Discussing the ongoing riots between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester, I have said that I believe that part of the problem comes from politicians’ and anti-racist groups’ exclusive focus on White racism. This, I believe, was shown a few years ago during a Labour party gathering when an Asian man asked Diane Abbott if Labour would do more to tackle racism amongst ethnic communities. Abbott refused, stating that Whites would use it to divide and rule. Searching through YouTube for this exchange, I regret that I’ve been unable to find it. But I did discover other occasions where she stated that Whites liked to divide and rule.
She seems to have first uttered it in 2012 during a twitter exchange with another Black woman about the sentencing of the accused in the Stephen Lawrence murder. The other lady objected to statements about the Black community, as if they were all a monolithic group. Abbott replied that she understood that, but that ‘Whites like to divide and rule’. She was challenged on that statement by various Tories in parliament, who called her racist and demanded that she should resign. Andrew Neil also tackled her about it, in the company of Michael Portillo and an Asian guest, on his programme. Abbott tried to excuse it by saying that she was really talking about 19th century colonialism, but she was unable to state this precisely because of the 140-word limit on Twitter. But as Neil pointed out, did she didn’t put it in the past tense. She used the present. And she continued to repeat it. She stated that Black people need to unite, because the races with the greatest cohesion succeed while Whites like to divide and rule. And two years ago, she repeated the same statement when calling for all of Britain’s ethnic minorities to unite against White racism.
Here’s a video from ‘Bin the Labour Party’ of Abbott making her racist statement. I definitely do not endorse the channel or its sentiments, but this video is very useful for what it shows about Abbott’s racial attitudes in this regard.
While I can see the logic behind her statement, I still believe very strongly that Abbott’s exclusive focus on White racism against Blacks, Asians and other ethnic minorities, and those of anti-racist activists like her, have brought Britain to the current climate of racial tension today. Nothing was done about the ideologies entering Britain’s ethnic communities, such as Islamism and the Hindutva fascism of Modi’s Indian BJP and others. It didn’t suit their purpose. And the result is that gangs of Muslims and Hindu youths – not the entire communities, as the mayor of Leicester also said on GB News – are tearing each other apart on Leicester’s streets.
As an aside, one of the interviewers on GB News – I think it may have been Mike Graham – in the interview with the Mayor of Leicester claimed that half the people arrested during the riots were foreigners. No, said the good mayor, ‘they came from Birmingham’. Graham thought that some of the trouble came from Gujeratis who had entered the country through Portugal and had Portuguese passports. One of the commenters on that exchange on YouTube knew some of the Asians Graham was talking about. They were Christian Goans, who spoke Portuguese. And as Christians, they weren’t going to join either side in the fighting.
I saw from a headline from the Heil posted this morning on the news section that greets you when you get online that three ostensibly Labour MPs are considering defecting to the Tories. Mike has put up a piece about it this morning, pointing out that no true Labour member or supporter would ever considering crossing the floor to the Tories, because their values are completely opposed to traditional Labour beliefs. Which isn’t to say it hasn’t happened before. Unfortunately it has. I also remember that in the 1980s the SDP was rocked by a series of defections to the Tories after they split from Labour. I don’t think the defectors were exactly met with open arms either. Well, perhaps they were, but there were also a few sneers. The Sunday Express lampooned them in its ‘No. 10’ cartoon, which showed two figures, presumably representing Dennis Thatcher and another Tory watching a clockwork soldier march to the end of a table before falling off. This was matched with some comment about SDP defectors. I only dimly remember it, and not because it was funny. I think it stuck in my mind simply because of its overt, unpleasant sneering.
Mike also points out that if these MPs do defect, it would show how bad the Tory entryism has been during successive leaderships since Tony Blair. Quite. There was a computer game at the time that gave you anagrams of various politicians’ names. I think Michael Portillo came out as ‘a cool, limp Hitler’. Anthony Blair produced ‘I am Tory B’. Or Something like it. And he was, despite all that guff about a ‘Third Way’. Well, the last world leaders to speak about their parties constituting a ‘third way’ between socialism and capitalism were the Nazis and Fascists. They are argued that their noxious regimes constituted such a new politics because they were capitalist, but made ‘social’ by being subjected to the state. Which comes to think of it, does sound a bit like Blair and his enthusiasm for the state partnering with private industry.
And Blair very definitely favoured Tories. His Government Of All the Talents included Tories like Chris Patten. When a Tory defected, Blair quickly had them parachuted into a safe Labour seat. The result of this has been a series of Labour MPs so right-wing that even Tories wonder what they were doing still in the Labour party. Years ago the arch-Tory Anglican blog, Cranmer, commented approvingly on Frank Field and invited him to cross the floor to the Tory ranks, assuring him of a warm welcome. This was the Frank Field who demanded conditions be made even more harsh for the unemployed in order to make them find work. Then there was the Labour bureaucrat, who ended up as a moderator on a Tory website. He astonished the Tories there with his invective against the Labour party which was actually far more vicious than theirs. But the Tories in Labour’s NEC don’t like you to mention it. When a Labour member has asked what these bozos are doing in the Labour party when they’re behaving like that, they’ve been expelled for ‘bringing the party into disrepute’ or some such nonsense. Some constituency parties were quite open about this entryism. There was one that was so horrified during Corbyn’s leadership by the sudden influx of real, socialist members, that the leader started pleading for Lib Dems and Tories to join.
Mike quotes the Mail, which said that the defections could greatly harm Stalin’s leadership. Well of course they would. As Mike says, it would show that he prefers Tories to real Labour people and suggest there were more closet Tories in the party. I don’t doubt that. I can see any defectors making exactly this comment, as well as encouraging those still hesitating to join them over on the Tory benches. Mike says that it might even make more of these quisling consider leaving, so that real socialist can be elected instead.
Of course, what could happen is that the defections could also give the message that Starmer is too left-wing and weak even for the parliamentary Labour party. This could push Starmer even further to the right. Or if ends up being the target of the kind of right-wing coups and defections that the right inflicted on Corbyn, he made have to swallow his Thatcherite pride and start trying to appeal to the left to bolster his leadership. But I don’t see that happening.
But what might happen is that Starmer goes down through infighting and plotting by his own side, which will further show just how unpleasant and treacherous they are.
This is another video from History Debunked’s Simon Webb. I’ve put up a number of his videos because they seem to contradict and refute some of the falsehoods deliberately being told about slavery and the maltreatment of Blacks in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. I’ve made it very clear that I despise Black Lives Matter, but I fully recognise the reasons behind their anger. As a community, Blacks do suffer from poor educational achievement, poverty, a lack of career opportunities, drug abuse and the violent criminality that goes with it. I know from talking to Black and Asian friends and relatives that there is real racial discrimination out there, including the threat of genuine Nazi violence. What I object to is some of the glib assertions and false history that has been added to genuine fact and the one-sided presentation of these problems. It’s simply an historical fact that slavery has existed in very many societies right across the world. It existed in Africa, and the Black slaves we acquired during the days of the transatlantic slave trade were purchased from powerful African slaving states like Dahomey, Whydah and a number of others. Black Africans were also enslaved by Muslim Arabs, Turks, as well as Indians and were exported from east Africa as far as modern Sumatra and Java. One historian of slavery has remarked that it has been so prevalent across the world, that what is remarkable is not that White Europeans practised it, but that White Europeans and Americans abolished it. But slavery is increasingly being presented as something that only White Europeans and their colonies did to Blacks.
In this video Webb talks about a form of slavery practised in Britain from the late 17th century to the end of the 18th century, which I doubt few people know about. It was the enslavement of White Scots people to work in their country’s mines and salt pans. The law, Anent Colliers and Salters, was passed in 1660 and was designed to stop shortages of labour in the coal mining and salt-making industries. The salt was produced through boiling seawater in vast pans. These were large parts of the Scots economy at the time, and the law was intended to stop workers in those industries going off and seeking gainful employment elsewhere. The law bound the miners and salters to their masters, who were given the power to beat them, whipping those who refused to work, as well as the right to sell them to other owners. They could not look for other jobs or even leave the area. In 1661 the law was extended so that the masters could forcibly conscript into their employment tramps and vagabonds. And there were harsh punishments for runaway miners. When one owner put up a mine for sale, as occasionally happened, the men were listed alongside equipment and livestock like the pit ponies. In 1701 Scotland passed what was dubbed ‘the Scots Habeas Corpus Act’, which prevented Scots from being imprisoned without cause. But it specifically excluded the workers in the above industries. In 1775 legislation was passed emancipating colliers and salters, but it applied only to new workers. It contained a ‘grandfather clause’, specifically excluding previous workers. It was only in 1799 that a law was passed freeing all miners and salt workers north of the border. He explicitly states at the end that the moral of all this was that slavery was not something that was done solely to Blacks. It was also done to Whites and continued until a few decades before the emancipation of all slaves.
As with all of his videos, I think you have to be aware of his personal bias. He seems to be a Telegraph-reading Tory, and some of what he says is incorrect. He has said that Britain never advertised for Caribbean workers, but this has been contradicted by several of the great commenters here, who remember just such appeals. In my understanding, he is wrong in what he says about the Mansfield judgement banning slavery in Britain. The judgement was issued by Lord Mansfield on a case brought before him by the Abolitionists on behalf of a slave, James Somerset. Somerset had been sold to another master, who wanted to take him abroad, which Somerset didn’t want to do. It’s like the later Dredd Scott in America. Webb claims that the judgement did not rule against slavery, only that slaves couldn’t be taken out of the country, because Mansfield had no power to pass judgement outlawing existing forms of British slavery such as that of the miners and salters.
This is wrong. In every book I read it is stated that Lord Mansfield ruled that slavery did not exist under English law. This is correct. Slavery had died out in England by the end of the 12th century as the Normans banned it. The former slaves instead became villeins, serfs. The mass of English peasants were unfree. By law they could not leave the manors on which they were settled, their property was technically that of their lords, and they had to pay a fine compensating the lord for his loss when their daughters married. In addition to working on their own plots of land, they were also required to do labour service on their lords’ demesnes. Their property reverted to their masters on their deaths, so that their widows and children had to appeal to the lord to get it back. Meanwhile, the parish priest had the rest to take the deceased peasant’s best beast, meaning his best cow, ox or bull. It’s not as severe as chattel slavery, and serfs have certain rights, which slaves don’t. But sometimes, especially in the Russia as the tsars, the distinction between serfdom and chattel slaves is a fine one. Serfdom was abolished in France during the French Revolution. Other states, like Denmark and the German states, abolished it in the decades following and during the 19th century, as did Russia under tsar Alexander II.
In school we’re taught, or given the impression, that serfdom died out because of an acute labour shortage following the death of between a third and half of the European population during the Black Death in the 14th century. In fact what happened is that the Black Death commenced a long period in which serfdom began withering away as landlords began to compete amongst each other to persuade peasants to settle on their estates and commute labour services into money rents. But the process was a long one. The last serf died in 1645, I believe. In one of her programmes in which she visits various historic towns, Dr Alice Roberts, a former female star of Time Team, medical doctor, anthropologist and Professor for the Public Engagement with Science at Birmingham university visited one of the great cities of Norfolk. She learned there about a battle in the 16th century when the local peasants revolted against attempts to turn them back into bondsmen – serfs.
Furthermore, even if slavery was formally abolished in England and serfdom had withered away, it was still customary to purchase certain types of human being. Time Team’s Tony Robinson, also known as Blackadder’s Baldrick, described the appalling conditions suffered by 18th and 19th century mill workers in his series, The Worst Jobs in History. He trembled with raw, justified outrage when he told how millowners would to workhouses and orphanages to buy the children left there to use as their workers. Wives were also seen as the property of their husbands, and the traditional form of divorce amongst British peasant and working class communities was to take them to market to sell. It happened up and down the country, including Bristol, where you could get a reproduction of an advertisement for such a sale down at the Central Library. The transportation of certain criminals also acted as a form of slavery. The Monmouth rebels in the West Country, who supported the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth against James II, if they escaped hanging by Judge Jefferies were transported to Barbados, where they were sold to the planters for sacks of sugar. Irish rebels were also treated the same way. A friend of mine at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum, who was a staunch anti-slavery activist with a mixed-race African wife, told me how you could still see the former cabins occupied by the White Irish amongst those of the Black plantation labourers in Barbados and the Caribbean. The Irish cabins were patriotically decorated with shamrocks.
I think the Mansfield judgement only applied to English law. Scots law is different, because until the Act of Union in the early 18th century England and Scotland were different countries with separate parliaments and different legal systems. Since the 12th century, English law includes custom and precedent. A judgement passed on one case acts as the model for others in similar cases. Scots law is based on Roman law. As I understand, a judgement passed in one case is not automatically binding for similar cases. It can be used as the basis for a similar decision, but the judge is also free to disregard it and make his own judgement. Lord Mansfield’s judgement probably only affected English, and not Scots law. Nevertheless, it was highly influential in that during the 1820s and ’30s before the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, Black slaves in the Caribbean used it as the basis for their own efforts to gain their freedom. There were a series of slaves, like Grace James of Antigua, who had been brought to Britain, or English overseas territories like Gibraltar, by their masters. On their return home, they presented themselves to the Guardian and Protector of Slaves, the official charged with protecting the slaves from brutality and maltreatment, as free people of colour illegally held in slavery. Their owners naturally objected, claiming they were being robbed of their property. The colonial authorities appealed to the home government for guidance, and the diplomatic correspondence, as printed in the government’s blue books, included copies of the Mansfield judgement.
I also believe that the conditions for miners in the north of England was similar to those in Scotland. I think it may have been on Bargain Hunt, one of the Beeb’s early evening antique shows, or perhaps Great Railway Journeys with Michael Portillo, that they were in County Durham. The presenter was shown around the miner’s hall, the grand headquarters of the local trade union. He was told about the horrendous, oppressive conditions contained in the contract that traditionally had to be signed by every miner binding him to his master. These were only successfully fought and finally overturned thanks to union opposition in the 19th century. Which is another demonstration why we need strong, effective unions.
There was considerable sympathy for enslaved Blacks amongst working people, and particularly in Scotland. It’s been claimed that one reason for this was because of the enslavement of White, Scottish mineworkers. Thus the authorities and slave masters complained that there was too much sympathy for runaways among ordinary Scots, who were hiding and protesting them.
I think that possibly too little is known about serfdom and the traditional enslavement of Whites in Britain and Europe. Some of this might simply be due to the fact that most history is ‘history from above’, the actions of monarchs and great statesmen and politicians, rather than social history, or ‘history from below’. Another factor may well be the myth most Brits have grown up with – that Britain is the country from which freedom and good government flows. What isn’t appreciated is that every one of the freedoms we enjoy, and which are being stripped from us by the Tories, were hard won through the blood, sweat, toil and tears of ordinary folk and their champions.
It has led to a distorted view of history, the myth of ‘merrie England’ in which everything was somehow better in the old days, when lords ruled and the hoi polloi knew their place. It’s a view that the right do want to bring back. But a lack of understanding of traditional forms of British forced labour, that applied to Whites, has also contributed to the equally distorted view that slavery and forced labour is very much something that Whites inflicted on Blacks or other people of colour.
The Goblin Universe was a short-lived, small press version of the Fortean Times that briefly appeared in the 1990s. That decade was a brief golden age of the small magazine, when thanks to desktop publishing software if became cheap and easy for ordinary people to publish their own magazines on whatever interested them. Quite a number were produced by amateur writers’ groups, as well as sexual minorities like gays and transpeople. They had their own little magazine, Aeon – The Magazine of Transkind. And there were all manner of mags devoted to the occult, the strange and the weird. The Goblin Universe was one of these latter magazines, produced by Jon Downes and some of the same people responsible for the cryptozoological magazine, Animals and Men.
I found this brief piece below about the release of germs around the Dorset area, as well as London and the Southeast, by aircraft and ships as part of Porton Down bacteriological warfare research in issue five of the magazine. Part of it runs
“Germ Warfare Experiments in the West Country
With friends like these…
Parts of London and the South East were used as test sites for germ warfare between 1964 and 1977, according to an admission by British defence secretary Michael Portillo. He stated, though, that there was no risk to public health. On 3 Feb 97 the Dorset Evening Echo carried a follow-up
“An urgent inquiry is being demanded into revelations that tens of thousands of people in south and west Dorset were exposed to germs during secret biological warfare tests. The government admitted that scientists released radioactive, chemical and biological agents into the air in a series of secret trials over 14 years…”
The report continues, “Microbiologists claim that some of the materials released are capable of causing a wide range of illnesses, including septicaemia and pneumonia…”
And we thought the Russians were the enemy at that time…
No-one actually seems to know what was released over the area, but if the materials were so harmless then why the continuing veil of secrecy about what was done and why? A later report, dated 28 Feb, covers ‘unexplained ailments’, cancer clusters and deformities suffered by various people, and says
“A ship sprayed clouds of cells and spores which mobile sampling stations … then attempted to collect and monitor.”‘
The rest of the article is a piece from Mark North, their cartoonist, speculating whether the fuel tank his father remembered falling off an RAF onto a smallholder’s field near the main Dorchester road may have been part of these experiments due to the speed with which the police and the MOD reacted. They were soon there to recover the tank, which they claimed were full of measuring instruments. The magazine also said that it was investigating rumours that similar experiments were being carried out in the Willand/Halberton area of East Devon, although the MOD was being suspiciously silent about the whole affair.
That said, I think it’s clear that it was the Russians who were behind the Skripal poisoning, despite my early doubts that this was so. However, it clear that there are still very good reasons not to trust the government when it comes to secret experiments like these.
As I’m sure everyone following this blog knows, the Tories won Thursday’s election. I had a horrible feeling they would, because despite Labour’s excellent manifesto and the polls showing that support for the Labour party had risen so that they were close behind them, the Tories are masters of deception. They’ve had the mass media, almost without exception, lying to the electorate for the last ten years. And I was afraid people would believe Johnson’s lies when he said he was going to build 40 new hospitals, recruit more coppers and nurses. All demonstrable lies, but people believe them. Just as they believed the lies put out by Thatcher and Major when their reforms were causing mass unemployment, poverty and misery, and ruining the Health Service. But I was unprepared for the extent of the Tory victory. They now have a majority of 78 seats.
Like very many people, I felt extremely bitter and angry, and spent yesterday trying not to think about politics, though it was inevitable. And now I’m ready to start analysing and making sense of this mess.
Martin Odoni has already written a very good piece about it, which is well worth reading. He argues that the result had zip to do with the public rejecting Labour’s manifesto, and everything to do with Brexit. He writes
It is absolutely self-evident, and was even so as the results were unfolding, that the biggest factor in the outcome by a country mile was Brexit. At almost every turn where Labour’s support had slumped, a similar number of votes had been claimed by the Brexit Party, by the Tories, or by a combination of the two – the two parties that are most rigorously pursuing British departure from the European Union. Most of Labour’s lost support was in traditional working class territory in the north of England, the north of Wales, and the Midlands, and most particularly in areas where there was a high Leave vote in the 2016 Referendum.
Now, I have no doubt Corbyn was a factor in some voters’ rejection of Labour – no politician will be everybody’s cup of tea. And given how brutally and relentlessly he has been smeared by the media, including many supposedly ‘left-leaning’ periodicals, there can be no doubt that the wider public’s view of Corbyn has been unfairly coloured. But the general results do not offer any specific evidence of a rejection of Labour’s policy platform as a whole. The shift was very definitely Leavers, with their maddening tunnel-visioned obsession with Brexit, moving to parties boasting their determination to ‘Get Brexit done’.
Either way, a personal objection to Corbyn does not constitute an objection to his policies. When discussing the Labour Manifesto, people were usually very enthused – Labour’s polling numbers did improve substantially rather than deteriorate after it was launched – just as they had been in 2017. On that occasion, Labour scored forty per cent of the vote, and it seems unlikely that huge numbers have suddenly reversed that position.
Absolutely. When Labour were mooting their new policies – of renationalising the NHS, and taking water, electricity and the railways back into public ownership – the polls showed that the public largely supported them. Which is why the Tories and the mass media had to fall back to smearing Corbyn personally with the false accusations of anti-Semitism and that he was some kind of Communist, IRA-supporting threat. Also, analysis of the grassroots membership of UKIP also showed that they’re largely in favour of nationalising the public utilities. What they don’t like is the EU, immigration and the new morality – the acceptance of the LGBTQ community. UKIP always was much smaller than the impression given by the media, and collapsed when it spectacularly failed to win any seats at the last election. The reasonable, or at least, less bonkers section of its membership went over to Fuhrage’s Brexit party, which has now also collapsed.
I conclude from this that it’s not Labour’s manifesto that’s the problem, despite Piers Morgan and the rest of the media and Tory establishment, including the Labour right, all claiming that it’s ‘far left’. It isn’t, and never was. It’s properly centrist in the true Labour tradition of a mixed economy.
I also think it would be difficult for the Labour to win under the circumstances. The anti-Semitism smears began when the Jewish Ed Miliband was elected leader. He was far more moderate than Corbyn, but dared to utter a mild criticism of Israel and so was subjected to a storm of smears. And Maureen Lipman flounced out of the party for the first time. Corbyn was then subjected to further smears and abuse for his support of the Palestinians – which does not equal anti-Semitism nor even a hatred of Israel, except in the minds of the ultra-Zionist fanatics. This was pushed by the media and the Conservative Jewish establishment, as well as the Labour right. They also misrepresented his work helping to negotiate peace in Northern Ireland as support for terrorism and the IRA. Oh yes, and he’s also supposed to be a supporter of Islamist terrorism. There’s also a nasty touch of racism in some of the other reasons I’ve heard for people not giving him their support. I’ve been told that Labour are in favour of open borders, and would flood the country with immigrants. Diane Abbott is also bitterly hated, and among the sneers I’ve heard thrown at the Labour leader is the accusation that he had an affair with her. Well, he might have, but that’s his own business and doesn’t affect his policies or how he intends to govern. Abbott is perceived by many as anti-White. I remember the quotation the Scum attributed to her in the 1987 general election ‘All White people are racist’. I don’t know if she really said it, but I doubt she believes it now. She’s friends with Michael Portillo, so I don’t think she regards him as racist. But her continuing anti-racism means that she is perceived by some as anti-White. And this also extends to Corbyn through their close professional relationship. And then there are the antics of the Labour right and their determination to bring Corbyn down through splits, rumours of splits, right-wing female Labour MPs trying to claim that he’s a misogynist and the endless lying and partisanship of the media.
It reminded me very much of the elections in the 1980s and the abuse and smears hurled at the Labour leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. Labour lost those elections, and Lobster has published a number of articles explaining how, under the circumstances, it would have been difficult for Labour to win.
But I don’t believe that we should give up hope just yet.
Labour’s manifesto was popular. People do want a return to the old social democratic consensus of a welfare state, mixed economy, and nationalised NHS. Prviatisation hasn’t worked, services are still crumbling and Boris will soon show how empty his promises about building hospitals and putting more money into the Health Service are. It’s just that, for the people who voted Tory in the north and midlands, Brexit took precedence.
And I feel that Corbyn has also given people hope. Before Corbyn’s election, I was extremely pessimistic about the survival of the NHS because all of the parties were participating in its privatisation. But Corbyn showed that its privatisation was not inevitable, at least at the hands of Labour. Which is no doubt partly the reason why the Labour Thatcherites are now queuing up to blame him for the election defeat. I do feel very strongly that Corbyn has set a very firm basis for a future Labour party to build on and grow from here, provided it finds a suitable successor.
I do not want another Blair.
Also, my guess is that this defeat will also make the true Labour supporters more determined. Always remember: an animal is most dangerous when it is cornered. I’ve heard tweets from people calling for new, more aggressive forms of resistance like the occupation of Jobcentres. And these will come. People will think up new ways of getting Labour’s message across.
And Boris hasn’t and won’t solve this country’s problems. Sooner or later some people, at least, will have to realise what I sham and a fraud the Tories are.
Ho Ho! More criticism of the Beeb’s late night politics show, This Week, hosted by Andrew ‘Brillo Pad’ Neil, former editor of the Economist and the Sunset Times. Neil has already found his career cut short as BBC bosses consider axing one of his politics shows after Owen Jones raised the issue of the increasingly extreme Right-wing slant of his magazine, the Spectator. This was during a debate on one of his shows about the role the media plays in boosting the rise of the Fascist Right. Neil is chairman of the board of the company that publishes the arch-Tory Spectator, one of whose contributors is the noxious Greek playboy, Taki Theodoracopulos, otherwise known to readers of Private Eye as ‘Taki Takealotofcokeupthenos’ because of his conviction for cocaine possession some time ago. Taki’s columns are often racist, with a real streak of anti-Semitism. And in once recent issue of the Speccie, he praised the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn as just patriotic young people, who are bit rough about the edges. Which is a lie. The Golden Dawn are outright Nazi thugs, who beat up illegal immigrants. One of their leading members was arrested for murdering a left-wing activist. An clearly agitated Neil told Jones that he wasn’t responsible for the magazine’s content, but Jones carried on and pointed out that he was responsible for the appointment of the editor, Fraser Nelson. Neil tried changing the subject and talking over him, but Jones carried on, even when an exasperated Neil asked him if he was trying to get him sacked. The announcement that the Beeb was cancelling one of his shows came a week or so later, and may not be unconnected, despite the Beeb’s statement about it coming with professions of effusive pride in Brillo and his journalistic performance.
Brillo’s professionalism as a journalist, and that of his co-presenters, was cast into severe doubt a few days ago by the Dutch author, Rutger Bregman. Bregman’s best known for a viral video telling the super-rich at Davos to pay their taxes. Bregman’s written a book on how Utopia may be attainable, Utopia for Realists, and was invited on to Brillo’s show to discuss it with Michael Portillo and Alan Johnson, who were presumably the three dinosaurs Bregman described in a devastating Twitter account of his experience on the show. Bregman was colossally unimpressed by Neil and co’s complete lack of interest in his book. He stated they hadn’t read it, and didn’t even have a copy. Before they went on air, he was asked if he could say something about the EU. He refused on the grounds that it wasn’t his area of expertise. So he was asked to say something about the terrorist outrage in Utrecht. He refused to comment on that either, for the same reason. So the produce returned to asking him to comment on Brexit again, and got the same reply as before. He was then asked to make a two-minute video summarising his ideas. This, badly edited, was then played on the programme. He then found the three right-wing dinosaurs, two of whom were from the Stone Age, ganging up on him. They blatantly made up facts, telling him that inequality hadn’t grown and that the economy had never been better, changed the subject every ten seconds and hardly let you finish a sentence before it’s over. Bregman said
This was the worst experience I’ve had with UK media, but after quite a few interviews in different countries, I think I can say that, on average, British journalists are the least curious of all. So often, being ‘critical’ is just a pose.
He contrasted this with an interview he gave to Trevor Noah in the US. He also said that the good news was that there were new media in the UK filling the gap. The sharpest questions he had that week came from Aaron Bastani of Novara Media.
This criticism clearly stung Brillo, who tweeted back about how discriminatory towards old people it was to call them dinosaurs, and compared it with talking about Black or gay people in the same context. He was just asking legitimate questions, and as for being a dinosaur, he accused Bregman of reviving policies from Eisenhower in the 1950s and Milton Friedman in the 1960s.
Zelo Street pointed out that ‘dinosaur’ referred to a state of mind, and that his disparagement of Milton Friedman seemed also dismissive of his former idol, Maggie Thatcher, who was also a fan of Friedman at one point. As for policies from the 1950s, this was America under Eisenhower, which suggested that Ike was a Keynsian or an secret economist.
Brillo then roped in a few others to support him, but Zelo Street remained unimpressed, concluding:
Kicking off like that and justifying his behaviour by Retweeting sympathetic voices from the right – David Jack and Iain Martin, for instance – is not going to help either the BBC, or those wanting the Corporation to somehow accommodate Brillo, rather than just bin his late night show. And it won’t help The Great Man himself.
The age of Andrew Neil at the BBC was for a time, but not for all time.
Mike in his article concluded with the observation that Ofcom might find it informative to watch the show. He said
This Writer sincerely hopes that Ofcom, which is currently investigating whether the BBC is honouring its obligation to be impartial in its news reporting, has been paying attention. If not, I would encourage Mr Bregman to get in touch with that organisation.
I’m not surprised that Brillo and his fellow presenters or guests and the production team behaved like that. Media monitoring organisations have said for years that the Beeb has a pronounced pro-Tory bias, which has become increasingly explicit. Question Time has become particularly notorious for Fiona Bruce’s biased treatment of Diane Abbott, by the fact that the audience for the show have been repeatedly packed by Tories and Kippers. From Bregman’s account of his experience, it seems very clear that neither Brillo nor any of the others were remotely interested in the book, only in talking about Brexit, the EU or terrorism, issues which they felt they knew about. And they clearly didn’t know anything and didn’t want to know anything about Bregman’s ideas. Shows like This Week often book more guests than they can use in case someone drops out. John Spencer, a UFO researcher, described a similar experience he had back in the 1990s in one of his books. Looking at Bregman’s description, it’s possible that the person Brillo really wanted on his show was unavailable, so they brought on Bregman instead. Or it may be that they felt they needed to tackle his book, but idleness and right-wing complacency made them utterly uninterested in reading it and seriously discussing his ideas.
Either way, not only does This Week seem biased, it also looks extremely shallow in expecting him to present his ideas in two minutes, and actually dishonest in making up facts to assert against him. If you believe the Beeb, Neil is a master broadcaster with a keen grasp of the facts and able to get to grips at the real heart of the issues he is discussing. This would suggest otherwise.
Last week was not a good one for Andrew Neil, the presenter of the Beeb’s politics shows ‘This Week’ and ‘The Daily Politics’. It was reported on ITV News on Friday that his show, ‘This Week’, was being axed. The article about it in this weekend’s I for 16-17th February 2019, by Keiran Southern on page 16, entitled, ”This Week’ ends as Neil quits his late-night show’ read
The BBC’s long-running politics show This Week is to end after presenter Andrew Neil announced he was stepping down.
The BBC1 show, which airs on Thursdays after Question Time, will be taken off air this summer when its current series ends, the corporation said.
Neil has fronted the show since it began in 2003 and regular guests include the former Tory MP, Michael Portillo, and Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott.
Fran Unsworth, BBC’s director of news, said: “We couldn’t imagine This Week without the inimitable Andrew Neil, one of Britain’s best political interviewers. After 16 years, Andrew is bowing out of late-night presenting on the show, at the top of his game.”
Neil will continue to present Politics Live on Thursdays, Ms Unsworth added, and the BBC wants to keep the 69-7ear-old “at the heart” of its political coverage.
This Week is known for its informal look at politics, while Ms Abbott and Mr Portillo formed an unlikely TV double act, despite being on opposite sides of the political divide.
The announcement comes amid uncertainty surrounding the BBC’s news output – it is under pressure to cut £80m from its budgets and to attract younger audiences.
Earlier this week, BBC journalists wrote to the broadcaster’s director-general to oppose the decision to shorten its News At Ten programme after it emerged it would be cut by 10 minutes to make way for youth programming and Question Time.
Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen and other foreign correspondents have asked Lord Tony Hall to reconsider.
Last year, Sunday Politics, hosted by Sarah Smith, was axed and replaced by Politics Live, which airs Monday to Friday.
Other people, who are sick to death of the Beeb’s right-wing Tory bias, including Andrew Neil, are actually quite delighted and amused. The good fellow at Crewe, who does the Zelo Street blog, posted a piece on it on Friday, whose title said it all ‘Andrew Neil Nearly Out the Door’. He noted that despite Hall defending Neil over his ‘crazy cat woman’ remark to the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, the cancellation of one of Neil’s vehicles shows that the comment and the outrage it sparked has had an effect.
The deputy political editor of the Heil on Sunday, Harry Cole, was furious, tweeting
“A bloody outrage. Will only give succour to Corbynistas and sad sacks like Jukes and Carole who are modern equivalent of green ink dickheads who pester management. Since when did boss class start listening to loons before the viewers? Bring back #ThisWeek and make @afneil DG”. Which brought forth the reply from Peter Jukes
Harry Cole defending Andrew Neil, and desperately trying not to look like a member of the boss class.
Rather more damaging to Brillo and his supposed impartiality was another photo Carold Cadwalladr unearthed, showing Neil in the company of the former Ulster Unionist MP, David Burnside, who was formerly the PR man to Cambridge Analytica shareholder, Tchenguiz, who was in his turn the publicity man for Dmitryo Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch wanted by the FBI. And Nigel Farage, now desperately trying to claw his way back into British politics with his wretched Brexit Party.
Zelo Street also noted that this was in addition to the discomfort Neil was bringing the Beeb with his continued association with the Spectator, now increasingly Alt Right, which specializes in climate change denial, pro-Brexit propaganda, and vicious islamophobia from pundits like Douglas Murray. As well as the snobbery and elitism of James Delingpole and anti-Semitism and Fascist propaganda from their other long-running contributor, Taki. Who a few weeks ago embarrassed the magazine by praising the Greek neo-Nazi group, Golden Dawn, as just ‘patriotic Greeks’, who were just a bit rough around the edges. Like when one of them murdered left-wing journalist, perhaps, or when the attack and demolish market stalls belonging to illegal immigrants and attack and beat asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East.
The Zelo Street article concluded
In any case, Andrew Neil should be grateful that he’s been allowed more or less free rein to reinvent himself as a broadcast journalist after falling out with Rupert Murdoch. Now he’s got more dosh than he knows what to do with, it’s time to yield to youth.
He’s at the top of his game? Good. Then he may be remembered well. Time to go.
Unsworth’s cancellation of his show, rather than handing it over to someone else to present, also says something about the show’s audience. It’s viewers are clearly people, who want it to be helmed by an older White man, whose backgrounds is very much in establishment, centre-right journalism: Neil was editor of the Sunday Times and The Economist. And Zelo Street has quoted other journos at the Spectator that he is another Thatcher cultist, who wishes Maggie was still around running the country. Presumably it’s the same kind of audience that avidly supports John Humphries on Radio 4’s Today programme, another massively overpaid, right-wing White man of mature years. Which would indicate that the audience for these two is also largely made up of right-wing, very establishment White men who are middle-aged to elderly.
It seems to me that Neil’s show needn’t be axed, but could easily be handed over to someone else, someone younger, who was rather more impartial, or at least less publicly biased. It struck me that the team on the Beeb’s breakfast news could probably do it, Charlie Stayt, Naga Manchetti and Louis Minchin. And the rise of the new left-wing media on the internet has show what very incisive minds there are well outside of the establishment media. Like Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar, and The Canary’s Kerry-Ann Mendoza and Steve Topple. They’re all young, Sarkar and Mendoza are both BAME, while Topple definitely had a countercultural appearance with his Mohican coiffure. But they’re all very shrewd reports, who keenly analysed and dissected the news. And their example shows that out there is a vast pool of talent, which is currently being ignored by the current media political establishment.
Of course the Beeb’s refusal to appoint someone else to present the show may also be partly based from their experience of what happened to Newsnight after Paxo left: its audience collapsed. But rather than cut back on current news reportage and analysis altogether, the Beeb could actually launch a replacement instead, presented by younger people and aimed at younger people. You know, all the millennials and younger, who are trying to make their voices heard in a political climate dominated by the old and middle-aged. The people a genuinely functioning democracy needs to get involved and interested in political debate.
But I’m sure this would be a step too far for the Beeb. You’d have the establishment media whining that the Corporation was dumbing down, that it was ‘Yoof TV’ after the various tasteless disasters in youth programming spawned in the 1990s by Janet Street-Porter and others of her ilk. As well as the more serious fact that the establishment is absolutely terrified of millennials and what the Victorians used to refer to as ‘the rising generation’ because they’re generally more left-wing than their elders in the political establishment. You know, all those pesky kids in America and Britain, who are backing Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn against the corporatists in the Democrat Party, Trump and the Republicans, and Tweezer, the Tories and the Blairites over here. Young people, who want socialism rather than the tired, destructive Neoliberalism of the past forty years.
But the political, media and industrial establishment is absolutely petrified of them and their views. They don’t want them to be heard. And so they’d rather axe one of Neil’s shows than hand it over to them. Which shows how paralyzed the Beeb is in trying to hang on to its aging, establishment audience at the expense of trying to bring on board young, and potentially radical talent.
This is a turn up for the books. Richard Madeley is probably the last person I would have considered an aggressive, uncompromising interviewer, trying to hold the government and the authorities to account. But on ITV’s Good Morning on May 29th, 2018, Madeley showed he was not prepared to put up with Gavin Williamson’s repeated failure to answer his questions about the Skripal poisoning. And so, rather than let him continue, Madeley ended the interview, wishing him good luck with his project for Africa.
Mike put up a piece about this yesterday, remarking that not only had Williamson not answered the question, he was carrying on with a smug smirk on his face. Mike wrote of Williamson’s refusal to answer the question
He was deliberately withholding, not only his opinion on his ill-chosen words about the Russian government, but information on whether the Conservative government acted prematurely in blaming Russia for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
The Tory narrative that the Russian government was responsible has collapsed beneath a barrage of factual information suggesting otherwise, with no facts to support it.
If Mr Williamson had admitted his words were ill-advised, he would have been accepting that the anti-Russia stance was a mistake – and opening the UK government to an investigation into its own activities. So he was between a rock and a hard place.
And he thought he could brazen it out on TV because mainstream media interviewers are now notoriously soft on Tories.
Mike noted that this deference to the Tories had changed with Madeley’s actions, but was unsure whether it would spread to the Beeb because so many of the Corporation’s top news team are Conservatives. However, the public are also turning away from soft interviewers like Andrew Marr and Evan Davis, and this may force the BBC to adopt a tougher stance when interviewing Tory politicians.
Mike’s article also compares it to the incident, 21 years ago, when Paxman ended an interview with Michael Portillo because the future presenter of programmes about train journeys around the globe refused to answer a question on his party’s policy towards the single European currency. The incident happened in a good-humoured way, and Paxo was probably able to do it, according to Mike, because Portillo was out of Parliament at the time, and his political influence was due to be confined for the foreseeable future to being one of the commenters on Andrew Neil’s The Week.
RT, as well as a number of other news sites on YouTube, also reported the incident. Here’s RT’s video of it.
Way back in the 1990s Jeremy Paxman was called a ‘Rottweiler’ for his persistent, aggressive questioning of politicians on his show, and his refusal to take any nonsense from them. Which was shown in his repeated questioning of Michael Howard whether he overruled another Tory minister. His ‘take no prisoners’ style of questioning enraged the Tories, and Michael Heseltine actually walked out during one interview, ‘angrily tossing his mane’ in the words of Ian Hislop later that week on Have I Got News For You.
The Tories responded as they usually do by claiming that Paxman and the BBC were biased against them. There was an article in the Spectator comparing Paxman to a similar TV interviewer in the Republic of Ireland, who went in hard with establishment politicians, but didn’t dare adopt the same stance with Sinn Fein or spokesmen for the IRA. And so eventually Paxo left Newsnight, and went instead to harass university students on University Challenge.
Then when Labour got it a few years later, the Tories showed once again how two-faced they are by lamenting how sad it was that Paxo had departed from political journalism, because now the country needed him to interrogate Blair and co with his aggressive refusal to allow his guest to get away with talking nonsense.
And so began the situation that prevails today, when members of the government turn up on television with the attitude that they can more or less say what they want, without being corrected or pressed by the interviewer. Some of us can still remember how Nicky Morgan repeatedly refused to answer one of the Beeb’s interviewer’s questions when she was minister for education. This was when Tweezer decided that every school should be an academy. The interviewer asked her a question about the number of academies, that had to be taken over again by the state, and all Thicky Nicky did was to repeat a line about how terrible it would be if children continued to be badly educated through attending failing state schools. In fact, the number of failing academies was high – about 21 or so, I seem to recall. Thicky Nicky clearly couldn’t admit that, and so she carried on repeating government propaganda. Just as the interview ended, the journo said, ‘You know the number’. He was clearly annoyed and frustrated at Morgan’s failure to answer the question, and made it very clear.
It would solve a lot of problems if interviewers did adopt a more uncompromising stance, and did throw politicians off the programme if they didn’t answer their questions. Reith was an authoritarian, who supported Mussolini, but he was right when he said that broadcasting to the nation was a privilege, not a right. This is a democracy, and the role of the press and the media – the Fourth Estate, as they’ve been called – has traditionally been to hold the government to account. Of course, this collapsed at least a decade ago, when the media became dominated by a very few big proprietors, who made sure that their papers represented their interests and those of the Conservative government, including Blair’s Thatcherite New Labour.
It’s good now that some TV interviewers are tired of giving the government such soft treatment. And as I said, it’s remarkable that this should come from Richard Madeley, who would be the last person I would have thought would do it. But obviously he decided he’d had enough, and something snapped. All hail Madeley, news Rottweiler. And I hope this attitude carries on and spread, so that we get something like the media we deserve in this country, rather than the one that’s foisted on us by the Beeb, Murdoch, Dacre and the Barclay Twins.
Mike today put up a piece blowing away another lie that the Tories and their servants in the media have hawking: that the Left is full of misogynists, who harass and abuse women MPs. In fact Amnesty International have published a report showing that the opposite is true: most abuse comes from the right. And the female politico, who most often suffers it is Diane Abbott.
Who in the Left is honestly surprised by this? There are Conservative varieties of feminism, as you’d expect, but feminism, or women’s lib as it was known in the 1970s, is most often associated with the Left. And as the Austrian democratic socialist Marxist, Karl Kautsky argued, socialism is all about equality. This is why they champion the working class, and why left-wing governments, particularly Communist, have encouraged women to enter politics and the workplace, even if their countries’ traditional culture is very sexist, as it is in Russia and some of the countries of the former eastern bloc.
Conservatives, on the other hand, stress the importance of tradition, and despite having given Britain two female prime ministers, Maggie Thatcher and now Theresa May, this usually also means stressing and promoting traditional gender roles. Thus, while the right-wing broadsheets may earnestly discuss the issue of getting more women into the boardroom, and equal pay, the Daily Heil has been telling its female readers that stable families, and indeed western civilization as a whole, needs women to concentrate on staying at home to raise children, rather than both pursuing independent careers. The image the right projects of feminism is of angry misandrists, which has been a factor in why so many young women a few years ago rejected the term ‘feminism’, even when they had strong feelings about winning equality and rejecting sexism.
There’s also more than a little racism on the Tories’ side as well. The Tory right has always had links to Fascist right, including inviting members of central American death squads over to their annual dinners. A few days ago I put up a piece about Owen Jones’ video on YouTube, in which he commented on an odious conversation by the Tory youth movement, Activate, about gassing chavs and shooting peasants. This wasn’t the first time they had made Nazi comments and bullied the poor and underprivileged by a very long chalk. Jones discussed some prize examples of their foul behavior. This included the members of Oxford University Conservative society goose-stepping around like the real Nazis, singing songs about ‘Dashing through the Reich … killing lots of ****’, the last a very unpleasant terms for Jews. Their comrades north of the border ain’t no better either. This crew thought it would be jolly fun for one of them to dress up as a slave master, while another cringed before him as a slave. It wasn’t that long ago that the Tories in Scotland were known as the Unionist party, and their antics and Thatcher’s complete dismissal of the country was a large factor in the decision of so many Scots to vote for the SNP.
As for the Tory press, they’ve been consistently against coloured immigration since Windrush. And long before then, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they were busy campaigning against allowing ‘aliens’ – that is, eastern European Jews, to enter this country as asylum seekers fleeing the pogroms in eastern Europe. This anti-immigration stance has frequently been blatantly racist. Private Eye, when covering the prosecution of the Scum yet again for racism by the Press Complaints Commission, as it then was, noted that the wretched paper had had 19 judgements against it previously for its racist content. I can remember how the Torygraph, Mail and Express back in the 1980s railed against ‘unassimilable’ immigrants and the way they were forming little ghettoes.
Racism became a major issue in that decade following the 1981/2 riots, and the publication of government reports that revealed a massive culture of institutional racism and Black deprivation in Britain. To the Tory press, however, the riots were all the fault of racist Blacks. While there have been Black and Asian politicians before, Diane Abbott was one of the group of very visible Black politicians and activists to achieve public office during the decade, along with Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant, the leader of Brent Council. They were all very vocal in their opposition to racism. Grant died the other year, and I think Boateng more or less vanished into the depths of Whitehall. There are a number of other Black politicos, like David Lammy, Chuka Umunna and Oona King, but Abbott is one of the longest-serving and most reviled. The Scum tried running a Communism scare against the Labour party in the 1987 election, by putting up a two-page spread with the photographs of Labour MPs and candidates, below which was a few brief quotes or comments showing how they were a threat to British society. Red Ken is supposed to have said that he wasn’t in favour of the British army, but wanted the workers to be armed so they could guard the factories. Under Abbott’s was a quote, ‘All Whites are racist.’
That was very much the image she had at the time. She’s supposed to be very keen on tackling racism, because she felt that her mother’s career was blocked because of her colour. This is actually quite likely. But it’s highly questionable that she’s anti-White. Many of the stories the press published about the supposed hard-left extremists in the Labour party at the time were either exaggerations or completely made up. Ken Livingstone, whom the Eye has frequently mocked under the nickname, Ken Leninspart, really did believe in worker’s control. But he was never a Marxist, and in fact worker’s control used to form only a small part of the subjects he discussed with the, um, ‘gentlemen’ of the press. Most of the time it was rather more mundane. But they played up the worker’s control, and attacked it, because it frightened their proprietors and editors, quite apart from the rest of the middle class. The veteran gay rights activist, Peter Tatchell, who was also beginning his career as a Labour politico, was another who was made to appear much more extreme than he was. At one point the papers published a story about him going on holiday to one of the great gay centres on the American west coast. Except that he hadn’t, and didn’t even know the place existed. They also did the same thing to Marc Almond. In his case, they didn’t think he looked sufficiently effeminate, and so retouched his photograph.
Given this long record of telling porky pies about radical politicians, you can’t be sure that Abbot made the above comment, or that it represents her views now. But as Sid James remarked to Tony Hancock in ‘The Scandal Magazine’, mud always sticks, boy. They’ve carried on portraying her as a threat to White history and culture. A few years ago, the Daily Mail ran a story about how the London borough she represents in parliament decided to replace the paintings in their civic offices. Down came the traditional portraits of the White guys, who had previously served on the council, and up came paintings of Black children.
The story was part of a larger article about her, and didn’t offer any details about this, nor the reasons for the decision. Without putting it in so many words, it was presented merely as Abbott’s coterie of angry Blacks removing Whites from the history of the borough. How this supposed racist anger compares with her appearing regularly alongside Michael Portillo on Andrew Neil’s The Daily Politics, where she appears perfectly calm and genial with her White presenters, as befits a grande dame of British politics, I really don’t know.
Nevertheless, she remains a Tory bete noir, and given the fact that there have always been members of the party, who can’t understand why a Black person could ever object to golliwogs, the Black and White Minstrels or why you can make derogatory comments about Black people’s supposed character defects as a race, or use the unpleasant terms previous generations used to insult them, and it becomes quite easy to see why she should be the target for so much abuse.
As for the supposed sexism in the Labour ranks, there was never much substance to that anyway. It was never more than an attempt by wealthy, entitled right-wing Labour female politicians to smear their male rivals. These women had nothing to offer ordinary working Brits, including women. While ordinary women are finding it difficult to pay the bills and feed their families, thanks to the ravages of neoliberalism, these female politicians simply offered more of the same. More cuts, more privatization, more precarity. But like Hillary Clinton, from whom they got the tactic, they wanted to present themselves as representing women in general, even if in fact they only represented rich, entitled women like themselves. And so just Clinton was outraged by the popularity of Bernie Sanders, these women were infuriated by Jeremy Corbyn. Clinton claimed that she had been vilified by the ‘Bernie Bros’, who didn’t actually exist. And so her counterparts in the Labour party over here decided to follow her, and lie about how they were the victims of savage misogyny from Corbyn and the Old Left.
The reality is the opposite. I don’t doubt that there is racism and sexism on the Left. But there’s far less of it than on the right. But the press are still liars for claiming otherwise.
My drawing of Boris Johnson, who seems to have been in some pain. Make up your own jokes.
Earlier today, Mike put up an audio clip of Boris Johnson, Tory MP for Henley on Thames, former editor of the Spectator, mayor of London, and frequent guest on Have I Got News For You being interviewed on the Queen’s Speech by Eddie Mair on Radio 4. Boris has got a reputation as an incompetent buffoon, based on the fact that things have gone spectacularly wrong with him in charge in public for years. Like, for example, when he tried coming down a zipline for some event, and got stuck halfway along and had to be rescued. Or when he shut himself out of his own house in front of reporters. Or when he held a press meeting for some campaign he was involved in, only to have the video go wrong, as reported in Private Eye.
This interview will most certainly not have dispelled that reputation.
Mair begins by asking Johnson about Theresa May’s comments last year about tackling various injustices. What was there in the Queen’s Speech today, about correcting the harsher treatment Blacks receive in court?
Johnson’s reply was a series a mumbled ‘ers’, followed by ‘I’ve got it here somewhere’ and rustling sounds.
So Mair moved on to his next question, which was about what plans the government may have to tackle mental health issues.
More mumbling and sounds of ignorance from Johnson, who then tried to change the subject and go back to the previous question.
At which point Mair brought him up sharp with the words, ‘No, Boris, this isn’t the Two Ronnies, where you can answer the question before last’, referring to that sketch which gently sent up Mastermind.
He then asked Boris about the contents of the Queen’s Speech in general. BoJo didn’t know, and so Mair told him. Or rather, he listed all the subjects and policies May had said she would tackle in her manifesto, which she has now discarded. 13.7 million people voted for that manifesto, said Mair. Was it right that this should now be thrown away?
More mumbling and muttering from Boris, who blustered something about ‘changed circumstances’.
Along with the clip, Mike has also put up some of the responses to it on social media, including those of the Labour politicos John Prescott and Chuka Umunna, and the left-wing writer and journo, Owen Jones. All of them make the point that this was a dreadful interview, comparable to that of Diane Abbott a few weeks ago. This resulted in Abbott being ridiculed across the media. Now Boris has given a similarly bad one, so will he get the same treatment?
No surprise there. The French Philosophical Feline, Guy Debord’s Cat, made this point over a fortnight ago when Abbott was forced to pull out of the campaign due to ill health. People started muttering about how this showed she was incompetent, while May asked the rhetorical question if people wanted this woman as Home Secretary? La Chat Philosophique Francaise compared this to the 1970s racist campaign against the Labour party, in which voters were explicitly told that if you wanted a ‘coloured’ living next to you, you should vote for the Labour party. Or to put it crudely, ‘If you want a n***er for a neighbour, vote Labour’. He writes
In the last week or so, we’ve heard May and her Tories say “Would you want Diane Abbott as Home Secretary”? Such a question is predicated on the knowledge of the Other. The idea that the Home Office will be run not only by a woman, but a black woman is too much to bear for our crypto-racists. Better to have a white woman or a white man in charge, eh? Where are the black faces in May’s cabinet? There are none. There are a couple of Asian millionaires but no black people.
Diane Abbott has been attacked precisely because she is black and because she’s a woman. Boris Johnson is allowed to make as many gaffes as he likes and get away with it. He’s given plenty of latitude when he indulges in racism and his thuggish behaviour is regularly overlooked, even laughed off. He’s a clown, so we’re told.
He concludes
When you base your competency argument on a handful of gaffes rather than a person’s record, then you play the bully’s game. If you can’t see the obvious racism that underpins the bullying of Abbott and prefer to focus on her presumed incompetency, then you need to have a word with yourself.
Part of the issue in Abbott’s case, I suspect, is the fact that challenging racism has been a very important part of Abbott’s political career. Her parents were both working class. The Daily Mail a little while ago in an article on her claimed that she was personally embittered because she believed that her mother had been passed over for promotion because of her colour. Which is very possible, given the racism of the times.
As a result, Abbott got a reputation as someone, who was prejudiced against Whites. In the 1987 one of the Tory papers – I think it was the Scum – ran a double spread of photographs of various Labour politicians, underneath which was a quote designed to frighten all right-thinking British Thatcherites. Underneath Red Ken’s fizzog was the quotation ‘I am not in favour of the army. I am in favour of arming the working classes to guard the factories.’
And below Abbot’s was the statement ‘All White people are racist’.
This was designed to show how far left and unfit for government the Labour party was. As it stands, Ken Livingstone was in favour of workers’ control, though this was only one aspect of his views on industry and government. And as some of his Tory opponents and colleagues in London admitted, Livingstone was far from a lunatic.
I’m sure the same can be said for Abbott. The quotations from the Scum sound plausible, but that’s what effective propaganda has to be. If it sounds like lies, then people won’t believe it. And it isn’t as though the Scum doesn’t have a reputation for lying. As one of the premier organs of Thatcherite propaganda, it shares all the mendacity of the party is loudly supports.
And this is quite apart from its blatant racism. Way back at the end of the 1990s or the first years of this century, Private Eye ran an article on yet another case in which the Scum had been hauled up before the Press Complaints Commission, as was, for racism. The Eye pointed out that the wretched paper had had 19 decisions against it by the Commission for racism over the years. And that was then. Who knows what the count is now!
As for Abbott, she seems perfectly at home with Michael Portillo and Andrew Neil on The Daily Politics. I did hear a little while ago that Portillo was her baby’s godfather, though I’m not sure if this is right. If it is, it confirms that she’s fitted right in as a politician of long and distinguished standing.
Will Boris get pilloried for his dreadful performance? Of course he won’t! He’s White, pukka old Etonian establishment – the type of people, who believe that they have an unquestionable right to govern the rest of us, and who the right-wing media, including the Beeb, will support against challengers like Abbott. Or Jeremy Corbyn, for that matter, who was also ridiculed after failing to know the answer to a question posed by Woman’s Hour.
Which will just show just how biased in terms of class and race the Beeb and media are.
And for fans of classic comedy, here’s the Two Ronnies Sketch in question.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 