I know it’s still the Christmas season, but we’re in those days between Christmas proper and New Year when there’s a sort of lull in the festivities. I’m therefore going to post one or two pieces about politics. And one of the issues I want to tackle is a video from GB News’ and the New Culture Forum’s Calvin Robinson, which stated that the way to prevent your children from being politically indoctrinated in schools was to support free school. The thumbnail for the video shows the message, and says that children were told by the teacher to vote Labour.
This comes from an interview Robinson did with a woman, who was suing her local school because of political indoctrination. According to this lady, the school was teaching the gender ideology and Critical Race Theory. One teacher told the class to vote Labour and the children were also encouraged to sing ‘Our prime minister is a racist’. This was presumably back when Johnson was in power. If all this is true, then I think the woman’s quite right to complain and sue. It is political indoctrination. Gender ideology and Critical Race Theory aren’t facts, although a poll cited by various right-wing media channels claimed that 75 per cent or so of those polled said that this had been taught in school, and 68 per cent said it had been presented as fact. There is an organisation set up to combat the teaching of the gender ideology, the Safe Schools Alliance, and there is a similar organisation to fight indoctrination by Critical Race Theory. And while I believe that people should vote Labour and that Johnson is racist, this shouldn’t be taught in school any more than the lie that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite.
There have been fears and scandals over left-wing indoctrination in schools since as far back as the 1980s, when the Scum was running stories about teachers in Brent teaching kids to sing ‘Ba Ba, Green Sheep’ as an anti-racist revision of ‘Ba ba, Black Sheep’. There were also stories in the Scum and Depress about Communists indoctrinating children with the new-fangled subject of Peace Studies, and ‘English’ being renamed ‘Language’. Their solution was to take failing state schools, where all this was going on, out of the control of the Local Education Authorities and transform them into City Academies. These were the Thatcherite precursors of Blair’s academies. They didn’t work, and Thatcher’s education secretary, Norman Fowler, wound them up. Then Blair won the election, took the idea out of the bin, and relaunched them. And the result has been the part-privatisation of our schools for corporate profit, many of which are still failing.
If children are being indoctrinated in schools, then it isn’t just in those schools left under local government management, but also in the academies. One of the other victims of ‘woke’ ideological censorship interviewed by the New Culture Forum’s Peter Whittle was an Anglican chaplain at a private school. He’d been sacked after raising questions in his sermon about some of the LGBT teaching that had been delivered to the school by an outside activist. According to the chaplain, the man had made them out all chant ‘Smash heteronormativity!’ during a meeting in the headmaster’s office beforehand. The clergyman had been alarmed by this, and in a following sermon simply said that students should question this for themselves. Such independent thought wasn’t allowed, and he was censured and sacked. Smashing heteronormativity, the social status of heterosexuality as the norm, goes far beyond teaching tolerance for gays. The EDIJester, a gay critic of the woke ideology, states that heteronormativity should continue, as without straight people breeding there would be no more gays like him. But beyond the specific nature of the radical indoctrination is the fact that this happened in a private school.
This is also going on across the Atlantic. James Lindsay, another fervent critic and opponent of the woke ideology, did a piece on his New Discourses YouTube channel about a paper published in an American education journal by a radical activist about indoctrinating the children in private schools to be woke, anti-capitalist, anti-racist activists. If the goal of privatisation is to stop political indoctrination, then it clearly isn’t working.
I’m very sceptical of these stories about ‘woke’ teachers, at least in Britain. My mother was a teacher, and I did my first degree at a teacher training college. My own experience of teachers is that the vast majority of them aren’t in it to indoctrinate children to be young communists or radical LGBTQ+ and race activists. They’re there simply because they want to stand in front of a whiteboard and teach. If radical doctrines are being taught in schools, then most likely they’re coming from the headmaster, the LEA or the academy chain. The teaching staff may not be aware how radical they are, as these doctrines are presented as just a form of conventional liberal teaching about tolerance to gays and transgender people and anti-racism.
And there is already a solution to the problem of indoctrination in schools. It’s banned by law, introduced by Blair. Teachers may not present political or religious ideas or opinions as fact. If they do tell the class their personal view of a political or religious issue, they have to make it clear that this is only their opinion. A teacher that tells their pupils to vote Labour or any other party is breaking that law.
But Robinson isn’t interested in such legal niceties. He just wants to push right-wing fears of evil, left-wing activist teachers in order to promote the establishment of free schools. This is another right-wing Tory idea. Toby Young was behind an attempt to set up a free college a few years ago. That collapsed, and I don’t doubt that any attempt to set up free schools will go the same way. But it’s all an attempt to privatise education and make it two-tier, with the state-educated poor at the bottom and the rich elite, who are able to pay private school fees, at the top. All under the guise of protecting children from indoctrination.
Privatisation isn’t working. The academies are terrible and free schools are going to be worse. Renationalise schools, give them proper funding and make sure they obey the rule of law when it comes to political or religious indoctrination.That’s the way to improve education.
A few days ago I put up a post about how very relevant some of the concerns and causes taken up and championed by children’s author and Fabian Socialist E. Nesbit are. For example, she was appalled at the poverty and hunger among the children at a local school near her in Deptford, so she organised work parties held every Saturday in October, November and December to make clothing for the children, as well as provide them with a Christmas party. Each child was to have a cake, plentiful bread and butter and a toy. Her husband, Hubert Bland, went to frame legislation, passed by parliament, that provided free school meals for children in council schools. The parallels to today, with increasing numbers of people forced to use food banks to keep body and soul together and the campaign by footballer Marcus Rashford to have schools continue to provide free school meals during the summer holidays to feed needy children are very striking.
But I was also struck by a passage in Eleanor Fitzsimon’s biography of her, The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit where she describes how Nesbit was also deeply impressed by a visit to a jail while staying with Welsh friends. This prompted her to write an article arguing that it would not only be cheaper but more effective for the government to provide more schools with better funding rather than more prisons in order to combat crime.
One of the characters in Nesbit’s book, The Incredible Honeymoon, Colonel Bertram, was based on Colonel Arthur Ashley Ruck Chief Constable of Caernarvonshire and father of her friend, Berta. The book states
‘While she was staying with them, he arranged for Edith [Nesbit] to tour a Welsh prison. This experience appears to have affected her greatly. As she left, she turned to one convict and declared ‘I wish you well’. In ‘Cheaper in the End’, the remarkably progressive essay she wrote for Cecil Chesterton’s magazine, the New Witness, she declared ‘we4 want more money spent on schools and less on jails and reformatories’. She believed education was the key to avoiding incarceration and she explained her reasoning.
‘It cannot be put too plainly that the nation which will not pay for her schools must pay for her prisons and asylums. People don’t seem to mind so much paying for prisons and workhouses. What they really hate seems to be paying for schools. And yet how well, in the end, such spending would pay us! ‘There is no darkness but ignorance’ – and we have such a chance as has never been the lot of men since time began, a chance to light enough lamps to dispel all darkness. If only we would take that chance! Even from the meanest point of view we ought to take it. It would be cheaper in the end. Schools are cheaper than prisons.’ (pp.187-8).
It’s not exactly the same situation as today, but close. Successive right-wing governments, including that of Tony Blair, hate spending money on state schools. Funding has been repeatedly cut, even as the amount teachers are expected to do has increased, and the education privatised as far as possible by the transformation of many state schools into academies, run by private companies for their own profit. The academies are not more efficient compared to state schools, just better funded. Thatcher tried to set up a similar system with her wretched ‘city academies’, but these were a complete failure and we actually being wound up by her education minister, Norman Fowler. Then Blair got in, fished the idea out of the bin, and pushed them through as academies.
But the Tories also haven’t been keen on funding the prison service either. A few years ago there was a crisis in the prison sector with massive overcrowding. So much so, in fact, that they were considering housing criminals in ships, like the historic prison hulks. And like everything else, Blair and the Tories tried to push prisons and jails some way towards privatisation by outsourcing them to such brilliant, superbly performing companies as G4S. Or as Molesworth would sa, ‘Hem hem, I do not think’.
Part of Black Lives Matter’s programme was to defund the police. A few days ago its leader, Patrice Cullors, stated that what she meant by that was the complete abolition of the police, the judiciary and the prison system. It’s a completely insane idea that would undoubtedly result in utter chaos and crime rates rocketing, with Black people among the victims. But others involved in the organisation merely said that they wanted police funding cut and the money spent instead on programmes that benefit and uplift the Black community. I don’t believe in cutting police funding, as after Priti Patel under Tweezer removed something like 20,000 police officers from the force crime, not unnaturally, increased. But increased funding for schools and genuine change and improvement in the education system still seems the best way of preventing some children turning to crime.
I’m very much aware that education has very much become a political football, with demands that schools teach ethical issues quite apart from formal academic subjects, like stopping misogyny and racism. But it seems to me that much good would simply come from simply reforming schools so that teachers have enough funding and resources to provide effective teaching that would prepare pupils to become worthy citizens, and allow them to avoid being forced or sucked into offending.
I also feel that to cut down on crime, there needs to be general changes in society so that people are able to get suitable jobs and the gang culture that infects some of Britain’s cities smashed. That’s a tough task.
But we can begin by building more, and better funded schools.
Here’s another interesting piece from this fortnight’s Private Eye for 29th October to 11th November 2012. It seems it’s not just the failing private railway companies that the government is desperate to prop up against the threat of nationalisation. They also need to do it for the academy chains and further education colleges. Here’s the article
Chains Reaction
In a worrying indication of the Department for Education’s level of confidence in the financial health of school chains and further education colleges, the department has made a deal with seven big law firms to provide insolvency services to “a broad range of financially distressed education providers”.
The scheme will put the firms, based in London, Leeds and Bristol, on a rota to provide advice on restructuring and insolvency to institutions facing either normal insolvency or “education administration”, the new process created in 2019 which allows an administrator to prioritise the needs for existing students to finish courses or find new placements, before paying creditors. Although the billing rates for insolvency work are not revealed in the contract award notice, the tender is listed with an estimated value of £3m.
The DfE has borne the brunt of winding up costs for a number of large academy trusts and has had to write off large sums where the department itself was one of a trust’s creditors.
Thus far two colleges, Hadlow College and West Kent and Ashford College, have been through the education administration process. Recently Brooklands College in Weybridge also faced the threat of insolvency as the Education and Skills Funding Agency attempts to claw back £20m after an investigation into the subcontracting of apprenticeships.
Academies are another failed Thatcherite idea that was taken over by Starmer’s molten idol, Blair, and then kicked into high gear. Thatcher and her education secretary, Norman Fowler, had founded a series of schools outside the Local Education Authorities as City Academies. They were an abject failure and were actually being wound up. Then Tory Tony fished ’em out of the dustbin along with a whole slew of other grotty ideas, and lo! the academies were established These were supposed to introduce private investment and management in the school system. Great things were predicted, like schools specialising in the STEM subjects, or music or whatever. And standards were definitely going to get better. In fact, the academies are only able to maintain their high standards through a rigorous policy of exclusion and selection to keep out the poor, the less able and those with behavioural problems, which state schools are bound to take. They have also benefited from far greater levels of funding. Some of the academies received up to £40 million, compared to LEAs which may have a budget for all the schools in their area of £250,000. Despite these advantages, numerous academies have had to be taken into receivership and into state management.
There is no use keeping up the pretence that they’re some kind of glowing Thatcherite, private industry success. This is just throwing good money after bad, and using the taxpayer to bail out failing private investors as the with PFI in the Health Service. It has to be ended now, and schools renationalised. Mussolini also set up a government department to bail out failing private industry. Fascist manifestos and ideology praised private industry and declared it to be the foundation of society and a proper, healthy economic system. But they had to recognise that some industries could not be supported privately and had to be taken into state ownership. And if Mussolini’s viciously anti-socialist dictatorship could realise that private industry is not the panacea for all industries, it’s high time our supposedly liberal, democratic politicos also had the guts to do so.
Academy schools are failing children, and it is just grotty Tory and Blairite Labour ideology that’s keeping them going. Renationalise now!
I wonder sometimes if the Communists and Trotskyites didn’t throw in the towel too soon. They were always looking for the collapse of capitalism, and while that didn’t happen and probably won’t, they would have realised that Thatcherism, at least, isn’t working and made real efforts to make the British public realise it. Communism collapsed with the velvet revolution in eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the countries of the former Soviet bloc threw off their chains and embraced democracy and free market capitalism. Francis Fukuyama declared that it was ‘the end of history’. Liberalism in the broad sense of the mixture of liberal democracy and capitalism, had seen off its rivals and would now reign supreme and unchallenged as the global ideology bringing peace, freedom – both political and economic – and prosperity to everyone.
But it hasn’t worked out like that.
Thatcher’s privatisation of the public utilities here in Britain haven’t brought the necessary investment these sectors needed. As Ken Loach’s superb documentary, The Spirit of 45, makes very clear, the power, water and railway industries are natural monopolies that need national planning and support. This has been particularly shown time and again in the management of the railways. Major’s privatisation of British Rail in the 1990s and its breakup into separate companies resulted in a spate of horrendous train crashes. Insult was added to injury by the rail companies passing the buck and accusing each other of responsibility for the disasters. As a result, the company owning the railway network itself, Railtrack, had to be renationalised in 2002. Privatisation did not work. And it has continued to fail with the private railways companies. Several have had to be taken back into state administration after providing poor service. However, this has always been excused as a temporary measure and the government has insisted on finding some other private company to run those services afterwards. After a series of such failures, this strategy now looks more than a little desperate. It’s an attempt to fend off the obvious: that private enterprise isn’t providing a proper, decent rail service and the only way to run it properly is to renationalise it.
It is very much the same with the government’s part-privatisation of Britain’s schools. Declining standards in state schools led Thatcher to experiment with privately-run schools outside the control of Local Education Authorities. These were then called ‘city academies’. They were another failure, and her education secretary, Norman Fowler, was forced to wind them up quietly. Unfortunately, Tony Blair thought it was a wizard idea and it became a major part of New Labour education policy. Simply called ‘academies’, these schools would be run by private companies. Some of these would specialise in particularly subjects, such as Maths and science. Expertise from private industry would ensure that standards would be high, and they would provide a powerful incentive through their competition for the remaining state schools to improve their performance. Except that didn’t happen either. The academies don’t perform any better than ordinary state schools once the massive difference in funding is taken into account. An academy may receive tens of millions of funding compared to a fraction of million that the Local Education Authority receives to spend on all the schools it runs. Furthermore, many of the academies have only been able to maintain their high standards through being highly selective about their intakes. Pupils that may not reach the marks demanded by the schools, including those with behavioural problems or who come from poorer families, are often excluded and expelled. Educational performance and standards in many academies has been so abysmal that the chains managing them have collapsed and the schools once again taken into public administration. But private enterprise under the Tories cannot be allowed to fail, and so we had the grim spectacle a few years ago of Nicky Morgan, the Tory education secretary, repeatedly not answering the questions on the Andrew Marr show why the government was pushing ahead with turning schools into academies when just a little while ago 25 academies had had to be taken over by the government again.
Now, thanks to a mixture of Brexit and global problems elsewhere, the gas industry is in crisis. There are shortages of gas, a number of the smaller companies have already collapsed and customers are being faced with sharp price rises. Novara Media have even said that the government has admitted that if there are severe problems with the major gas suppliers, then they will have to be nationalised.
Gas, like electricity, should never have been privatised in the first place. When it was initially privatised, the company was not split up into separate, competing companies and so it was able to dominate the market as a private monopoly. Now some of those companies are suffering because they are unable to cope with free market conditions. This says to me very much that Jeremy Corbyn was right – that the public utilities need to be publicly owned and rationally managed as part of an integrated system. This is another point that Ken Loach’s documentary makes very well.
And Brexit has created further problems. The establishment of a customs border with Eire overturns one of the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and so threatens to return Northern Ireland to sectarian violence and chaos. There is a shortage of CO2 as a result of which some foods and other goods may suffer shortages. And there may be further shortages, including petrol and other fuels, because Brexit has also resulted in fewer haulage drivers. Some are even now predicting a new ‘Winter of Discontent’, like that in 1979 that resulted in the defeat of the-then Labour government and the election of Maggie Thatcher.
I remember the petrol crisis of the ’70s, when OPEC suddenly raised oil prices and there were queues at petrol pumps. Just as I remember how Ted Heath’s dispute with the coal miners resulted their strike, the three-day week and power cuts. It got to the point that by the middle of the decade the right were expecting a Communist takeover and the end of civilisation as we know it. There were supposedly private militias being formed by bonkers right-wingers while parts of the establishment wanted to overthrow the minority Labour government in a coup to be replaced by a kind of coalition government composed of representatives from all the parties. Well, that was what the Times discussed in its articles. The security services, however, were forming plans to round up trade unionists and left-wing politicians and activists and intern them on a Scottish island somewhere. The editor of the Mirror went to Sandhurst to interest them in overthrowing the government but was met with a no doubt polite refusal. I think he, or one of the other plotters, even went as far as Paris to see if that old Fascist, Oswald Mosley, would be interested in leading the new government.
All that has been used in the Tory myth that socialism doesn’t work, and only creates the economic and political chaos that helped bring Britain to its knees. Chaos that was only ended by the glorious reign of Maggie.
Except that these problems look like they’re coming back, and this time the fault is Brexit and the free market.
I think Boris will be able to find temporary solutions to alleviate, but not cure, some of these problems. He has, for example, introduced new legislation to encourage lorry drivers from the continent to come over here. But the underlying structural problems remain. The only way to solve them is through nationalisation.
The Labour party is in an excellent position to drive this home, at least in the case of gas. Even if it doesn’t go that far, it should still be landing hard blows on Johnson and the Tories because of Brexit’s massive failures. But Starmer isn’t doing that. Instead, as Zelo Street pointed out in a piece published a day or so ago, the Labour leader is more intent instead on destroying democracy in his party as part of his war on the left.
Which is why I’m almost nostalgic for the old Socialist Workers’ Party. They’re still around, rebranded as ‘the Socialist Party’, but they’re nowhere near as active as they were. Whenever there was any kind of crisis or major issue you could count on them turning up with their megaphones and copies of their newspaper to harangue the masses and demand further action against the problem. Unfortunately, in many cases the Socialist Workers’ Party were the problem. They colonised left-wing issues in an attempt to turn protest groups into front organisations, which they could then use to produce further discontent. Rock Against Racism collapsed when the SWP took over the leadership of that organisation, formed to protest against the rise of Fascism. They were also busy infiltrating the Labour party and other left-wing parties here and abroad with the intention of radicalising them. I think the eventual hope was to create some kind of mass revolutionary movement. It didn’t work, and has only resulted in purges, such as that of Militant Tendency by Kinnock in the 1980s. In fact, the policy has helped strengthen the right in the Labour party, as they smeared Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters as Trotskyite infiltrators as the pretext for their continue purge.
The Trotskyites lived, however, in the firm belief that capitalism would eventually fail. Well, it isn’t doing that now, but it should be abundantly clear that Thatcherite free market capitalism isn’t working. The SWP would have realised that and tried to get the message across. The Labour left, which isn’t remotely Trotskyite, realises too that Thatcherism isn’t working. Their solution is simply a return to the mixed economy of the social democratic consensus. This wasn’t perfect, but it operated far better than the free market shambles we have now. And no, mixed economies are not ‘Communist’, ‘Trotskyist’ or ‘far left’. The real Communists and Trotskyists hated it as a form of capitalism, just as they hated reformist socialist parties like Labour.
But Starmer’s leadership is pledged to propping up the same wretched free market capitalism. Which is why I really feel there should be a mass movement driving home the point, again and again, that Thatcherism is ideologically and economically bankrupt. It is doing nothing but producing chaos in the economy and industry, and poverty and starvation to Britain’s working people. And this poverty will get worse. This is why I’m almost nostalgic for the wretched SWP, as they would have been determined to drive this home. And who knows? Perhaps if they behaved like a reasonable party, they might have gained further support and forced the Labour party to rediscover its socialist heritage in order to head off a challenge from real Communists.
And what a sordid, depressing spectacle it is too! But we can’t say it wasn’t expected. One of the most dispiriting pieces of last week’s news was that Starmer had appeared in the pages of the Financial Times, declaring he was only intent on power and would take Labour back to the glorious policies of Tony Blair.
Yes, Tony Blair! The unindicted war criminal who pressured the intelligence agencies into ‘sexing up’ the ‘dodgy dossier’ on Saddam Hussein and lied about the dictator having weapons of mass destruction that he could launch within forty minute. This was all done to provide the pretext for an illegal invasion with his best mate, George ‘Dubya’ Bush. It was all done ostensibly to liberate the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant. The reality was that it was all done so western multinationals led by the American-Saudi oil industry could grab Iraq’s oil reserves and its state enterprises. The result was the destruction of one of the most secular societies in the Middle East and its welfare state. The country’s economy was decimated as the neo-Cons turned into the kind of low tax, free trade state they’d like America to be, unemployment hit 60 per cent and society descended into sectarian violence and chaos. Women could no longer pursue careers outside the home, the American army colluded with local thugs in running deaths squads while the mercenaries also employed by the occupying forces ran prostitution and drugs rings and shot Iraqis for sport. Then, a few years later, Blair joined Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, and Immanuel Macro in helping to overthrow Colonel Gaddafy in Libya, with the result that one half of that country is in the hands of militant Islamists, who have re-opened the slave markets to sell Blacks.
Blair’s domestic policies have also been horrendous. Blair pushed the Thatcherite programme of privatising the Health Service into a much higher gear, so much so that it astonished some Tories. They remarked that he got away with doing more than they would have dared with Labour in opposition. Blair set up to the Community Care Groups, the doctors’ organisations charged with running doctor’s surgeries so that they could raise money privately and buy services from private healthcare companies. The new health centres and polyclinics he set up were also to be privately run. More contracts were given to private healthcare companies and more hospitals closed or turned over to private healthcare companies to run instead. His health secretary, Alan Milburn, wanted the NHS to become nothing more than kitemark on services provided by private healthcare companies. The same Milburn is in this fortnight’s issue of Private Eye following an article Milburn wrote in one of the papers calling for more of the NHS to be given over to private industry. Milburn is not a disinterested observers, as the Eye’s article shows his connections with any number of private healthcare companies.
This is the same Blair who gave positions in government, including regulatory bodies, to the chairmen and senior staff of big businesses that donated to him and his party. He applied the Public-Private Finance Initiative to industry as a whole, resulting in costs and delays massively increasing in public works projects. He favoured the big supermarkets over small, family run stores, thus putting many of them out of business. At the same time, the farmers who supply the supermarkets found themselves locked into extremely exploitative contracts.
He also carried on the Tories’ policy of destroying state education. Thatcher’s project of revitalising schools by privatising them as ‘city academies’ had been a failure and was actually being wound up by her education secretary, Norman Fowler. But Blair fished it out of the dustbin, rebranded them as ‘academies’ and forged ahead with the idea, even against local opposition. The result has been a series of scandals over schools run only narrowly religious lines with draconian and humiliating disciplinary codes. At the same time, the academies have also been criticised for seeking to maintain their academic standards through highly selective admissions policies excluding the less academically able and those with behavioural difficulties. These academies have been boosted with the expenditure of tens of millions on them while ordinary state schools are starved of funds. When this is taken into account, they don’t perform any better than ordinary state schools. In fact they often performed far worse, as a string of academies have folded or their schools taken back into state administration.
At the same time, Blair, Mandelson and co also demonstrated their hatred and contempt for the unemployed, the poor and disabled. They fully believed in Thatcher’s ‘Victorian value’ of less eligibility, in which the process of claiming state benefit was to be made as humiliating as possible in order to deter people from claiming it. Based on spurious, fraudulent research cooked up by American private health insurer Unum, they decided that most people claiming disability benefit were malingerers. The result was the infamous work capability tests, which were set so that a specific percentage of claimants were found to be ineligible and thrown off benefit. The result has been even more despair, starvation and deaths for hundreds of genuinely disabled people, who have had their only source of income removed. It was also Blair, who introduced workfare as part of his risible ‘New Deal’. Under the guise of teaching long term benefit claimants the necessary skills to get them back into work, the unemployed were handed over to work for various businesses and private sector organisations, like the big supermarket chains and charities. If they refused, they lost their benefits. Contrary to what Blair and his Tory successors claimed, this does not help unemployed people get back into work. In fact it does the opposite. The unemployed actually do far better looking for jobs and voluntary work on their own.
Blair also hated the trade unions, the working class organisations that have been part of the Labour party since it was founded in 1905 or so. The Labour party was partly set up to protect trade unions and their members. But Blair did everything he could to smash their power further. When he became head of the party c. 1997 he threated to cut the party’s ties with them if they didn’t back his reforms.
Yes, Blair won three elections, but the cost was a massive drop in membership and support amongst traditional Labour voters and activists. From this perspective, Jeremy Corbyn was actually far more successful, turning Labour into the biggest and best funded of the UK parties. This was through the simple technique of putting forward a traditionally socialist, truly Labour set of policies: end the privatisation of the NHS, renationalise the utilities, restore the welfare state, remove the restrictions on the trade unions and give working people proper rights at work. Corbyn became massively unpopular only due to a concerted campaign of personal vilification, but his programme was genuinely popular. Unlike Blair’s, who only won the election because almost two decades of Tory rule had made them even more unpopular.
But the Labour left and the continued popularity of socialism continues to worry the Blairites. Hence Starmer’s determination to purge the party of them, and most specifically socialist Jews. On Wednesday there was a Virtual meeting of left-wing labour politicos and activists on Zoom discussing Starmer’s continuing persecution on the Labour left. One of the great speakers quoted the late Tony Benn. Speaking during the purges of Marxists from the party in the 1980s, Benn stated that it would start with the Marxists, go on to the socialists and end with a merger with the SDP. It was all about protecting capitalism. Occasionally the party would be given a chance to govern the country, but nothing really would change.
And that’s really what you can expect from Starmer’s return to Blairism. It’s just going to be more Tory policies, put forward by people who claim to represent ‘real Labour values’ but who in reality have nothing but absolute contempt for the working class and the ideals of the people who founded the party.
As Mike has pointed out, it was clear which direction Starmer really was going from the outset. Despite his declaration that he would continue Corbyn’s manifest promises, he broke every one of them as soon as he could. He carried on the purges under the pretext of clamping down on anti-Semitism – and who knew so many anti-Semites were self-respecting Jews! – and then had the whip withdrawn from his predecessor. He has also done his best to destroy the party’s internal democracy, suspending individuals and constituency parties at a whim and imposing his own candidates against the wishes of local activists.
Somehow Starmer has managed to convince himself that a return to Blairism will be a vote-winner. Well, it hasn’t so far. Coupled with the islamophobia and anti-Black racism of his supporters, it’s led to the party massively losing members and working class support. The result has been a string of election defeats.
Blair was a mass-murderer, whose wars have turned the Middle East into a charnel house and whose economic and welfare policies have further impoverished this country and its awesome, hard-working people. But they kept capitalism secure and further enriched the already obscenely wealthy.
And to Thatcherites like Starmer and his supporters, that’s all that really matters. Expect Labour to lose, and continue to lose, with this open move to the right.
Here’s another video from another Conservative youtuber, Simon Webb. Webb’s channel, History Debunked, specialises in attacking various myths and pseudo-history being pushed as authentic Black history. In this video he attacks the call from supporters of Critical Race Theory that there should be separate schools for Black pupils, and particularly for boys. He has seen for himself how such schools actually lead to worse academic performance and behaviour in such a school in Tottenham in Haringey. But some of the reasons for its failure – management by parents, instead of qualified teaching staff – are also a major problem for the Thatcherite free school project, which was intended to allow parents to break out of the state education system.
Webb begins by quoting a passage describing how one Black activist, Derek Ball, urged Blacks to abandon their demands for integrated schooling during the Civil Rights struggle, and instead concentrate on building good, all-Black schools to boost Black educational achievement. The argument for these is that, despite attending the same schools as Whites and Asians, Blacks, and particularly Black boys, still fall behind because of the lack of suitable role-models.
Webb describes how the Seventh Day Adventists in Haringey in 1980 set up their own, all-Black school as part of this ideology. Staff at the school, John Loughborough, were good, moral, upstanding people. Unfortunately, they had a problem recruiting proper teaching staff, so they were being taught by the friends and relatives of the people who founded it, who wanted a job. Webb states he noticed how the academic achievement and basic behaviour of the children of friends, who sent their kids there, progressively decline. Their interest in and performance in vital subjects like maths and physics declined. At the same time, their interests narrowed to Black music, culture and politics. The teaching staff were unable to keep discipline, and so their behaviour became worse, instead of better. By the 1990s, when Haringey closed it down, it was the worse school in the borough.
Webb states that he has heard similar stories from across the Pond, and there are also similar stories about Muslim and Orthodox Jewish schools in this country. In the case of the Orthodox Jewish school, the educational curriculum was extremely narrow, so that its former pupils were left unprepared for life in wider British society. The same is true of the Muslim schools, while many of the pupils at the former John Loughborough school have a chip on their shoulder about how poor their schooling was, and its inability to prepare them for mainstream British society. He states that the problem with schools is that their management requires a very specific set of skills, which most parents don’t have. He states that in all the similar schools of which he knows, Black, Muslim, Orthodox Jewish, there are similar problems – a narrow curriculum, safeguarding issues and poor discipline.
The demand for racially segregated schools to benefit Blacks goes back several decades. I can remember the idea being debated in the 1990s. Round about the time Bristol City Museum was setting up its ‘A Respectable Trade’ exhibition about the city’s role in the slave trade, a women wrote into the local paper, then the Bristol Evening Post, calling for such schools. There were similar moves before then. After the riots in the St. Paul’s area in 1981/2, the council sent into schools various teams and advisors to teach the children not to be racist. This included the school at which my mother taught. This was accepted by staff and parents, though I do remember that the headmaster at the time refusing to allow the same anti-racist educators to take Black children out of the school to have special lessons on their Black identity, or something like that, as he was firmly against any kind of segregation.
I also recall Thatcher’s attempt to break up the state education system. As well as the City Academies, which were so terrible she and her education secretary, Norman Fowler, were actually winding up before Blair later relaunched them as academies when he came into power, she also announced she was passing legislation for free schools outside Local Education Authority Control. No longer would parents have to tolerate sub-standard education as the hands of evil lefty teachers and local councils. No! Parents would now have the power to break free and found their own schools, run how they wished. Which would undoubtedly do well due to market forces. All absolutely tripe, of course. Teaching really is a skilled profession, which not everyone can do. But right-wing governments like those of the Tories and Blair have been able to use it as a political football and partially privatise it by playing on the general belief that ordinary people know how to teach and manage a class better than the professionals. I remember back in the 1980s how the right-wing press, including the Bristol Evening Post, was constantly attacking teachers with scare stories about Communist teachers indoctrinating children. Thatcher herself, in one of her wretched speeches, was scathing about ‘anti-racist mathematics’, while her lapdog paper, the Scum, ran the story about children in Brent or Lambeth being taught to sing ‘Ba Ba Green Sheep’ because the original nursery rhyme, ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’, was supposedly racist.
And the concerns about the narrowness of the curriculum in some of the free schools and academies run by religious organisations are perfectly justified. A few years ago there were concerns about the Muslim schools up north, with allegations that they were being run very strictly in accordance with traditional Islamic practice. The sexes were segregated, discipline harsh, and the curriculum narrowly religious. There have been allegations since that this wasn’t the case, and such concerns were the result of Islamophobia. The Christian schools set up by a the evangelical Christian head of a haulage company have also been criticised for their severe and humiliating discipline, as well as teaching Creationism as science. As for Orthodox Jewish schools, the French academic, Alfred Kepel, in his book about the rise of religious fundamentalism, The Revenge of God, describes one such school in Paris where the only secular subject was maths.
I am certainly not against faith-based schools. Both Mike and I went to an Anglican church school and got a Christian education. But the school also strongly condemned sectarian and racial prejudice, and did take children to other, non-Christian places of worship, like the local mosque, as a way of teaching them about those faiths.
Nevertheless, the very narrow focus of some religious or racial organisations in the education they wish to provide should be of concern. Whatever their faith or none, children need and deserve a broad education which promotes their personal achievement and growth and prepares them for wider British society rather than isolating them in self-imposed ghettoes. And they also need to be taught by properly qualified, experienced and skilled staff, rather than ordinary people, who wrongly think they can teach thanks to decades of being told so by the right-wing press.
The free schools and academies may not provide this, and in many cases they certainly don’t. But they make profits for the academy chains and support the Tory ideology of attacking the state provision of education.
I’ve no doubt that racially segregated education is a failure, regardless of whether it is intended to benefit Blacks or other ethnic minorities. So are the free schools and academies generally.
All of them should be wound up, and schooling returned to the state and control of local authorities.
And now for a much more serious subject. The day before yesterday, 30th December 2020, Talk Radio posted this video on YouTube of one of their presenters, Kevin O’Sullivan, talking about the compilation of a Dictionary of British Slave Traders by a group of British universities with that fixture of the right-wing press, Rod Liddle. The project is led by a professor Pettigree, and involves the universities of Lancaster, Manchester and University College London. O’Sullivan quotes Prof. William Pettigree, who said that after Black Lives Matter it was important that there should be further, accurate information on the breadth of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. As you can imagine, neither O’Sullivan nor Liddle are fans of the project. Some of their arguments are good, but others are just them using the issue to ride the usual Conservative hobby horses of attacking state education.
Non-White Slave Trade Ignored
The Dictionary will have 6,500 entries, including small investors, women, and people, whose involvement in the Abominable Trade has not been mentioned before. O’Sullivan claims that this is a device for finding out whether a perfectly respectable living person had an ancestor 350 years ago, who invested £5 in a plantation, and then make their blameless descendant into a pariah and get them sacked. He states that we need the Dictionary ‘like a hole in the head’, denounces the obsession with the slave trade as a ‘national sickness’. Liddle, who is introduced as writing for the Sun, the Spectator and the Sun on Sunday, agrees, calling it ‘self-flagellating imbecilic obsessiveness’. He states that the Dictionary isn’t about anyone, but specifically the White English. It doesn’t mention the Ottoman Empire, the people, who profited from the slave trade in the West African countries, specifically Ghana. He states that he was in a cab a couple of months ago, whose driver was Ethiopian. The driver told him how much he hated Britain. When Liddle asked why, he was told that it was because Britain was the country that invented slavery and enslaved whole nations. He’d never heard of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire or the slavery that continued in his own country for hundreds of years after Britain had stopped it. He’d never heard of the fact that Britain was the first country to abolish it. Liddle also makes the point that Ethiopia, where it continued, had never been colonised. Liddle goes on to claim that universities are implanting in people’s minds the notion that it was only the British, who were slavers and had this wickedness. This is, he said, reflected in ‘that very stupid woman, who is head of the British Library’, Liz Joly, who said that ‘White people invented racism’. Liddle goes on about how we also invented television, the printing press, democracy, but we invented slavery, sin and mosquitoes. It’s utter rubbish and time we got over it.
The Coronavirus Lockdown Prevented Criticism of BLM at Football Matches
O’Sullivan dismisses Pettigree’s comments about the need for the Dictionary as nonsense, and describes the obsession with the slave trade as a kind of ‘national insanity’. He asks why the country is obsessing about the actions of slave traders who lived three centuries ago. Liddle says we’re not obsessing. It’s a tiny, tiny minority, who are obsessing. And they’ve been partly able to get away with it because of the Coronavirus. This has allowed footballers to take the knee in support of an organisation that wishes to abolish the family and capitalism. This wouldn’t have happened if there had been fans in the ground, because as soon as fans were allowed, they booed. This occurred not just at Liddle’s club, Millwall, but also at Colchester and Dallas in the US. They’ve got away with this because this year has meant the lone voice of the common sense public has not been heard. O’Sullivan agrees with him, stating that the people have been eclipsed by the lockdown and the authorities in politics and football have been allowed to proceed without comment from the public and fans. Liddle states that it’s a salutary lesson that when these restriction are placed on our lives, there is nothing they won’t try to get away with. He then goes to tilt at the Beeb, stating that they used the Coronavirus as an excuse to ban the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule, Britannia’.
Liddle Attacks his Daughter’s State School for views on British Empire
O’Sullivan agrees with him that the obsession with slavery and the ‘Woke’ thing is that of a tiny, tiny minority, who are vocal and noisy. He hopes that in this coming year, 2021, the Dictionary never gets published, and that the people’s voice gets heard and we are able to push back against these noisy people. Liddle then describes how, when his daughter went to state school last year, she was taught in her history lessons, which went uncontested, that the reason Africa was in poverty was because of colonialism. He states that this is easy to disprove, as Ethiopia, which was never colonised, is exactly the same as Eritrea. Both countries are equally impoverished and despotic. Liberia, which was never colonised, is as badly off as Sierra Leone next door. Singapore, on the other hand, was colonised for 200 years, and is the most affluent country in the world. There is, Liddle claims, a reluctance to face the truth because of this liberal mindset. This is based on a fallacy, which falls apart if you pick at it.
O’Sullivan then asks Liddle if they teach Critical Race Theory at his daughter’s school. This ‘controversial and very dubious philosophy’ is being taught in schools all over the country, which states that if you’re White, you’re racist, even if you don’t think you are. He states that it’s fine if adults want to learn this nonsense, but really dangerous to teach it to children in schools. Liddle again agrees with him, says he’s sure his daughter was, and that they got her out of it not just because they were teaching ‘that rubbish’, but because most of the time they weren’t teaching at all. There were no lesson during the Covid outbreak, not even online, O’Sullivan jokes that it was probably better that she was getting no lessons at all then. Liddle replies that she got lessons from him on how the British Empire brought decency and democracy to the world as a corrective for five minutes.
There are several issues to unpack here. Firstly, if the Dictionary was only an academic exercise in researching the depth of British public involvement in the slave trade, then I don’t think there should be any objection to its compilation and publication. There’s already been considerable research on the subject. A little while ago one historian of the subject said that they were actually astonished by how widespread participation in the slave trade and slavery was, with ordinary members of the public investing their money in it. In fact you could easily produce a list of British slaveowners simply by going through the government’s Blue Book published c. 1840 for the compensation given to the slaveowners after abolition. From the 1820s onwards the British government passed legislation designed to halt the illegal importation of slaves in their colonies by passing legislation demanding that all slaves be registered. This could also be used. The compensation returns and slave registries might have some surprises for those, who believe that only White people owned slaves. Several of the slaveowners in the Caribbean included the Maroons, the free Black communities outside British law. I also believe, though I’m not sure, that the free people of colour, the free Black population, may also have owned slaves.
Real Danger of Innocent People Demonised for Ancestors’ Involvement
O’Sullivan’s claim that the book would be used to denounce and pillory perfectly decent people for what their ancestors did hundreds of years ago is hysterical, but unfortunately also a real possibility. I had to make a similar decision myself when I was working in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum. It seemed that there was a strong possibility that some of the people described as slavers may have been the remote ancestors of people I knew personally. I had to think very carefully about telling them, and was eventually advised against it by one of their close friends. They told me that I shouldn’t tell this person about their possible connection to the slave trade, because they were very anti-racist themselves and the information would only upset them. I’ve no doubt that this is true of very many people. I also think that behind some of outrage from O’Sullivan and Liddle, but which goes unspoken, is the fear that it will be used by activists to demand reparations for slavery. I’m not sure how much this will affect ordinary people, though. In the 18th and 19th centuries most people in this country were the ‘labouring poor’, who comprised 90 per cent of the population. These had problems enough paying for food, clothing and accommodation. They wouldn’t have had the disposable income to invest in anything, never mind slaves or plantations, even if they were so inclined. Really we’re only talking about the middle classes and aristocracy as investors and slaveowners. Reparations for slavery are a different issue, but this has its dangers too. Over time, many of the wealthy or comfortably off people, who owned slaves, will have lost their money. All it would take to cause real controversy and angry backlash is if poorly paid people struggling to make ends meet get a demand for reparations from richer Black people. If that happens, you can expect the story to be all over the Heil, Depress and the rest of the press like a rash.
Need to Teach Extra-European, Islamic and Asian Slavery and Slave Trade
I also agree with O’Sullivan and Liddle that more should be taught about extra-European slavery. This includes that of the Arabs and Muslims in north Africa, the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic slave trade from east Africa across the Indian Ocean. Liddle is also quite right about the Ethiopians practising the slave trade. Way back in the 19th century we sent a punitive expedition into Abyssinia to stop them raiding British territory for slaves. One of the books we had in the library at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum was Major Darnley’s Slaves and Ivory. This was published in the early part of the 20th century and described Darnley’s own personal undercover investigation of slavery within the Abyssinian empire. Darnley published the book to make the public aware that the Abyssinians were still raiding British Uganda for slaves, and that the Ethiopian princes were destroying whole regions of their own empire through such raids. He wished to generate sufficient outrage that public opinion would swing behind a British invasion of the country. Dame Kathleen Simon, a determined foe of slavery, actually praised Mussolini and the Italian Fascists in her book on it for their invasion of Abyssinia, which she felt would at least extinguish slavery there. I do think there is a real need to teach this aspect of the slave trade to counter the notion that it was only Britain that was only, or primarily responsible for it. Britain wasn’t the first country to outlaw it – that was Denmark – but we were the leading country to do so and insist that other nations follow.
The East African Slave Trade in the 19th Century, from James Walvin, Atlas of Slavery (Harlow: Pearson Education 2006) 129.
Concentration on Western Slave Trade Product of Black Rights’ Movement
Research into the historic slave trade has been linked with the campaign for Black liberation since the time of W.E.B. Dubois. Hence the fixation on it by contemporary anti-racist activists. Driving this is the continued impoverishment and disadvantaged condition of the Black community as a whole. But real, Black chattel slavery has re-emerged in Libya and in sub-Saharan African countries like Uganda. There is little interest in combating slavery there. When right-wing critics urged western anti-racist activists to do so, the response has been that it should be ignored as a distraction from continued demands for racial equality here in the West. Kate Maltby, a White contributor to the I, made that argument in its pages a few months ago. She has a point, but it’s still no reason to ignore real slavery as it exists now in order to concentrate on angry denunciations for past crimes. There are books published on non-European slavery. Jeremy Black includes it alongside western slavery in one of his books. James Walvin includes maps of the African and Indian slave trade and routes alongside transatlantic slavery in his Atlas of Slavery. There are books on African slavery, and there is a particular study of the Islamic slave trade, Islam’s Black Slaves: A History of the Other Black Diaspora, by Ronald Segal. I think, however, that there may be some objection to teaching about these slave trades from some anti-racist activists, who may feel that it would somehow be racist or even islamophobic to do so.
Liddle Promoting Privatisation of State Education with Comments
But as you can hear from the video, O’Sullivan and Liddle were also determined to use the issue of slavery to attack other right-wing bugbears. Like the Coronavirus lockdown. This is there to save lives, but it’s too much for the right, who favour the economy at the expense of people’s lives. Hence the rant about footballers taking the knee for Black Lives Matter. Liddle also uses it, surprise, surprise! – to attack state education. We’ve been this way before. I remember the rants of the right-wing press under Thatcher, when the Scum, Heil, Depress and the rest ran stories about children in state schools being indoctrinated with left-wing propaganda, like Peace Studies, while anti-racist fanatics in Brent forced them to sing suitably altered nursery rhymes like ‘Ba Ba Green Sheep’. That was a lie put out by the Scum, supposedly, but I’ve met people, who swore they sang it at school. Thatcher used those fears to push through her creation of academy schools, telling the British public that it would put them in control of their children’s education. And this would be taken out of the hands of evil, left-wing Local Education Authorities. In fact, Thatcher’s academy school programme was a complete flop. It was being wound up by Norman Fowler before Blair took the idea out of the Tory dustbin, dusted it off and then made it official Labour policy. And unfortunately the wretched schemes been going ever since. In fact academy schools are not better than state schools and are far more expensive. They should be wound up and education renationalised. But this would upset the parasites running the academies. I don’t think it’s an accident that Liddle came out to rant against state education when he writes for the Scum, as Dirty Rupe would like to move into education as well.
Neo-Colonialism and African Poverty
As for the terrible condition of modern Africa and the legacy of British colonialism, it’s quite true that much of the continent’s problems don’t come from it, but from the rapacious venality and ruthless tyranny of their post-independence rulers. But we took over these countries partly to exploit their resources, and their poverty is partly caused by the Neo-colonial economic system that prevents them from industrialising and confines them to exporting raw materials to the Developed World. I can remember being taught all this in ‘A’ Level Geography nearly forty years ago from teachers, who were definitely not Marxists trying to indoctrinate us. As for the success of Singapore, this can be used to support the socialism Liddle and O’Sullivan fear and despise. Singapore’s leaders were influenced by the Fabians and their belief that the state should take a leading role in the economy. Singapore ain’t a socialist country, but its success does refute Thatcherite free market economics.
While O’Sullivan and Liddle thus are quite reasonable in their criticisms of the proposed Dictionary, they are using it as a tool to promote a wider, right-wing agenda. One that will cause further poverty and endanger lives, but will benefit their paymasters in the press barons and big business.
More on the hidden racism and bigotry seething away under the surface of the Tory party. A week or so ago, Mates Jacob got tired of James Cleverly’s decision not to do anything about the rampant islamophobia in the Tory party, and published his extensive dossier on it. Zelo Street put up the details of ten of the Tory politicos caught expressing bigoted views about Muslims. They happened to be local councillors, and had made the usual rants about Muslims being ‘barbarians’ and invaders, who forced their views on others through war and conquest. One also thought that immigration from Africa should be stopped, and famine was just nature’s way of dealing with overpopulation. Another was angry that the Muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was still in Britain. Which shows how perverse their bigotry is. Alibhai-Brown’s a committed anti-racist, but she’s no friend of Islamism and has criticised extremist Islam for its bigotry and repressive attitudes. Just as she’s also criticism anti-White racism, as well as that directed at Blacks, Asians and Muslims.
Mates Jacob stated that his dossier of 25 Tory islamophobes showed that the party was a hostile environment for Muslims. Miqdaad Versi of the Muslim Council of Britain commented
“Islamophobia is truly endemic within the Conservative Party & yet they still do nothing and ignore the problem … The scale of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party continues to be ignored by the mainstream political commentariat, with little scrutiny or accountability despite the Party’s total inaction & despite the depth of Islamophobia across all levels of the Party”.
Faced with its publication, the Tories were forced to act and suspend the 25, pending an investigation. A spokeswoman declared that the swiftness with which they were suspended show the seriousness with which the party took racism and discrimination, which they would not tolerate in any form. As Zelo Street drily commented, ‘Cue hollow laughter all round’.
And the blog concluded
‘Sadly, the reality of the situation is that it is only the Guardian and Mirror showing a willingness to follow up Mates Jacob’s work, and the impending election, that has spurred the Tories into pulling their fingers out. Moreover, there has been no action, and most likely will not be, against Jacob Rees Mogg, Priti Patel, and Michael “Oiky” Gove over their recent veering across the anti-Semitism line. Which leads to just one conclusion.
The Tory Party is institutionally racist from top to bottom. I’ll just leave that one there.’
Following this, Mates Jacob reported that he had uncovered a Tory Jew-hater. He’d been going through the alphabet, starting at ‘A’, and got as far as Aberdeen North before he found one.
This was Ryan Houghton, who the Scottish National reported had been suspended from the Tories because of comments he had a made several years previously. What were those views? Apparently, they were about gays as well as Jews, as well as Holocaust denial. The paper reported that
“Houghton said the National newspaper had taken a ‘selective look’ at comments he made in discussions about terrorism, LGBT rights and anti-Semitism and vowed to clear his name. He said that in the discussions seven years ago, when he was 20, he referenced the views of discredited historian and Holocaust denier David Irving but had made clear in subsequent posts that he was not defending them”.
Houghton tried to hang on as the prospective candidate by apologising unreservedly to the Jewish community, and saying that he was in contact with them. Put the Scots Tories didn’t accept it, declared his blogs about these issues were unacceptable, and suspended him.
Zelo Street notes that he wasn’t the only Tory to be suspended for anti-Semitism. Amjad Bashir, the Tory candidate for Leeds North East, had described British Jews returning from Israel as ‘brainwashed extremists’, He also accused the chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee of also being an apologist for Israel. Leeds has a large Jewish population, and that constituency was represented for years by Keith Joseph. The Tories really had no choice if they wished to retain the seat. They had to get rid of him.
Zelo Street also reminds its readers in this article that the Tories have made some very anti-Semitic remarks using coded language. Suella Braverman had ranted about ‘cultural Marxism’, a term that goes all the way back to the Nazis, and which has been used to refer to left-wing Jewish intellectuals. The smirking Priti Patel praised Viktor Orban, the anti-Semitic far right president of Hungary. Michael Gove confused Israel and Jews, which is a mark of anti-Semitism according to the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. But Benjamin Netanyahu has passed a law in Israel stating they’re one and the same, so he got a pass. And then there was Jacob Rees-Mogg calling Oliver Letwin and John Bercow ‘illuminati’, from the far right conspiracy theory about Freemasons, Jews and Satanists trying to take over the world. He also claimed that George Soros was behing the Remain campaign, which follows the Nazi conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers.
As Jewish bloggers like David Rosenberg and Tony Greenstein have pointed out, anti-Semitism has always been far more prevalent on the right than on the left. Conservatives value tradition, and Jews have been seen as an invasive threat to traditional social structures, ideologies and values. In the 1930s the membership of the various British pro-Nazi organisations was largely made up of upper and upper middle class Tories. The Daily Heil is notorious for its support of Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler in this period. And certain sections of the Tory party had such a reputation for Jew hatred that in 1970 the Monday Club opened its membership books to the Board of Deputies of British Jews in order to show them that it didn’t contain any anti-Semites or Fascists. That didn’t stop the Monday’s Club’s deserved reputation for racism, stemming from its intense hostile to Black and Asian immigration. It’s reputation was so toxic that when David Cameron became leader of the Tory party, he made a great show of cutting the party’s ties with it as part of his campaign to clean out racists from the party. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
The Nazis and racists were still there throughout the 70s and 80s. I can remember the uproar during Thatcher’s tenure of No. 10 when the Union of Conservative Students decided to support racial nationalism as their explicit ideology. That’s the same one as the BNP and former National Front: you’re only British if you’re White. This provoked a crackdown by Norman Fowler, who was forced to merge them with the Young Conservatives to produce Conservative Future, a new youth organisation. The overlap between the Tories’ membership and that of far-right organisations was so great, that Panorama was going to screen a documentary about it, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’. But that was never broadcast due to pressure from the PM in an act of explicit state censorship.
Despite their claims to the contrary, the Tories are still a deeply racist party, but this is overlooked by a Conservative press and media establishment, which shares and promotes their bigotry and hatred. And so it’s silent about the vicious racism within the Tory ranks, while hypocritically doing all it can to present Labour as an institutionally anti-Semitic party.
Here’s another snippet of information from that evil Russian propaganda machine, RT. And it’s one that very definitely hasn’t been on the mainstream news, which alone shows why we need alternative sources like RT and the others.
In this video, they reveal how 968 individuals from the Alt Right were referred to the government’s anti-extremism programme from March 2017, an increase of 28 per cent. 272 of these Fascists were under 15. 37 per cent of them were referred to the channel scheme, an increase from 26 per cent. There were 3,740 cases of Islamist extremism, but this had decreased by 26 per cent.
Clearly the majority of people being referred to Prevent are Islamist fanatics. But the extreme Right is doing its best to catch up fast. But no-one wants to talk about them, except the Israel lobby, which is trying its best to claim that it’s all about Momentum and the far Left in the Labour party. In America, Trump shut down the parts of the FBI which specifically investigated White Fascist terrorism. The government banned the Nazi youth group National Action last year, after the horrifying murder of Jo Cox. But the youthful storm troopers are still around. They’ve just gone under cover. They’re still training for violence, and making vile speeches about how the Jews are trying to destroy the White race through racial intermixing. And then there’s the influence of the Net, which allows Richard Spencer and the rest of them an outlet for their vile views.
But not a peep about this from the mainstream news. Probably for the same reasons that White racist shooters are always described as ‘lone wolves’ or ‘deeply disturbed individuals’, while Islamist butchers are called precisely what they are: terrorists. And so should murderous White fascists.
But despite the denials and smears of the Tories, the Conservative party has always had links to the extreme right, and consistently promoted the anti-immigration policies that are an integral part of modern British Fascism. Anyone remember the furore in the 1980s when parts of the Tory party declared they wanted ‘racial nationalism’ adopted as the party’s official policy? ‘Racial Nationalism’ is the ideology of the NF and BNP. Only White, traditional Brits, can be true citizens. It had massive support amongst the Union of Conservative Students, which is why Norman Fowler closed them down and merged them with the Young Conservatives to form Conservative Future. And a friend of mine in Cheltenham told me years ago that it split the Tories in his ward, as half of them were very definitely in favour of it.
This is what the Tory dominated media isn’t telling you. And by not doing so, they are reinforcing racist double standards and protecting the racist Tory right.
Mike put up a piece on his blog today, commenting on the distinction the lamestream media makes between White and Muslim terrorists. He was discussing the coverage of Darren Osborne, the islamophobe who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of worshippers leaving two mosques in London. Osborne had become obsessed with killing Muslims after watching a documentary on the Muslim grooming gangs and radicalised by following various anti-Islamic groups, including the notorious Britain First, on the net.
What drew Mike’s ire was the way Osborne was described as a ‘loner’, in sharp contrast to the various Islamist mass murderers, who were rightly described as terrorists. They were. So is Osborne. He killed and maimed innocent people for a political ideology. And there is no difference in the pattern of his radicalisation from the Islamists. Many of them were self-radicalised, turning to hatred and violence by following the propaganda spewed over the internet by groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. They were described as ‘lone wolves’, which I think is how the Islamists themselves want to promote them and their actions.
But White killers like Osborne aren’t described as what they are – terrorists.
Mike wonders if this was propaganda. And he has a Tweet by Tom London, who also comments on this distinction, and makes the point that to understand these peoples’ action, you need to understand the causes.
Mike and Mr London aren’t the only people, who’ve noticed this peculiar double standard. The American left-wing and progressive news shows – The Young Turks, in particular, – have also commented repeatedly on the way the media in America also makes this distinction. Whites are ‘loners’, Muslims are ‘terrorists’. And Islamist terrorism is taken very seriously. As it should. White racist terrorism should also be treated in the same way. In fact, it deserves more attention and effort to combat it, as there’s actually more of it than Islamist violence. But Trump’s decided to just about close down the parts of the FBI dedicated to monitoring and tracking White supremacist terrorist organisations. Of course, some of this is self-interest for Trump, as he’s received strong backing from White Supremacist groups, most notably the Alt-Right. Which has its own gang of violent, SA-type thugs in the ‘Proud Boys’, who believe that combating the threat to White America means going out and beating up Anti-Fascists.
But there’s a wider, underlying assumption here. It’s that White America and Britain is tolerant and non-racist, and that the threats to British and American society come from outside. From the ‘unassimilable immigrants’ the Daily Mail, Express and the Torygraph talked so much about under Thatcher, and continue to discuss in those terms. And when the Scum declares that we are a tolerant society, attacking a White racist outrage, you have to be amazed at their hypocrisy. This is a paper that never missed a trick to vilify Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Nearly twenty years ago Private Eye ran a piece about the rag’s double standards, pointing out that there had been 19 complaints against the Scum for racism upheld by the Press Complaints Commission, as was.
Now I don’t doubt that most Brits now aren’t racist, although there still is lingering prejudice, particularly towards Muslims. Some of that is the result of the War on Terror and Israeli propaganda – when the word ‘terrorist’ began entered widespread use in the 1960s-70s, it was always in the context of Muslim and Palestinian/Arab terror. It was the deliberate use of language to present Israel as the noble, wronged party, standing against murderous fanatics. Who were, as orientals, terrible others to be feared and hated. And some of it comes from the real fanatics, who organised demonstrations demanding the death of Salman Rushdie and the Pope, waving banner proclaiming that we would soon be visited for our crimes by the jihadis. And some of this is media bias, as the counterdemonstrations organised by far more tolerant, liberal Muslims against the bigots, firebrands and wannabe mass murderers didn’t receive nearly so much coverage.
There are also dangers with accusing White society en masse of racism. Nobody likes to be told they’re racist, and I’m afraid some of the self-proclaimed anti-racist and Black and ethnic minority advocacy groups did go too far in claiming that British racism was endemic and widespread. Some of them really did give the impression that they regarded all White people as racist. And this has provoked a backlash. Way back around 2004 the Spectator ran a piece, ‘Blackened Whites’, attacking anti-racist groups for unfairly smearing the White British majority, and particularly White men. It was the Tories attempt to use the Republicans’ tactic of appealing to ‘angry White men’, who feel threatened and demonised by feminism and the rise of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Pushing anti-racist campaigning too far, and labelling all Whites, or nearly all Whites racist, risks further alienating ordinary people, who would otherwise be sympathetic. It plays into the hands of the Tories, who would like to present themselves as the nice, anti-racist party, in contrast to all the White proles in the Labour movement. See Owen Jones’ book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, for the way the media deliberately misrepresented an industrial dispute about the use of immigrant workers to see how the Tories and their lapdogs in the press do this.
But there is real racism there. The Tory party was riven in the 1980s with groups declaring their support for ‘racial nationalism’ – the ideology of the National Front and BNP. The Conservative youth organisations were notorious for it, before they were shut down by Norman Fowler and merged into Conservative Future. But these racists haven’t gone away, and neither has the anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s still there in the right-wing press. A little while ago that side of the Tories tended to decamp to UKIP. But now that UKIP’s very definitely on the rocks, they’re all coming back. In the meantime, there’s always Boris Johnson and Toby Young to make horrifically racist pronouncements, although in fairness to Johnson, he did apologise for his comments about ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon grins’.
And so a White racist, who killed and injured innocent people, simply because of their religion, gets called a ‘loner’, but not the terrorist he is.
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