Message from We Own It about Their New Website and Campaign Against Channel 4 Privatisation

I got this email from anti-privatisation campaign group We Own It informing me about their new website and their continuing campaign against the government’s proposed sell-off of Channel 4.

‘Dear David,

What do Armando Iannucci, the Archbishop of York and Siobhán McSweeney from Derry Girls all have in common?

They’re all taking a stand against Nadine Dorries’ plan to privatise Channel 4.

They’re not the only ones. 27 independent production companies, actor Jon Pointing, comedian Jack Rooke, and the Bishops of Ripon and Leeds are taking a stand too.

They’ve come together today to send a message to the divided Conservative Party: Channel 4 ain’t broke. Don’t fix it. Conserve it.

Thanks to donations from hundreds of you, today we were able to launch an ambitious new campaign which hit the front page of the Yorkshire Post, the Evening Standard, the Independent, the National and local papers across the country.

Check out the beautiful new website and share it to spread the word! We need YOU to make this big launch even bigger! This is a campaign we can win.

Share the new campaign on Twitter

Share on Facebook

Check out the website and forward the link by email to friends and family

THANK YOU so much for showing this government where you stand.

Cat, Alice, Johnbosco, Matthew, Jack and Kate – the We Own It team

PS Thanks so much to everyone who took part in the day of action for the NHS on Saturday. You were all over the press for that campaign as well!’

I very much support this campaign, not least because Bristol is one one of the various cities in which the broadcaster is located. I’m afraid that if the government privatises the station it will have to close down its offices or studios in Bristol and the other towns, and that these local broadcasting industries will be severely damaged. A little while ago I wrote to my local Labour MP, Karin Smyth, to express my fears about the loss of local broadcasting in Bristol. She very kindly wrote back stating that she also was going to oppose Channel 4’s privatisation.

I think the channel has declined in quality since the 1980s and 1990s, but it has been a vital part of British broadcasting and cinema. There have been a stream of British films made either by, or with the participation of Channel 4 films. And when it was first launched in the 1980s, it offered a genuine alternative to mainstream broadcasting. It showed Indian films in a slot entitled ‘All India Goldies’ as well as an adaptation of the Indian national epic, the Mahabharata. It also provided excellent opera coverage, and really did much to bring it to a genuinely popular audience. It also gave Britain the wit and wisdom of the journalist and TV critic, Clive James, who had his own show on a Sunday night. James published a trio of books of his TV criticism, as well as his travel journalism and an autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs. His writing could be hysterically funny, as when he covered the extremely excitable remarks of over-the-top sports commenters. In one of his articles he described how one of the cars broke down or crashed during a race ‘and Murray Walker exploded’. At other times, when discussing the horrors of the Holocaust and the surviving Nazi and Fascist leaders like Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach and Oswald Mosley, who turned up on British television, he was deadly serious and scathing. As he also was when writing about Stalin’s famine and purges and Mao’s China. He interviewed a number of great personalities on his show, including a very young Victoria Wood and the late, great Peter Cook. For fantasy enthusiasts, there was The Storyteller, a series of tales adapted from folk stories, narrated by John Hurt, with puppet creatures, including the Storyteller’s dog, created and operated by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Henson and Frank Oz were the geniuses behind the Muppets. They also made the fantasy movie The Dark Crystal, in which every character is a non-human creature. In the 1990s Henson’s Creature Shop also created the various aliens in the Australian-American SF series Farscape. I am very much afraid that if Channel 4 is privatised, then this history and pool of great broadcasting talent and skills will be permanently lost.

And it will be lost not because there’s anything wrong with Channel 4, but because the Tories’ backers, like one Rupert Murdoch, want British state broadcasting to end so their own cruddy networks can move in and take its place.

A Black Woman Visits Qatar’s Museum of Slavery

Very interesting video posted by Angela B. on her channel on YouTube. It was posted five years ago for Black history month. The hostess is an English-speaking Black woman, who lives in the Middle East. One of her parents is African, while the other comes from the Virgin Islands, which gives her a personal connection to the history of slavery. The video is her visit to a museum of slave trade in Qatar. This covers the history of slavery from ancient Greece and the use of enslaved Ethiopians in the bath houses, which understandably chills Angela B on what they saw and what they were used for – through the Atlantic slave trade and then the Arabic slave trade. It has animated displays and the voices of the enslaved describing their capture, the forced march through the desert during which many were left to die where they fell before arriving in Zanzibar, Kilwa and other east African islands under Arab suzerainty. The museum describes the enslavement of boys as pearl fishers and the abolition of slavery in Qatar in 1951. It also goes on to discuss the persistence of slavery in the modern world. Angela B is personally chilled, as someone with ancestors from the Virgin Islands, by the sight of the slave manacles in the museum. Interestingly, the explanatory panels in the museum also talk about serfdom in medieval Europe, which she doesn’t comment on. Serfdom is one of the numerous forms of unfree labour that is now considered a form of slavery by the international authorities. It’s interesting to see it referenced in an Arabic museum to slavery, when it is largely excluded from the debate over slavery in the West, which largely centres around the transatlantic slave trade. The recorded speech and voiceovers in the Museum are in Arabic, but the written texts are bilingual in Arabic and English.

The video’s also interesting in what the museum and Angela B include and comment on, and what they omit. There’s a bias towards Black slavery, though how much of this is the museum and how much Angela B obviously attracted to the part of the slave trade that affected people of her own race is debatable. Slavery was widespread as an unremarkable part of life in the Ancient Near East long before ancient Greece. There exist the lists of slaves working on the great estates from ancient Egypt, some of whom had definite Jewish names like Menachem. Slavery also existed among the Hittites in what is now Turkey, Babylonia and Assyria, but this isn’t mentioned in the video. If the museum doesn’t mention this, it might be from diplomatic reasons to avoid upsetting other, neighbouring middle eastern states. Or it could be for religious reasons. Islam regards the period before Mohammed as the ‘Jaihiliyya’, or ‘Age of Darkness’, and discourages interest in it. This is perhaps why it was significant a few years ago that the Saudi monarchy permitted the exhibition in the country’s museums of ancient Arabian pre-Islamic gods, except for those idols which were depicted nude. If the museum did include that era, then Angela B may have skipped over it because her video is concentrating and Black slaves. At the same time, the video doesn’t show the enslavement of White Europeans by the Barbary pirates and other Muslims. This may also be due to the same reason. The ancient Greeks used slaves in a variety of roles, including as craftsmen and agricultural labourers. Some of the pottery shows female sex slaves being used in orgies. There’s also a piece of pottery in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in the shape of a sleeping Ethiopian boy curled up around a wine pot. I wonder if the piece about enslaved Ethiopians serving as bath attendants was selected for inclusion in the museum because it was similar to forms of slavery they would have been familiar with.

The video’s fascinating because it, like another video about the Arab slave trade I posted and commented on a few days ago, it shows how the issue of slavery and Black civil rights has penetrated the Arab world. The other video included not only discussion of Libya’s wretched slave markets, but also covered modern Afro-Iraqis and their demand for civil rights and political representation. These are issues we really don’t hear about in the west, unless you’re an academic at one of the universities or watch al-Jazeera. But there’s also an issue with the museum. While it naturally condemns historic slavery, Qatar and the other Gulf Arab states effectively enslave and exploit the foreign migrant workers that come to the country. This has provoked protests and criticism at the country hosting the World Cup and one of the Grand Prix’.

Counterpunch on George Galloway’s Documentary on Tony Blair

Counterpunch on Thursday put up an interesting article by David Swanson discussing the release of a documentary by George Galloway about Tony Blair, and arguing that the film’s subject qualified for the title of worst human being alive. The film’s entitled Blair’s Killing$, and shows just how nasty the Islington Generalissimo is. Swanson states that Blair faces some stiff competition, and that, as an American, he feels the title of Worst Person Alive ought to go to someone on his side of the Atlantic. Like Donald Trump, the Cheneys and Rupert Murdoch. Quite apart from the leading role the US is playing in exporting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, start wars and causing climate change.

He notes that Blair has done to the Labour party what Clinton did to the Democrats. He imported the anti-working and lower middle class policies which Jeremy Corbyn is trying to undo, and Shrillary is trying to bury forever. He states that Blair did to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq what Clinton, Bush and Obama have done. But while these have gone off and retired, Blair has carried on in his role as global warmonger. He also makes the point that Blair forced into these wars a nation with a far greater opposition to starting them than America. As a result, he can’t leave the house without a protest gathering. And from starting wars, Blair moved right into promoting corporate corruption and promoting wars. He states that from now on, future prime ministers can rest assured that they can make themselves stinking rich by following the demands of their foreign and corporate paymasters.

He then goes on to describe the contents of Galloway’s film. This is, as he says, ugly. This shows how Blair gave Murdoch monopoly control of the media in return for his papers’ support; accepted bribes from Bernie Ecclestone, the racing mogul, sold British warplanes to Indonesia to carry on its genocide in East Timor, and air traffic systems to Tanzania, which doesn’t even have an air force. He also shut down an investigation into corruption and Saudi Arabia, as well as privatising schools and hospitals. Post-prime minister, Blair also accepts millions from JP Morgan Chase, Petro Saudi and other big businesses for getting them connections with other rich, powerful people. He also hires himself out to a number of dictators in Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Egypt and Libya. He stopped Colonel Gadaffi’s victims from suing him, but did nothing to prevent Hillary bombing and killing the dictator.

But what really clinches him as worst person in the world is the fact that he got the job as Middle East Peace Envoy, before being sacked when people realised it wasn’t a joke.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/18/worst-human-being-alive-tony-blair/

The article has a trailer for the film. I’m not a fan of George Galloway nor the Respect Party. Galloway was too friendly towards Saddam Hussein. There’s that notorious clip of him telling the dictator he saluted his ‘indefatigability’ and so on. But I don’t think he took oil barrels from Hussein, as alleged. But Galloway was right about Blair and the Middle East, and right about Palestine. He’s also not an anti-Semite. Mahmoud Mazher, the fake sheikh, tried to entrap him into saying something vile in support of the Holocaust. Galloway recognised Mazher from his bodyguard, a seven-foot tall bruiser nicknamed ‘Jaws’ because of his gold teeth and similarity to the Bond villain. Galloway refused to be drawn, and instead stated very firmly that the Holocaust was a crime against humanity. He’s an anti-Zionist, but not an anti-Semite. This upset Mazher, who went off minus a story.

The documentary does look interesting, though I’m afraid it’s one of those things you might have to order. Among the talking heads featured is Stephen Fry. Again, I’m not a fan, but here he does make a very good point. He says that when you meet him Blair is very charming, but this hides the fact that he’s a complete b*stard. This is true. Blair did have a smooth charm, rather like Clinton, and so smarmed his way into power. And the result of this has been the legacy of war, corporate corruption, power and death that this film exposes.