SNP Leader Stephen Flynn Tears into Starmer for Dropping Pledge to End Tuition Fees

This is a very short video from the PoliticsJoe site on YouTube of the leader of the SNP in Westminster having a very sharp dig at Keir Starmer for his betrayal of the country’s students. Flynn says that David Cameron convinced his coalition partner, Nick Clegg, to drop his pledge to end tuition fees. Flynn therefore has to congratulate Rishi Sunak on similarly convincing Starmer to drop his commitment to ending tuition fees. Of course, the Tories are highly delighted. Sunak grins like a maniac and looks around him to the Tory benches, who are also enjoying the joke immensely. Starmer just sits there with an expression half-grimace, half-stupid grin. Sunak then take to the despatch box to state that more people have gone to university under the Tories than ever before. Flynn responds by taking the floor again to say that the Conservatives don’t believe in ending tuition fees, the Liberal Democrats don’t believe in ending tuition fees, and now Labour doesn’t believe in ending tuition fees. He therefore appeals to the Speaker, ‘isn’t it true that all of them mainstream parties have failed Britain’s young people?’ Sunak responds by stating that more underprivileged young people are going to university in England than in Scotland.

I don’t like the way Flynn handed Sunak an opportunity to make the Tories look good, but his gibe at Starmer is right on target and deserved. As for more people going to university under the Tories than ever before, that’s probably true but it’s the continuation of a trend that began under Blair. It also doesn’t answer the real point underneath Flynn’s statement, which is that students are being burdened with mountainous debt. As for more underprivileged young people going to university in England rather than Scotland, that’s because the population of England is far greater than Scotland and there are more universities. Sunak is not helping students, as they’re faced not only with student debt, but also with the costs of living away from home during the cost of living crisis.

But Starmer isn’t going to help students either, although he still seems to want people to believe that he might with his wibbling that the current system is wrong and Labour will look at alternative ways of paying tuition fees. Well, some of us can remember Thatcher’s big plan in the 1980s to get businesses to sponsor students at university, even if they weren’t studying a subject related to the sponsor. That idea didn’t last long, despite all the fanfare. I don’t think any similar alternative to state payment of tuition fees Starmer might dream will last long either. The Guardian was similarly sceptical about Starmer’s ambiguous statement. They compared it to Schrodinger’s Cat, a metaphor for the behaviour of sub-atomic particles in quantum physics. In the metaphor, a cat is locked in a box with an instrument measuring atomic decay and a flask of poison. The atomic device randomly decides whether or not to smash the flask and release the poison, killing the cat. How can you tell if the moggy’s alive or dead? You can’t unless you open the box and make an observation. Until that time, the cat is both alive and dead, in the same manner that, in quantum physics, particles can be in two contradictory states until the scientist makes an observation. Starmer’s position on tuition fees is like the cat: it both is and isn’t in favour of dropping tuition fees.

But quantum physics, while it holds sway in the sub-atomic world, doesn’t work in the macro world which is subject to Einsteinian relativity. Similarly, Starmer’s position on tuition fees comes down to him deciding against ending them and betraying students. He wants us to believe otherwise, but that’s what it amounts to.

His repeated betrayals and breaking of pledges and promises have made him a laughing stock. As a leader, he’s a treacherous liability. And unfortunately we can’t blame this on Tory influence.

Starmer Preparing to Abandon Pledge to Scrap Tuition Fees

He’s doing it again! Starmer is about to break another pledge. Are there any promises he won’t break, any principles he won’t betray? Sky News and the Independent have reported that during an interview on Radio 4 this morning, the Tory infiltrator in chief of the former Labour party announced that he was considering dropping his promise to end tuition fees. According to him, the economy is different now than when he made the pledge. Excuse me, but I’ve heard this one before. Whenever a politician goes back on a policy they’ve previous supported, one of the excuses trotted out is, ‘Now is not the time’. Tweezer did it when she went back on her election pledge to have workers in the boardroom. It also, I think, brings to mind a quote from Malcolm X. X warned his followers to be aware of betrayal by White liberals. I think he may have said that they were worse than Conservatives, because the racists were honest about what they were. But when it came to reforms to empower Blacks, White liberals would often give the excuse that they agreed with them, but the time was not right. This isn’t racial politics, but it does accurately describe Starmer and his mentality regarding radical reforms.

The Independent’s article describes how Blair brought in tuition fees, how they were initially capped and then raised and then raised again by the coalition government of Cameron and Clegg. The interviewer on Radio 4 brought up the fact that Starmer had made a series of pledges, like taking the utilities back into government ownership, and then dropped them. So Starmer replied by saying that it was quite wrong that Labour had dropped all of these pledges. Really? Mike over at Vox Political has a long list of all the promises Starmer’s broken. And he started, more or less, on day one when he was elected head of the party. He said he was going to retain Corbyn’s policies, which he then dropped, one by one, just as he persecuted the former leader’s supporters. As for Corbyn himself, one of the YouTube channels showed just how two-faced Starmer was about him by showing clips of Starmer giving glowing testimony about Corbyn before later going on to decry him. It’s all a bit Stalinist, like the way under Communism the latest member of the Politburo was hailed as men of great intelligence and integrity who would lead the workers’ to victory over capitalism before being denounced as an evil capitalist imperialist lackey and co-conspirator with Trotsky a few weeks or months later. Communist politicians and apparatchiks during Stalin’s reign used to read Pravda to see if they would be mentioned as the intended victims of yet another anti-Soviet plot that existed only in Stalin’s paranoid imagination. If they were, then they could tell that they were in favour with the old brute. If they weren’t, it meant that they’d fallen out of favour and could so be expecting a knock at the door from the NKVD/KGB. And the victims of the show trials were frequently smeared as collaborators with Trotsky. I supposed the contemporary Labour party equivalent is being accused of supporting Corbyn and being an anti-Semite.

But Starmer still wanted people to think he was sincere about reforming tuitions fees. He said that the present system was unfair and Labour was looking at alternative ways they could be paid. How? I don’t see any alternative. Either the government pays the tuition fees or the students have to. There may be some fudge, so that the government pays it as a loan, but you’d still be stuck with students having to pay them.

The paper went for comment to the head of Labour Students, who really wasn’t impressed. She rightly mentioned that students are now faced with mountains of debt and stated that this would be Starmer’s ‘Nick Clegg moment’. This referred to Clegg’s pledge to end tuition fees, which he immediately reneged on once he was in power with Cameron. And the decision to retain or raise tuition fees, I’ve forgotten which, was Clegg’s. Cameron was apparently ready to let him honour his policy announcement. I was doing a Ph.D. at uni when Clegg went back on his word, and naturally the former head of the Lib Dems was not popular amongst some students. Indeed, for some of them he became synonymous with treachery.

Starmer’s hesitancy about this decision, his determination to reject it while telling everyone that he still supports it, reminds me of his indecision over changing the Gender Recognition Act. Starmer was first in favour of it, then when the issue helped to bring down Sturgeon in Scotland he announced that it wouldn’t be a priority for Labour, before changing his position yet again and swinging back to support it. But in answer to that knotty question ‘Do women have penises?’ Starmer tried to have it both ways and declared that 99.99 per cent of women don’t have penises. All that did was provoke more ridicule and allowed Sunak to score points for the gender critical side by saying that no, women don’t have penises.

Apparently, it doesn’t matter what the issue is, Starmer will break any promise he makes about it while telling you that he still supports it. He really can’t be trusted.

That Preston Journalist Shows Video Exposing Starmer’s Lies

That Preston Journalist is a former Conservative local councillor, now turned right-wing YouTube. Much of his content has been attacking Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP in Scotland, but now that McKrankie, as he calls her, is in dead trouble with her husband arrested and the rozzers digging up her garden, he may be turning to other targets. Like Keir Starmer and the Labour party. Starmer has provoked controversy with his wretched attack ads against Rishi Sunak. These claim that Sunak is soft on crime, letting armed gunmen and child abusers escape custodial sentences. However, whatever else you can say about Sunak – and there’s so much – this isn’t his fault. It’s the decision of the judges sentencing them. More than that, Starmer was part of the committee that drafted the sentencing guidelines. Emily Thornberry appeared on the news yesterday to try and defend Stalin. When she was asked whether Stalin was part of the committee, she said she couldn’t remember. Which is unlikely, as she wrote to Starmer at the time objecting to him proposing lighter sentences for rapists. Many on them left are sick of the attack ads, and I think Novara Media have called them a descent into the gutter. It reminds me of the Labour election broadcast the party ran under Ed Miliband, which personally attacked Nick Clegg. Most people thought that was too low as well. But it is in line with Starmer’s Blairite values. Back in 2004 Blair got himself into a controversy over anti-Semitism when he produced an ad depicting the-then leader of the Conservatives, Michael Howard, as a pig. Howard’s Jewish, and so it’s not hard to see how the ad would cause upset amongst Jews and anti-racism activists. Not that the other parties are exactly innocent themselves. The Tories produced an ad showing Blair with demon eyes. I think this got called the ‘curse of Finkelstein’, after the ad executive who designed it. Instead of putting people of Blair, it put people off the Tories. The Lib Dems also produced a poster which merged the faces of John Prescott and Ann Widdecombe. This was supposed to show that the two parties were basically the same and they offered the only real alternative. This backfired as it turned out most of those who saw the picture simply thought it was just a picture of Widdecombe.

But Starmer’s history of mendacity also makes him vulnerable to similar attacks. The Preston Journalist therefore gleefully shows a video someone has made of Starmer breaking just about every promise he’s made. It begins with his pledge to nationalise the utilities and includes his warm comments about Jeremy Corbyn before sticking the knife in him. Usually I wouldn’t put That Preston Journalist’s material up here, but hey, it’s Starmer and he deserves it. Especially as the Labour right cooperated with the Tories and Lib Dems to suppress the Labour left, including being members of Conservative internet groups. In fact, they were more venomous in their hatred of the Labour left than the Conservatives. I therefore have no qualms about serving this back to them.

Is Keir Starmer Planning to Further Privatise the NHS If He Gets Into Government?

This deeply concerns me. A few days ago the mellifluous Irish left-wing vlogger, Maximilien Robespierre, posted a video asking if Keir Starmer was planning to push the privatisation of the NHS even further if or when he gets into 10 Downing Street. I didn’t see more than a few seconds of the video, but it seemed to be based on Starmer’s cagey response to how he would solve the country’s current crises. While Starmer has promised to repeal the anti-strike legislation, which would definitely be a great step if he actually does it, he answered that question by stating that Labour would not be spending its way out of these problems. This looks like an attempt to assure Tory voters that Labour is now fiscally responsible and no longer the high-spending party of traditional Tory caricature. But the current problems in the Health Service and other sectors are partly caused by decades of cuts and underinvestment. In the case of the NHS, the funding has also been gobbled up by increased administration expenses created by privatisation. So where is this extra investment, and improved services, supposed to come from? Blair tried to solve this by pushing the NHS’ privatisation further than Tories had dared. Not only were further NHS services outsourced to private healthcare providers, but he also created the Community Care Groups of doctors, who were responsible for commissioning medical services. These CCGs were granted the powers to buy in private medical services, and to raise additional income privately. Starmer is a Blairite, as shown by his vehement persecution of the Labour left and embrace of neoliberalism. One of the great commenters on this blog has suggested that he’s an admirer of the Swiss healthcare system. This is a mixture of state and private medical insurance, the degree depending on wealth. In the case of the very rich, it’s all, or nearly all, funded by private health insurance. In the case of the poor, it’s state-funded according to whether they can afford a level of private insurance. I have a feeling Nick Clegg of the Lib-Dems believed in the same kind of continental system. This obviously violates the fundamental principles on which Nye Bevin founded the NHS: that it should be universal and free at the point of delivery.

No-one wanted Blair to push through his NHS privatisations and there was electorally no need for it. By the time Blair was elected in 1997 the country was so thoroughly fed up of Tory misrule and their policies that Blair could have pursued a traditional Labour policy of renationalising it as well as funding it properly. But Blair was a Thatcherite and intensely concerned to get the Tory press and Tory voters onside, to the point that Rupert Murdoch has been described as an invisible presence at cabinet meetings. Blair’s pursuit of Tory policies left traditional Labour voters and members feeling betrayed and disenfranchised and the party lost both. They only continued winning elections because the Tories were worse.

I joined the Labour party a few years ago, inspired by Corbyn’s commitment to genuine Labour party policies and the protection and renationalisation of the NHS. I really don’t want to see it privatised by Starmer as Blair did.

If Starmer does push through further measures to privatise it, not only will he betray this country’s working people, making them poorer and with less available healthcare, then it will also have disastrous consequences for the direction of politics in this country. The recent surge of identity politics following the Black Lives Matter protests back in 2020 has also resulted in a backlash and the appearance of anti-woke parties further to the right, like Reform, led by Richard Tice, and Laurence Fox’s Reclaim. If working people become alienated from politics because whichever party you choose, economically they’re all the same, it leaves the way open for the far right. That was shown very clearly in Margaret Hodge’s neck of London, where Hodge did so little to tackle the rise of the BNP that the stormtroopers at one point had seven members on Tower Hamlets council. Their fuehrer, Derek Beacon, even sent her a garland after their squalid electoral victories. What has been shown to work against the fascist parties and unite working people of different ethnicities and religions is effective, traditional Labour welfare policies. These are desperately needed in themselves, but without them there’s the possibility that Britain may go the same way as the continent in the rise of extreme right-wing nationalist parties.

Renationalising the NHS and restoring the welfare state will not only massive improve the health, wellbeing and prosperity of the British working people, but will do much to stop the racial division and alienation fuelling the drift towards the parties of racial division, friction and resentment.

Drunk Tory Calls for the Privatisation of the NHS

This comes from the Daily Blase’s channel over on YouTube. Edward Lee, Tory MP for Gainsborough, staggered to his feet in the House of Commons today and said the quiet part out loud. Directing his remarks at health secretary Therese Coffey, he declared that it was not the fault of the healthcare workers that the NHS was in the state it’s in. It’s the fault of the institution itself. The NHS was the last example of collectivist socialist government. It should be abolished and replaced with the social insurance programmes France and other countries have, because they have better health outcomes than we have. Why, he concluded, should only the rich have private healthcare? To this Coffey responded by saying that the government didn’t view it that way.

As Mr Blase said, the florid-faced Tory blamed the NHS for its problems, rather than 12 years of Tory austerity. He’s quite right. We used to be ahead of much of the continent in health outcomes, but thanks to cuts and privatisation we’ve fallen below the other countries. And this is a direct result of forty years of unquestioned Thatcherism and the stealth privatisation Thatcher inaugurated. He also said that Coffey doesn’t really have any real difference of opinion to him. She’s just embarrassed he spoke so plainly about Tory policy. Again, he has a point. But it’s not just the Tories that wanted to privatise the NHS. Nick Clegg when he was Dodgy Dave’s deputy prime minister also thought it would be a good thing if we changed to a continental style insurance system.

This is an extremely right-wing government. Far more right-wing, it’s been said, than Thatcher’s. Get them out.

How Can I Trust Keir Starmer to Protect the NHS When Blair Wanted to Privatise It?

The parties have been running their election broadcasts this week in the run up to the local, elected mayoral and other elections in May. I caught a bit of Labour’s the other night, and wasn’t impressed. The piece I glimpsed consisted of Starmer sitting in front of the camera, urging people to vote Labour to protect it from the Tories’ privatisation. And the Tories are privatising the NHS by stealth, all under the cover of bringing in best practice from the private sector. And the Lib Dems have been exactly the same. They were the Tories’ partners in David Cameron’s wretched coalition government, which carried on the privatisations. Nick Clegg did nothing to stop it. Indeed, he gave every assistance to the Tories and seemed to be fully behind the handing over hospitals and doctor’s surgeries to private enterprise to run. Just as the Liberals and SDP were way back in 1987, when the two allied parties had declared that it didn’t matter whether doctors and hospitals were public or private, provided that the treatment was free. Except that the Tory privatisation of the NHS will definitely not retain free treatment at the point of use, as provided by the terms of the NHS’ establishment. The Tories wish to turn the NHS into a fully private system funded by private medical insurance like the American health system.

There are Labour MPs who are fighting tooth and nail to protect the NHS. I’m thinking here of the people on the Labour left, such as Jeremy Corbyn, Richard Burgon, Diane Abbott, Rosina Allin-Khan. I also believe that others from the Labour right are doing so. At one meeting of my constituency party here in south Bristol, our local MP Karen Smyth said she joined the Labour party and became an MP because she was so appalled at what Cameron and co. were doing to the Health Service.

But I find Starmer’s claim that he will protect our NHS much less than credible. He’s an arch-Blairite, who has spent his tenure as leader so far in conjunction with the wretched NEC trying to purge the party of left-wingers and socialists. This has involved all the usual trumped-up, fake charges of anti-Semitism. And sometimes there’s no explanation given at all, like when the NEC barred three of leading Labour contenders for elected mayor of Liverpool. Worse than that, he has broken all of his leadership promises. He claimed that he would continue to uphold Labour’s manifesto promises of returning the utilities to state ownership, reversing the NHS’ privatisation and properly funding it, strengthening the welfare state and workers’ rights and restoring power to the unions. But in practice he hasn’t done any of that. It might put off all those rich donors he’s trying to attract. He has shown no real opposition to Johnson’s government, and what little he has shown has been glaringly opportunistic. So opportunistic, in fact, that right-wing windbag and broadcasting egomaniac, Julia Hartley-Brewer, asked him if there was anything in fact he stood for when he appeared on her wretched show on LBC radio.

And if this isn’t ominous enough, the fact remains that Tony Blair also went ahead with the right-wing programme of privatising the NHS. The polyclinics and health centres Blair set up were opened up to private management. He continued handing over doctors’ surgeries and hospitals to private healthcare firms. And the Community Care Groups, the groups of doctors which were supposed to manage local NHS doctors’ budgets, were granted the ability to buy in services from private sector companies, and raise money from the private sector. His Health Minister, Alan Milburn, wished the NHS to be reduced to a kitemark logo on services provided by private industry. And I fear Starmer will do exactly the same.

Brian Burden, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted this comment noting Starmer’s telling lack of opposition to another Tory appointment.

Hi, Beastrabban –

I refer you to p19 of the April 7 issue of Socialist Worker: Samantha Jones, formerly of Openrose Health, owned by US health insurance giant Centene Corporation, has recently been appointed a top adviser to Boris Johnson. Openrose took over scores of NHS GP surgeries earlier this year. Centene has faced a number of fraud and corruption law suits in USA. Socialist Worker believes that Johnson is moving towards the full privatisation of the NHS. Not a whisper from Starmer about any of this.

I wasn’t aware of this appointment, though I haven’t been paying much attention to the news recently. Not that I think it would be in the news. Ray Tallis and Jacky Davis have a whole chapter in their book, NHS – SOS to how the BBC has supported the privatisation of the Health Service. I’m not a fan of the former Socialist Workers’ Party, but I’ve no doubt they’re correct about this and are right to publicise it. And Starmer’s silence is telling.

I doubt very much that Starmer’s serious about protecting the NHS. And everyone else seems determined to privatise it with the exception of the much-reviled Labour left.

So forget the vile propaganda and smears against them and support the real people of principle who are standing up for this most precious of British institutions.

Ed Davey Elected Leader of Hated, Failing Party

Ed Davey has beaten his rival Layla Moran and been elected leader of the Lib Dems. But according to an article in Monday’s I by Nigel Morris, ‘Liberal Democrats to crown new leader as party hits ‘rock bottom’, the Lib Dems are still in major trouble with the electorate. The article states that the British public may still hate them for joining the Tories in the coalition government under David Cameron and their leader, the noxious and duplicitous Nick Cligg. The article runs

The new Liberal Democrat leader, who will be crowned this week, will inherit a party whose fortunes remain at “rock bottom” following a succession of dire electoral performances, the polling expert Sir John Curtice has said.

The party’s support has fallen to a 50-year low amid signs that it is still being punished for its part in the Tory-led coalition government of 2010-15.

Sir Ed Davey and Layla Moran are vying to become the Lib Dems’ fifth leader in five years, with the victor facing the daunting task of carving out a distinctive niche for a party at risk of being reduced to a bit player on the political stage.

The winner also must decide how to respond to moves by the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, to steer his party towards the political centre ground.

Despite their initial optimism that they could attract anti-Brexit voters, the Lib Dems won just 11 seats in last year’s election, and two polls this week showed them languishing on 6 and 7 per cent support.

Sir John, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, told I: “There was a brief moment last year when it looked as though they might be able to turn around their fortunes on a wave of Remain discontent with Brexit, but by polling day in December most of these voters had slipped through their fingers.

“As a result, the party finds itself still at rock bottom and having to start from scratch in persuading voters of its relevance and message.”

Although its vote share edged up to 11.6 per cent in December, it finished the night with two fewer MPs and suffered the embarrassment of its leader, Jo Swinson, losing her seat, plunging the party inito yet another leadership contest. Lib Dem insiders predict a close finish as Sir Ed, who has been acting leader for nine months and served in the Coalition cabinet, faces the insurgent appeal of Ms Moran, who has been an MP only since 2017.

Voting closes on Wednesday, with the result being announced on Thursday.

Mark Pack, the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire, said the party had some grounds for optimism, including increased membership, a growing local government base and stable finances.

“We cannot afford to be blase about the situation, but there is material for a new leader to have a decent opportunity,” he said.

“One of the clear needs is to communicate the positive vision we have for the country. People just don’t notice we are around. The new leader has to make voters feel we are relevant.”

Mike in his report on Davey’s election reminds us that this is the party of mischief. The Lib Dems targeted the Labour party in various constituencies with misleading graphs and polling figures claiming that Labour couldn’t win there. Davey and Moran have also adopted some of the popular Corbynite policies, like increased taxes for the rich and Universal Basic Income, that Starmer has dropped like the good, corporatist Blairite he is. There’s therefore a real danger that some Labour voters may go over to the Lib Dems, thus weakening opposition to the Tories even further. Because after the Lib Dems’ betrayal of their supposedly liberal principles to join the Tory government in the coalition, you really can’t expect them to honour their promises one bit.

And some of the centrists in the Labour party are also worried about the fate of the Lib Dems. A few weeks ago, Labour MP Ayesha Hazarika was in the pages of the I arguing that Starmer should work out some kind of partnership or pact to save them. Why? She confessed she liked them, and wanted to create some kind of anti-Brexit opposition bloc. I have no time for Hazarika. She seems to me to emblematic of much that is wrong with the Labour party under Starmer. She comes across as a Blairite, and I think her media prominence is entirely due to the fact that she is a young woman from an ethnic minority. Her parents are Indian Muslims, and according to Wikipedia, she went to Laurel Bank, a private girls’ school in Edinburgh. She’s thus a very privileged ex-private schoolgirl, who really doesn’t have anything to offer the working class. But due to her gender and ethnic background, she represents diversity and liberal values.

In fact, it could be argued that centrist, Labour MPs like Hazarika are a particular liability to the Labour party. The Tory media are currently whipping up White resentment against current affirmative action programmes and the anti-racist political consensus. You only have to look at Alex Belfield’s wretched output on YouTube, in which he posts rant after rant attacking ‘left-wing snowflakes’ and their attacks on Britishness and Whites. Such as attacks on the singing of ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ on the Last Night of the Proms, and an announcement by Channel 4 that one day next year will be entirely given over to Black presenters. And one of the other far-right websites on YouTube has put up a video on the ‘Demonisation of the White Working Class’.

UKIP’s core support came from older, White working class voters, who felt left behind by the mainstream parties. Blair and Brown turned the party away from its working-class roots to concentrate on getting the votes of middle class swing voters. They rejected traditional Labour policies and embraced privatisation, the free market and the destruction of the welfare state. But nevertheless they complacently believed that the working class would still support them as they had nowhere else to go. There is clearly a need to increase the representation of women and ethnic minorities in politics and parliament, but the selection of privileged, Blairite MPs like Hazarika threaten to further weaken parts of working class support for the Labour party. Because if working class voters don’t see Labour offering them anything except more poverty, and appearing to favour the BAME community instead, then some of them will respond to the barely coded racism of the Tories.

As for the Lib Dems, they are treacherous and completely unprincipled. They’ve shown that, whatever they may say about being a centre party and pulling the Tories in a more moderate direction when they were in government with them, they actually did anything but. It was Nick Clegg who wanted to raise tuition fees, for example. Cameron was prepared to give in to the Lib Dems, who had pledged not to raise them. Clegg, Cable, and Swinson have all shown that they are simply another neoliberal party of deceit with nothing to offer Britain’s working people except more poverty and despair. Instead of being given a life-line, the party should die.

And it would only be a good thing if the Blairite faction in the Labour party died out with them.

See also: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/08/27/ed-davey-elected-leader-of-the-party-of-mischief/

 

 

 

Will Keir Starmer Be the 21st Century Ramsay McDonald?

This occurred to me a few days ago, thinking about Starmer’s strange decision to offer only constructive criticism of the government and his agreement to serve in a coalition with Johnson if asked. It was a bizarre decision, that either showed Starmer as naive, or far more closely aligned with the Tories at the expense of the left in the Labour party.

In fact there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Starmer, as a man of the Labour right, is basically a Tory in the wrong party. The leaked Labour report shows the Blairites in the party bureaucracy – Iain McNicol, John Stolliday, Emilie Oldknow and the other scum – actively working to make sure that Labour lost the 2017 election. One of them described feeling sick that Corbyn was actually high in the polls, and the intriguers exchanged emails in that the wished that Labour would lose to the Lib Dems or the Tories. One of them was even a moderator on a Tory discussion site, and had such a hatred for his own party that people wondered why he was still in it. Of course, when someone in the Labour party actually raised that question they found it was verboten and they were purged on some trumped up charge. And in at least one of the constituency Labour parties the right-wing leadership actually appealed for Lib Dems and Tories to join when the rank and file started to get Bolshie and demand change and the election of genuine Labour officials. Blair himself was described over and again as a man in the wrong party. He was a Thatcherite neoliberal. He stood for private enterprise and the privatisation of the NHS, although with the caveat that he still believed in free universal healthcare paid for by the state. And Thatcher herself claimed him as her greatest achievement. The first thing that the Blair did when he entered No. 10 was invite her round for a visit.

Blair claimed that politics had changed, as the fall of Communism meant that we were living in a post-ideological age. All that stuff by Francis Fukuyama about ‘the end of history’. Blair also packed his administration with Tories, arguing that in this new political era he wanted to reach across party lines and form a government of all the talents.

But neoliberalism itself has not triumphed, except as a zombie ideology kept walking by the political, social and economic elites long after it should have been interred. It keeps the 1 per cent massively rich at the expense of everyone else. And under Corbyn people started to wake up to it. Which is why the establishment were frantic to demonise him, first as a Communist or Trotskyite, and then, in a grotesque reversal of the truth, an anti-Semite. Starmer’s victory in the leadership elections is basically the Blairites returning to power and attempting to restore their previous domination.

It’s perfectly possible that Starmer is also simply being naive. After all, Germany’s equivalent party, the SPD, went into coalition with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, the German Conservatives. It was a disastrous mistake, as Merkel’s gang stole the credit for their reforms strengthening Germany’s welfare state, while making sure that the SPD took the blame for their mistakes and the negative part of the coalition programme. The result was that the SPD lost the next election heavily to Merkel. 

There’s also the object lesson of what happened to the Lib Dems in this country when Nick Clegg threw in his lot with Cameron. Despite the rhetoric of dragging the Tories further left or rather to the centre, Clegg immediately abandoned any real centrism and backed Cameron’s vile, murderous austerity programme to the hilt. Indeed, he went even further. Cameron was willing to concede to Clegg that university tuition fees shouldn’t be raised. But Clegg decided that they should. And so they were, and British students naturally turned against the man who betrayed them. And at the next election, the Lib Dems were devastated as their supporters chose instead either to vote Tory or Labour.

And there’s an important lesson for Starmer from the Labour party’s own 20th century history. Right at the end of the 1920s or the beginning of the 1930s, the Labour Party entered a coalition with the Conservatives under its leader, Ramsay McDonald. This was a response to the Wall Street Crash and the global recession that followed. The party’s members wanted their government to act in the interests of the workers, who were being laid off in droves, or had their wages and what unemployment relief there was cut. Instead the party followed orthodox economic policy and cut government spending, following the Tory programme of welfare cuts, mass unemployment and lower wages. This split the party, with the rump under McDonald losing popular support and dying. McDonald himself was hated and reviled as a traitor.

Something similar could easily occur if Starmer’s Labour went into coalition with the Tories. They’d back the programme of further austerity, an end to the welfare state and the privatisation of the NHS, and would lose members as a result. Just as the party did under Blair. However, I can see Starmer and the Blairites seeing this as a success. They despise traditional Labour members and supporters, whom they really do view as Communist infiltrators. They did everything they could to purge the party of Corbyn supporters, using the accusation of Communism and then anti-Semitism as the pretext for doing so. And they seemed determined to split the party if they could not unseat him. There were the series of attempted coups, in one of which Starmer himself was a member. It also seemed that they intended to split the party, but hold on to its name, bureaucracy and finances in order to present themselves as the real Labour party, even though they’re nothing of the sort.

My guess is that this would happen if Starmer does accept an invitation from Boris to join him in government. And the question is whether Starmer realised this when he made his agreement with the blonde clown. Is he so desperate for power that he sees it as a risk he should take?

Or does he say it as a way of joining the party to which he really feels allegiance, and a useful way of purging Labour of all the awkward lefties?

 

Tories Create Sock Puppet Twitter Accounts to Push Anti-Lockdown Propaganda

The Tories don’t get any better. The party that spent public money on the Institute for Statecraft and its wretched Democracy Initiative, or whatever the wretched organisation was called, to put out anti-Labour, anti-Corbyn propaganda from its army of sympathetic hacks on Twitter has once again been exposed using pretty much the same reprehensible tactics. The pretext for giving the Democracy Initiative our hard earned tax money was to defend democracy against Russian on-line influence. In reality this meant targeting any British or European politico that the right didn’t like. This time there seems to have been absolutely no excuse whatsoever. They did it simply to push propaganda. And when caught the sock accounts were deleted and the Department for Health and Social Care went on the attack, vehemently denying they had done any such thing, and shouting that it was all misinformation that would damage the common effort to combat Coronavirus. Rubbish. The Department was caught red-handed, and it’s got the weaselly paw-prints of the man Zelo Street calls ‘Polecat’ Dom all over it.

Mike put up the story last night. John O’Connell, of the awesome Rightwing Watch, had discovered 128 fake accounts, 9 probable fakes and a further 14, possibles, which had been created by someone at the Department. 43 of those fake accounts used photographs of real NHS staff. One of these was for a deaf NHS junior doctor, ‘Susan’, who was due to transition into someone of the opposite gender. ‘Susan’ gave a shout out to the LGBTQ+ community, and praised Boris Johnson. The photograph used for the Tweet was identified by John Scott as that of Mia Magklavani, a paediatric staff nurse from Greece. The fake accounts were trying to push for the ‘herd immunity’ solution to the crisis, although this changed and instead they were arguing that the lockdown should be lifted.

The DHSC created these sock accounts through a marketing company set up a few months ago. This company apparently only has one client – the DHSC, and a staff of three, all ex-DHSC. The posts were sent using the mass-posting tool Hootsuite, whose account was registered to one person with four assigned contributors. That person is a government employee on temporary secondment to the department.

O’Connell contacted the DHSC about this, naturally making some inquiries. They refused to comment. He also offered to provide all his data to them to help them with an internal inquiry, which they declined. He also asked to deal directly with their Soc Med and Comms teams to work through their data. They refused that offer too. When he asked for further comment, he got this reply from the Department:

These claims are categorically false.

To share disinformation of this kind undermines the national effort against coronavirus.

Before anyone shares unsubstantiated claims online, use the SHARE checklist to help stop the spread of harmful content:
https://sharechecklist.gov.uk/ 

O’Connell makes it very clear that no-one should be surprised by these tactics. They’re what the Tories did when they were pushing Brexit with Cambridge Analytica. And at the general election First Draft, a monitoring body, found that they issued 5,952 political ads on Facebook that they called ‘indecent, dishonest and untruthful.’ The Labour Party didn’t issue any deceitful advertising.

Mike in his article on this squalid little tactic advises people not to use the ‘sharechecklist’ link, as the Tories at the changed their publicity department’s monicker to ‘FactCheckUK’ at the election. This purported to be an independent fact-checking organisation, and calmly reassured anyone who used it that the Tories were telling the truth, and Labour were lying. Which was more lies, of course.

John O’Connell further states that the DHSC and various NHS trusts have shown no interest in the welfare of the 43 NHS staff whose photos were used. He naturally wonders if this runs contrary to their duty of care. And Mike concludes his article about this by asking rhetorically

And why would anybody use a government website to check whether content is harmful, when it’s the government that is accused of creating it?

The danger is that the Tory government is undermining trust in the institutions we need to be able to trust. It is deadly dangerous – but the Tories are playing the fool.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/04/20/more-coronavirus-propaganda-hundreds-of-fake-nhs-social-media-accounts-set-up-by-health-dept/

Zelo Street added further information, noting that another Tweeter had tried to alert various media figures to the scandal, like Laura Kuenssberg, Robert Peston, Peter Jukes of Byline media, and Novara Media, The Skwawkbox, Zelo Street itself, and Carole Cadwalladr. Unfortunately, although Peter Jukes responded stating that it looked very much like Cambridge Analytica/ Russian bot farm tactics, the other major media figures appear to be uninterested. Zelo Street suggested that it might be because they’re afraid of Polecat Dom.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/nhs-fake-twitter-accounts-exposed.html

Zelo Street followed up their piece with a further article arguing that Dominic Cummings was very likely behind this torrent of sock puppetry and falsehoods, as the Polecat has previous. He was rumoured to be the man behind an abusive account, @toryeducation, when he was but a lowly Spad working for Michael Gove in the education department. This Twitter account poured scorn and abuse on politicos like Margaret Hodge, Chris Patten, Tristram Hunt, Hannah Richardson, Robert Peston, the Beeb, as well as Zelo Street and Tom Barry of Boris Watch.

Cummings denied he was behind these tweets, but Toby Helm, at that time a hack at the Observer, revealed that the Department had taken steps to stop the Twitter feed issuing any more abuse against its opponents. He also stated that the Observer had said that two contributors to it were Dominic Cummings and Henry de Zoete. Under the code governing spads, disseminating party political material and personal abuse were sackable offences. Cummings and de Zoete had not denied they contributed to the feed, merely saying that they were not @toryeducation.

And, like the 128 sock puppets John O’Connell discovered, @toryeducation also mysteriously vanished. It was registered as an official Tory account on Twitter until the day after the Observer told the world who was behind it. And a year after this all occurred, bloated badger-haired Libertarian Fascist Guido Fawkes revealed that it was indeed Cummings who had been the Twitter account while discussing a spat between Gove and Clegg over free school meals.

Zelo Street concludes

‘Cummings is not, it seems, subject to the controlling hand of his current boss right now, and restored to health following his brush with Covid-19. And by complete coincidence you understand, the Twitter fakery is firing up again. As Private Eye magazine might have put it, I wonder if the two are in any way related? I think we should be told.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/tory-twitter-dirty-tricks-warning-from.html

It seems O’Connell has got the Tories bang to rights, right down to the personal identity of the woman behind all these fake accounts. And it really does look like Dominic Cummings is also behind it, although given their record of flagrant, gross mendacity, he doesn’t seem to have broken any established Tory patterns of conduct whatsoever. It would be rather more surprising if they told the truth instead.

But it also shows the Tories are afraid. Very afraid. According to polls, 65 per cent of the public think that Johnson is doing a good job, which shows how effective media spin and propaganda is. But with the death toll increasing and medical staff running out of PPE, that spin appears to be wearing very thin.

And so they’ve started lying again, to cover up their massive failures and the deaths for which they’re responsible.

The sock puppets’ support for the discredited ‘herd immunity’ policy and an end to the lockdown also shows how worried they are about their donors’ interests. The party’s backers clearly want the lockdown ended so that they can continue making big bucks.

Even though this policy could lead to 40,000 deaths, or even as many as 200 – 250,000.

But still, Murdoch and those hedge fund managers must have their billions.

 

 

 

The Beeb’s Biased Reporting of NHS Privatisation

The Corporation’s General Right-wing Bias

The BBC is infamous for its flagrant right-wing bias. Writers and experts like Barry and Savile Kushner in their Who Needs the Cuts, academics at the media research centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff Universities, and ordinary left-wing bloggers like Mike and Zelo Street have pointed out time and again that the corporation massively prefers to have as commenters and guests on its show Conservative MPs and spokespeople for the financial sector on its news and political comment programmes, rather than Labour MPs and activists and trade unionists. The Corporation relentless pushed the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. But it has also promoted the privatisation of the NHS too through its biased reporting.

Biased Towards NHS Privatisation

Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis’ book on the privatisation of the NHS, NHS – SOS, has a chapter by Oliver Huitson, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’, discussing the biased reporting of the NHS’s privatisation by the media in general. Here, however, I will just confine myself to describing the Corporation’s role. The Beeb was frequently silent and did not report vital pieces of information about successive privatisations, such as the involvement of private healthcare companies in demanding them and conflicts of interest. On occasion, this bias was actually worse than right-wing rags like the Daily Mail. Although these ardently supported the NHS’ privatisation, they frequently reported these cases while the Beeb did not. When the moves towards privatisation were reported, they were often given a positive spin. For example, the establishment of the Community Care Groups, groups of doctors who are supposed to commission medical services from the private sector as well as from within the NHS, and which are legally allowed to raise money from the private sector, were positively described by the Corporation as ‘giving doctors more control’.

Lack of Coverage of Private Healthcare Companies Role in Privatisation

David Cameron and Andrew Lansley did not include Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill in the Tories’ 2010 manifesto, because they didn’t believe they’d win the election if they did. But in all the two years of debate about the bill, the Beeb only twice reported doubts about the bill’s democratic mandate. (p.152). In October 2010, Mark Britnell was invited to join Cameron’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. Britnell had worked with the Labour government and was a former head of commissioning for the NHS. But he was also former head of health for the accountancy firm, KPMG, which profits greatly from government privatisation and outsourcing. He declared that the NHS would be shown ‘no mercy’ and would become a ‘state insurance provider, not a state deliverer’. But the BBC decided not to report all this until four days after others had broken the story. And when they did, it was only to explain a comment by Nick Clegg about how people are confused when they hear politicians stating how much they love the NHS while at the same time demanding its privatisation. (pp.153-4).

On 21 November 2011 Channel 4 News reported that they had obtained a document which showed clearly that GP commissioning was intended to create a market for private corporations to come in and take over NHS services. But This was only reported by the Groaniad and the Torygraph. The rest of the media, including the Beeb, ignored it. (pp. 156-7).

Lansley was also revealed to have received donations from Andrew Nash, chairman of Care UK, another private healthcare firm hoping to profit from NHS privatisation. But this also was not reported by the Corporation. (pp. 157-8).

In January 2011 the Mirror reported that the Tories had been given over £750,000 from donors with major connections to private healthcare  interests since David Cameron had become their chief in 2005. But this was also not mentioned by the Beeb. (pp. 158).

The Mirror also found that 40 members of the House of Lords had interests in NHS privatisation, while the Social Investigations blog suggested that it might be as high as 142. The BBC, along with several papers, did not mention this. (pp. 158-9).

Sonia Poulton, a writer for the Heil, stated on her blog that 31 Lords and 18 MPs have very lucrative interests in the health industry. But this was also ignored by the Beeb, along with the rest of the media with the exception of the Guardian. (p. 159).

The Tory MP, Nick de Bois, was a fervent support of the Tories’ NHS privatisation. He is a majority shareholder in Rapier Design Group, which purchased Hampton Medical Conferences, a number of whose clients were ‘partners’ in the National Association of Primary Care, another group lobbying the Tories for NHS privatisation. This was also not reported by the Beeb. (pp. 159-60).

The Beeb also chose not to report how Lord Carter of Coles, the chair of the Co-operation and Competition Panel charged with ensuring fair access to the NHS for private healthcare companies, was also receiving £799,000 per year as chairman of McKesson Information Solutions, part of the massive American McKesson healthcare company. (p. 160).

There were other links between politicos, think tanks, lobby groups and private healthcare companies. The health regulator, Monitor, is dominated by staff from McKinsey and KPMG. But this also isn’t mentioned by the press. (pp. 160-1).

Beeb Falsely Presents Pro-Privatisation Think Tanks as ‘Independent‘

The BBC, along with much of the rest of the media, have also been responsible for misrepresenting spokespeople for pro-privatisation lobby groups as disinterested experts, and the organisations for which they speak as just independent think tanks. This was how the Beeb described 2020health.org, whose chief executive, Julia Manning, was twice invited onto the air to discuss the NHS, and an entire article was given over to one of her wretched organisation’s reports. However, SpinWatch reported that its chairman, former Tory minister Tom Sackville, was also CEO of the International Federation of Health Plans, representing of 100 private health insurance companies. Its advisory council includes representatives of AstraZeneca, NM Rothschild, the National Pharmaceutical Association, Nuffield private hospital group, and the Independent Healthcare Advisory Services. (p. 162).

Another lobby group whose deputy director, Nick Seddon, and other employees were invited onto the Beeb to discuss the proposals was Reform. Seddon was head of communications at Circle, the first private healthcare company to take over an NHS hospital. Seddon’s replacement at Circle was Christina Lineen, a former aide to Andrew Lansley. None of this was reported by the Beeb. Their corporate partners included companies like Citigroup, KPMG, GlaxoSmithKline and Serco. Huitson states ‘Through Seddon’s and other Reform Staffs’ appearances, the BBC may have facilitated private sector lobbying on a publicly funded platform without making relevant interests known’. (163).

Beeb Did Not Cover Protests and Opposition to Bill

Pages 164-5 also discusses the Beeb’s refusal, with few exceptions, to interview critics of Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill, the rightwing bias of panels discussing it and how the Beeb did not cover protests against it or its discussion in parliament. Huitson writes

At the BBC opportunities were frequently missed to provide expert opposition to the bill on a consistent basis. the RCGP’s Clare Gerada was largely the exception to this rule. Many of the most well-known and authoritative critics of the bill – the likes of professors Allyson Pollock or Colin Leys, doctors Jacky Davis and Wendy Savage from Keep Our NHS Public – never appeared on the BBC to discuss the plans. Davis recalls being invited to appear on the BBC a number of times but the item was cancelled on every occasion. ‘Balance’ is supposedly one of the BBC’s primary objectives yet appearing on the Today programme of 1 February 2012 to discuss the bill, for instance, were Shirley Williams (who voted in favour of the bill, however reluctantly), Nick Seddon of ‘independent’ Reform (pro-Bill), Steve Field (pro-Bill) and Chris Ham (pro-Bill). It’s difficult to see how that is not a breach of BBC guidelines and a disservice to the public. One of the fundamental duties of an open media is to ensure that coverage is not skewed towards those with the deepest pockets. And on that issue the media often performed poorly.

Further criticism of the BBC stems from its curious lack of NHS coverage during the climactic final month before the bill was passed in the House of Lords on 19 March. One such complaint came from blogger and Oxford Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology Dorothy Bishop, who wrote to the BBC to ask why it had failed to cover a number of NHS stories in March, including an anti-bill petition that had been brought to the House by Lord Owen, carrying 486,000 signatures of support. In reply, the BBC confirmed that the bill had been mentioned on the Today programme in March prior to the bill’s passing, though just once. Bishop replied:’So, if I have understood this right, during March, the Today programme covered the story once, in an early two-minute slot, before the bill was passed. Other items that morning included four minutes on a French theme park based on Napoleon, six minutes on international bagpipe day and eight minutes on Jubilee celebrations.’

Other BBC omissions include Andrew Lansley being heckled by angry medical staff at a hospital in Hampstead, as reported by both the Mail and Sky News. On 17 March a peaceful anti-bill march took place in central London. Those out protesting for their national health service found themselves kettled by riot police despite being one of the most harmless-looking crowds you’re ever likely to see. The protest and the shameful police response were completely ignored by the media, except for a brief mention on a Guardian blog. On social media numerous examples have been reported of protests and actions opposing the bill that were entirely absent from national coverage.

Then, on 19 March, the day of the final vote on the bill, the BBC ran not a single article on the event, despite this being one of the most bitterly opposed pieces of legislation in recent history – it was as if the vote was not taking place. The next day, with the bill passed, they ran a full seven articles on the story. Three days after the bill passed, Radio 4 broadcast The Report: ‘Simon Cox asks: why is NHS reform mired in controversy?’ Why this was not broadcast before the Lords’ vote is a mystery. 

When the Bill was passed, the bill scrolling across the BBC News’ screen ran ‘Bill which gives power to GPs passes’. (166). Huitson remarks that when the Beeb and the other news networks reported that the Bill gave power to GPs and allowed a greater role for the private sector, it was little more than regurgitating government press releases. (p. 168).

Beeb Bias Problem Due to Corporation’s Importance and Domination of Broadcast News

Huitson also comments on the specific failure of the Beeb to provide adequate coverage of NHS privatisation in its role as one of the great British public institutions, the dominant role it has in British news reporting. On pages 169-70 he writes

Campaigners may not expect more from the Sun but they certainly do from the BBC, given its status as an impartial public service broadcaster whose news gathering is supported directly by licence fee payers. The BBC accounts for 70 per cent of news consumption on television. Further, the BBC accounts for 40 per cent of online news read by the public, three times that of its closes competitor, the Mail. Quite simply, the BBC dominates UK news. The weight given to the BBC here is not purely down to its dominance, however, but also because, along with the NHS, the BBC remains one of our great public institutions, an entity that is supposedly above commercial pressures. Many of the stories ignored by the BBC were covered by the for-profit, right-wing press, as well as the Guardian and Channel 4, so the concern is not that the organisation failed to ‘campaign’ for the NHS, but that it failed to report facts that other outlets found newsworthy.

The BBC’#s archive of TV and radio coverage is neither available for the public to research nor technically practical to research, but there are a number of reasons for confidence that their online content is highly indicative of their broader output. First, BBC online is a fully integrated part of the main newsroom rather than a separate operation. Consequently, TV and radio coverage that can be examined is largely indistinguishable from the related online content, as demonstrated in the examples given above. During the debate of Lansley’s bill, the BBC TV and radio were both subject to multiple complaints, the figures for which the BBC has declined to release.

Beeb’s Reporting of NHS Privatisation as Biased as Coverage of Miners’ Strike

He also compares the Beeb’s coverage of the bill, along with that of the rest of the media, to its similarly biased reporting of the miners’ strike.

The overall media coverage of the health bill brings to mind a quote from BBC radio correspondent Nicholas Jones, on the BBC’s coverage of the miners’ strike: ‘stories that gave prominence to the position of the National Union of Miners could simply be omitted, shortened or submerged into another report.’ (pp. 172-3).

Conclusion

The Beeb does produce some excellent programmes. I really enjoyed last night’s Dr. Who, for example. But the right-wing bias of its news reporting is now so extreme that in many cases it is fair to say that it is now a propaganda outlet for the Tory party and big business. It’s utterly indefensible, and in my view it will only be reformed if and when the newsroom and its managers are sacked in its entirety. In the meantime, Boris and the rest of the Tories are clamouring for its privatisation. Godfrey Bloom, one of the more prominent Kippers, has also put up a post or two in the past couple of days demanding precisely that.

If the Beeb was genuinely impartial, it would have defenders on the Left. But it is rapidly losing them thanks to its bias. And to the Tories, that’s also going to be a plus.

Thanks to the Beeb’s own Tory bias, it’s going to find it very hard to combat their privatisation.

And in the meantime they will have helped destroy the most valued of British institutions, the NHS, and free, universal healthcare to Britain’s citizens.