Hat tip to Michelle, one of the great commenters on this blog, for letting me know about this article.
Priti Patel has finally done the decent thing, and resigned following the revelation of her highly secretive visit to Israel, where she met met leading politicians, while telling everyone she was just on a holiday. Part of the reason behind Patel’s little trip seems to have been to get the British government to divert some of the money it gives for international aid to Israel, so it can spend it on the IDF’s continuing occupation of the Golan Heights. This is territory which Israel nicked from the Syrians during the Six Day War.
Israel is already massively supported by Britain, the US and the EU, where it is treated almost as a member, despite not having formal membership. The IDF is one of the main instruments of the country’s brutal repression and ethnic cleansing of its indigenous Arab people, the Palestinians. During its independence campaign in 1948, the Israeli armed forces were responsible for a series of massacres, rapes and beatings against the Palestinians. The most notorious of these was Deir Yassin. But that was only one massacre out of many. Very many. Israeli soldiers killed people sheltering in a mosque, shot and threw handgrenades at women and children, and in one horrendous incident killed a group of Palestinians, who were coming towards them to offer them rice in the hope of getting some mercy. The IDF today enforces the brutal apartheid regime against the Palestinians, including the fouling of cisterns and wells to make the water undrinkable, and the demolition of houses and seizure of property by Israeli colonists.
I have no desire whatsoever to see my government give aid money to the IDF. And I very much doubt I’m alone.
This isn’t about anti-Semitism. I am very much aware that there is and always has been a very strong Jewish opposition to the ethnic cleansing and terror, which not only includes American and European Jews, but also Israelis such Ilan Pappe and human rights organisations such as BT’salem. Anyone, who dares to criticise Israel, is smeared and abused as an anti-Semite. But many anti-Zionist Jews, or simply Jews critical of the occupation of the West Bank and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, feel that they are particularly singled out for abuse and vilification. Tony Greenstein, a veteran anti-Zionist and anti-Fascist campaigner, has quoted in his blog the left-wing comedian, Alexei Sayle. Sayle, the son of Jewish Communists, has said that it seems to him that the majority of people smeared as anti-Semites in the Labour Party were Jews.
Returning to Patel, an article by Adam Ramsay on the Open Democracy site, reveals that she has very extensive links to some very shady right-wing lobbying groups and thinktanks.
Before she was elected MP in 2010, Patel worked for the PR form Weber Shandwick, whose clients included British American Tobacco. Not only does the company produce a highly addictive and lethal drug, it also has links to the dictatorship in Myanmar and child labour. The article notes that some of the PR company’s employees were uncomfortable dealing with BAT. Not so Patel. She was perfectly relaxed.
BAT in their turn fund the right-wing think tanks the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs. In 2002, while Patel was working there, Weber Shandwick merged with the Israeli lobbyists Rimon Cohen, whose clients include the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, the illegal Migron settlement on the West Bank, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Whom Patel coincidentally met on her jaunt.
Weber Shandwick’s clients also included Bahrein, and just months after her election, the Bahreini’s flew her there to meet some of their ministers. This is a Gulf kingdom widely criticised for human rights abuses. In 2012 she went on another trip, this time to the United Arab Emirates, as part of the All Party Group, which went there. She made two return trips in 2013 and 2014. The first time she went with the World Consulting and Research Corporation, based in New Delhi. This outfit describe themselves as a brand equity and management organisation. The second trip was courtesy of Sun Mark Ltd., who are regular donors to her office. Weber Shandwick also added the Dubai firm Promoseven to its list of clients about the same time it merged with Rimon Cohen.
In 2014 she also attended a meeting in Washington, courtesy of the right-wing, and highly secretive British think tank, the Henry Jackson Society. The meeting was organised by AIPAC, the very powerful Israeli lobbying organisation in the US, about security in the Middle East. As for the Henry Jackson Society, they are so secretive about the source of their funds that they withdrew it from two parliamentary groups, rather than reveal where it comes from. Earlier this year the Charity Commission announced they were investigating it following allegations that it was being paid by the Japanese government to spread anti-Chinese propaganda.
Patel’s holiday to Israel also seems to have been sponsored by Stuart Polak, the former head and honorary president of the Conservative Friends of Israel. In 2009 Peter Oborne wrote a piece about the extensive influence the CFI has in the Tory party. Ramsay also notes that trips to Israel funded by the CFI and similar groups are the most consistent entry in the MPs’ and MSPs’ register of foreign interests.
The article concludes
Much has been written about the weakness of the current Conservative government, as exhibited by this scandal, Boris Johnson’s blunders, and last week’s resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon amid allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour. But here is the problem. When governments are falling apart, special interest groups run riot. Flagrant abuses usually happen at times when minor abuses are normalised. What other powerful lobby groups are pushing ministers around? How did it get to the point that Patel thought she’d get away with this?
It’s a good question, though you’d have to work extremely hard to find out. The Labour MP Colin Challen wrote a piece years ago in Lobster reporting that half of Tory funding remains mysterious. As for the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs, they’re extreme right-wing think tanks that provided much of the ideology of the New Right during Thatcher’s grotty rise to power and period in office. They want to privatise everything, including the NHS and schools, as well as social security. I know. I’ve got the IEA’s pamphlets about the last two. The IEA also produced another pamphlet addressing a question vital to today’s women: Liberating Women – From Feminism. Which has been the line the Daily Mail’s taken almost since it was founded.
Mike yesterday put up a piece commenting on the strange verbiage of Patel’s resignation letter, and the reply from Theresa May. Both contained passages stressing that Patel was usually open and transparent about her business. Mike commented that neither of these letters actually looked like they’d been written by the two.
Mike comments that neither May nor Patel have acted transparently and openly, and we still don’t know what Downing Street’s role in this whole affair may have been. The Jewish Chronicle suggests it’s rather more than May and Patel are telling.
He concludes
This matter has demonstrated that Theresa May’s government has no interest in transparency and openness. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The minority Prime Minister will be hoping that it will go away, following the resignation of the offending minister.
It won’t.
We need to know exactly what happened, when it was arranged, with whom, who knew about it, who was there at the time, what was said about it afterwards and to whom, and whether all the information has been made public. My guess that it hasn’t.
Recent events involving Boris Johnson have shown that ministers cannot expect to be able to lie to us and expect us to accept it. We need the facts.
And if Theresa May can’t provide the answers, it won’t be one of her ministers who’ll need to resign.
The Beeb really does seem as determined as possible to spread as much Tory and right-wing American lies as they can, even if it brings us closer to a needless war with Russia.
Mike has already commented yesterday on the Beeb’s highly biased reporting of the sexual abuse scandal now engulfing parliament. The Beeb has seized on the Kelvin Hopkins story, and has been banging on about this, while casually ignoring the even bigger scandal about the number of Tory MPs, who sexually harass staff. Hopkins was briefly a member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before retiring to the backbenches. He is accused of harassing Ava Etamadzadeh, to whom he allegedly sent an inappropriate message, and held his body close to hers when they shrugged. The major question here is whether Corbyn knew about the allegations when he appointed Hopkins to the shadow cabinet.
The Beeb has been endlessly promoting this story, with Corbyn stopped in the street by a Beeb reporter. And Laura ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg, who tweeted thirteen times about the allegations but has made no mention of the far greater number of Tory MPs accused of sexual harassment.
While it’s unclear if Corbyn knew anything about Hopkins, the MPs has been suspended from the party and the Labour whip withdrawn. Unlike the Tory party, where Theresa May certainly knew about the unwelcome attentions 36 of her MPs were foisting on their staff in a weekly reported nicknamed ‘the Ins and Outs’. So far, none of the MPs accused have been suspended and they are not being investigated. The only casualty so far seems to have been Michael Fallon, who resigned from his role as Defence Secretary. But Kuensberg wasn’t interested in this, preferring – as good Tory propagandist – to continue harping on about Hopkins instead.
Then last night the Beeb decided it was going to retail once again Killary’s lies that she lost the election due Russian hacking and meddling in the US election on Have I Got News For You. They reported that Trump’s aides Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort were arrested for their corrupt links with Russia and Ukraine.
This is debatable. I can’t comment on Papadopoulos, but the FBI file on Manafort only mentions Ukraine. It doesn’t mention Russia.
The show also claimed that all the files that incriminated Hillary, showing her corrupt dealings in the Democrat party and her connections to Wall Street, were also released through Russian hacking.
They weren’t. As WikiLeaks themselves have said, and indeed the former British diplomat who took custody of the documents for them, the information was leaked by a disgruntled Democratic insider. Russia had nothing to do with it.
Now there’s probably a big story there about Manafort’s connections with Ukraine. Ronald Reagan patronised and supported the ex-pat Ukrainian organisations during the Cold War, giving their leaders posts in the various anti-Communist propaganda departments. These organisations and their leader, Vladimir Stetso, were former Nazi collaborators with a virulent hatred of Jews. Just as the current ruling Ukrainian coalition contains fully paid up, unreconstructed Nazis from the Pravy Sektor.
But we ain’t supposed to know about them. It might put us off the lie that the Maidan Revolution of 2012 was entirely spontaneous and democratic, instead of being stage-managed by Obama’s State Department under Victoria Nuland, George Soros, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which took over the CIA’s task of engineering ‘regime change’ when the Agency became too notorious for fomenting coups.
As for Killary, when in government she was one of the most hawkish members of Obama’s team, and was needlessly ramping up tensions with Russia and China. And the people backing her story about how it was due to the Russians, rather than her own venality and colossal lack of sympathy for the American people, are another bunch of sordid Nazis. They include the Von Mises Society, which is dedicated to privatising the state and destroying what little is left of American welfare provision. They also used to subscribe to eugenics and pseudoscientific racism. That means, they published a series of pamphlets and other literature intended to demonstrate that Blacks were thicker than Whites, and that America should not set up a welfare state, because this would simply be a waste of money. If people were poor, it was because they were biologically unfit. Particularly Blacks.
This is the kind of people, who are promoting Hillary’s lies about the Russians stealing the American election. And the Beeb seems happy to repeat this garbage, even if it means creating another wretched Cold War of the time that dam’ nearly destroyed the world the last time under Reagan.
I don’t know why the Beeb is actually doing this, apart from the issue of right-wing bias within the Corporation. Possibly its part of the whole Atlanticist mindset, which permeates much of the British governing class since America superseded us as a world power after the Second World War. We can only be a major force on the world stage by riding on America’s coat-tails. Everything they do, we have to follow. One British ambassador was told by his superiors in the Foreign Office that his job in Washington was to get up the Americans’ backside and stay there. And so Blair enthusiastically joined Bush in invading Iraq, creating the ‘dodgy dossier’ and lying about weapons of mass destruction in order to do so. And certain NATO generals were predicting that by May this year we would be already fighting Putin’s forces in the Baltic States.
That fortunately hasn’t happened, but I wonder if the generals, civil servants and politicians, who promoted this feel disappointed.
As it stands, it certainly looks like the Beeb are keen to defend Killary, even to the point of lying about Russian involvement and ratcheting up the Cold War a further notch or two.
And showing further that you cannot trust the Beeb to tell the truth about either the Labour party or the real state of affairs in eastern Europe.
In this short clip from RT’s Going Underground, main man Afshin Rattansi reports on and comments on the British army’s latest attempts to recruit more squaddies, as well as the time when Donald Trump appeared to be an anti-war candidate. The clip was posted on July 15, 2017, when Defence Secretary Michael Fallon was attending an air tattoo here in the UK.
In order to find 12,000 new recruits for the army, the government started looking for them in sub-Saharan Africa. Rattansi then pointedly comments that if there are viewers from that region of the continent, from poor and starving nations like Malawi, Mozambique or Sierra Leone, and they fancy dying for Britain, they can get through to army recruitment on the following number.
He also talks about the army’s attempts to recruit child soldiers using a video, This Is Belonging. It shows one squaddy walking behind his a truck carrying a load of his mates. At first they tease him by slowing down, so that he thinks he can climb in, before speeding up and pulling slightly away. They then slow down again, he manages to climb him, and is greeted with cheers and comradely backslaps from his mates.
Rattansi discusses how this video has been criticised by an anti-war group, Child Soldier International, because it is aimed at young people aged 16-25. And in particular those from the poorest and least educated sections of society. The video is also targeted at the good folk of the northern towns, which have been hardest hit by Thatcherism.
He also quotes the response from the government’s outsourcing partner, Capita, which predictably finds nothing wrong in this.
He then goes on to say that there is evidence from America that when poor kids, like those targeted by Capita’s wretched film, do come back from fighting and dying, they vote for anti-war candidates. Like Donald Trump. ‘You do remember when Trump was anti-war, right?’ he asks. He then plays footage of Trump telling the crowd that if he gets in, he will not send any more troops to the Middle East. It’s unjust to the millions of people that’ve been killed there, as well as to America. Thanks to the wars in the Middle East, America’s roads and hospitals aren’t properly maintained. If he gets in, he’ll stop the war and spend the money on that instead.
Child Soldier International isn’t the only organisation that has expressed concern about the UK’s recruitment of child soldiers. The issue got into the papers, or at least the I a few weeks ago. We are the only nation in Europe, I believe, that recruits children of 16 years old. Michelle, one of the great commenters on this blog, has also posted comments talking about the concerns of peace groups about the way the British army goes into schools to recruit there.
This used to happen at my old school here in Bristol. I don’t remember it ever happening to us in the top streams, but certainly recruiting films were shown to the less bright in the lower bands. One of our art teachers, a woman of left-wing opinions, was outraged by this. Someone told me that her father had been an air-raid warden during the War, and so had seen the bits of bodies strewn amongst the rubble after a bomb strike. If that was the case, then it’s not hard to see why she hated war, and those who seduce the young into fighting in one, so much.
As for Trump, I do remember when he was anti-war. Just like he also suggested at one point he was in favour of Medicare for All. Now he’s turned out to be no such thing. It was all lies. The result has been that many of the people, who voted for him are seriously disillusioned, and this is contributing to opposition to Trump within the GOP. A few days ago I came across a video on YouTube with the title, ‘Trump Will Destroy Capitalism’. I don’t think he will, but he’s certainly doing his damnedest. And if he does destroy it, then it won’t come too soon.
This is frightening. By refusing to sign up to the international treaty proposed by the UN to ban nuclear weapons, May is actively endangering our planet.
Mike today put up a piece reporting that the UN proposed a treaty in July that would ban nuclear weapons across the globe. 120 nations have already put their signatures. But Britain and the other nuclear powers oppose it. Nevertheless, Britain is coming under increased pressure to sign the treaty, which will be put forward before the UN again this week.
Mike in his blog suggests that Britain’s reason for not signing the treaty is because Michael Fallon no doubt thinks that he can sell a few nuclear bombs elsewhere in the world, along with all the other instruments of murder produced and exported by Britain.
I don’t think that’s probably the case. What is more likely is that Britain, America and the other members of the nuclear club, like Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan and China, are afraid that if they sign this treaty, then their own ability to defend themselves and intimidate the rest of the world will be weakened. In the case of America, it’s part of the country’s long history of exceptionalism, in which America is seen to be unique and above the laws and treaties that it imposes on other countries. It’s why America is keen to see the Serbs and other war criminals from the former Yugoslavia, for example, prosecuted by the international war crimes tribunal at the Hague, while not submitting itself to the tribunal. It’s why, despite the attacks on Islam by the American Right for the common practice of FGM, the US did not sign a UN treaty outlawing it. America simply wants to reserve the right to judge and invade other nations, but not to be judged and held to the same standards by them.
Ditto for this country, as we have spent so much of the post-War period riding on America’s coat-tails, pretending to be a global superpower when we lost that status nearly the moment the Second World War was over. The possession of nuclear weapons seems to be important to our national psychology. So long as we have them, we can convince ourselves that we can see off any foreign threat.
One of the interesting things I’ve read about the Labour party under Michael Foot is that, paradoxically, it was not extreme left. This is despite the foaming rants about ‘loony Labour’ and Communist infiltration by the Tories at the time. Foot was actually seen by many outside the party as a centrist. But Foot stood for unilateral nuclear disarmament, and so Thatcher portrayed him as someone, who was a positive danger to this country’s security. If we didn’t have nuclear weapons, it was argued, the USSR would not be deterred and would attack us or invade with impunity.
Except that if the Russians had launched a nuclear attack, our nuclear deterrent wouldn’t have mattered one iota. The MOD ran a simulation of what would happen if such a horrific event had occurred. The predicted results were that there would have been massive casualties in the first minutes of the attack, with millions dead and the destruction of our major cities.
Naturally, this was unacceptable to Thatcher, so she tried to falsify the results. She altered the parameters of the simulation, so that she could say that, well, actually most of us would survive and be able to strike back at the enemy. Except that for this to happen, most of the Soviet missiles would have had to land in Wales and other, largely rural parts of Britain. Even then, the casualties were too high, and the simulation was eventually abandoned because Thatcher’s interference to get the results she wanted made it completely unrealistic.
Foot was actually quite right, and the number of times the world has been a hair’s breadth away from nuclear Armageddon is terrifying. Nuclear weapons are a real danger to the continued existence of our planet. A global ban is desperately needed.
And perhaps – just perhaps – if a ban on nuclear weapons were imposed, we could develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes without the suspicion that they would be used for manufacturing missiles. Like space exploration and colonization. in the 1960s, Freeman Dyson and NASA developed the concept of the Orion spacecraft, a spaceship that would use nuclear bomblets to achieve unheard-of speeds to zip around the solar system. Mallove and Matlock in their book, The Starflight Handbook, show that a fission rocket would cut the journey time to Mars from six months or so to three or four weeks.
Orion was cancelled because it would have violated an international treaty banning nuclear explosions in the Earth’s atmosphere. But if nuclear weapons were banned completely, and the only uses for nuclear power were civilian and scientific, nuclear rockets could be a safe option for exploring and colonizing Mars and the other worlds of the solar system.
But this won’t happen so long as the present situation persists, and the world is endangered by the existence of nuclear weapons and the threat of their use.
Mike today has put up a piece over at Vox Political commenting on Michael Fallon’s speech yesterday at the DSEI arms fair in London. Fallon, who earned the monicker ‘Bomber’ because of a speech in which he declared that Britain had a moral duty to bomb the peoples of the Middle East, now went on to say that, thanks to Brexit, Britain’s future as the world’s leading arms exporter looked good. And that we should try to sell armaments to anyone in the world, regardless of morality.
Mike makes the point that Fallon’s comments are insensitive, coming as they do when Britain is selling arms to Saudi Arabia, which is using it to kill innocent civilians, including children in schools and madrasas, in Yemen. And Saudi Arabia has no qualms whatsoever against using such armaments against us. 17 of the 19 people involved in the 9/11 hijacking were Saudis, and the trail of responsibility for that atrocity goes right up to the top of the Saudi government itself.
This weekend’s Counterpunch also carries an article by Michael Dickinson, ‘Stop the London Death Fair’, about the DSEI trade fair and its dealings with some of the world’s most evil and repressive governments. It begins
Roll up! Roll up! Ballistic missiles and hand grenades! Drones, helicopters and warships! Rocket launchers, tanks and assault rifles! Welcome to the biennial London Arms Fair! Showing now until 15th September at the Excel Centre in Docklands, the Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEI) – “a world-leading event that brings together the defence and security sector to innovate and share knowledge” – presents one of the world’s biggest arms bazaars, displaying the latest high-tech arms and surveillance technology, crowd control and weaponry. This year the exhibition is split into five key zones: air, land, security and joint, all showcasing the latest equipment and systems. DSEI is organised by Clarion Events, with extensive cooperation from the British government.
Military personnel, politicians, private defence contractors and consultants mingle as they shop. Countries accused of war crimes and human rights abuses, Algeria, Angola, Colombia, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, the UAE, and Ukraine are among the invited. Although not an official guest, the Israeli arms industry has special pavilions at the venue, where over 34,000 visitors are expected to view the latest in killing weaponry for sale, exhibited by more than 1,600 arms companies, including the US and UK giants Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and BAE Systems.
With authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Azerbaijan among the official UK government guests in attendance, this year’s keynote speakers at the opening day conference included British Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox and many of the top brass in the UK military establishment. Fox said that overseas governments had an inaliable right to defend themselves and that if they could not buy the equipment they required from developed countries with effective controls, like the UK, they would look elsewhere. Last year Britain’s arms export industry turned over 3 billion pounds.
Andrew Smith, a spokesman from the activist group Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) said: “DSEI is one of the biggest arms fairs in the world. It exists purely to maximise arms sales. Prime Minister Theresa May and her colleagues may talk about promoting human rights but DSEI could not happen without the full support of government. A lot of the regimes in attendance have been linked to terrible human rights abuses, and events like DSEI only make them more likely in future. It is vitally important to spread as much awareness as possible of this terrible arms fair taking place. ”
Conservative governments, including Margaret Thatcher’s, keenly supported the British arms industry, and this policy was taken over, along with just about everything else, by Tony Blair and New Labour. It’s hardly surprising. George Orwell remarked when he finally gave up his anti-War stance in the face of the Nazi threat, and went to work for the BBC writing anti-Nazi and pro-war material, that if you’re a member of the British upper and upper middle classes, you’re bred for war. This has always been true, ever since the modern armed forces emerged from the military aristocracies of the Middle Ages. The officer elite has always been solidly middle class, although there has been some efforts to make it more diverse.
The government has tried to defend its massive support for the arms industry by arguing that arms sales open up foreign markets to British industry generally. After buying some of that ‘wonderful kit’ David Cameron enthused about, foreign nations would go on to buy other British products and services. But they don’t. They buy British weapons, tanks and other pieces of hardware, and nothing else.
And the British ruling class, its politicians and senior civil servants, also stand to benefit personally from the arms trade. Private Eye for decades has exposed the revolving door between the MOD and British defence ministers, and the arms industry, in which British generals and officials find very lucrative places on the boards of defence contractors and arms manufacturers once they retire or leave office.
As for the private military contractors, previously known as mercenaries, that the British government has supported, these have been used by the Tories to give unofficial support to regimes, where it would have been otherwise embarrassing for Britain to send in the regular army. Like Sri Lanka.
It hardly needs stating that the arms industry is a deeply immoral trade, and that by lauding Britain’s role in it Fallon has shown the complete absence of any kind of moral consideration for the victims of these weapons and a complete indifference to the nature of the regimes he intends to sell them to.
As far as he’s concerned, war is a business. And business is good.
Close down the arms fair, and kick out Fallon and the rest of his vile government.
Mike over at Vox Political has produced another excellent blog post utterly demolishing the lies of the Tory warmongers that Jeremy Corbyn supported IRA terrorism, and that his election would somehow leave Britain more vulnerable to atrocities such as the one on Monday night in Manchester.
His piece contains a graphic by Eoin Clarke showing that far from supporting terrorism, Corbyn consistently condemned paramilitary violence and sincerely looked and worked for peace in Northern Ireland. As such, he was respected not only by the Republicans but also by Loyalists.
Clarke’s graphic states, for example:
* In November 1994 Corbyn signed a parliamentary early day motion condemning the Birmingham Pub Bombings committed by the Provisional IRA.
* The same year, Corbyn held several meetings with four Loyalist leaders to discuss the release of Neil Latimer, a member of the UDR, and to be informed that October at the Labour Party’s conference of the ceasefire the following week.
* In October 2015 Ian Paisley’s wife told the Belfast Telegraph that she found the Labour leader courteous and polite, and thought he was a ‘gentleman’.
* In February 1987 the Times apologised to Jeremy Corbyn. Murdoch’s British ‘paper of record’ had smeared him by claiming that he had not phoned the police to warn them of a suspected Provisional IRA terrorist in London. In fact Corbyn had.
* In August 1988 the Irish Times hailed him as ‘a tireless campaigner for the Irish.’ Corbyn had worked to the quash the wrongful convictions of the Guildford Four, and reopen the inquiry into Bloody Sunday.
* Corbyn in fact only ever met Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams after Adams had been elected to parliament, 14 years after the commencement of the Troubles, in Adams’ capacity as an elected MP. He did, however, oppose Thatcher’s ban on broadcasting the voices of elected Sinn Fein politicians, and was keen that Adams’ constituents in West Belfast should not be silenced.
* When Adams visited Westminster in 1996, Corbyn was only one of a number of Labour MPs, who met him. The meetings were solely concerned with reviving the IRA ceasefire. This was achieved several months later. And Bill Clinton, who was then president of the US, had the previous year invited Adams to the Whitehouse. As Clarke’s graphic points out, this places Corbyn’s meeting with Adams firmly within the context of wider attempts by politicians to secure peace in Ulster.
Clarke does admit that there are two incidents, which are controversial, and do require an explanation.
* Shortly after the Brighton bombing of the Tory conference, Corbyn and other MPs met Republicans in Westminster. Corbyn’s motive for doing so was to end the strip searching of female prisoners on remand. However, Clarke states that the meeting was insensitive and wrong.
* In May 1987 Corbyn stood for a minutes’ silence to show respect for eight people, who had been killed by the British armed forces in Northern Ireland at a meeting of Irish sympathisers in London. Although one was entirely innocent, seven were members of the Provisional IRA. The circumstances of their deaths were unclear, and they may have been the victims of a ‘shoot to kill’ policy. The European Court ordered the payment of £10,000 each to the eight victims’ families.
* As for Adams himself, Clarke states that it was the Tory government, who began talking to him eleven years before Corbyn became an MP. Adams had been released in prison for the secret talks the Conservatives were holding with Irish paramilitaries following the deaths of 476 people in 1972, the worse year of the Troubles. This was revealed in MI5 files released under the 30 year rule. The files also showed that the Tories considered that Adams genuinely wanted a ceasefire and an end to the violence, and that his answers to questions were ‘reasonable and moderate’.
So while Corbyn did meet with Gerry Adams and other Irish Nationalists, he also worked with Ulster Loyalists. It certainly appears from this that Corbyn wanted to find a fair, peaceful solution to the violence and hatred in Northern Ireland.
Mike’s piece also includes a short video, running just under a two minutes, by the Labour MP Chris Williams. Williams points out that 14 years ago in 2003, Corbyn had warned that ‘the Iraq war will set off a spiral of conflict that will fuel the wars, terrorism and misery of future generations.’ He also warned several times that police cuts would leave the country more vulnerable to terrorism. He also warned that intervention in Libya would lead to it becoming a breeding ground for terrorism. He also objected to selling arms to Saudi Arabia for the same reason. Williams states that Labour has a crystal-clear policy to make Britain safer, unlike the Tories. They intend to undo the cuts to the police force, and have the longer term goal of rethinking this country’s foreign policy. This means not sending more of our courageous young men and women to die in wars no-one invited us to take part in, and destabilising countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. And Williams asks his viewers to challenges the Tories, the rich, the media magnates and the cheerleaders for these wars in voting for Labour. New approaches and responses are required following the evil terrorist atrocity in Manchester, and Labour has precisely done that.
Mike also includes a wonderful little video of Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy refuting Michael Fallon, the Tory defence minister. Guru-Murthy quotes Boris Johnson at him. Boris had said that the Iraq invasion didn’t create the problem of Islamist terrorism – the attack on the Twin Towers occurred before that – but it did sharpen their resentment. Fallon then attacks the quote, believing it was said by Jeremy Corbyn. When Guru-Murthy points out it’s by Johnson, he then flails around trying to claim that it shows that Johnson really concurs with him, that this does not explain terrorism. But the Channel 4 newsman goes on, and quotes Boris as saying that you can’t disagree with the nay-sayers, who say that the invasion has increased Islamic resentment. Even after he’s been told, Fallon continues to state that he’d have to see what Boris Johnson really says for himself, and denies that Britain’s foreign policy explains away terrorism.
Mike comments drily if there’s anyone, who doesn’t agree with Jeremy Corbyn? (Apart, obviously, from Michael Fallon).
And at the very top of the piece is a quote from the former director of MI5, Theresa Manningham-Buller, that the Iraq invasion ‘undoubtedly increased the terrorist threat in Britain’.
So Jeremy Corbyn was right about the Iraq invasion. He’s been right about the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, and he was right about the cuts to the police force. And he is very right to demand a ban on arms sales to the Saudis.
And while two of his actions in support of the Republicans in Northern Ireland have been insensitive, he is not a supporter of terrorism, as the Scum, Heil and Torygraph would have us all believe.
Go to Mike’s blog and read and watch the full article. Eoin Clarke’s information about Corbyn is in the form of a graphic, so that you can post it elsewhere on line to refute the Tories and their stooges, who still continue with their smears about the Labour leader.
And if you really want to see a just end to the violence in the Middle East, and a sensible policy to eradicate Islamist terror in this country, then vote Labour on June 8th.
If we don’t, if we continue to follow the Thatcherite warmongering of Blair, Cameron and May, it will only lead to worse violence and terror in the Middle East and at home.
The Tories must be getting very desperate indeed with this one. After Labour jumped in the polls last week to close the gap between themselves and the Tories down to 9 points, their lapdogs in the media decided that it was time once again to raise the spectre of Jeremy Corbyn’s support for fairer conditions for the Roman Catholic people of Northern Ireland and negotiations with the IRA.
Yesterday, Sophie Ridge of Sky News asked Corbyn about his membership of the editorial board of a magazine, which published an article praising the IRA bombing of the Tory conference in a Brighton hotel in 1984.
If she was hoping to catch him out, she was severely disappointed. Corbyn replied quietly and clearly that he didn’t write the article, and wasn’t on the editorial board. He admitted reading the magazine, and contributing articles. When she tried pressing him on how he could possibly write for such a magazine, he states that he didn’t agree with that article or many others, but there were others, which he did. He then expressed his wholehearted support for the 1994 peace agreement. He also made the point that there were many things on Sky, which he didn’t agree with, and which Ridge herself probably didn’t either. But that doesn’t mean not engaging with these issues. He stated that it’s sometimes good to read articles with which you don’t agree. ‘Sometimes’ he said, ‘you might learn something.’
Now today both the Torygraph and the Daily Heil lead with the same accusation that Corbyn supports on the IRA on their front page. That they should do so is not even remotely surprising. Both newspapers have the creeping horrors of the Labour leader. The Torygraph was one of the newspapers that tried to make the most out of the smear that he was a Trotskyite, while the Daily Mail can always be relied on for bug-eyed anti-Labour propaganda, especially if you can squeeze in a mention of the IRA.
Mike in his article also points out the immense hypocrisy in these very feeble smears. He states, quite correctly
For the record, Mr Corbyn had well-publicised talks with members of the IRA over several decades – while successive UK governments were doing the same, but in secret, while publicly claiming they never negotiated with terrorists. Who was more honest?
Maggie Thatcher initiated talks with the IRA soon after the bombing of Canary Wharf, I believe. And Mike’s quite right – the talks were extremely secret. All the while she and her government were talking to the IRA and Sinn Fein, the Leaderene was screaming at the top of her lungs that she wouldn’t negotiate with them.
Which proves the old age: ‘the Conservative party is an organised hypocrisy.’
In fact, Ted Heath had also tried negotiating with the terrorist groups in Northern Ireland back in the early 1970s when the bloodshed was just beginning. These collapsed through the intransigence of the Unionists. Heath was an awful prime minister, who tried to break the unions, and there have been allegations of paedophilia made against him since his death. But it’s a pity here that he didn’t succeed, as this would have prevented nearly three decades of murder and mutilation.
Counterpunch this morning published an article by Jamie Davidson about the allegations, and what they show about the Tory desperation to rubbish Corbyn. Davidson does not agree with Corbyn’s stance towards the IRA in the 1980s. He recognises the terrible injustices which the Roman Catholic population of the Six Counties suffered, and the way the Unionist domination of the province was secured through massive gerrymandering. But he believes Corbyn conceded too much to the IRA through supporting their goal of a united Ireland and his association with Sinn Fein. He also states that Corbyn supported the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence. I don’t know if the latter’s true.
But he states that these allegations surfaced yesterday when MI5 leaked a report to the Sunday Torygraph showing that they had kept a file on him because of his pro-IRA sympathies. Davidson states that this hardly singles Corbyn out as anything special, as vast numbers of people on the rest were under surveillance and harassment by the secret state and its allies. He makes the point that what has moved the Torygraph and the rest of the right-wing media to start making these accusations is the massive support large number of voters, even Tory voters, have for Labour’s polices, even if they don’t like the party’s leader. He writes
It’s also in this context that I found myself convinced to wholeheartedly back Corbyn as well as Labour today. It’s simply no longer practical to try to stay above the fray. What pushed me over the edge was yesterday’s report in the Daily Telegraph, leaked to them by an MI5 source, that the intelligence agency kept a file on Corbyn in the 1980s due to his IRA links. These links are, as mentioned, a matter of public record. There is no new information, besides the fact that Corbyn was under surveillance, which anybody who knows anything about British left-wing organisations and the scandalous level of harrassment they received from the state in the 1980s would have expected anyway. What is interesting and important here is the fact that an MI5 source felt the need to say this to the press at all. The Labour Party has trailed the Conservatives by double digits in every serious poll conducted since Corbyn became leader. The entire weight of the British media, both conservative and “liberal”, has been thrown behind the campaign to discredit not just Corbyn but the policies he supports, with great success. Though Labour has seen a bounce in the polls since the Prime Minister called a snap general election, as Corbyn has come into his own, campaigning amongst the public, while Theresa May has revealed herself to be by turns awkward, inept, vicious and deceitful, it is still inconceivable that the Conservatives won’t win and increase their majority on election day. So it is worth asking why anyone would consider it necessary to warn the public, again, about Corbyn’s past. The answer, I think, lies in that bounce in the polls.
He also talks about another piece of massive hypocrisy about which you’ll rarely hear the Tories reproached. Also in the 1980s, Maggie Thatcher supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to the point of sending the SAS in to aid them.
That this kind of state power is never directed against conservative politicians probably scarcely needs to be said, but let’s explore it anyway. When Corbyn became an MP in 1983, at which point he already supported the IRA’s political aims, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. Around this time, Thatcher was sending SAS squads to camps on the Thailand-Cambodia border, where they trained the exiled Khmer Rouge forces in laying mines and booby-traps in civilian areas. She insisted that the Khmer Rouge keep its seat at the UN as the official, internationally recognised government of Cambodia. By this point, the extent of the Khmer Rouge’s actions when they controlled Cambodia was widely known. Around a million people are thought to have been executed by the regime and another million killed by famine. I expect that I could stop 100 British people on the streets of London and tell them about the time that a Conservative Prime Minister supported a supposedly communist regime, thought to have killed two million people, and if I could count the number of people who knew about it on more than one hand I would be astonished. It simply isn’t part of the wider national discourse. Nor is her support for Saddam Hussein. Nor is the fact that the current Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, has admitted that “the vast majority of these opposition groups [which Britain supports in Syria] are Islamist”.4
The very real anti-imperialist credentials of the Vietnamese communists constituted a potential disaster for western hegemony. Why Thatcher favoured the Khmer Rouge over the Vietnamese liberators of Cambodia should be obvious to anybody; given a choice between the two, a capitalist will always side with the worse of two “socialists”, in the hope of spreading news of the system’s inherent horrors as widely as possible. Readers must ask themselves why right-wing figures are permitted to take this stance without damage to their reputation, even after the true horrors committed by their chosen ally are known, while left-wing figures who gave the same ally the benefit of the doubt before the truth was known are condemned to eternal criticism. The truth is that the left is never permitted the defence of pragmatism when it comes to working with unsavoury characters towards a particular political end. The right always is. This disparity is accepted more or less wholesale in Britain, for reasons that aren’t necessarily to do gullibility. I think that the British people implicitly recognise that the hypocrisy at the centre of our political life is absurd, it’s simply that they quite reasonably expect better from Labour. The next step is convincing them to expect nothing from the Conservatives. (My emphasis).
So the Telegraph and Heil are quite outraged at the thought that Corbyn might have supported negotiations with the Republican paramilitaries in Ulster, while quite unconcerned about Maggie’s real, material support of brutal organisation that murdered two million people.
This not only shows their hypocrisy, it also shows their willingness to support regimes responsible for death and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, if this support is organised by a Tory heroine of free markets and destroying the welfare state.
This morning I put up a piece about the report in Friday’s I newspaper that Margaret Thatcher had continued planning to dismantle the welfare state, including the NHS, even after her own cabinet had revolted against it. Thatcher was keen to follow the plans outlined by the CPRS, a right-wing think-tank, to whom she had given the task of formulating plans to transform Britain into a free market economy. Amongst their proposals was the abolition of free universal healthcare, meaning the NHS, and the introduction of compulsory school fees, quite apart from the destruction of the rest of the welfare state.
I said in the article that it would be good to know who the people responsible for the CPRS were, as they should take their share of the blame, rather than just the politicos who fronted the reforms. As it stands, unfortunately it seems to me that even when one politician espousing the views of one of these wretched groups goes down, the members of the think tank just slink away to another job advising someone else. Like the various right-wing groups that jumped from the Tories to New Labour under Blair.
Florence replied:
I would suggest Letwin is the thread running through the whole sorry tale. Elected to a safe seat in 1997, he finished his academic studies (PhD) in 1982, and almost immediately became part of the CPRS in 1982. That was coincidentally when the ideas initially proposed in 1978 became part of the assault on the individual budget holders began in earnest. He then moved on to working with the CPS think tank.
In fact Letwin was associated with some of the most controversial policies – such as using Scotland as a testing ground for the POl Tax, and other unpopular policies. He is associated with racist memos written for Thatcher. He was also the author with Redwood of the 1988 CPS pamphlet that is the blueprint for the 2012 Act, which had itself been under preparation since 2007 -8 (ish).
The CPS was founded in 1972 by the “Mad Monk” Keith Joseph, and Alfred Sherman and Thatcher, to champion “liberal thinking” (now called neo liberalism). “In her own words, its job was to ‘expose the follies and self-defeating consequences of government intervention….’to think the unthinkable’ ” (Margaret Thatcher The Path to Power (London 1995), p. 253). The proposals on the NHS certainly fulfilled that objective, and seem to have arisen from within this coterie and melting pot while the Tories were in opposition in the 1970s. Other notable members of the CPS who are still influential in the Tory party include John Redwood, Dave Willitts, and Michael Fallon. Letwin of course was the main back-room grandee for Cameron and Osborne. He has since left the Downing Street role but his policies continue to be implemented.
Friedman, Joseph and Sherman were the main right-wing influences on Thatcher, but through Friedman and the Chicago School there were links directly to Pinochet in Chile (the Chilean “Chicago Boys”) and into the economic ideologies of nations across the globe. In the Wiki entry for Chicago school for the UK it sparsely notes that Thatcher implemented the Chicago school neoliberal policies and these were left intact and some were completed by Blair including the entry of private medicine into the NHS.
Getting information in who the members of the CPRS and the CPS were during those years is surprisingly difficult.
From my own reading about the subject, Keith Joseph was certainly Thatcher’s mentor, and she was very definitely influenced by Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, who were also responsible for General Pinochet’s grotty economic policies. Friedman even went down to Chile to see how his ideas were being put into practice. As for Alfred Sherman, he’s another shadowy figure responsible for much of the neoliberal suffering around the world. I’ve got a feeling he’s the subject of a number of articles in the parapolitical magazine Lobster, as well as possibly being mentioned by Guy Debord’s Cat in his blog. The ‘Deep Politics’ angle – meaning covert manipulation by the secret state – probably explains why information on the CPRS is so difficult to obtain. They were a conspiratorial group within the heart of the establishment, and the establishment most definitely does not want their perfidy exposed.
The determination of this government to profit from the bloodshed in Yemen, despite the humanitarian concerns of both the British parliament and the international community is astonishing. Mike over at Vox Political has this report about the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, and other ministers attending a very expensive banquet on Tuesday night in support of ADS, one of the trade organisations for the merchants of death: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/03/ministers-wined-and-dined-by-arms-trade-hours-after-mps-demand-ban-on-selling-weapons-to-saudi-arabia/. In the past there have been a series of scandals as many Tory MPs have had personal links to arms manufacturers. I don’t doubt that’s the case here as well.
The rationale for the British government pushing arms sales is that this will open up those countries to further British trade. The hope is that the nations buying our arms and military equipment will go on and buy other British goods. And it’s completely wrong. That never happens. After buying British weapons, they only go on to buy more British weapons. On the other hand, it does lead to former defence secretaries and MOD senior civil servants getting lucrative jobs on the boards of the arms manufacturers.
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