Open Britain on the Corruption of British Democracy by Corporate Dark Money

‘Dear David,

Brexit, we were told, was all about regaining Britain’s “sovereignty” and being in control of our own destiny. But big money in British politics is a more significant threat to our future than unelected EU bureaucrats ever were.

Even though the Brussels bureaucrats have been removed from the equation, people still don’t feel they have a proper say in how this country operates. One big reason for that is the amount of money, often from opaque sources, sloshing around our political system.

Have you ever thought that the national picture painted by the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Rishi Sunak differs significantly from the one you see when you look around your own family and friends? You’re not alone.

Britain ranks among the most socially liberal countries in the world on key issues, and a substantial majority now reject many of the established economic assumptions of recent decades. But you won’t see any of that reflected in the current government’s agenda. Westminster is becoming an island of irrelevance, increasingly detached from the concerns of ordinary people.

There’s a reason for that. The government cannot hear the concerns of ordinary people over the hubbub of wealthy donors and other lobbyists with shady financial backers.

As part of our Parliamentary work, we’ve been researching just how broken the system is. In this longer-than-usual email, we’d like to share some of that with you.

Dark Money and Foreign Influence

The UK has particularly lax campaign finance laws. As a result, many donations get through that probably shouldn’t. Yes, there are permissibility requirements in place, but there are plenty of ways to evade them if you want to.

The term “Dark money” refers to donations whose origins are untraceable. Because the ultimate source cannot be confirmed, there is no way of knowing whether that money comes from the kind of person or organisation that shouldn’t have influence over our lawmakers.

One example of dark money is the “Proxy Donation”. These are donations made by one person, who would not be a permitted donor,  in the name of another who is. Some examples include:

• Ehud Sheleg, art dealer and former Conservative party treasurer, gave over £600k to the Tory party. Documents later showed that the money originated in a Russian account of Sheleg’s father-in-law – a former official in the old pro-Putin regime in Ukraine. Proxy donations are a complete blindspot in the law, so there was no legal mechanism to hold him accountable for it.
  
• Lubov Cherdukhin – back at it again – gave money to the Conservative party while her husband was receiving funds from business deals with sanctioned Russian oligarchs. She gave £50k to the Tories 8 days after Putin invaded Ukraine.
  
• Mohamad Amersi has given over £200k to the Conservatives and worked closely with Boris Johnson on key policy decisions. Prior to the donation, he was given a large deposit from a Kremlin-linked company secretly owned by Putin’s telecoms minister Leonid Reiman. 

“Shell Companies” are another way for dubious donors to evade the rules. According to Transparency International, 14% of LLPs established in the UK between 2001-2021 (21,000 companies) show signs of being shell companies. Here are some examples:

• Conservative mega-donor Lubov Cherdukhin, who once paid £160k to play tennis with Boris Johnson, was being paid out by a shell company secretly owned by Russian senator and Putin ally Suleiman Kerimov, according to the BBC.
  
• The offshore company Aquind is owned by a former Russian oil magnate and a Russian arms manufacturer. The company has donated heavily to the Conservative party.
  
• Top Labour MPs Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, and Dan Jarvis received a combined £345,000 from a company called MPM Connect Ltd, which has no staff or website and is registered at an office where the secretary had never heard of the company. 

“Unincorporated Associations” are nebulous groups with little oversight or legal classification. It’s essentially like ticking the “miscellaneous” box on a donation form when asked what kind of organisation you are.

• Tory minister Steve Baker’s “Covid Recovery Group” organisation (a parliamentary coalition of anti-lockdown Conservative MPs) received tens of thousands from a UA called the Recovery Alliance. It has no digital footprint, no registered members, and its finances are completely opaque. Opendemocracy has linked it to a number of other covid conspiracy campaigns and anti-lockdown groups. 
  
• Richard Cook’s “Constitutional Research Group” – of which he is the only listed member and chair – gave £435,000 to the DUP’s Brexit campaign. No one knows for sure where the money came from, but investigative journalists discovered his involvement in a number of illicit trades, including underground trash-dumping and fire-arms sales.
  
• According to Byline Times, 29 different opaque UAs donated £14 million to the Conservative party between 2010-2022. 

Big Money

Between 2001 and 2021, one-fifth of all political donations in the UK came from just ten men with an average age of 70. If that doesn’t indicate that we have a big problem, we’re really not sure what would.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with political donations, huge amounts of money coming from multinational corporations and the mega-rich does raise questions about who really calls the shots. Especially when they seem to get things in return. 

Here are some situations where extremely wealthy individuals and corporations used their financial heft to influence things: 

• In 2021, the Conservatives received £400k in donations from oil and gas companies while the government was deciding on new oil and gas licences.
  
• More generally, the Tories took over a million from oil companies between 2019 and 2021.
  
• From 2020-2022, the Conservatives took £15 million from the financial services industry, which they were certainly kind to when it came to dealing with banker’s bonuses.
  
• Labour MP Wes Streeting received £15k from John Armitage, former Tory party donor and manager of a hedge fund that owns half a billion dollars in US health insurance and private healthcare. Streeting recently came out in support of private hospitals.
  
• The “Leader’s Group” is a dining club of Tory super-donors that has given over £130 million to the party since 2010. The club’s billionaires and business moguls have been known to dine with Boris Johnson.

• In 2022-2023, controversial groups, including gambling giants, climate sceptic organisations, and evangelical Christian groups, made over £1 million in donations for staffing the Labour front bench. Recipients include MPs Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, and Yvette Cooper. Reeves alone received nearly £250k.
  
• Recently, Crossbench peer Caroline Cox received large donations from American evangelical Christian activists against gay marriage that used hateful language about Muslims. 

While the Conservatives often top the list when it comes to money in politics, remember that this is a cross-party systemic problem. The real issue is that the rules that are supposed to prevent the wealthy from buying influence just aren’t strong enough. We’ve allowed a situation to emerge where money can buy outcomes almost directly, and the mechanisms to detect the sources of that money are ineffective. Our system just isn’t fit for the 21st century. 

The first step to fixing any problem is admitting that there is a problem. Our political system is addicted to money, to the extent that we’re now shutting real people’s voices out on a regular basis.

As you know, Open Britain’s mission these days is to deliver a democracy that works for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. That means a political system primarily driven by people, not primarily driven by money. That’s what democracy was always meant to be about. 

As you might expect from what you’ve read above, we don’t take donations from shady think tanks or Russian oligarchs. All our work is funded directly by you, our supporters. We believe that having our work funded through small donations from a large number of people is the healthiest model of all, one that allows us to say what needs to be said to whoever needs to hear it. We hope you agree.

All the very best,

The Open Britain team

SUPPORT THE MOVEMENT

Open Britain is proud to be funded entirely
through small donations from our many supporters.

Your generosity makes all our work possible.
Thank you!‘

Open Britain: Richard Tice’s Party Bribing Tories to Join Reform

A week or so ago, the hard-right crowd on the Net, the people who think the Tories are now too left-wing and ‘socialist’, were posting videos boasting that various Tory politicos had defected to Reform and more were expected. Tonight I got this message from Open Britain stating that Tice and his cronies were using something more material than persuasive arguments and political idealism to try to persuade Tory politicians to join them.

‘Hi David,

Did you see the news about Nigel Farage’s friends at Reform UK?

According to the Daily Mail, Farage’s mates have been attempting to bribe a number of Tory MPs to defect to Reform by promising them over £400,000 a piece.

The pitch seems to be that these Tory MPs are certain to lose their seats at the next election, so they might as well cash in by making the switch now. 

Clearly, ‘Team Farage’ wants us to believe that his party has momentum behind it and that it’s not just a club for cranks and con men.

But they’ve got their work cut out for them because we’ve seen through Farage now. We know he’s a charlatan who will sell his country down the river so his mates can make a fast buck.

If the Great British public does sweep the Tories out of power at the next election (and the polls say they will), then it will be to replace them with MPs who care about democratic principles, people who are committed to delivering the things that matter to ordinary people. It certainly won’t be to fill Parliament with an army of Nutty Nigel’s acolytes. 

This is an excellent illustration of what we’re up against. A charlatan with piles of money and a ruthless determination to have one over the British people…again.

Don’t let him get away with it. Be part of our growing movement. Help send this dangerous man back into his cave.

The Open Britain Team

FOLLOW OUR CAMPAIGN‘

Open Britain on Lee Anderson, Sunak and the Further Decline of Democracy in Britain

‘Dear David,

If you listen carefully, you can hear the Conservatives scraping the bottom of the barrel. Through all of the corruption, scandals, and resignations over the years, Rishi Sunak’s government is facing a serious dilemma: they’ve got no one normal left to serve in key positions. 

That’s why Lee Anderson MP was just made deputy chair of the Conservative party. Not because he was the best candidate but because there are simply no decent people left who are willing to go down with this sinking Tory ship.

Anyone who’s familiar with “30p Lee” will not be surprised to see him immediately cause a scandal. After all, this is the man who condemned food bank users for being “bad at budgeting”, refused to watch England play because they took the knee to stand against racism, and expressed delight at being named the “worst man in Britain” 

A core part of Anderson’s new role is promoting the government in the media and generally garnering public support. It’s not an enviable position for anyone to be in, but they genuinely seem to have found the worst possible person for the job. 

Anderson is, of course, off to a roaring start as deputy chair. He very publicly called for the return of the death penalty just before his appointment, forcing Rishi Sunak to awkwardly clarify that that was not the government’s official position. He also advocated for a “naval standoff” in the channel over small boats and got himself into a petty row with a BBC reporter who brought up his past. That’s just in his first week. 

The real story here is not just that Lee Anderson is the worst kind of politician and person (though that’s hard to deny). It’s that Rishi Sunak is too weak to fight off the extreme and incompetent wing of his own party. He’d rather bring them into the fold than take any kind of principled stand.

Rishi’s lame-duck government is an opportunity for far-right ideologues like Lee Anderson. Since Johnson, they’ve made a comfortable home in the Conservative party and advanced an anti-democratic, xenophobic, economically illiterate agenda that has had real repercussions for the public. Sunak, despite his promises for change, is only letting them dig their heels in even further. 

The most frustrating part of all this is that, despite what he may say, Lee Anderson and his ilk are nowhere near being representative of ordinary British people. Yes, there are some people who share Andreson’s extreme, pigheaded views, but they are a tiny minority and should never be allowed to dominate the political debate, let alone occupy positions of power and influence over our lives.

Nigel Farage plays that game too. He claims to be an ordinary bloke, someone you might have a pint with in your local pub, but he isn’t. He’s a multimillionaire TV show host with a global network of rich and influential friends. Remember that the next time you hear him dishing out questionable advice about the direction we should be taking our country in.

All this shows why our mission to fight for proper democracy is so important and why we MUST succeed. If we don’t, our broken democracy will continue to allow people like Lee Anderson to exercise power and influence over our lives. What a terrible thought that is.

All the best,

The Open Britain team

SUPPORT THE MOVEMENT‘

I haven’t donated to Open Britain, but I’m putting this message up because it is an accurate statement of the dire state of politics under Sunak and the Tories.

GB News No Longer Paying Guests As Ratings Fall

‘Oh dear. How sad. Never mind’, as Sergeant-Major Shutup from It Ain’t ‘Alf ‘Ot Mum used to say. Mad Brexiteer Mahyar Tousi put up a video yesterday gloating over the continued demise of GB News and boasting about how his own YouTube channel now has more average viewers than the ‘old media’ TV stations. People are continuing to switch off GB News, and so Angela Frangopoulos, the station’s chief Dalek, has ruled that guests will no longer be paid fees for appearances. Regular guests will be paid a flat rate, which sounds like it’s basically just expenses, but it looks like they’re expected to find their own transport and be prompt and prepared for their appearance. Tousi points out that this isn’t a good idea, as guests and contributors should be paid for their expertise and broadcasters are in competition for them. This included GB News, which used to pay them well.

He then talks about the poor average ratings of these channels. The BBC is at the top with 100,000 average views. Next highest is Sky News. GB News is below them, and right at the bottom is Talk TV, which Tousi describes as only half a station that’s only on for part of the day. His channel has 300,000 views or followers, which shows how YouTube channels are eating the old media alive. Which is true, but I wish it didn’t include right-wing channels like Tousi’s.

As for GB News, I think this was supposed to be a rival to the ‘woke, wet BBC’. Their ratings have been steadily going down since they were launched. Many of their programmes have zero people watching. They tried to improve matters by bringing on Farage, and he did boost their rating – but only for his show. Once Farage’s programme had ended, people went back to not watching. This dire situation probably explains why they’ve now hired Lozza Fox and are hiring Jacob Rees-Mogg. Speaking personally, Mogg is one of the last people I want to see on TV, but for some reason the man who comes across very much as wanting to send small children back up chimneys is a great, molten hero of the Tory voters. And I definitely do not want to see any video with Nana Akua complaining about the health service and subtly hinting that it should be privatised.

And this isn’t all of the channel’s problems. Libertarian Islamophobe Mark Steyn left/ was given the heave-ho because of his remarks about the Covid lockdown and vaccination, and the channel is ordering its staff to keep any anti-vaxxer views they may have to themselves. This has outraged all the right-wingers who think that it should have been better to have kept Britain open, risking more people catching the disease and who think that there’s something in the vaccine itself that’s harmful. I think the YouTuber Paz 49 is one of these, as he threw a strop when Reform’s Richard Tice advised people to get the jab.

The internet is taking over, but rather than people watching GB News or Tousi’s right-wing rants, I’d rather people looked at left-wing YouTubers like A Different Bias, Novara Media, Maximilien Robespierre and so many others. As they are presenting a genuinely different view of this country and its politics, which is far more informative than the nonsense spouted by the privileged individuals spouting populist nonsense against the NHS. welfare state and the Channel migrants.

Open Britain Launches Stop Farage Campaign

I had this email from the internet activist group Open Britain yesterday. They’re concerned about the rising popularity of Farage and the Faragist parties and tendency in the Conservatives, and so are launching a campaign to stop him. This is accompanied by another campaign to encourage people to vote, as they’re also worried by low voter turnout and increasing demoralization among the voting public. I think this may be too much for me to get involved with, but I’m putting it up here for anyone who’s interested.

‘Hi David

You’ve heard a lot from us in previous weeks about the tragic state of British politics. We have some good news for you today, Open Britain has a plan. 

How we’re fighting back in 2023

We can’t sit back and watch the fate of Britain struggle. While many are looking at a future general election with great favour, this is not the time to only sit and  watch. Remaining vigilant is not enough in these turbulent times which is why Open Britain is proud to launch two very different but two incredibly impactful campaigns. 

Stop Farage

Farage and his damaging ideology are back. He never really went away but the Reform party, set up as the Brexit party by Farage and led by his pal Richard Tice, is doing better and better in the polls day by day.

We need to end the myth that Farage is an honest man supporting every day Britons. His ideology is driving a stream of inconsiderate and dangerous policies and is empowering the far-right within the Conservative party. We’re campaigning to reduce his influence.

Find Out More

Plan to Vote

Too many people in the UK don’t vote, their vote. This is for many reasons, sadly a good number of people are simply disillusioned. 

We’re frightened that the next elections could be the worst election yet. Changes in the rules means that people who want to vote may be turned away. The new rules have been rushed in, we want to help people plan to vote.

Find Out More

Help us help everybody

While these campaigns are ongoing we will of course be continuing our usual activities. You will still receive regular updates about democracy and still see us pushing other campaigns to fix our country.

Support Open Britain

Kind regards

Matt”

Open Britain: Tories Using Brexit to Scrap Laws Protecting Consumers, Workers and the Environment

Here’s another update on the Tory attack on democracy, this time using the pretext of Brexit to scrap up to 4,000 British laws protecting ordinary Brits and the environment against big business exploitation.

‘Dear David,

The Brexit campaign did not end when the UK left the EU. High priests of the cause, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, continue to influence government priorities and push damaging legislation such as the Retained EU Law Bill.

They say that the Retained EU Law Bill is a simple administrative tool to tidy up UK law following our messy departure from the EU. But the truth is altogether more sinister.

What that Bill actually does is give government ministers powers to scrap up to 4000 perfectly sensible UK laws that enforce environmental standards, protect workers’ rights and help consumers hold big business to account…and all without any further reference to our elected representatives in Parliament.

This Bill is a blatant attempt to further entrench the interests of big business over those of ordinary people and the environment. No wonder they are attempting to rush it through at an indecent pace; it would never pass proper democratic scrutiny.

The fact of the matter is that the Brexit purists in this Sunak government don’t care about democracy. They are only interested in delivering for their wealthy paymasters (spoiler: that’s not you and me), and if that requires them to pass regressive legislation behind a smokescreen of anti-EU sentiment and dangerous xenophobia, then so be it.

They will do anything to perpetuate the illusion that Brexit is something other than a cruel ruse carried out on behalf of the elite beneficiaries of a harsh economic model that puts excessive profits first and people and the environment last.

The Retained EU Law Bill demonstrates the general recklessness of the ongoing Brexit project. Ministers are taking ‘Henry VIII’ powers for themselves and have imposed a deadline of December 2023, beyond which any of the laws on their list that have not been given a reprieve will simply fade into the ether.

Consumer protections…gone. Workers’ rights…gone. Environmental standards…gone. For the Brexit puritans, this would be a proud victory; for the British public, an abject and undemocratic disaster.

By taking this approach, government ministers are effectively cheating Parliament, and therefore the British people, out of our right to scrutinise the laws we must live by. Sunak is effectively placing critical elements of Britain’s future in the hands of a minority of Brexit radicals. No one voted for that, and we should not accept it.

It’s no secret why he’s doing it, either. This Sunak government is so weak that it cannot do anything without the agreement of their most radical faction: those who were never going to be satisfied with Brexit and who want to push this country further into the realm of right-wing extremism. (Just this week, the cranks in that faction forced the government to table an amendment to the Online Safety Bill that would make it illegal to share videos of small-boat Channel crossings if they were presented in a “positive light”. Wow!)

It’s important to remember where all this started…in the poisonous Brexit referendum campaign. There is a direct line between the lies and fear-mongering of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in 2016 and the Conservative playbook in 2023. Unfortunately for us, neither of those two charlatans shows any sign of going away. Almost everything Farage says these days suggests he is planning to unleash another wave of Brexit-level political chaos in the coming elections. And just last week, we saw press reports that Johnson received a record-smashing £1,000,000 donation from a wealthy Brexiteer, which some have speculated could fund a campaign to retake Number 10 if/when the Conservatives take a kicking in May’s local elections.

All of this demonstrates why Open Britain’s fight against the “Farage-isation” of UK politics has never been more important or more urgent. We’re determined to ensure that these political wreckers can never exert their will over us again.

Despite their self-congratulation and the symbolic victories they claim, the Brexit campaign has achieved nothing positive for the people of this country, especially the most vulnerable, who endorsed it with the hope that it would improve their lot. As elections approach, we must all resolve to use our democratic power to put this dangerous ideology to bed once and for all.

The Open Britain team

PS – A quick reminder that we and a number of partners in the democracy sector are working to put pressure on Labour to commit to making the changes we need to renew our political system. You can help right now by signing our joint petition here to get Keir Starmer to support proportional representation.‘

This is all deeply alarming, though not entirely unexpected. We warned a few years ago that the Tories wished to replace EU, or EU inspired human rights legislation with a British Bill of Rights, which would be far weaker.

Going through this, I found the legislation banning people from sharing videos of the channel migrants particularly pernicious. I’d seen something about this in the titles of videos from various anti-immigrant groups and people on the web. The impression given was that the government was doing this to stop people knowing about the large numbers of migrants crossing the channel in order to protect the migrants themselves and the supposed official policies protecting and encouraging them. But according to Britain, this is absolutely not the case.

The Tories really are getting desperate. Sunak is flailing around with no new ideas against a wave of strikes which have popular support. Hence the attempts to make the right to strike all about illegal, and repeal EU legislation in order to appease the Brxiteers. People like Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

We have to stand firm and get them out.

Article in Yorkshirebylines Discussing Violent Misogynist and Far Right Activist Andrew Tate

Thanks to Gillyflower for pointing me towards this excellent article in Yorkshirebylines on Andrew Tate, the British/American far right activist Andrew Tate. Tate has just been arrested by the Romanian plod on charges of enslavement and human trafficking. His extreme right-wing supporters have been crying that somehow he’s been framed because it came after a Twitter spat with Greta Thunberg. Why the Romanian police would be so worried about that is, of course, never explained. It’s just left to the imaginations of their supporters, who assume that because Thunberg is a global Green activist and celebrity, the Romanian government is somehow desperately keen to defend her by imprisoning her critics and opponents. In fact, it appears that Tate was arrested on charges of imprisoning women and forcing them to perform pornographic acts. If this is correct, then Tate deserves to do a lot of time.

Tate’s father was Black Californian chess champion, who was honoured by the state for his achievements in the game at his death. After his father died, Tate and his brother’s mother moved to Luton, where they lived in poverty. He took up kickboxing, got on Big Brother and then was thrown off it after a video was found of him whipping a woman. He then set himself up as a self-help guru and anti-feminist, men’s right’s activist. He’s been thrown off a number of internet platforms for promoting conspiracy theories, violence towards women and rants about the World Economic Forum. This bunch, led by Klaus Schwab, seem to have replaced the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission as the objects of right-wing paranoia. Tate’s mates have included Alex Jones of Infowars, now facing a $1bn bill for damages for libelling the bereaved parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims as ‘crisis actors’, as well as Paul Joseph Watson, Donald Trump jnr and Nigel Farage.

Eventual things got a bit too hot for him in Blighty, so he fled to Romania. According to the article, 40 per cent of his reason for doing so was to escape rape allegations. He’s also very aware of the promotional benefits of being a controversialist, telling his viewers that if they want their blogs and vlogs to get anywhere, they should aim for a 60/40 mix of friends and haters. After the other platforms got rid of him, he was taken up and promoted by Peter Thiel, an American magnate connected to the Alt-Right. Thiel wrote the foreword for William Rees-Mogg’s Libertarian manifesto, The Sovereign Individual, and, as the head of a private healthcare company, wants a slice of the NHS’ business. He was given a £190 million contract by the Tories before this was challenged over breaches of the commissioning process.

To some it all up, he sounds a very nasty piece of work. The article is well worth reading for exposing the connections Tate has to the extreme right, including the people who want to privatise the NHS. And far from appearing like an innocent self-help guru advising men and boys how to reclaim their masculinity constructively, he instead seems to be a violent misogynist.

To read the article, go to: https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/news/andrew-tate-platformed-by-government-favoured-service-provider/

Richard Tice Claiming that Immigration Responsible for Low Wages, Not Thatcherism

I just caught the headline of a video on YouTube, which I think was posted by GB News. They’ve been plugging Reform’s head honcho, Richard Tice, who has been claiming his party would beat the Tories and Keir Starmer at the next election. I’m doubtful of that, as no matter how Tice may talk the party up, Reform is basically the reheated leftovers of UKIP. And despite the way Farage and his party were hailed by the media as a threat to the mainstream, traditional parties, like the SDP in the 1980s it significantly failed to break the mould of modern politics. Indeed, UKIP imploded when Farage bailed out and he was replaced by Gerard Batten, who invited far-right YouTubers Mark Meacham and Carl Benjamin to join. All the genuinely anti-racist members left, the Swindon branch protested against Benjamin being appointed their candidate for the parliamentary elections and the Gloucestershire branch broke away altogether.

From the headline it appears that Tice is now blaming low wage immigration for keeping wages low. He may have a point, in that plentiful unskilled labour means that employers don’t have to worry about offering high wages to attract workers for those jobs. But this seems to be part of a general Brexiteer, right-wing accusation that elite liberals are in favour of mass immigration as it provides them with a source of low paid labour. You find this attitude stated every so often, but there’s never any evidence cited for it, and I’ve never come across it from the left. I have come across the assertion, stated in a book published nearly 20 years ago attacking the Neo-Cons, Confronting the New Conservatism, that the Neo-Cons of both the left and the right are in favour of affirmative action programmes, so long as they don’t affect their children. I’ve also seen the argument that immigration is good for the country because on average immigrant workers pay more in tax than they take in benefits – contrary to what you’d hear from the right – and so support the state and welfare system with their taxes. Also, they do the jobs White British tend not to want to do.

So if immigrants aren’t responsible for low wages, who is? Easy – Margaret Thatcher and the Tories. Thatcher preached wage restraint and freezes in order to keep inflation low. This is leading to millions of working Brits, of all colours, now earning literal starvation wages, well below the rate of inflation. Many families are only keeping their heads above water through food and warm banks, where they have a choice between eating, heating their homes or paying the rent or mortgage. The Tories in particular have offered pay rises well below the inflation rate, so that they are in fact cuts. Hence the current wave of strikes as workers are fed up with it. Also, the 19th century classical economists from whom the Tories take their ideas recommended that the government should keep ‘a reserve army of the unemployed’ in order to keep wages low by providing a ready source of labour. I’ve got a feeling Blair and Gordon Brown had much the same idea when they talked about the need to keep the labour market fluid.

It is Thatcherism that’s really responsible for the mass impoverishment of this country’s working people. Tice is merely trying to divert attention away from this by playing the race card against immigrants. Don’t vote for him, and don’t vote for the Tories.

Our Nurses Are Striking against Real Starvation Wages

According to the news, the NHS nurses are going on strike on the 15th and 20th of December. I don’t want the nurses to strike, but I don’t blame and absolutely support them. Or rather, what I should say is that I don’t want the nurses to have to strike. Because I don’t believe they have a choice. I went to one of the fringe Labour meetings online a few weeks ago. I can’t remember whether it was organised by Arise or the Labour Assembly Against Austerity. Not that it really matters. One of the speakers was a medical professional or activist with the NHS. And what she said was really chilling. One quarter of the country’s NHS trusts – I don’t know whether this is Britain as a whole or just England – were running food banks for their nursing staff. For the nurses! And we have student nurses considering dropping out, because they can’t afford to feed themselves and study! And that obese abomination Therese Coffey wanted the NHS budget cut further. Like all the other right-wing Tories, including Farage, who boast about they’re going to cut waste. The Irish vlogger, Maximilien Robespierre, asked in one of his videos whether she was the most odious Tory politician. She had responded to an interviewer’s question by saying that if nurses didn’t like it, they should look for work elsewhere. It’s the standard Tory answer that you hear trotted out whenever there’s a strike. Presumably Coffey thinks we could get more poor immigrants to work for cheap wages to replace them, as one of these horrors suggested we could do to plug the labour shortage in other industries. I’m sick of Coffey, sick of Hunt, and sick of the Tories full stop.

Defend the NHS!

Pay nurses a living wage!

Tories out!

Media Suggests New Farage-Led Party Could Challenge Tories with 25 per cent of the Vote

I’ll believe it when I see it, but that was what the headlines said on two videos I found on two right-leaning channels on YouTube yesterday. I think one was GB News, which in some cases is so right leaning that it’s actually fallen over. Farage has been making noises about a political comeback and was reported as recommending that the various fringe right-wing parties like Reform and Reclaim should unite to challenge the Conservatives. Because apparently the Tories aren’t the Tories anymore, and Rishi Sunak is following socialist policies. This comes from the bonkers Brexiteer right, the kind of people who declare that the Nazis and Italian Fascists were socialists because they started out on the left and were all in favour of state control. Which conveniently ignores the fact that both parties were nevertheless frantic supporters of private industry – Mussolini even included it as one of the fundamentals of the Fascist state. I wonder what they would have made of Harold Macmillan, who supported the social democratic consensus and memorably described Thatcher’s privatisations as ‘selling off the family silver’. ‘Supermac’ widened access to the universities so that people from more ordinary backgrounds could attend and expanded the construction of council houses, though these were poorer quality than those built by Labour under Clem Attlee. Presumably he was a socialist too? The Lotus Eaters have also got in on that act and were pushing David Kurten’s Heritage Party as ‘the real Conservatives’. Yeah, David Kurten, whose name reminds me of Peter Kurten, the gay serial killer of 1920s Germany, dubbed the something-or-other vampire or werewolf, because he drank his victims’ blood. Obviously, the only thing Dave has in common with that monster was the surname.

I’m sceptical of all this. I think Tice and Fox are too possessive of their own positions as leaders of their respective parties, and I can’t see them merging for the same reason other small parties on the political fringes, like the NF and BNP, seem to fragment into ever smaller political sects, due to personality clashes and differences in doctrine and strategy. Besides which, Farage has had his day. He was never elected to parliament despite his many attempts, did absolutely nothing as an MEP except collect his paycheque and moan, and jumped ship from UKIP, leaving it to sink under the inspired leadership of Gerald Batten.

As for 25 per cent of the British electorate voting for them, this reminds me of one of the stats the Independent reported back in the ’90s. This claimed that a poll had found that a majority of Brits would vote for a far-right party. In fact, the closest the BNP ever got to sweeping into power was in 2007 and it imploded under massive public criticism soon after. Before then I think it had never got more than 2 per cent of the vote. The prediction of a new, even more right-wing party challenging the Conservatives seems very much like that prediction. Though the Tories themselves are now horrifically right-wing, no matter what the demented Brexiteer right may think.