Heaven help me, I’ve agreed with ‘Hatey’ Katie Hopkins! You remember her, the supercapitalist, racist snob who came runner-up on The Apprenticeship and became a right-wing media pundit until her views were too toxic even for the Heil to keep her on. Since then she’s been knocking around with convicted stalker Alex Belfield, now looking at the possibility of going to the slammer. But in the video below she actually says something that I hope we can all get behind.
She criticises the way 45 million people by her estimation will be in fuel poverty this winter. This means that more than ten per cent of their income will be spent on heating. This is unsustainable. And she’s afraid that something like one million people will decide they can no longer face life in this country. She goes on to state that in her view, the energy crisis has been brought on by successive governments going green and shutting down the coal-fired power stations with nothing to replace them, at a time when India and China are building new ones. And our government has also thrown away concerns about this country’s fuel security. But, she says, even if you disagree with her views and are a complete ‘greenie’, can we all agree to unite against fuel poverty and the possibility that a million people may decide that life in this country is not worth living. And so she urges people not to pay their exorbitant energy bills.
I fully support people from both left and right coming to together against fuel poverty and put pressure on the various politicos and companies that are responsible for the present crisis. Tory icon Maggie Thatcher has had a large part in it, because the Tories closed down the British coal mines except for a very few in the ’90s or so. The argument for this was that it was supposedly cheaper to import South American coal. An additional, if not the real reason, was that she wished to break the miners’ union, the NUM, because of the way they’d defeated the Tories under Ted Heath.
But energy policy has been a mess. Cameron’s lot got the French nuclear power engineers in to build various nuclear power stations despite problems building them and the sustainability of this strategy as well. And this is apart from Jacob Rees-Mogg showing us all where his sympathies lie last week when the Beeb interviewed him on Radio 4. Instead of sympathising that the price rises were wrong when these companies were making massive profits, the Minister for the 18th Century and Bringing Back Child Chimney-Sweeps declared that those companies had only been able to pay their shareholders dividends of a few pence, and that they needed to do so as a reward on investment. Somehow I don’t think the shareholders only got a few pence as dividends. The companies’ directors certainly didn’t: they’ve pocket bonuses and salaries worth hundreds of thousands, if not a few cool millions.
I don’t really agree with people refusing to pay their energy bills, as I can see people being prosecuted as a result and going to prison, whereas it should be the energy companies and their bosses up before the beak.
Incidentally, it shows where the sympathies of the Heil are that they published an article about how the ‘don’t pay’ campaign was organised by middle-class ‘Corbynistas’. Oh those poor mega-millionaires, being persecuted by the evil middle class commie followers of the despised Trotskyite running dog Corbyn!
But even so, I agree with her that left and right need to stand together against this poverty and profiteering and look after those who may otherwise think that life is not worth living. Always assuming that she means suicide, and not people trying to flee abroad to live and so help to precipitate a demographic crisis.
I also got this email today from the organisers of the Arise Festival of left Labour ideas notifying that there’s an event at 7.00 pm tonight about LGBTQ+ Liberation, Solidarity and Socialism. The email runs
Premieres TODAY, Sunday July 3, 19.00. Join & watch with comrades here or watch back later here // Get ticket for the whole festival here.
As the government turns to reactionary divide and rule politics in the face of a cost of living crisis, and as violent attacks on LGBTQ+ increase at an alarming rate, Amy Smith of Arise Festival meets in conversation with Mike Jackson (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) and Katherine Harlow (LGBTQ+ candidate on Young Labour’s Socialist Future slate) to discuss the way forward for LGBTQ+ liberation.
LGSM were at the forefront of providing solidarity to striking miners throughout the 84/85 strike. The NUM then led the 1985 Pride March and moved the motion supporting LGBT rights at Labour’s conference in the same year. We’ll be discussing what we can learn from that experience, the importance of Pride, and why solidarity and socialism must be at the heart of fighting for LGBTQ+ liberation.
I go this email below from the organisers of the forthcoming Arise Festival about an online event next Sunday celebrating and promoting gay and socialist solidarity.
‘LGBTQ+ Liberation – Pride, solidarity and socialism – Tune in at Arise FestivalÂ
Premieres, Sunday July 3, 19.00. Register here // Retweet here // Get ticket for the whole festival here.
As the government turns to reactionary divide and rule politics in the face of a cost of living crisis, and as violent attacks on LGBTQ+ increase at an alarming rate, Amy Smith of Arise Festival meets in conversation with Mike Jackson (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) and Katherine Harlow (LGBTQ+ candidate on Young Labour’s Socialist Future slate) to discuss the way forward for LGBTQ+ liberation.
LGSM were at the forefront of providing solidarity to striking miners throughout the 84/85 strike. The NUM then led the 1985 Pride March and moved the motion supporting LGBT rights at Labour’s conference in the same year. We’ll be discussing what we can learn from that experience, the importance of Pride, and why solidarity and socialism must be at the heart of fighting for LGBTQ+ liberation.
They’re absolutely right about the gay movement’s support for the miners. It’s the subject of a British film, Pride, which is set during the miners’ strike and is about gays and the striking miners coming together. I’m not aware that homophobic violence has increased, but it wouldn’t surprise me. There have been polls showing that for the first time, the present younger generation is less tolerant in this direction than its elders.
Some of this hatred might come from recent controversies from over the other side of the Pond. There has been considerable discussion and opposition to the nudity and kink at Pride marches over in America, as well as drag clubs hosting shows for children and the inclusion of LGBTQ* teaching to young children of nine and below in schools. There’s also increasing opposition to the drag queen story time events for children in public libraries. I gather that British Pride marches are somewhat different, but concerns about nudity and kink in public at an event which is promoted as child-friendly and suitable for children do seem to me to be entirely justified given some of the behaviour displayed by the marchers. This doesn’t mean banning the marches, though, or using it to promote homophobia. It should just mean getting the organisers and participants to clean up their act if they really want to be seen as suitable for children. Otherwise, regardless of the marches’ best intentions to promote tolerance across all ages, they should really be seen as for adults only.
I’ve also read criticism of Pride marches by gays, who say they’ve been put off them by the atmosphere that’s appeared there in recent years. They’ve written in various comments about Pride on right-leaning video channels discussing them that the marches have changed and aren’t what they once were. Some of these gay commenters find them now rather intimidating and corporate, as companies boast how they’re sponsoring them as a public relations exercise to show how tolerant and inclusive they are. They contrast this with the genuinely celebratory and subversive feeling there were about such marches back in the 80s and so on, when gays didn’t have the right to marry, were widely hated despite decriminalisation, and Thatcher wanted to ban the promotion of homosexuality in schools. As Thatcher was friends with Fascist monsters like Pinochet, it seemed all too credible that this would result in real, vicious persecution against gays that could see a return to them being imprisoned and worse.
Under Cameron, the Tories reversed their public stance against homosexuality and promoted openly gay candidates. But it does seem from the above message that they are trying to find ways to break the connection between the gay movement and the organised working class through stirring up anti-gay hatred.
Mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield has put up a clip from GB News of Nigel Farage wondering why we don’t mine our own coal. Instead of importing it, suggests Nige, we should reopen that mine in Cumbria which has a large amount of it. Well, this might come as a surprise to Farage and Belfield, we did mine our own coal. However, this stopped, and the industry was first privatised and then decimated because Maggie decided that imported coal was cheaper and she wanted to break the unions. The NUM had humiliated Ted Heath when he tried to break them in the 1970s. The result was the three day week and power cuts, a clear demonstration of the union’s power. So Thatcher privatised it, and then broke the NUM with militarised, highly politicised policing backed with obedient TV propaganda with the miners’ strike. And after that was over, the Tories went ahead and did everything that Arthur Scargill warned about and closed down nearly all the pits. The result was the demise of an entire industry and the destruction of whole towns.
Belfield states that he’s a working class lad from a pit village, and rants about how the White working class are neglected and attention paid instead to ‘box tickers’ from ethnic minorities. But there’s an answer to that, and I correspondent Yasmin Alibhai-Brown gave it a few years ago when she appeared on TV with Rod Liddle. Liddle also complains about the marginalisation and official neglect of the White working class. Alibhai-Brown told him that she wasn’t responsible for that. Indeed, she’d actually worked with White, working class pupils. It wasn’t people of colour who destroyed working class communities and self-respect, but Margaret Thatcher.
Dam’ right!
We should be mining our own coal, provided it isn’t too harmful to the planet and we can make a transition to cleaner, greener energy in the long run. But a revived coal industry would need significant government investment to guarantee it, as private industry hasn’t resulted in greater investment in the utilities. Such a coal company might have to be nationalised.
Which would destroy a central plank of Thatcherism.
This is another really great policy from the Labour Party. They’ve announced that they plan to abolish the £22.70 fee for dental check-ups, and Corbyn has said that the ultimate aim is to abolish all fees for dentistry.
According to a piece Mike has reblogged from elsewhere, the fees were first introduced in 1951 to pay for the Korean War. It notes that one in five adults puts off going to the dentist because of the cost, and that ‘worrying numbers’ are turning to the internet for kits for scaling and makeshift fillings, which can cause serious problems.
515,000 patients a year go to A&E or their GPs for treatment for toothache, which costs the Health Service £38 million a year. Over a hundred children have rotten teeth removed in hospital every day, and decay is the leading cause of hospital admissions for children aged from five to nine. Ninety per cent of those cases can be prevented by early treatment.
In addition to abolishing the fees for ordinary check-ups, Labour also wish to remove them for oral cancer examinations, X-rays, clinical scaling and polishing and emergency treatment.
Mike adds that it would also be great if Labour could also ensure that everyone has access to an NHS dentist. He hasn’t seen one since June last year, 2018, because the dental service in mid-Wales was handed over to a private company. He concludes
Health service privatisation – it will always leave us short-changed.Â
Mike’s right again, and this is an issue that goes back years. I’ve read a number of newspaper reports about people missing out on dental treatment because they can’t afford it. And there is a crushing shortage of NHS dentists. We’ve had problems finding suitable dentists in my part of south Bristol, as a number of them went private and immediately put their prices up. Some of this problem comes down to the profit motive at the heart of any system of private healthcare. Where it exists, there will always be the motive to charge inflated fees and concentrate on those, who are better health, rather than those who need much more treatment, because the latter aren’t as profitable.
And like the other issues with healthcare in this care, it was caused by Maggie Thatcher. I can remember how there was a massive dispute between her government and the dentists over funding, with the result that many split off from the NHS and went private. They claimed that they simply couldn’t survive with what the government was prepared to pay them. Thatcher, I remember, put the blame on them for demanding too much. I don’t know which side was right, but instinct tells me it wasn’t the Tories. Thatcher was determined to privatise the NHS in toto, but was prevented by a cabinet revolt. She carried on, however, with a campaign to encourage 10 per cent of the British population to take out private health insurance, and a programme of limited privatisation. Some of the auxiliary services for the NHS were opened up to private contractors. The department specialising in in vitro fertilisation – test tube children – was privatised. She also introduced fees for eye tests at the opticians.
The Tories are past masters at creating an industrial dispute, which will allow them to attack a particular industry and the trade unions or professional associations for its workers. We’ve seen how she did it to the miners, in order to break the NUM and close down most of the mining industry. I think she did something similar with the dentists. She manufactured a dispute with them, so that she could force some at least out of the NHS and created a private dental service.
And thanks to her, people are missing the dentist and their health is suffering.
Labour’s plan to abolish dental fees are needed. People really do need proper dental examinations. A few years ago I was diagnosed with a mouth condition that could have become serious and which needed monitoring, and I’m very sure I wasn’t alone. People are damaging their health, possibly seriously, by not going to the dentist and having the examinations and work they need done.
And it is the fault of the Tories.
Thatcher and her legacy have been catastrophic for this country, its industries and working people. But she’s still a molten idol to the Tories, Lib Dems and the Blairites. They have to be defeated, and Thatcher’s vile legacy consigned to the dustbin it deserves.
Our health, and our Health Service, cannot afford not to.
Last Monday, 13th May 2019, the great man at the Zelo Street blog put up an article explaining how Tommy Robinson was avoiding the more prosperous areas of northwest England to concentrate instead on the poorest, and those areas with the highest levels of depression. The virulent anti-Islam campaigner, late of the EDL, Pegida UK and the BNP, was avoiding towns like Crewe, Chester, Southport, Lancaster, Northwich, Winsford, Runcorn, St Helens, Ellesmere Port, Chorley, Wilmslow, Ashton-under-Lyne, and places like them. Instead, he was concentrating on towns like Brinnington, Birkenhead, Blackpool, Rochdale, Burnley, and Barrow-in-Furness.
Brinnington has the highest levels of clinical depression in the north and midlands. According to the Groaniad, it accounted for 23.6 per cent of all cases seen by GPs in the town. Four other areas with the highest levels of depression are in or near Birkenhead – Bidston Hill, Tranmere, Woodchurch and Birkenhead Central. Another two are in Fleetwood, near Blackpool. Robinson is due to visit that fair town, as well as Carlisle, which has another area with a very high incidence of depression. Three more areas are Rochdale, whose Heywood area Robinson was due to visit on Saturday. Robinson cancelled a visit to Blackburn, but turned up in Burnley, which has two of England’s most deprived towns near it. He also planned on visiting Barrow-in-Furness, which has an acute heroin problem.
Zelo Street concluded
And by pure coincidence, Stephen Lennon is favouring the area with a visit this week. All the while, The Great Man is waving his begging bowl, telling those amongst whom he comes that he needs their help. That they live on the margins of society, and he lives in the lap of luxury, does not seem to occur to those willing to cheer him on.
Living high on the hog while preying on misery. Welcome to the Tommy Tour.
It’s not just that Robinson is exploiting the poverty and poor mental health afflicting the people of those towns, he’s also trying use their misery to distract them from the real economic and political causes of their problems. These areas have suffered from the decline of traditional industries, resulting in high unemployment rates. Which would also account for the massive rise in depression due to the lack of self-esteem, hopelessness and sheer despair. These are areas that have not been helped by the neoliberalism embraced and enthusiastically promoted by the Tories, the Lib Dems and Blairite Labour. Thatcher made it very clear that she did not believe in providing any help to failing industries or direct state interference in the economy. Failing companies were to be allowed to fail, on the grounds that state aid was inefficient and would prevent the operation of the market forces that would see new industries take off to provide work and prosperity.
This hasn’t happened. These areas are still poor and depressed. And it was situation made worse in the 1990s when the Tories decided to destroy whatever remained of the British mining industry. This was touted, again, as saving the country from supporting a failing and uneconomic industry, but the real reason was to destroy the NUM, which had overthrown Heath’s government in the 1970s.
But Conservative ideology prevents any discussion of the failings of private industry or the precious market forces, which the supporters of the free market are constantly telling us must be obeyed at all costs, and will ultimately bring back jobs and wealth. And so scapegoats must be found to explain why the free market isn’t working as it should, or to direct popular anger away the businessmen, think tanks and politicians pushing these policies. And so Fascists like Robinson accuse racial or religious minorities or outside groups of causing these problems. The Nazis made Jews synonymous with capitalism, and so claimed they had created a socialist Germany when they persecuted and murdered them. Capitalism, however, was retained and encouraged, although private industry was subject to a complex system of state planning. George Orwell described it as ‘the socialism of fools’. And right-wing populist politicians across the world, from Trump in America to the EDL, UKIP and the Brexit party in Britain are doing it today. Aided by mainstream Conservatives.
The right-wing press, and particularly the Heil and Speccie, have been telling their working class readers that their poor and underprivileged, not because of Tory policies that have decimated manufacturing industry and are destroying the NHS and welfare state for the profit of big business. No, it’s because high-spending Labour authorities and liberal ‘political correctness’ are deliberately diverting funding to undeserving groups, like Blacks, other ethnic minorities, gays and in the case of Tommy Robinson and his supporters, Scary Muslims.
The right have been doing this since Bacon’s Rebellion in 17th century. This was a revolt in Virginia where the slaves were joined by White indentured servants. The rebellion was put down, but to ensure that Blacks and poor Whites never united again to challenge the social hierarchy, laws were passed that separated Blacks from Whites, and gave Whites a higher social status. But crucially, these laws did not improve conditions for the indentured White servants. Materially, they gained nothing from these laws. Nevertheless, they had the psychological effect intended. From then on, White indentured servants didn’t make common cause with the slaves against their exploitation, or at least, not so much, because Blacks were now their social inferiors.
And it’s the same here. Robinson fully supports neoliberalism. Indeed, in his attack on a female academic at Liverpool John Moores University, he defended it against left-wing academics such as herself. He and his supporters offer precious little that will make the lives of ordinary working people better. The only thing they offer is more division and hatred.
There are issues with Islam, such as the continuing malign influence of the preachers of hate and the dangers of self-radicalisation for the young and disaffected through the internet. And authorities have targeted ethnic minorities for a greater proportion of aid because these groups are, or have been, more deprived, or have specific needs that can only be addressed through projects directed to them. Like the rape helpline for women from ethnic minorities, which Robinson so grossly misrepresented as deliberately excluding Whites and legitimising the assault of White women. It wasn’t the case, and his vile tweets about it resulted in the phone line having to be shut down because of the abusive calls they were receiving, thus depriving extremely vulnerable women of the help they needed.
Fortunately, Robinson’s tour of the northwest isn’t going as smoothly as he planned. A string of towns have made it clear that he is not welcome, there have been large counterprotests. And to cap it all, the internet platform, Stripe, that makes it possible for people to donate their hard earned cash to him, has thrown him off. Which makes it a bit more difficult for him to scrounge off the poor and misinformed.
Robinson poses as a member of the working class, defending them from the politically correct Left and militant Islam. He isn’t. He’s a very rich man, thanks to the money he’s been given by his followers. And he offers nothing to the working class except more neglect and poverty, but with racial hatred and suspicion added. He’s a disgrace.
This Thursday, those who really want to see working people’s lives improved should ignore him, and his lies about Europe and Muslims, and vote for somebody else instead.
Mike today put up a piece about the two candidates the government is considering sticking on the back of the fifty pound note. They are Alan Turing, the wartime mathematical genius, who broke the enigma code and helped shorten the war. One of the machines Turing designed, or helped design to break the code was programmable, and Turing is respected as one of the founders of modern computing.
He was, however, gay at a time when it was very much against the law. He was convicted of gross indecency, and chemically castrated, which led to him taking his own life.
Thatcher, on the other hand, is the woman whose policies have inflicted nothing but misery on this planet for nearly forty years. She started the Tories’ and New Labour’s privatization programme, including that of the NHS, the destruction of the welfare state and deliberately made signing on for unemployment benefit as humiliating as possible, in order to deter the poor from doing so. She was also determined to break the unions, manufacturing a strike by the NUM through the gutting of British coalmining, purely to break the union that had brought down Heath’s government years before. And she used the police has her army to attack and beat the miners, aided by a complicit media, including the Beeb. These ran the footage of the strike at Orgreave colliery backwards to make it appear that the miners were attacking the police, while it was the other way round.
Exactly as the great peeps on Twitter, whose comments Mike quotes in his piece about it.
Ah, but Thatcher was a chemist! She worked for Walls, inventing the process that injects air into ice cream to make it appear that there’s more of it than there is.
Well, if the government wants to put scientists, and especially women scientists, on the fifty pound note, I’ve got a few suggestions of my own. Female scientists they could choose include:
Dorothy Hodgkin. She’s the woman who should have got the prize for discovering the structure of DNA, as Crick and Watson were looking completely in the wrong direction until they walked past the door of her lab, and heard her talking about her work. She lost the Nobel to them, but did get another prize for another great discovery she made. If she hasn’t been already, it’s the right time to have her commemorated on our folding stuff.
Jocelyn Bell Purnell. She was the astronomer, who discovered pulsars. These are tiny, dense stars at the end of their lives, which send out a radio signal. They spin very quickly, so that the signal sweeps across the sky, so that they appear as a regular beat. At first it was believed that they might be signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. Some astronomers also believe that, while they’re natural, space-traveling aliens could use them as lighthouses to navigate their way across the Galaxy.
Helen Sharman. She’s another chemist, though at Mars, rather than Walls. But she is know for being the first Brit into space when she joined the British-Russian space mission to Mir in the 1980s. Since then, she’s been something of a science educator, appearing at events to encourage children to take up science.
Caroline Herschel. She’s the brother of John Herschel, and daughter of William. She and her brother were astronomers in 18th century Bath, making telescopes and discovering new stars.
I’m sure there are many others. These are all astronomy and space related, because that’s the area I’m interested in and know most about. All of these ladies have a better claim to be on the Fifty pound note than Thatcher.
But if you want another bloke, how about Dr. Jacob Bronowski. He was another mathematician working during the War. He was also the presenter of the 1970s Beeb science blockbuster, The Ascent of Man. He was also a Fabian socialist with a hatred of war. In The Ascent of Man he makes his view of armed conflict very clear by saying: ‘War is theft by other means’. It’s parody of Clausewitz’s famous phrase ‘War is politics by other means’. Bronowski’s description of war is very true, especially now when we’ve seen that the humanitarian interventions in the Middle East have all been about conquering them in order to despoil their oil reserves, loot their state industries and stop any kind of Arab and Islamic support for Israel. And Iran appears to be next on the hit list.
However, I do like the suggestion of Raab C. Brexit that it should be the sage of Govan, Rab C. Nesbitt on the notes. Having his mug staring out at them might just put a few of the really filthy rich off when they get it out to pay for their bottle of Krug.
Remember, it was Nesbitt who predicted that there’d be a war between the Toffs and the Scum. The Toffs would win initially, because they’ve got the army. But the Scum would be the victors, because they have all the Rottweilers.
The Winter 2016 issue of Lobster also has a very disquieting review by John Newsinger of a book on the relationship between British Ministers and the intelligence services, The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers by Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac. This discusses not only the way British prime ministers have co-operated with the secret services in the bugging and surveillance of the Left, and how they used the services in a series of foreign operations, including Iraq, but also how the same intelligence services also worked against them, including interventions by foreign espionage services in Britain. In doing so, several reputations are left tarnished and some convenient myths destroyed.
One of the keenest supporters of British intelligence against his domestic opponents was Harold Wilson. When he was in office in the 1960s, Wilson had had leftwing trade unionists put under surveillance, taps placed on their phones, and bugged. This included the participants in the 1966 strike by British merchant seamen. Others kept under very close watch included, naturally, the Communist party. He also encouraged other rightwing union leaders to cooperate with MI5. Those, who did so included Harry Crane, the head of the GMWU, who passed information onto Sarah Barker, the Labour Party’s national agent, who in turn passed it on to the spooks.
Wilson also continued the secret wars the Tories had begun in Yemen and Indonesia. The British, Saudis and Israeli secret services provided aid and assistance to rebels, who perpetrated the same kind of atrocities as ISIS. Unlike ISIS, they didn’t cause a scandal and international terror by posting them online. Newsinger notes that Aldrich and Cormac state that the extent of the British involvement in the 1965 massacre of the Left in Indonesia is a mystery. As this also involved the commission of atrocities, besides which those of ISIS seem pale by comparison, this is a very convenient mystery. It’s widely believed that Wilson kept Britain out of the Vietnam War, but this is not the case. Wilson actually wanted to send a token force, but was prevented from doing so because of the extent of British public opinion against the War and the opposition of the left wing within the Labour party itself. This did not prevent him from providing the Americans with intelligence support. This involved not only GCHQ, but also MI6, who provided reports on the effect of American bombing campaigns from the British embassy in Hanoi. The Americans were also allowed to operate their biggest CIA station in that part of Asia from Hong Kong. In addition to this, Wilson also wanted MI6 to assassinate Idi Amin, but they refused. Considering the carnage wrought by this monster, it’s a pity that they didn’t.
Wilson himself was the subject of various intelligence plots and smears against him, despite his collaboration with the intelligence services. This involved not only MI5, but also the South African intelligence service, BOSS. This got to the point where it was literally spies watching other spies, with BOSS spying on the anti-apartheid campaign, while themselves being spied on by MI5. BOSS were allowed to get away with their espionage, however, as it was claimed that they had a film of MPs taking part in an orgy and a dossier on a sex scandal that was far more shocking and compromising than Christine Keeler.
Ted Heath in the 1970s had Jack Jones, the leader of the TGWU put under surveillance. Joe Gormley, the head of the NUM, was also an informant for special branch throughout the decade. The usual practice at MI5 when a company requested assistance monitoring radical trade unionist was to pass the case on to the Economic League, a private outfit specialising in blacklisting trade unionists. But Ford also demanded that Special Branch vet their workforce, to which Heath agreed. This led to more firms demanding information on trade unionists, including Massey Ferguson. Not only was the British government under Heath actively compiling blacklists of trade unionists, Heath himself demanded that MI5 should have some of the militant activists ‘done’.
Under Thatcher the number of private intelligence agencies tackling her domestic enemies, like CND, increased. But Newsinger observes that the book does not cover at all the involvement of this agencies in the machinations against the NUM in the Miners’ Strike, and the establishment of the scab Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Newsinger comments
Perhaps the official material is not available, but not to have any discussion of the great miners’ strike at all is a serious shortcoming. The very absence of material, if this was indeed the case, is tremendously significant and deserved discussion. This was, after all, the decisive engagement that shifted the balance of class forces and made everything that has followed possible.
The book also covers Blair’s wars, which Newsinger does not cover in his review, finding the book’s revelations about Cameron’s own warmongering in Libya and Syria more interesting. MI6 and the Defence chiefs advised Cameron not to try to bring down Gaddafi. This didn’t stop him, and Cameron had the agency and SAS give the rebels training, arms and body armour. MI6 wanted the Libyan dictator sent into exile into Equatorial Guinea, where his own links to them would not be placed in any danger by him having to appear before an international human rights court. But this problem was, as Newsinger notes, solved by his death.
The book also reveals that a number of people within MI6 and the CIA did not believe that Assad’s regime in Syria was responsible for the Sarin attack in Ghoutta. They believed that the real perpetrators were the al-Nusra Front, backed by Turkey, which hoped to provoke the US into starting a bombing campaign. The US was ready with a fleet of aircraft, which Britain was also set to join, but the operation was cancelled due to the disagreements over responsibility for the atrocity within the US secret services.
The authors also report that Mossad has also been responsible for kidnappings and murders in London, but give no further information.
Newsinger concludes that ‘after reading this book we not only know more than we
did, but also how much more we need to know and unfortunately how much we are likely to never know….’
What is also clear from reading this is not only the extent of the involvement of British prime ministers in covert operations, against left-wingers and trade unionists in Britain and a series of foreign regimes abroad, but also the weakness of parliament in restraining them. British involvement in the bombing of Syria was stopped because of dissension within the American intelligence community, not because of opposition from parliament. As for Heath targeting British trade unionists for surveillance and possible assassination, Newsinger remarks on how this is ‘dynamite’, which should be investigated by the Commons Intelligence Select Committee. There is not the most remote chance of this happening, however, as the Commons Intelligence Select Committee is really
just a parliamentary spittoon into which the intelligence agencies occasionally feel obliged to gob.
Lobster’s entire raison d’etre is the belief that western, and particularly the British intelligence services are out of control and responsible for immense crimes that otherwise go undocumented and unpunished. Newsinger’s review of this book and its potentially explosive contents bear out this belief. It also hints by its omissions that there is more buried yet deeper, which may never be brought to light.
Mike over at Vox Political also put up a piece today reporting that May had finally folded, and given the French and Chinese the go-ahead to build the nuclear power station, Hinkley C in Somerset. The stations’ going to be built by the French state power company, EDF, and the Chinese. The project was put on hold because of concerns about security, which created tension between Britain and China. May and her business secretary, Greg Clarke, were claiming that they had put in place ‘significant new safeguards’. Mike points out that they seem far from it. The ban on EDF selling its share in the site without government permission is simple commerce, rather than security. And he considers a similar precaution, the new security test for foreign investment in critical infrastructure also to be ‘toothless’. As he points out, it won’t stop the Chinese going ahead with their plant at Bradwell in Essex, and investing further in Sizewell B in Suffolk. He quotes EDF’s chief executive, Jean-Bernard Levy, that the construction of Hinkley C marks ‘the relaunch of nuclear in Europe’.
Apart from May flatly ignoring Green concerns, this also doesn’t appear to be a good deal for the British customer either. The government has guaranteed EDF a price of £92.50 for every megawatt hour of electricity generated, despite the fact that this is higher than the market rate.
As Mike says
This is a step backwards – and a bitter blow for all those who have been working towards a greener, cleaner, forward-looking mode of energy generation.
I’m not remotely surprised by this. The Conservatives have always backed nuclear power at the expense of Green energy. Way back in the early 1990s under John Major, Private Eye documented the way the government was pushing nuclear, and doing everything it could to discredit its environmentally friendly competition. For example, reviews into the viability of renewable energy were given to government panels headed by scientists or officials from the nuclear industry.
And the Tories’ choice of nuclear power over other forms of energy, such as coal, has nothing to do with its supposed benefits. Certainly not if EDF are being given a price for their wattage above market value. I’ve forgotten where I read it, but I came across a piece the other day, which claimed that the Tories deliberately chose nuclear as a way of breaking the unions. Nuclear fuel – the uranium used in the rods in the reactor core – has to be imported. I think the main source of it at the moment is Africa, where obviously labour is cheap and disposable. Unlike coal, which exists over here, but whose supply was controlled by a notoriously strong and stroppy union, until Maggie broke it in the 1980s, and the Tories then decimated the industry itself in the 1990s.
This isn’t about supplying cheap electricity. This is about breaking organised labour, to keep people poor and cowed by the threat of unemployment. And it shows how wise Tony Benn was when he turned from being an advocate of it to its opponent.
Mike has also put a report that tomorrow, a delegation from the Orgreave Truth and Justice campaign will meet with the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, to demand an inquiry into the wrongful arrest of 95 miners at the colliery during the Miner’s Strike, the construction of a false narrative about them, and the presentation of this false narrative to the media, which then uncritically accepted it. These allegations are based on previously unseen documents which show that there was collusion between the police and the courts in the attack on the miners at the Orgreave during the strike in 1984.
Mike states that there is clear prima facie evidence that there was undue political interference in the police and the courts. In light of the ongoing investigation into the way the police and the government doctored the evidence in the Hillsborough tragedy, Mike states that it seems to him that an inquiry must be launched. He wonders, however, how the Tories will try to slither out of it.
There is in my mind absolutely no question whatsoever that the miners’ campaign is exactly right. There’s abundant evidence about the way the media deliberately misled the public about Arthur Scargill and the Miners’ Strike, and Mike and numerous commenters on this blog have frequently remarked on the way the BBC edited footage of the violence at the colliery to show the police being attacked by miners, when the reality was the other way around.
I also went to a meeting in Bristol of the Fabian Society, in which the guest speaker was a member of the NUJ. She was discussing the threat posed by the increasing right-wing media bias and the concentration of the press and media in the hands of a very small number of magnates. The bias against the Miner’s Strike was one example of this, and she described the way Conservative politicians and officials moved around the country to coordinate and direct the attacks on the miners.
Seumas Milne, a former advisor of Jeremy Corbyn, has also written a history of the Miners’ Strike attacking the campaign against the NUM. I wonder if this is one of the real reasons Private Eye has also been running stories attacking him as part of their campaign against Corbyn. After all, a Prime Minister, who decided that Arthur Scargill was exactly right and showed how the union was correct about the unnecessary destruction of Britain coal industry, and Thatcher’s determination to break the unions, would just be too much for the Blairites now writing for it. And far too much for a political establishment that has been more or less thoroughly Thatcherite since her election victory in 1979. We can’t have anybody shattering the popular illusion that she made Britain great again, by showing that she did the exact opposite. The 1% would never allow that.
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