Reform posted this short video, just over two minutes long, on their YouTube channel. In it, their current fuehrer calls for the partial, and rather half-hearted renationalisation of the water and power companies. He tries to connect this with Brexit, and has a dig at Starmer for initially backing it and then dropping it, saying he was no longer interested. Tice begins by stating that we are being badly served by the water companies, who are foreign-owned and so use various dodges to avoid paying tax. No other country allows vital parts of their infrastructure to be owned by foreigners. This is quite true, and Mike has been pointing this out on Vox Political since forever and day. This has been the case since they were privatised by the Tories great, molten idol of private enterprise, Maggie Thatcher, in the 1980s. He wants them partly renationalised – 50 per cent owned by the state, 50 per cent owned by pension funds, and placed under private management. This, he feels, will bring it the best of both state and private enterprise.
He’s wrong, of course. There is no magic solution behind private industry. When they’ve been handed state enterprises or institutions, their policy has always been the same: sack people and make those who remain work for less in poorer conditions in order to deliver profits and shareholder dividends. This has been done in the NHS, when hospitals and doctors’ surgeries have been handed over to private companies. In the case of GPs, this has also resulted in unprofitable patients being dumped and their surgeries closed. It also reminds me slightly of the restructuring of industry under the Nazis. Companies were linked together in a series of industrial associations, set up as private companies but membership of whom was mandatory under the Nazi regime. These associations were under the direction of the state planning apparatus running the economy. And the head of these industrial associations always came from private industry, even when the companies under him were state-owned. Obviously Tice isn’t calling for an extension of this system to British industry as a whole or its transformation into a centrally-planned economy. But he makes the same assumptions that Hitler and the Nazis, as well as the Italian fascists did, about the superiority of private industry. And as a true-blue Brexiteer he tries to link it to Brexit by saying that, as with the departure from the EU, this is all part of Britain taking back control.
Still, Tice has got something right, even though I think his speech is partly influenced by a BBC report today that Oxford Council has called for the end of water privatisation, as well as the outrage of the massive profits the private power companies have been making while energy bills have rocketed.. He’s clearly looking around for policies which he thinks will resonate with the public, and so has recognised, albeit grudgingly from the half-hearted way he wants it done, that the majority of the British public want the renationalisation of the public services. Of course, he’s still extremely right-wing in demanding more cuts to the welfare state, which he’s justified with the bogus explanation that British people need to move into low paid jobs in order to stop the British state importing more foreigners to do them. I posted a piece yesterday rubbishing that, and you should also read the comments on the piece left by the greater people reading this blog, who have added much more relevant information. But it is interesting that in this area of policy, Reform has moved left of Labour.
Not that I’ll believe they’ll keep their promises, anymore than I believe Starmer will.
Yeah, I know this ad hominem, but it is funny. Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani interviewed Tory iconoclast Peter Hitchens the other day. The two don’t really have much in common, but Bastani justified the interview saying that if you want to be certain in your political views, you should test them by talking to people who hold the opposite. Hitchen’s is very much a man of the right, and some of his views are odd, if not barking. He believes, for example, that we shouldn’t have gone to war with Germany as it was not in our interests. Perhaps it wasn’t, but we had signed the defence pacts with France and Poland, And if we hadn’t gone to war, I think we would have still lost the empire sooner or later. Plus we would have been excluded from a continent under Nazi domination. And this is not to mention the carnage that would have been perpetrated by the Nazis, with the Jews and Gypsies becoming extinct in Europe, followed by the Czechs and the Slav populations enslaved as peasant farmers supplying produce to their German overlords.
On the other hand, Hitchens has said that he never supported Thatcher’s sale of the council houses or the privatisation of the prison system, because justice, as a principle, should be in the hands of the state. He also states in one of his books that he was shocked into an awareness of how fragile civilisation was after visiting one of the failed African countries as a journalist in the 1980s. The country had descended into vicious gang violence, but walking through its capital Hitchens saw everywhere grand architecture and all the signs of modern corporate development. I think this gives an insight into the basis of his own Tory views. I remember reading in the Spectator years ago that the right-wing philosopher Roger Scruton abandoned the left when he witnessed the rioting in Paris during the 1968 student and workers’ protests. He was alarmed by their ‘anti-civilisational rage’.
Back to the interview, Hitchens described Blair’s spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, as being frightening intelligent. He mentioned people, who really thought for the first few months of Blair’s regime that it was Campbell running the country. He joked that it was probably because of Campbell’s mighty intellect that he was kept away from voters, as he would probably frighten them all away.
But Blair, on the other hand, wasn’t terribly bright and Hitchens doubted that he could have run the country without Campbell. To illustrate his point, he told the story of how he briefly met Blair just before the 1997 election. Blair was in Oxford, travelling in his motorcade. Hitchens was following him by bike, but as the traffic was bad, he got to Blair’s destination before him. After Blair had arrived, he was immediately surrounded by a crowd taking pictures. Hitchens wanted to talk to Blair, and so, after the crowd had finished and dispersed, he walked up to the future Prime Minister. He decided to open the conversation by asking who the crowd were. Blair replied, ‘They’re Brazilians. I’m very popular down there.’
‘Oh, you should learn Portuguese then,’ replied Hitch.
‘What?’
It turned out that Blair thought they spoke Brazilian in Brazil. Hitchens concluded that what Blair really wanted to be was a pop star, and you didn’t need to ascribe any deep ideological motives to him.
There was, nevertheless, an ideological basis to his policies. He was a product of BAP, the British-American Project for the Successor Generation, which was set up by Reagan to influence the rising generation of British politicians from both the Conservatives and Labour. Blair had started out as a supporter of nuclear disarmament, but after going on a BAP-sponsored trip to America and hearing the views of various right-wing think tanks, he came back as an opponent. He was fervently Thatcherite, believing in the superiority of private industry and strongly influenced by the American political system. Private Eye ran several pieces about the American private healthcare and prison companies lining up to donate to New Labour in the hope of getting some of that nationalised action. He took over advisers and staff from private healthcare companies as well as other businesses, and pushed the privatisation of the NHS further than the Tories would have dared. As stupid as he may have been, he set the course for right-wing Labour, and Starmer shows every indication of returning to it.
The online encyclopedia states that she was encouraged in her career after writing a letter to Patrick Moore about it when she was 16. He replied, ‘Being a girl is no problem’. She studied astronomy and physics at Leicester University in 1973, where she met her long-term collaborator, fellow astronomy student Nigel Henbest. The two formed a working partnership, Hencoup enterprises, devoted to popularising astronomy. She then carried out postgraduate research as a student of Linacre College, Oxford, in the university’s Astrophysics department. She became the senior lecturer at the Caird Planetarium at Greenwich. In 1984 she was elected president of the British Astronomical Association. She was the first female president and second youngest. I can remember her appearing on Wogan and playing down the fact that she was the first woman to become president, far preferring to be noted as the youngest. She also served as the President of the Junior Astronomical Society, now the Society for Popular Astronomy. In 1988 the London Planetarium invited her to write and present its major new show, Starburst. In 1993 she was appointed professor of astronomy at Gresham college. She was the first woman to hold the position in 400 years and remained professor until her death.
She wrote and co-wrote with Henbest over 40 books, as well as writing articles for a range of magazines such as BBC Sky at Night, BBC Focus and Astronomy. She also presented a lecture on the solar eclipse in Guernsey in 1999, and led expedition to view other eclipses in Sumatra, Hawaii, Aruba, Egypt, China and Tahiti. She also made numerous public appearances and talks about the cruise liners Arcadia, Queen Mary 2, and Queen Victoria. She was aboard Concorde when it made its first flight from London to Auckland. She also appeared and spoke at various science festivals, including Brighton, Cheltenham, and Oxford. She also spoke at corporate events for British Gas, Axa Sun Life and IBM.
She also presented a number of programmes and series on astronomy on the radio. These included Starwatch and The Modern Magi on Radio 4. She also presented an Archive Hour programme on the same channel on Britain’s Space Race, for which she received an Arthur C. Clarke award. She also appeared on Radio 2, and Radio 5Live, as well as making other appearances on Radio 4. She also presented a series of thirty 15-minute episodes on the history of astronomy. Her shows for the BBC World Service included A Brief History of Infinity, The Essential Guide to the 21st Century, and Seeing Stars, which was co-hosted by Henbest.
She made frequent appearances as the guest expert on various TV programmes, mostly on Channel 4. She made her first TV appearance on The Sky at Night, In 1981 she presented the children’s TV programme, Heaven’s Above, on ITV with Terence Murtagh. I think I remember watching this when I was about 14 or so. She then presented the series The Planets for Channel 4, which was followed by The Stars. She also presented the ITV show Neptune Encounter, the Horizon episode ‘A Close Encounter of the Second Kind’, and Stephen Hawking: A Profile on BBC 4.
Couper, Henbest and the director of her series, The Stars, founded a production company, Pioneer Productions. The Neptune Encounter, which covered Voyager 2’s flyby of the planet, was its first programme. She was also the producer for the Channel 4 shows Black Holes, Electric Skies and Beyond the Millennium. She later left the company to concentrate on more general radio and TV appearances.
In 1993 she was appointed a member of the Millennium Commission. Of the nine commissioners appointed, only she and Michael Heseltine continued until it was wound up.
Outside her work on astronomy, she was also a guest presenter on Woman’s Hour, as well as the John Dunn programme and Start the Week on the radio. She was also interested in local history and literature, and so appeared on Radio 4’s With Great Pleasure and Down Your Way. She also appeared on Radio 3’s In Tune selecting her ‘pick of the proms.’ She was also the narrator on a number of other factual programmes, including Channel 4’s Ekranoplan: The Caspian Sea Monster, and Raging Planet on the Discovery Channel.
So, a huge science populariser, but probably one whose achievements are obscured by other, more prominent, celebrities.
As well as the children’s astronomy programme, I also once saw her speaking on about Mars and the question of life on the Red Planet at the Cheltenham Festival of Science. She had a rather mischievous sense of humour. There’s a real possibility that life in some form has existed on Mars and may exist now, but if it does, it’s almost certainly at the level of microbes. At the time, however, various individuals who had spent too long looking at photos of the planet claimed to have seen much larger lifeforms on the planet. There was a programme on Channel 4 in which a Hungarian astronomer appeared to describe how he believed there were massive mushrooms growing there. People also thought the saw giant ‘sand whales’ crawling about its surface, like the sandworms in Dune. These were, in fact, geological features left by some of the dune’s slumping, which created a trail that looked like the segmented body of a worm. One of the peeps taken in by this was the late Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke rang her up from Sri Lanka, asking her if she’d seen them and telling her that he really didn’t know what to make of it. She commented that for a moment she thought he’d gone mad, then covered her mouth like a naughty child caught saying something she shouldn’t.
For all that she played down her importance as a female pioneer in astronomy, I think she did prepare the say for more women to enter it and become television presenters. There’s now a drive for more women in the hard sciences, and we’ve science had a Black woman presenter, Aderin-Pocock, on the Sky At Night, and female astrophysicists and mathematicians appearing on the radio and TV.
I got this email just this afternoon from Stop the War Coalition giving the details of the protests and demonstrations they’re holding against the war in Ukraine tomorrow. They’re almost entirely in England, but there is one in Glasgow for any Scots, who may wish to join in and another in Cardiff for the people of Wales. The email states
‘Tomorrow: International Day of Action for Peace in Ukraine
Towns and cities across the UK will be alive with anti-war activity tomorrow as part of the International Day of Action for Peace in Ukraine.
We are calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops in Ukraine, an end to the military escalation by NATO countries and for all efforts to be focused on finding a negotiated solution to the horrific war in the country.
A Scotland-wide demonstration is set to march through Glasgow and protests will also be taking place in Bournemouth, Brighton, Manchester and Newcastle.
Stalls and speak-outs have also been organised in over 30 locations. Find yours below…
We are asking all activists involved to upload pictures to social media and tag us @STWUK or use the hashtag #PeaceForUkraine
Please can you also email pictures to us at office@stopwar.org.uk if you would like your event included in the end of day report.
Do write to us and let us know how you get on!’
The email also includes notice of forthcoming protests in support of the Palestinians on the 14th May, and against the siting of nuclear weapons at Lakenheath on the 21st.
‘Protest for Palestine – Saturday 14 May
Join us on Sat 14th May to call for an end to Israel’s oppression and to assert the right of the Palestinian people to live in freedom with justice and equality.
The Palestinian people need our solidarity now more than ever.
It has been revealed that Britain is to become the sixth country in Europe to host US nuclear weapons. The expected location: RAF Lakenheath, a US Air Force base in Suffolk – 70 miles from London.
Creating the conditions for siting American nuclear weapons in Britain puts us on the front line of a nuclear war. It is tantamount to painting a target on the back of everyone in this country.
We’re joining the CND protest at RAF Lakenheath on Sat 21 May. Transport is being organised from across the country. If you’d like to join us click the button below.
Brian Burden, one of the great commenters on this blog, has suggested that I should dig up material on the Bullingdon Club in response to Bozo’s repulsive smear of Stalin. Our clownish premier had declared that Stalin had deliberately refused to prosecute Jimmy Savile for his heinous crimes. It wasn’t true. Stalin refused to prosecute not because he had any sympathy with the gold-bedecked monster, but because at the time he didn’t think there was enough evidence to secure a conviction. Johnson’s been rightly criticised for his lie and at least one cabinet official has resigned as a result. But the smear has gained traction, and was one of those hurled at Stalin and David Lammy by a mob from the anti-lockdown group, Resistance GB. A simple Google search turned up this article on the Groaniad website from the Observer for 7th July 2019, written by Harriet Sherwood, ‘Sexism, vandalism and bullying: inside the Boris Johnson-era Bullingdon Club’. It reports the description of the club and its grotty activities by an unnamed woman who had the job of finding recruits in the 1980s. It begins
‘It is notorious for champagne-swilling, restaurant-trashing, “pleb”-taunting elitism. Now new light has been shed on the outrageous antics of the Bullingdon Club – the Oxford University group that may be about to produce its second British prime minister – by someone intimately connected to it during Boris Johnson’s membership.
A woman who acted as a scout for potential members of the Bullingdon Club in the mid-1980s has said that female prostitutes performed sex acts at its lavish dinners, women were routinely belittled, and that intimidation and vandalism were its hallmarks.
The woman, who has asked not to be named, is now an academic and regards her involvement with the male-only Bullingdon Club more than 30 years ago with extreme regret and embarrassment.
In her first week at Oxford in 1983, she was approached by a member of the club to identify potential recruits – a role she performed throughout her time as an undergraduate. She also had an 18-month relationship with a man who became a president of the club. In her final year at Oxford, she shared a house with Bullingdon members.
Her involvement with the club coincided with Boris Johnson’s membership and overlapped with David Cameron’s. She was not a close friend of Johnson but they had a number of good friends in common, she said. She has maintained contact with several former Bullingdon members over the past 30-plus years.
“I helped recruit for the Bullingdon, and advised [the president] on its activities,” she told the Observer. “I know very well what the patterns of behaviour were. When [her ex-boyfriend] was president, they had prostitutes at their dinners. They performed sex acts, sometimes at the shared dining table, and sometimes elsewhere on the premises.”’
She describes how the club’s culture was to get drunk and vandalise something. When someone was recruited, they had to wreck their room. In one incident, a recently refurbished wood-panelled room at Magdalen College was completely trashed and the wreckage piled up in the centre. They were also bullies, who liked to intimidate ordinary peoples. She said that they “found it amusing if people were intimidated or frightened by their behaviour. I remember them walking down a street in Oxford in their tails, chanting ‘Buller, Buller’ and smashing bottles along the way, just to cow people.” You probably won’t be surprised that at a party where they had to come as their alter ego, two of them turned up in Nazi uniform. And Boris Johnson was a major member. About our current Prime Minister she says “Boris was one of the big beasts of the club. He was up for anything. They treated certain types of people with absolute disdain, and referred to them as ‘plebs’ or ‘grockles’, and the police were always called ‘plod’. Their attitude was that women were there for their entertainment.” Johnson now says that he’s ashamed of his membership and the club’s antics, but she also remarks that there are strong generational links, close-knit ties, and that they think it’s in their power to confer office on anyone they choose. ‘They have a bond of loyalty’.
Since its heyday in the 1980s the club’s power and membership has dwindled. It now has only a handful of members, apparently, and in October 2018 Oxford Conservative Association banned its members from holding any positions in it. But despite Johnson’s professed shame at being a member, she did not want him to become PM:
‘“The characteristics he displayed at Oxford – entitlement, aggression, amorality, lack of concern for others – are still there, dressed up in a contrived, jovial image. It’s a mask to sanitise some ugly features.”’
All of this rings absolutely true. Mike posted up a piece by one fellow who had the misfortune to meet Johnson in the bar while he was awaiting an interview to get into Oxford. The man comes from an ordinary background, so had to endure Johnson’s boorish sneers about him and everything about him for the amusement of his wretched, sneering, toff friends. And others have also stated that Johnson’s image as an amiable buffoon is very carefully contrived, right down to the messed hair.
It’s an indictment of the British class system that a former drunken, destructive yob should become Prime Minister simply because he’s an aristo.
It’s sad but true that many people have been taken in by Boris Johnson’s image as an affable buffoon. Whatever he does, no matter how inept or offensive, like reciting ‘The Road to Mandalay’ in Thailand’s holiest temple, coming back from talks in Moscow to ratchet up tensions with Russia rather than decrease them, the massive cronyism and corruption, the continuing destruction of the NHS, the tens of thousands whose deaths from Covid could have been prevented, there seem to be any number of people ready to ignore all those because of Johnson’s jovial persona. He’s a buffoon, yes, he’s bumbling, but he’s well intentioned and has the nation’s interests at heart. Yes, he went to Eton, but somehow, like that other scion of money and privilege Nigel Farage, he has managed to convince too many ordinary people that he’s somehow one of them. The American radical magazine Counterpunch once quoted a porter in one of the northern English fish markets as saying that Johnson was working class like him. The reality is, of course, far different. Johnson’s an aristo, and as Jeeves once said to Spode in an episode of Jeeves and Wooster all those years ago, he and the working classes are barely on nodding terms. Like his hair, which is normally neatly combed but which he deliberately messes for effect, all the bonhomie and the image of being a man of the people is a carefully crafted pose. Johnson is genuinely inept, but what is false is the image he projects of having any kind of regard for working people and their concerns.
Mike has put up a very revealing piece originally put up by Damian Furniss, about the real face behind the carefully constructed mask. And, as the Ferengi used to scream about anything they didn’t like on Star Trek, it’s ‘Ugly. Verreeee ugleeee.’ Mr Furniss had the misfortune to encounter Boris while having a pint in the bar while awaiting an interview to get into Oxford. The future Prime Minister then amused himself and his similar rich and snobby friends by sneering at Furniss, mocking everything from his speech impediment to his far humbler social background. Mike’s put up this quote from Furniss about Johnson’s nasty performance.
“Three years older than me, and half way through the second class degree in Classics he coasted through with the diligence he later applied to journalism and red box briefings, you’d have expected him to play the ambassador role, welcoming an aspiring member of his college.
“Instead, his piss-taking was brutal. In the course of the pint I felt obliged to finish he mocked my speech impediment, my accent, my school, my dress sense, my haircut, my background, my father’s work as farm worker and garage proprietor, and my prospects in the scholarship interview I was there for. His only motive was to amuse his posh boy mates.
“In short, he demonstrated all of the character flaws that make him unfit to be our Prime Minister. Nothing I see today suggests he has changed. He’s not Falstaff, he’s Faust. If you are an ordinary working person and think he has your interests at heart, think again.”
I can’t say I’m surprised by any of this. I’ve heard stories myself about how he was a vile bully at Eton, though that’s hardly anything extraordinary given the vicious bullying culture that’s run rampant there and in the other public schools. And for all his aristocratic background, it also shows a monumental lack of good breeding. At some of Bristol’s grammar schools, for example, the pupils were taught that they were to show the same respect to the gardener and the ancillary staff that they would to the teachers. It’s bad form for someone from such a privileged background to sneer at those further down the social hierarchy. But clearly, Boris and his noxious chums regard such morals as for grammar school oiks rather than such lofty personages as themselves.
Unfortunately, I doubt Mr Furniss’ piece will make much of a dent in the impressions of those who continue to be taken in by Johnson. Some of this is, no doubt, because they want to be deceived. They want to believe that somehow Johnson represents the working people of this country, in the same way that there were people more than willing to believe Tweezer when she said that she and her cabinet weren’t members of the ‘elite’, when every single one of them was a millionaire. It’s the other side of the Tories’ equally carefully constructed image of the left and especially the ‘woke’. Membership of the elite isn’t just a matter of wealth and social class, but also of values. The elite, as described ad nauseam by the Tories over here and the Republicans in America, are rich leftists who attack decent, working people with their assaults on national pride and aggressive attacks on racism, misogyny, homophobia and anything else they consider bigoted. Highly privileged individuals, who don’t share the concerns and values of ordinary working people. Unlike them, of course.
But this is all just right-wing rhetoric and propaganda. Johnson, Tweezer and the rest of the Tories are the real elite. They’re millionaires from extremely privileged backgrounds, unlike very many of the Labour party, and particularly the Labour left. There are many MPs from that side of the party, who do come from a real working class background, and whose socialism reflects their genuine concern with improving conditions for ordinary working people. This is despite the attempts by Blair and Starmer to turn Labour once again into a middle class party pursuing Conservative policies and voters.
Johnson and the Tories have nothing in common with the working class, for whom they have nothing but contempt. But they’re very good at manipulating their public image, and so have succeeded in persuading many working people that somehow they represent them.
But every so often the mask slips to reveal the seething mass of class hatred, greed and snobbery beneath.
More from the whackier end of racial politics. History Debunked has put up a number of videos refuting various assertions and myths promoted as Black history. One of his videos attacked the claim, seen in the Netflix interracial historical romance, Bridgerton, that Queen Caroline was Black. This has arisen from the fact that one of her ancestors was a 13th Spanish Moorish prince. But that was five hundred years before her birth, and so any biological trace of her non-White ancestry would have disappeared way back in her lineage. Apart from which, the Spanish Moors were Berbers and Arabs from North Africa. They were darker than Europeans – the term ‘blue-blooded’ for the aristocracy comes from the Christian Spanish nobility. Under their idea of limpieza de sangre, ‘blood purity’, the racial ideology that distinguished them from the Moors, their skin was supposed to be so pale that you could see the veins in the wrist. But the Moors were nevertheless lighter-skinned than the darker peoples south of the Sahara, in what the Arabs called Bilad as-Sudan and the Berbers Akal Nguiwen, ‘The Land of the Blacks’. Which I think shows that the Arabs and Berbers, dark as they were compared to Europeans, very clearly didn’t think of themselves as Black.
In this video Simon Webb debunks a similar myth, that James I of England/ VI of Scotland, was Black. This ahistorical idea apparently began with the Black Hebrew Israelites, a Black Jewish sect who believe that one of the lost tribes of Israel went to sub-Saharan Africa. Webb mentions that a group of them settled in Israel in the Negev. He uses this to try to refute the demand that Israel should open its borders by stating that Israel had taken in people of a number of different racial groups. They are now, for example, taking in people from India. It’s true that Israel has taken in refugees from Africa, but many of the groups they’ve accepted were Jews. In the 1970s they mounted a rescue operation to transport the Falashas, the Black Jews of Ethiopia, away from their oppression in that country to safety in Israel. My guess is that the Indians they’re accepting are also Jewish. There’s an indigenous Jewish community in India, the Bene Israel, and it sounds like some of them may be migrating. There is, however, considerable racism amongst White Israelis. Abby Martin covered this in some of her reports for The Empire Files on TeleSur, in which she interviewed Black Israelis about the abuse, including physical assault, they’d experience. Gentile African refugees, although present, are resented by many Israelis as ‘infiltrators’, the term they also use for Palestinians trying to return to the ancestral lands from which they were evicted during the Nakba, the term they use for foundation of Israel and their massacre and ethnic cleansing in 1947.
But back to the Black Hebrew Israelites and James I. The Black Hebrew Israelites believe that the Spanish Moors were Black, and that they went from Spain to colonise Ireland and Scotland. Which must be news to most Scots and Irish. Mary, Queen of Scots was mixed race, but Lord Darnley, James’ father, was fully Black and so was James. The English, however, were determined to erase any trace of this Black ancestry, and so embarked on a deliberately policy of intermarrying with the Black Scots and Irish in order to make them White, at the same time destroying all the contrary evidence that they were Black. Although this myth began with the Black Hebrew Israelites it has spread out from them into the wider Black community. To support his description of this bizarre myth, Webb on the YouTube page for the video has link to an article in the Zimbabwean newspaper, The Patriot, which proudly promotes this claim.
The belief that the Spanish Moors were Black has formed the basis for an anti-White racist view of history. A few years ago the American left-wing magazine, Counterpunch, carried on its online edition a piece by a Black historian, Garikai Chengu. This claimed that the Moors were ‘obviously Black’, and their colonisation of Spain brought science and reason to a Europe then gripped by ignorance and superstition. There’s some basis for this in that the revival of science in the West began when Christian scholars acquired Arab and Islamic scientific texts from places such as Islamic Spain and Sicily after that was conquered by the Normans. However, it’s grotesquely exaggerated and is really just a piece of racial supremacist propaganda, albeit one by Blacks rather than Whites. I think it’s fair to see such Afrocentric views of history as a form of Fascism, including this myth that the Irish and Scots were also really Black. Some historians have no trouble describing certain Black political movements as forms of Fascism. One recent book by an academic historian not only includes the classic Fascist movements of German Nazism, Italian Fascism and various other White, European far right movements, but also Marcus Garvey’s Negro Improvement Association and the Nation of Islam, as well as Narendra Modi’s BJP in India. The inclusion of Marcus Garvey and his organisation may well offend many Black activists. Garvey is one of the pioneers of Black liberation. A month or so ago there was a Black celebrity writing in the pages of the Radio Times recommending that children should be taught about him in school. I really know very little about Garvey, but the claim that he was Fascistic rings true. When I was working as a volunteer in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol one of the jobs I was given was unpacking some of boxes of material given to the Museum by private individuals and institutions. One of these included a document by Garvey’s organisation. I didn’t do more than glance at it, but it appeared to be describing some kind of military parade or armed wing. This included women’s units and mechanised and mounted forces of various kinds. I don’t know if Garvey and his followers were ever able to set up such a paramilitary force or whether it was all a fantasy. But one of the features of Fascism is its militarism. The Nazis and Italian Fascists, not to mention the various other Fascist movements, all started out as paramilitary organisations complete with uniforms and arms.
Alongside the entirely reasonable demands for social and economic improvement and renewed action to combat White racism, the Black Lives Matter movement has also brought out and articulated strains of overt anti-White racism. One example of this was the attempt by Sasha Johnson, of the Oxford branch of the organisation, to set up her own paramilitary Black army in Brixton to protect Blacks from the cops, and her tweet that the White man wouldn’t be Blacks’ equal, but their slave. Which got her banned from the social media platform. I think there is a real need to start studying and publishing material specifically on Black racism and Fascism. At the moment, there appears to be very little, if any, books specifically published on it. If you search for ‘Black racism’ on Google, what comes up is articles and books on the attacks on affirmative action programmes by right-wing Whites. Way back in the ’90s and early parts of this century there was a book published on Black anti-White violence in America. This might be White Girl Bleed A Lot, which is a similar book. However, I’m not sure how academically respectable the latter is, as I think its author may have joined the extreme right. I can see many people on the left resisting any attempt to categorise and study various Black Fascist movements from the belief that, as Blacks have been oppressed in the West, and are still disadvantaged, it is unfair to characterise such movement as they arose in response to White racism and persecution.
But this does not change the nature of these movements and the racism and racist history they promote. Whatever their connections to the broader Black liberation movement, they’re still racist and Fascist themselves, and should be viewed as such. Fascism everywhere needs to be fought, regarded of race.
Last week or so Sasha Johnson was thrown off twitter for stating that the White man would not be the equals of Blacks, but their slave. Johnson is supposedly one of the leading lights in the Oxford Black Lives Matter movement. She was filmed holding a bizarre paramilitary-style rally in Brixton. Standing in front of a uniformed squad of Black people, she compared the police to the Klu Klux Klan and declared that what was needed was a Black militia. Like the one that was standing behind her, no doubt. She also screamed ‘Black Power!’ and ‘Revolution!’ She then followed that by announcing that, as Black and Asian politicians like Priti Patel and David Lammy were all sell-outs, she was going to found a a new political party solely for Blacks.
Johnson has been called a ‘Black Panther’, though I don’t know whether it was by her admirers in the Black power movement, or by herself. It certainly seems that she’s trying to copy the Black Panthers, who were set up to defend American Blacks against shooting and murder by the police, and set up their own party. But to British eyes it also looks very much like other violent paramilitary movements, like the terrorist organisations in Ulster and White Fascist organisations, such the British Union of Fascists and the National Front.
Black Lives Matter as an organisation, I gather, is Marxist, and the Black Panthers are usually seen as radical left rather than Fascist right. But this passage from Noel Sullivan’s Fascism (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd 1983) may explain how Johnson was able to move from a Marxist position to racial supremacy, albeit one that privileged Blacks against Whites.
Sullivan’s a Conservative historian, who take the view that the origins of Fascism are to be found in the activist style of politics that emerged with the French Revolution. This demanded that the public take an active part in politics as against the older, feudal system in which politics was confined to the king and the aristocracy. This new activism also set up the nation or the people against an outgroup, identified as their enemy. For the French Revolutionaries, the people were the French middle class, and their enemies were the monarchy, aristocracy and clergy. Later in the 19th century, Karl Marx identified the people with the working class. However, that didn’t end the process. This was followed in the 20th century by Asian revolutionary socialists, beginning with Sultan Galiev, identifying their peoples as the oppressed working class and urging revolution against their White colonial oppressors. Sullivan writes
In spite of Marx’s belief that his redefinition of the ‘true people’ as the proletariat represented a scientific and therefore final stage in activist strategy, the subsequent course of twentieth-century intellectual history revealed that his own position was a unstable as the one which he had attacked. Consider, for example, the doctrine advocated by Sultan Galiev in 1919, in an article entitled ‘Social Revolution and the East’. Galiev was a Marxist, in the sense that he followed Marx in identifying the true people with the proletariat. He differed from Marx, however, in his definition of the proletariat itself. The trouble with western socialism, Galiev wrote, is that ‘the East, with its population of a milliard and a half human beings, oppressed by the West European bourgeoisie, was almost entirely forgotten. The current of the international class war bypassed the East and the problem of revolution in the East existed only in the minds of a few scattered individuals. For Galiev, the true proletariat now became the Muslim, Hindu and Chinese masses of the East, and the Marxist class struggle was accordingly transformed into one between the white and coloured races. Other non-European socialists rapidly took up this theme. For example, in 1920 Li Ta-chao, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, defined as class-struggle as racial conflict ‘between the lower-class coloured races and the upper-class white race’. In this struggle, ‘China really stands in the position of the world proletariat.’ In Japan, Ikki Kita also pursued the racial method of defining the true people as the populace of the third world, maintaining in his Outline for the Reconstruction of the Japanese State, 1919) that ‘There are self-contrictions in the fundamental thought of those European and American socialists who approve of proletarian class-struggle within a country but who consider international proletarian war as chauvinism and militarism.’ In recent decades, Frantz Fanon has been the best-known exponent of this particular variant of the new activist style of politics. (pp. 51-2).
Sasha Johnson seems to have made a similar transition, identifying the true people with Britain’s depressed Black population. In so doing, she’s moved from a socialistic Black radicalism to Fascism. She’s become Black Britain’s version of the White Fascists Nesta Webster and Rotha Orne Linton.
I also wonder how long she’ll be a figure on the public stage. She was determined to make herself notorious and a figure of public outrage and terror, like any number of angry young people before her trying to epater le bourgeois. I don’t think Black Lives Matter have done anything to censure her or reel her in, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did. At the moment she’s a liability. They and the media have made a point of showing that Blacks and Whites, especially young people, are united in their support of the movement. BLM also released statements on placards stating that they were trying to start a race war. They were trying to end one. But that is precisely what Sasha Johnson wants to do.
My guess is that Black Lives Matter will now try and rein her in, if only for the sake of publicity. As for Johnson herself, she and her supporters come across as young, idealistic and stupid. 19th and 20th century history is full of similar young men and women, angry and radical, trying to threaten the establish order. Hopefully with time she’ll settle down and grow up.
One of the very few items that drew my attention in yesterday’s edition of the I, for Monday 27th July 2020, was an article by Ewan Somerville reporting that our murderous clown chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was considering adding Black, Asian and ethnic minority heroes and heroines to our notes and coinage. It would be the first time this was done, and is a gesture to Black Lives Matter. The article ran
Black and ethnic minority (Bame) figures could appear on Britain’s currency for the first time. Chancellor Rishi Sunak is considering proposals by campaigners to have influential Bame people featured on a set of coins, the Treasure minister, John Glen, said.
Those under consideration include the first Indian and Gurkha soldiers who received the Victoria Cross, the British-Jamaican Crimean War nurse Mary Seacole, and Noor Inqyat Khan, a Second World War agent and one of only four women to have received the George Cross. There has never been a non-white person features on British coins or notes.
Plans have been submitted to the Royal Mint, which has been encouraged by the Treasury to draft proposals and designs for a potential coin. Mr Sunak has previously expressed support for the anti-racist cause highlighted by the Black Lives Matter Protests.
I think there have been calls for distinguished Black and Asian Brits to be put on the currency before, if only a decade or so ago. There certainly have been calls many times for more women to feature on the currency. From the article it seems that all of the figures being considered well deserve such commemoration. I can’t think of anybody objecting to Black, and particularly Gurkha war heroes considering the latter’s splendid record of service in the British army despite the fact that we never conquered Nepal. One of the most striking images we came across at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum was of a Black British squaddy, his chest festooned with medals, proudly holding up a union jack. I think the image came from the Second World War. Either way, as the museum staff remarked, it utterly contradicted the BNP’s lies that Blacks cannot be patriotic British citizens, as this man had clearly fought with gallantry and distinction for the Motherland.
I’ve said before, though, that I’m not impressed with Black Lives Matter. I can appreciate the frustration, anger and deprivation fuelling it. But I think that it has an extremely simplistic view of race and class in Britain and is unintentionally divisive and polarising. And I don’t believe that Sunak or the Tories are going to be remotely sincere in their efforts to tackle the structural racism in British society. Boris Johnson has said he’ll set up an inquiry to investigate it. Or think tank. Or some other talking shop, just like the Tories already promised a few years ago.
And there is already a backlash taking shape. Mike posted a few days ago that the Tories had started recruiting racists on Twitter by appealing to their outrage that migrants were still coming to Britain. Labour had apparently sabotaged the government’s efforts to tighten up the migration system. Given how tough the system already is and that some of the noticeable reports are about people coming over here from France in flimsy, leaking vessels, I honestly don’t know what can be done to make it tougher without going into real, genuine Fascism. By which I mean following Katie Hopkins’ suggestion that migrant ships should be gunned down in the Med and left to sink. Or warned off by the coastguard firing automatic rifles, as the Greek navy/coastguard was shown doing a few weeks ago.
And some of the real firebrands in Black Lives Matter are playing into the Tories’ hands. Yesterday TalkRadio put up a video in which one of their right-wing mouthpieces was interviewing a young Black woman, somebody Samuel, of the Orthodox Conservative Black Group, or some such organisation. She was complaining that most members of Black Lives Matter were bored, disgruntled troublemakers. I didn’t watch all of it, so I may well be prejudging what she said. But it started off with a recording from the leader of Black Lives Matter in Oxford, ranting on about how the police were the Klan, defending statues and other acts of racism. She attacked senior Black figures in the Labour Party like David Lammy for being tokenistic, and said that they needed a new party. And then shouted ‘Black Power’.
The police have a racism problem, and it’s been very well demonstrated through a series of scandals over the years. Before the murder of Stephen Lawrence one of the big scandals to his the news was the revelation that members of her Majesty’s constabulary had been part of the League of St. George, an SS auxiliary unit set up for Fascist Brits during the War. But Mike and I had relatives and friends in the police, and no, not all cops are remotely like that, whatever the Met police is like. And it should be obvious that the police aren’t like the Klan. If they were, then that angry lady wouldn’t have the freedom to denounce them as such because of the sheer intensity of the violence that would be meted out, and the anonymity of those inflicting it. If you want to see the real fear the Klan spread and embodied, just watch last year’s Dr. Who episode where she and her ‘fam’ travel back to the American Deep South to stop a White racist trying to stop the beginning of the bus boycott which launched the mass phase of the Civil Rights movement. If the police were like the Klan, then there would be many more deaths and those responsible would be protected by their anonymity.
As for demanding a separate party for Black people, there are several ways in which that would be a non-starter. Firstly she seems to be harking back to the Black Panther Party and the New Black Panther Party in America. Which is all very well if you’re dreaming of revolution, but to the majority of Whites they look very much like anti-White paramilitaries. Small parties also have trouble establishing themselves. UKIP spent decades trudging up and down Britain getting practically nowhere at elections before their electoral breakthrough a few years ago. And as a single issue party, they’ve suffered from Brexit giving them exactly what they wanted. In Britain, blackness is still associated with foreigness and immigration, although Blacks have been here since the days of the Roman Empire. A party that served and only represented Blacks would be seen as anti-White and colonialist, exacerbating the fears of a ‘great replacement’ and White genocide. And part of the problem is the dispersal of Black people geographically throughout Britain. Someone worked out a while ago that if the number of Black MPs accurately reflected the size of the Black population of Britain, there would be 50 or more in the House of Commons by now. But not all Blacks are concentrated in specific, Black majority areas. Many live in more ethnically mixed or predominantly White towns and regions. They therefore have to show that they can represent their White constituents as well as standing for Black rights. And I doubt very many Whites would vote for a party set up solely to represent Blacks. The young woman TalkRadio was discussing was talking dangerously divisive nonsense.
I dare say that, despite her recent notoriety, she’s an isolated figure. Certainly there seem to be many Black Brits who don’t believe that someone like her stands for them. But through her ignorant comments, she’s given an opportunity for the Tories to take the initiative. I’d never heard of the Orthodox Conservative Black Group before, and I doubt many others had either. The Tories have been trying to win Black voters away from Labour by years. The tactic has been to present Labour’s attitude towards Blacks as that of angry, racial alienation – which is in many cases true – but extreme, and unrepresentative of Black Britain. Their racial policies and BAME members, they claim, are all about healing such divisions rather than increasing them. And so we had the unpleasant spectacle by in the 1990s of the Daily Heil drooling over Priti Patel at the beginning of her noxious rise to power under the headline ‘Priti as a picture’. No, she’s a smirking, self-centred, egomaniac bullying thug.
Sunak’s suggestion for more Blacks and Asians on the currency is certainly welcome, but I feel it will be no more than a token gesture. If it every happens at all, and Boris doesn’t decide to shelve it. Along with all the other Tories projects for a better, racially inclusive Britain.
This is absolutely disgusting. I really do wonder how the alleged ladies and gentlemen of the scumbag British press sleep at night. Zelo Street this afternoon reported that Layla Moran, the MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, came out last week. She revealed that she was pansexual, and was in a loving, supportive relationship with another woman. Moran’s a contender for the Lib Dem leadership, and her announcement that she was gay was on ITV news. Moran says that their relationship started six months ago. So naturally, Zelo Street raises the obvious question: why is she telling us all this now?
It’s because, according to Hacked Off, the group representing the victims of press phone hacking, Moran was put under pressure by hacks from the Mail on Sunday. The organisation said
“Ms Moran has described how several reporters have been asking questions, door-knocking neighbours and even offering payment to a former partner seeking information about her personal life over the last few months. Ms Moran writes that the Mail on Sunday threatened to publish details relating to her sexuality last Saturday, and that she herself only decided to reveal her sexuality publicly last week because she feared the newspaper would go on to publish”.
She did so on social media, which really annoyed the MoS, who were reduced to running a piece about Mumsnet showing bitterly critical posts of her by its users. One of these accused her of ‘weaponising’ her relationship with the Lib Dems former head of media, Rosy Cobb.
The Street then quotes Nathan Sparkes of Hacked Off on the squalid cruelty the MoS has shown:
“Newspapers have no business revealing an individual’s sexuality against their will, far less a politician who has devoted much of her career to date to furthering the cause of LGBT+ rights and equality … The decision of the Mail on Sunday … to publish an article attacking Ms Moran based on a handful of abusive tweets on a social media site speaks to the vindictiveness and cruelty of parts of our unregulated press”.
The Street concludes ‘Our free and fearless press’ attitude to sexuality stinks. And that has to change.’
I think I saw something in the I written by Moran about her experience of ‘coming out’. It had the title ‘In the 21st Century Coming Out Shouldn’t Be An Issue’, or something along those lines. I didn’t read it because quite frankly I wasn’t interested. So many public figures have come out over the past decades – pop stars, sportsmen and women, actors, politicos – that you get used to it, even bored. With many public figures, whether gay or straight, who they’re romantically involved with is the least interesting aspect of their lives. What’s more interesting is their talent, or issues such as whether they have an unusual personal background, skill or medical condition. Such as, for example, whether they can speak an exotic language, have mastered an arcane science or intellectual discipline like quantum physics, or are able to fly an aircraft. Or have overcome personal misfortune or a medical condition like autism or depression. For a politician, what really matters is how hard they work for and represent their constituents, and their policy positions. Like where they stand on Brexit, the destruction of the welfare state, rising inequality, racism, the privatisation of the NHS and so forth. Provided that they’re not breaking the law and their partners are consenting adults, who they share their private lives with is their own business.
I grew up in the 1980s, when the gay rights organisations were aggressively outing politicians, who kept their sexuality hidden. I thought that this was pretty shabby, until a gay friend of mine told me that the politicos they targeted were hypocrites, who publicly opposed homosexuality and its toleration. There was a serious point to their actions. But there doesn’t seem to be anything like that here, just a simple desire to boost sales figures through scandal.
And unfortunately, the press has got plenty of previous in trying to bully people into revealing their sexuality in this way. Way back in the 1990s the ‘Street of Shame’ column in Private Eye carried a story about an attempt by one of the tabloids – something like the Scum or the News of the Screws – to blackmail one of the pop stars of the day into coming out in its pages. Wisely, he decided to thwart them by going to one of the other papers instead to make the revelation.
And stalking celebrities in order to find out if they’re gay or not is pretty squalid anyway. A few years ago there was a programme on how the Mirror got that story about George Michael going into a gay toilet in Beverley Hills or wherever. That was when it was edited by Piers Morgan, now adorning ITV’s breakfast news. The photographer was there for a week staking the place out waiting for a celebrity, any celebrity, to come and use it. The photographs he took from a car parked over the road were worth tens of thousands. Which itself shows the squalid morals of the newspaper business. I’ve no doubt his family and children were well fed, clad and educated by the profits of his job, but it’s not exactly something your children can boast about in school. After hearing from all the other children how their parents are builders, engineers, scientists, business people, artists or whatever, what child really wants to answer the question ‘What does your mum/dad do?’ with the reply, ‘He/she hangs around gay toilets hoping to catch rock stars getting arrested by the rozzers’?
As for Mumsnet, they’ve been described as ‘4chan with prosecco’. From what I gather of 4chan, it’s an internet platform seething with racism, sexism and vicious trolls, so that’s hardly an endorsement.
The Mail on Sunday’s treatment of Moran, and the British press’ treatment of innocent people just trying to live their lives in peace is deeply shameful, and shows why it really does need to be subject to a press watchdog with teeth.
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