wrong nation, as Jews were the chosen race. He also describes an incident from 2012 involving Israeli schoolchildren, who had been taken to see the play Ghetto, about Jewish life in Vilna during the Nazi occupation. Instead of sympathising with the suffering of their parents’ and grandparents’, the kids instead applauded the Nazis, even cheering on a scene in which a kapo struck a Jew.

Herzl and Anti-Semitism

Greenstein then goes on to show how there always was a confluence of interests between Zionism and anti-Semitism. He quotes Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, who believed that gentile anti-Semitism contained the Divine will to good by forcing Jews to close ranks. He also quotes a piece from the Jewish paper, Davar, from the 1950s in which the writer stated he would like to select a group of ‘efficient young men’ who would be sent to countries in which the Jewish population are engaged in ‘sinful self-satisfaction’. These men would then paint anti-Semitic hate messages on walls disguised as non-Jews and demanding that they go to Palestine. He states that Zionism was never really concerned with fighting anti-Semitism. It was concerned with gathering the Jewish people together to establish a Jewish state. And so Zionists came to see their real enemies as the Jewish opponents of Zionism, who should themselves be the victims of anti-Semitism.

He states that, contra France’s President Macron, who declared that anti-Zionism was a new version of anti-Semitism, Jewish history shows that it is Zionism that actually has the closest similarity to gentile anti-Semitism. He illustrates this with a passage from Herzl’s The Jewish State, which lays the blame for anti-Semitism on the Jews themselves. For Herzl, Jews, who married gentiles were lost to the ‘Jewish tribe’ and he declared he had no quarrel with the ‘honest anti-Semites’ who would spur on Jewish emigration. He also recognised that people would accuse him of ‘giving a handle to anti-Semitism’ when he said that the Jews were one people. One of the very many Jews, who did consider Zionism anti-Semitic was Lucien Wolf, the head of Britain’s Conjoint Committee and British Jewry’s ‘unofficial foreign minister’, who is quoted as saying

‘I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies.’

Herzl also admired Edouard Droumont, a notorious anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfusard, who Herzl declared was ‘an artist’ and was delighted when Droumont gave The Jewish State a glowing review.

The Zionists also agreed with the anti-Semites that the Jews were an ‘asocial’ body that did not belong among gentiles. The Marxist Zionist left, which followed the doctrines of Ber Borochov, Hashomer Hatzair and later Mapam, believed that there were too many rich Jews at the top of diaspora Jewish society and not enough workers. The reality, however, was that the vast majority of Jews in the Russian Empire lived in grinding poverty. The Zionists also agreed with the anti-Semites that Jews were either rootless cosmopolitans behind Communist agitation or the excesses of capitalism. He once again quotes Herzl, who wrote

When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.

This is exactly the sentiments of that terrible Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has inspired so much Nazism, Fascism and real Jew-hatred in the 20th century.

Other Zionist Anti-Semitism

Greenstein goes on to quote the Israeli novelist, A.B. Yehoshua, who said that Jews treated other people’s countries as hotels. And when Zionists described diaspora Jews, they sounded exactly like gentile anti-Semites. The first Israeli Minister of Justice, Pinhas Rosenbluth, described Palestine as an ‘institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’. Jacob Klatzkin, the co-editor of the Jewish newspaper, Die Welt, and co-founder of the Encylopaedia Judaica, wrote that Jews were

‘a people disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror… some sort of outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type… some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew.’

Hashomer Hatzair’s Weltanschauung, first published in 1917, and then republished in 1936, also described Jews in hostile terms:

“a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline.”

Greenstein concludes

Why is this relevant? Because even today Zionism considers the Jewish diaspora as essentially worthless. Whenever a choice has to be made between the Jews and the Jewish state then the interests of the latter always take priority.

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/04/why-when-zionists-abuse-their-jewish.html

The Identification of the Oppressed with their Oppressors

This is deeply shocking stuff, and it shows that Zionists have absolutely no business whatsoever accusing decent people, particularly self-respecting Torah-observant and secular Jews, of anti-Semitism. Greenstein has elsewhere argued that Zionism is a capitulation to anti-Semitism. It also reminds me of a comment the great journalist of the gogglebox, Clive James wrote way back in the 1970s. He observed in a piece about Roman Catholic children identifying with the British army in Northern Ireland, that oppressed peoples often supported and took on the views of their oppressors. I think James may have been wrong in the case of Ulster Catholics, as many of them initially supported the deployment of British troops, because they expected them to be far more impartial than the police. But it does seem to apply to many Zionists’ view of the degraded nature of diaspora Jewry following Herzl.

Israel’s Abandonment of Diaspora Jewry for Its Own Interests

And Zionists have shown themselves to be perfectly willing to sacrifice diaspora Jews to real anti-Semitism if it will benefit Israel. Greenstein has blogged about how one of the Zionist pioneers – I have a feeling it may have been David Ben Gurion – said that he would rather half of Europe’s Jews were wiped out by the Nazis, if half of them went to Israel, than all of them being saved by going to Britain. George Soros, the billionaire financier, who is cordially hated by Zionists and gentile anti-Semites, despises Zionism because of the deal Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the Nazi occupation, struck with the Nazis. This allowed for tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews to be sent to the death camps in return for a certain number escaping to Israel. And they’re still doing it today. David Rosenberg has written time and again on his blog, Rebel Notes, about the threat posed to eastern Europe’s remaining Jews by the extreme nationalist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim regimes in Hungary, Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic states. But these have received little criticism from Israel, because they support the Israeli states and buy its armaments. Stephen Pollard, the gentile editor of the Jewish Chronicle, notoriously declared that a far-right Polish MEP wasn’t an anti-Semite, but a true friend of Israel. This was a politician, who among other things, supported legislation banning any discussion of Polish collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust, contrary to historical fact and ordinary, common morality.

Anti-Semitism and the Idea of a Chosen People

As for that comment by the Lehava supporter stating that Hitler shouldn’t have attacked the Jews, because they were the Chosen People, this is deeply offensive and dangerous for a variety of reasons. One common anti-Semitic accusation is that the Jews believe themselves to be superior to everyone else because they believe themselves to be God’s elect. There have been many attempts by Jews to tackle this misconception. In the 1920s, I believe, some German synagogues removed a prayer from their services referring to them as the Chosen People, because they were afraid it would give their non-Jewish compatriots the wrong idea. Other Jewish authorities have pointed out, citing the Bible, that their status of the Jewish people does not confer on them any kind of superiority. Rather, God chose the Jews because they were the smallest, weakest people, who are called upon to be a servant people.

Many Jews are uncomfortable with the idea of being a Chosen People, and some reject it outright. My guess is that some of this discomfort may also be due to the apparent similarity of the doctrine to secular ideas of racial superiority. I knew a lad at college, who bitterly hated Christianity, though he definitely wasn’t an anti-Semite nor any kind of Nazi. Quite the opposite. He believed that the roots of Nazi racism lay in the Old Testament and the idea of a Chosen People. He was wrong. Nazism grew out of western biological racism, which was founded in the 19th century by the French count, Gobineau. This also inspired Nazism, although the Nazis also took over and exploited Christian anti-Semitism. The Lehava supporter’s statement about Hitler and the Jews as the Chosen People would support the prejudiced views of the opponents of Judaism and Christianity as the origins of racism.

Zionist Silence over their Anti-Semitism

The existence of the virulent anti-Semitism in Zionism, which Tony Greenstein describes, also raises another issue. Why won’t Zionist organisations like the Community Security Trust log anti-Semitic incidents and hate speech committed by Jews? It seems to be a prohibition that really only goes one way. As we’ve seen, very many of the decent people vilified and smeared as anti-Semites in the Labour party and elsewhere for their opposition to israel’s oppression of the Palestinians have been Jewish. Their Zionist opponents have shown themselves to have no qualms about accusing them of Jew-hatred. But it seems they do not want to record instances where decent Jewish critics of Israel have been so reviled.

Not only is this a disgusting double standard, it also makes you wonder what they’re hiding. Is there so much of this vilification, that if it was recorded, Zionists would find themselves exposed as some of the worst anti-Semites?

Christopher Chope Blocks Bill to Outlaw FGM

What can decent people do about Christopher Chope, the Tory MP for Christchurch? Apart from either waiting for him to be voted out at the next general election, or having him committed to Broadmoor as a dangerous lunatic whose twisted view of democracy is a threat to the safety of vulnerable women and girls?

Yesterday Mike put up a piece reporting that Chope talked out a bill on Friday intended to safeguard girls and women against Female Genital Mutilation. His decision to do so was in direct opposition to his government’s own stance against this repulsive practice. Mike’s article quotes a tweet from Tweezer herself, who said

Female genital mutilation is an abhorrent practice and we will not accept it. We’ve strengthened the law on FGM, leading to the first UK conviction last week, and we’re helping communities around the world to end this appalling crime.#EndFGM

Chope declared that the reason he did so wasn’t because he was in favour of FGM, but because he hated Private Members’ Bills. But in the instance, as Mike pointed out, his professed principles amounted to pure egotism as he placed them before the wishes of his government, party, nation and parliament. Mike asked in his article whether Chope would have been quite so keen to block the bill if he knew someone, who had suffered from FGM, or if it was a form of mutilation and torture he might also have suffered if he had been born into a culture that practiced such barbarity.

Mike also goes on to say that he first learned about it at school, and it turned his stomach. I was about the same age when I first heard about it, and Mike’s right – it’s horrific and revolting. I think it can very in terms of severity, and has been described by feminists as ‘female castration’. There are absolutely no medical benefits to it, and, apart from the horrific nature of the operation itself, it can also be a positive danger to women’s health. It isn’t just the national government that is worried about it. Local authorities are too. A few years ago there was an article on the local news for the West Country on the Beeb, Points West, about concerns by activists and medical professionals about girls in Bristol being taken out of the country to their families homelands to have it done.

As for Chope himself, last year he also talked out a Private Members Bill to prevent upskirting, which Mike suggests means that he seems to have an unpleasant attitude to stop women protecting their private parts. And public opinion was very definitely against Chope. Mike quotes two Tweets from Dangerous Hero Rachel Swindon, who said

Following on from his upskirting disgrace, Tory MP Christopher Chope MP has just shouted to object to the Female Genital Mutilation Bill.

There is seriously something wrong with this guy. Abhorrent individual.

And also pointed out that he was one who believes in denying government aid to the many, while being very glad to avail himself of it.

Tory Christopher Chope doesn’t just derail upskirting & FGM bills. He voted –
•12 X for the Bedroom Tax
•44 X to cut benefits
​•9 X against bankers bonus tax
•19 X to reduce Corporation tax

He used £10,000 expenses to fix his roof, a £2,600 bathroom & £881 to repair a sofa

Mike stated that, thank to his principles, the provisions of this bill will now have to be included in a formal government bill. Which means more time putting more women and girls at risk. He asks

Will Mr Chope accept responsibility for their pain and humiliation? If not, perhaps any such victims should take out a private prosecution against him.

Mike also concludes

So perhaps we should simply accept that he blocked the Bill against FGM because this principled man believes in the principle behind FGM: That those with power are entitled to do anything they like with those who have none – and do all we can to remove this dinosaur, and his prehensile principles, from Parliament at the earliest opportunity.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/02/10/childish-chope-blocks-anti-fgm-bill-because-he-doesnt-know-any-better/

Chopes’ decision to block the bill seems to be part of the same attitude of a certain group of far-right Tories and Kippers. There was a scandal a few years ago, I seem to recall, when some UKIP MEPs tried to block or voted against a similar bill intended to protect women from either sexual assault or FGM, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which. And in some cases their actions have been extremely hypocritical.

I don’t know what Chope’s attitude towards Islam is. I’m not aware that he’s a bigot. But there is a very strong element of pernicious, systemic islamophobia in the Tory party. And one of the issues islamophobes have seized upon to try to show that Islam is incompatible with British culture and should be heavily legislated against and discouraged is Female Genital Mutilation. Yes, it goes on in Islam, but it is not commanded in Qu’ran. I think it’s one of the practices that entered Islam from outside, and is most widespread outside the Middle East in sub-Saharan Africa. Certainly the women’s rights activists, who spoke about it on the Points West piece cited cases were girls were being taken there. There is an Islamic feminist movement, and I’m absolutely sure that there are campaigners against it in the Dar al-Islam. But many of the same Kipper MEPs, who voted against the European parliament’s attempts to outlaw it were also bitterly islamophobic, which made them both religiously bigoted and misogynist. Islamophobe or not, by blocking this legislation Chope has also undermined the efforts of Islamic and BAME feminists to protect women. But then, as Dangerous Hero Rachel Swindon and Mike have pointed out, Chope doesn’t believe in supporting the health and welfare of the poor and underprivileged, only in giving even more to extremely rich White men like himself.

As for his precious principles, they’re clearly undemocratic. Private Members’ Bills always have been part of parliamentary democracy. He can hate them all he likes in principle, but it should not be his right to obstruct parliamentary democracy. Especially when it puts women and girls at risk of horrific mutilation.

You hope it won’t be too long before there’s a general election and he, and the rest of his party of thugs and bigots, are thrown out and a proper Labour government installed instead.

Short Film on the Police Targeting Anti-Fracking Protesters, Particularly the Disabled

Yesterday, Christmas Day 2018, Mike also put up a piece and a short film, about ten minutes long, Targeting Protesters, produced by Gathering Place. The film-makers have been working on a long form documentary about fracking in the UK, during which time they have observed some features of this issue they found ‘surprising’.

They contacted Mike after he put up a piece last week about how the rozzers were reporting disabled people at anti-fracking protests in Lancashire to the DWP. The assumption seems to be that any disabled person out on protest is committing benefit fraud, as if their condition was genuine, they would be in no condition to attend. The DWP’s response to any allegation of fraud is to suspend benefits during the investigation, so that disabled people are automatically denied the money they need to live on before the Department has made a decision on whether or not they are guilty. Opponents of the police’s actions have called it ‘ableist’, and stated that it’s based on a very simplistic view of disability. Not all conditions, that mean someone is unable to work, are obvious, and the severity of many of them can vary from day to day. They have also argued very persuasively that the police seem to be doing this to intimidate disabled people as a deliberate strategy to prevent them going on these demonstrations.

Mike quotes the film’s publicity, which states

“The police have identified and targeted prominent anti-fracking campaigners, key protest organisers and invariably protesters with disabilities – in order to undermine or neutralise their effectiveness in challenging the interests of the shale oil and gas industry.”

The film has been posted on social media by Netpol, the Network for Police Monitoring, and features their coordinator, Kevin Blowe. Blowe explains that the police have a deliberate strategy of targeting particular individuals for arrest. These are people, who are respected by the other protesters. They are either in a position of leadership, or can make critical decisions and actions when the moment comes. They also stop people travelling to the protests. The film shows an example of this, in which a carload of people are stopped by the cops at the side of the road. A woman, one of the crew, asks why they have done this. The policeman states that they are stopping them because they have information that their car contains a tripod. It’s a trumped up charge, and the woman asks them if they really think a tripod can fit in her car. The cop doesn’t respond and simply walks away. Later in the video Raj Chada, a member of a firm of solicitors, states that the cops’ charge that a woman was using a car illegally was complete ridiculous. The police haven’t charged her, or applied to the courts about it. Their arrest is simply a way of stopping free speech, which is unacceptable. It’s against the culture the police should have, which should be about facilitating those, who want to protest. The video also shows Labour’s John McDonnell talking to a group of protesters about the way they’ve been harassed. The film shows another woman, who has been grabbed by the rozzers, just as they release her. She says that it’s the second time that day the police have grabbed her.

Blowe states that the police target particularly influential people. This may sometimes involve arresting them, and pushing that arrest right up to taking them to court, even though the accused person would normally get off in other circumstances. If the targeted individual is local, the cops may continually go round to their homes or disrupt their business, deliberately making it very clear to them that they are under scrutiny.

While many fracking protesters are local, some do come from outside the area. They are also deliberately targeted by the police, who will visit their camps and make it clear that they are being targeted for arrest. They will also claim that any public order offences are due to people from outside the area. One protester from elsewhere in the country states that not only do the police target them, they also target anyone who associates with them, and that they can’t go anywhere without having a police escort. McDonnell also states that he’s concerned about the level of physical force used by the police, and particularly the incident where the police tip a disabled man out of his wheelchair. The film shows this happening, and the man says that it has happened to him three times already. McDonnell explains that the people on these protests are locals concerned about fracking in their area, and that most of them have had no interaction with the police before. The cops’ actions have shocked them, just as they’ve shocked him. The video shows another disabled man, in an orange T-shirt, being seized by the police, who then appear to strap him down physically into his chair. Blowe explains that the police will target someone, who appears vulnerable, in order to show that they will do absolutely anything possible to stop this person being as effective as they could be. Another disabled man tells the camera how the police told him that they had informed Motability that he was using his car for illegal purposes. The same man appears a few minutes later telling John McDonnell that the police have tried to stop his benefits, and passed on to the DWP a years worth of footage of him and other protesters. McDonnel states that this is unacceptable, and that this person should take it up with their MP, so that it can be discussed in the House of Commons. It appears to be done to prevent disabled people protesting, when they should have the same rights and ability in society to protest as everyone else.

Blowe also explains how the police will try to create ‘a situation’ where they can start arresting people by picking on someone vulnerable, like someone in a wheelchair or an older person, so that the other protesters will react. This is done so that the fracking lorries can get through. Sometimes the police is reactive, such as when the police on the day arrest particularly influential people. But they will also target otherwise unlikely targets, like women. They also target the young in order to give them the message that they are vulnerable, and the police consider them to be at risk of getting sucked into extremism. But it’s also a way of letting that person know they’re on the cops’ radar, and they have identified them for harassment. Blowe’s comments are accompanied by footage of a tall, long-haired young man being seized by the police, and forced onto the ground with his head all but in the gutter, before being dragged off. The man then briefly explains in a piece clearly filmed later that he was frightened after this happened to him in the short term, but in the long term absolutely not. Blowe then continues, explaining that this is all about identifying the key people to disrupt and end the protests.

Keith Taylor, an MEP from the Green Party, appears, and makes the point that many people still remember Orgreave from the miner’s strike, and that when the police follow orders, heads get broken. This is not the future that either he nor the community groups want to see.

John McDonnell then appears in turn to say that some form of inquiry into the conduct of the police is needed, and the evidence he’s seen is deeply worrying, and he believes other people seeing it will feel the same. There’s a level of physical force that’s unacceptable, and that therefore needs to be addressed.

Blowe explains that it’s all done to reduce the level of protest in an area, to cut down their duration time of months or weeks, to cut the numbers of people on these protests down to numbers they can manage, and to stop the mass opposition to fracking.

The film ends with the young chap, who was arrested, stating that he knows it’s all done to put people off, and that knowledge itself completely overrides any fear they would try to put upon him or others.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/12/25/watch-this-short-film-about-the-way-the-police-target-disabled-people-at-protests/

Taylor’s right when he says that it will remind many people of the miner’s strike. It seems very similar to the way Thatcher used the police in the 1980s to break the miner’s union. This was very much a political strategy on the part of the Tories. They remembered and resented the way the miners had defeated Ted Heath’s government in the 1980s, and were determined not to let this happen again. I can remember going to a meeting of the Fabian Society in Bristol, where one of the speakers explained how the efforts of the police, the Tory government, and Tory local authorities were very carefully coordinated and planned, with the same Tory politicians and activists appearing again and again around the country to try to break the strikers and the picket lines.

As for targeting women, they tried doing it to one of the members of my family. One of my female relatives was amongst the people protesting against the poll tax in London, and the police tried to grab her and pull her away, but her friends managed to hold on to her and pull her back. And I can very well believe that this is done deliberately to provoke the crowd to violence, so that the police will have an excuse to crack heads and arrest people.

The police did very well under Margaret Thatcher. They were well paid and given a range of benefits, like cheap or subsidized housing. Since then many very senior police officers have made it plain that they regret how they were used, stating that they were used by Thatcher as her private army. Recently the police have been decimated under Cameron and May through cuts in funding, which have led to a drastic fall in the numbers of police officers. Because the Tories clearly don’t think ordinary people and their homes and property are worth protecting as much as the rich. And they still probably believe that twaddle about neighbourhoods funding their own policing through hiring private security guards.

It is clear, however, that the link between the Tory party, the police and private industry still remains strong, at least as regards the fracking industry. Such politicised policing is a threat to the environment and democracy. McDonnell is right. We need an inquiry. Now.

Hope Not Hate on Anti-Semitism, Homophobia and the Islamophobes Speaking in Support of Tommy Robinson

On Saturday the islamophobic far right held a march to protest against the arrest and jailing of Tommy Robinson, the founder of the EDL, and former member of the BNP and Pegida UK, for contempt of court. Robinson had been livestreaming his coverage of the trial of a group of Pakistani Muslim men accused of child abuse. There are very strict laws governing press coverage of trials, which Robinson broke, just as he had broken them a year or so before in Canterbury. This had earned him a suspended sentence, which automatically kicked in when he repeated the offence last week in Leeds. Robinson was arrested, convicted and jailed.

The laws Robinson broke are there to make sure that everyone gets a fair trial, and apply to all cases, not just those of Muslims accused of paedophilia. But Robinson’s supporters decided that he had been the victim of state censorship and imprisoned for his political beliefs by an establishment determined to protect paedophile Muslims and persecute Whites, hence the march. This was addressed by some of the most notorious islamophobes in Britain and the Netherlands.

Hope Not Hate have an article at their site identifying the speakers, and giving a brief description of their political careers and their very racist views on Islam and Muslims. They included the notorious anti-Islamic Dutch politician Gert Wilders; Anne-Marie Waters, who was formerly a Labour party member before joining Pegida with Tommy Robinson. In October last year, 2017, she launched another far right party, the For Britain Movement; Raheem Kassam, a former advisor to Nigel Farage and editor of Breitbart’s London branch. He’s also the direct of Student Rights, which claimed to be a campus monitoring group dedicated to combating extremism. In fact, it has no student members or links to student unions, though it is linked to the extreme rightwing American group, the Henry Jackson Society. It has also been criticised by several London student unions for targeting Muslim students, and the Institute of Race Relations also noted that its work was used by far right groups to target a Nuslim student event. He’s also the editor of another, Neoconservative news site, The Commentator.

And then there’s the extremely islamophobic UKIP MEP, Gerard Batten, who in 2011 addressed the Traditional Britain Group, the far right outfit that invited Jacob Rees-Mogg to their dinner. Mogg attended, but now claims he only did so because he didn’t really known what they were like. Which sounds very unlikely to me.

As well as vile views on Muslims, the article also describes the vicious hatred towards other groups of some of those associated with the speakers. Like Mandy Baldwin, a member of Waters’ For Britain Movement, who posted homophobic material from a Nazi website on a social media site. For Britain also includes several former members of the BNP and other Fascists, such as Sam Melia, who was a former member of the banned terrorist group, National Action. Another member, Stuart Nicholson, posted extremely anti-Semitic material on his Twitter account before it was withdrawn. In one of these, he retweeted a post that read “National Socialism is the alternative to degeneracy we currently face. It is a pathway to freedom and prosperity. It is an escape from Jewish Tyranny. It is the Future of our people.”

https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2018/06/08/march-tommy-robinson-extreme-anti-muslim-activists-line-speak/

It’s probably no surprise that some of those, who joined the anti-Islam movement also have a bitter hatred of gays and Jews, and openly support Nazism. All the stuff Nazis write about ‘Jewish tyranny’ is a vile lie, responsible for justifying the Holocaust under the Nazis. And Nazism never brought freedom and prosperity. For the German working class, is meant low wages and complete subordination of the workforce to the bosses as part of Hitler’s Fuhrerprinzip, or Leader Principle. Just as it meant the absolute political, social and economic dominance of the Nazi party and the proscription of all competing parties and organisations, whose members were rounded up and sent to the concentration camps.

I don’t doubt that not all members of the anti-Islam movement have views as extreme as these. But it does seem to show that if these people have their way and ban Islam and persecute or expel Muslims, sooner or later they will move on to attack other groups. Like gays and Jews.

Boris Johnson, Brexit, and the Lies and NHS Privatisation of Daniel Hannan

Mike has put up two pieces today reporting on the antics of Boris Johnson and Daniel Hannan. BoJo has violated ministerial rules in allowing a pro-Brexit, free trade organization, headed by Hannan, to take up residence in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The rules, however, state that it is absolutely forbidden to give government or ministerial aid to organisations, which are against government policy. This has resulted in the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, making a statement that he intends to investigate this breach of the ministerial code. Mike is sanguine about what this will actually mean. He expects that rather than be severely reprimanded, BoJo will be let off with a slap on the wrist.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/09/30/civil-service-head-will-investigate-alleged-breach-of-ministerial-code-by-boris-johnson/

Knowing how libidinous Boris is, and his complete inability to take ‘No’ for an answer, he’ll probably take it as some kind of come-on.

As for Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP for Dorset has managed to show his ignorance and complete lack of any understanding for how Brexit will affect ordinary people by comparing leaving Europe to moving house. It’s painful, but better in the long term. This has drawn widespread ridicule, as Mike shows in his blog.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/09/30/brexit-buffoon-hannan-bombarded-with-ridicule-over-nicer-home-claim/

In fact, Hannan has some very unpleasant right-wing views. He used to have a regular column over at the Telegraph Blogs, where he treated his online readers to his Eurosceptic views. Buddy Hell, the French philosophical feline over at Guy Debord’s Cat, has posted numerous piece attacking his posts. Like many Tories, Hannan has told any number of lies trying to convince people about how wonderful Brexit is, and the massive increase in prosperity that will result if we privatize everything and remove whatever’s left of the welfare state. So frequent is he with these untruths and falsehoods, that the Cat gave him the soubriquet of the ‘lyin’ King’.

And one of the things Hannan is in favour of is the privatization of the NHS. This has been pretty much Tory – and Blairite – policy ever since Thatcher took power, though they’ve kept very quiet about it and gone about it piecemeal, for the reason that if the general public realise what’s going on they’ll never be elected again. But Hannan, like the current Health Secretary, is all in favour of it. Though I expect that, like Jez, if he’s pressed on it he’ll probably talk in public about how much he ‘treasures it’, leaving his real views to be discovered only be people, who have actually managed to read what he’s written about it.

The fact that BoJo has given his ministerial blessing to the Lyin’ King, or as I think of him, Dan, Dan, the Sanitary Man, after one of the characters from Carry On Screaming, also shows what BoJo really thinks of the health service, as well as his support for Brexit and free trade.

Neither of them should be anywhere near government. Boris desperately wants to be PM, but would be an utter disaster for this country of the same magnitude as Trump.

Lobster Review of John Strafford’s Book on Un-Democratic Britain

Anthony Frewin wrote a review of a fascinating political history in Lobster 59. This was Our Fight for Democracy: A History of Democracy in the United Kingdom, by John Strafford, and published by the author. A history of the development of democracy in Britain from the Romans and Anglo-Saxons onwards, Frewin praised the book for its readability and the fact that it was able to say something new in area which has been extensively covered by other historians. For example, unlike the conventional Whig narrative, which sees the emergence of democracy and representative government as a smooth progress from the middle ages to today, Strafford is quite clear that not only was this process not inevitable, it had to be actively fought for. Frewin quotes him in an introductory chapter as saying that ‘riot and revolution are the mother and father of democracy’ and ‘Our history shows that nearly all the advances towards democracy were accompanied by violence.’ He notes that Strafford’s is a critical history, and so does not automatically greet the great milestones in the development of democracy, like Magna Carta, the Great Reform Act and votes for women with uncritical admiration. And the book also contains much information on how un- and indeed anti-democratic political structures and institutions have survived into the present day.

Like the business vote. Under the old political system, business leaders were also granted a number of extra votes in local elections. This was not abolished with the Great Reform Act of 1833, but survived for another 136 years before finally being removed in 1969 from all of Britain with one exception: the City of London. Indeed, 14 years ago in 2002 16,000 new business votes were created.
Strafford states that the justification for non-resident voting in the centre of the metropolis is that the real population of the City is the 45,000 people who just work there in the daytime, and not just the mere 9,500 who permanently live there. A Private Act of Parliament passed the same year doubled the number of voters to 32,000. The actual captains of industry don’t even have to vote personally. They can nominate employees to do so, and the number of votes businesses receive depends on their size. He makes the point that wealth shouldn’t be allowed to buy votes, and that non-residents of the City of London should be deprived of the franchise in the City. If that means that the City’s electorate then becomes too small to be practical, the City should either be amalgamated with another borough or split up.

Lobster is profoundly Eurosceptic, and so Frewin’s reviews discusses the sheer absence of anything like democracy in the European parliament, where the MEPs’ power is severely limited and the Union governed instead by the unelected commissioners. An example of this complete absence of democracy is the career of Baroness Ashton of Upholland, who rose spectacularly from relative obscurity to become British High Commissioner in Brussels through appointment by Tony Blair and others, without once going through an election. This is an example of the way the government has increasingly adopted the practice of co-opting outsiders. One example of this was Gordon Brown’s elevation to the peerage of ten such people, who became government ministers. These included three businessmen, a surgeon, a former head of the RN, and an ex-diplomat. Frewin also makes the point that this also exemplifies the rise of Yes-men and -women, whose government preferment depends on political patronage.

The review also states that Strafford gives a list of 69 recommendations for reforms that would make the country more democratic, and includes a sample. These are:

1: Power should be devolved from central government and the higher levels of local government to the lowest practical level.
2: For all electoral purposes the City of London should be
amalgamated with the City of Westminster.
3: The Regional Development Agencies should be abolished and their functions transferred to local Councils.
10: The oath of allegiance should either be abolished or it should be changed to ‘I swear that I will bear true allegiance to the people, Parliament and democracy according to law.’
14: The whole House of Commons should elect Select Committee chairmen by secret ballot, thus ending de facto appointment of chairmen by the party whips.
18: The people should directly elect the Prime Minister. He could be removed by majorities in both Houses of Parliament or by referendum.
25: Our entire legal system should be disentangled from the nonsense that justice is dispensed in the name of the Queen. It should be dispensed in the name of the people.
28: The people should directly elect the House of Lords.
31: The European Council of Ministers should meet in public.
32: The European Scrutiny Committee of the House of
Commons should meet in public.
39: Both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party should reform themselves to become democratic bodies answerable to their membership so that members can change the Constitution of their party on the basis of One Member One
Vote.
46: Party Political Broadcasts (PPBs) should be abolished.
59: Within one month of the monarch’s death a ballot should be held of all the people to endorse the successor. Should such endorsement not be given a ballot should be held on the successor’s eldest child becoming monarch. Should
endorsement once again not be forthcoming the monarchy
would be abolished.

Frewin comments ‘Some pretty radical proposals here.’ Yes, indeed. We’ve seen how bitterly anti-democratic the Blairites in the Labour party have been about letting the membership vote in radical leaders and changes in policy that they dislike with their purges of the membership and constant campaigning against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.

One of the fascinating features of the book is that Strafford himself is not a left-winger. He founded a campaigning group in the Tories, the Campaign for Conservative Democracy, who have a website at http://www.copov.org.uk/. He was also one of those marching against the Iraq invasion, where he and his wife held a banner, ‘Conservatives Against the War’.

The review is at the magazine’s website on their books pages. This is at http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk. Pick the issue from the selection at the page, and then scroll down till you get to the relevant review. This also provides the details how you can order the book from Strafford himself.

Hope Not Hate on the BNP’s History of Stupidity

This is further to my last on the collapse of the BNP as a political party, thanks to them not actually bothering to register with the Electoral Commission. Hope Not Hate has an interesting and, in places, funny piece about how the BNP has very effectively managed to destroy itself through its leaders’ factionalism, venality, stupidity and massive incompetence. It’s at http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider/the-bnp-a-history-of-believable-incompetence-4695.

It begins

At the end of 2014 we remarked that our highlight of the year was the “total collapse of the BNP.” Nick Griffin had been booted out of the European Parliament, forced out as Chairman and then, humiliatingly, expelled from the party he had built into a once serious electoral proposition.

Between 2001 and 2009, the British National Party had an unstoppable feel about them. The party was full to burst with nazis, cranks, conspiracy theorists and even rapists and murderers. But they persisted with pushing ahead with a rebranding of an old nazi party into something that would at least look like it did not smell quite as bad as it once did.

They were picking up the odd council seat here and there, quite incredibly got a member elected onto the London Assembly in 2008, and by 2009 the party held over sixty council seats and had two MEPs. Close to one million people voted for them in the European Elections.

The BNP wanted to be seen as a serious political party; but in becoming a serious political party, Griffin had to make enemies. In November 2008 the party’s membership list was leaked by a disgruntled official. A proper party they wanted to be, but few people actually seemed to want to be on the dreaded list. Still, despite the humiliation, they forged ahead from that disaster in time to win those near one million votes. It was clear that the BNP was often its own enemy and Nick Griffin perhaps both their greatest and their worst asset.

One of the most interesting internal documents I have ever seen from the BNP was a secret letter that Griffin wrote to BNP officials after his election to Brussels in 2009- begging them to not take advantage of the European Parliament’s generosity. So aware of the likelihood of this happening was Griffin, he only entrusted party employee timesheets and expense claims to his wife Jackie (a midwife). The party’s treasurer, by all accounts a “great bloke”, was addicted to internet pornography so they had removed his office computer and given him an old ledger to work on instead.

The far right, like the far left, has a history of factionalism and in-fighting, with groups continually splitting and reforming. It’s beset with wannabe Fuehrers, Duces and Caudillos, all jockeying for power in their ambition to be the next Hitler. And their character and general behaviour is less than inspiring. I can remember way back in the early 1970s, when one of the leaders of the National Front was banged up in jail for about two weeks for stealing women’s underwear from a department store. And when they began to make electoral inroads about a decade ago, they couldn’t hold back their deep instincts to make a mess of things. Private Eye in its pages ran a number of pieces chronicling their truly impressive displays of crass ignorance and sheer inability to organise anything, or behave in anything like a reasonable or competent manner. High lights of this long career of idiocy include:

The seven BNP councillors on Tower Hamlet’s borough council not bothering to vote for a motion that the rest of the council had accepted should be put to the vote, on the grounds that they didn’t know you had to do it. As a result, the proposal failed.

A press meeting, in which various BNP members in pig masks were supposed to leap out and start slobbering over a trough to symbolise the greed of the other, mainstream parties. This also went spectacularly wrong, and thing’s didn’t quite work out.

A fight between a Labour councillor and his BNP colleague in a pub, when Dagenham and Barking council adjourned there. The Labour local politician called the stormtrooper a ‘poof’, so the squadristi responded by calling him a ‘Fascist’. Then fisticuffs broke out.

There was also much schoolboy sniggering and speculation over the sexuality of the BNP’s spokesman for the arts. He styled himself a ‘conceptual film-maker’. He was mostly known for making a art film entitled ‘HMS Venus: A Voyage into Love’ or some such, which featured naked young men frolicking in a river. This is an unusual piece, considering how totalitarian movements, like Fascism, are generally hostile to experimental art, and the far right’s own bitter homophobia.

The leak of the party’s membership lists produced yet another Downfall parody. In this one, an exasperated Hitler rants about Griffin’s incompetence.

And satire and mockery is an effective weapon against the far right. The Eye also chortled when they got hold of documents from the BNP from former members explaining why they weren’t renewing their subscriptions. One ex-member forthrightly stated it was because he was tired of the paper being a joke in Private Eye.

Well, they’ve continued being a joke, but this time, hopefully, it’ll be the democrats and anti-Fascists who have the last laugh.