Loser Johnson Loses Majority, Loses Vote and Purges Rebels

Ho ho! Things definitely aren’t going too well for the Blonde Generalissimo. Yesterday he lost his majority in the Commons when Philip Lee crossed the floor to join the Lib Dems while he spouting something about the G7 summit. Lee gave his reason for joining them his opposition to the immense harm being done to this country by Brexit. He declared

“This Conservative government is aggressively pursuing a damaging Brexit in unprincipled ways. It is putting lives and livelihoods at risk unnecessarily and it is wantonly endangering the integrity of the United Kingdom. More widely, it is undermining our country’s economy, democracy and role in the world. It is using political manipulation, bullying and lies. And it is doing these things in a deliberate and considered way.

“That is why today I am joining Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats.”

Even with the odious DUP supporting him, BoJob only had a majority of one. Now he doesn’t even have that. Which means that, democratically, he can’t pass any legislation whatsoever.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/03/tory-mp-defects-to-lib-dems-now-dictator-johnson-has-no-majority-in-parliament-at-all/

But the humiliation got worse. The 21 Tory MPs who were threatening to rebel against Johnson over the vote whether to debate a bill preventing a no deal Brexit put their money where their mouths were and actually did it. They voted with the opposition. From today backbenchers have control of commons business. The Old Etonian Duce becomes the first Prime Minister since Pitt the Younger to lose his first vote.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/03/mps-defeat-government-theyll-debate-bill-to-prevent-no-deal-brexit/

The Tories, who voted against him were Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Guto Bebb, Rory Stewart, Oliver Letwin, Dominic Grieve, David Gauke, Nicholas Soames, Richard Benyon, Steve Brine, Alistair Burt, Greg Clark, Justine Greening, Sam Gyimah, Stephen Hammond, Richard Harrington, Margot James, Anne Milton, Caroline Nokes, Antoinette Sandbach and Ed Vaizey. Clarke is, I think, the father of the House, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer under John Major. Hammond was also Chancellor until a few weeks ago, while Oliver Letwin and Nicholas ‘Fatty’ Soames have been prominent, even notorious, Tory politicos since the days of Thatcher, as I recall. And unlike many Tory chancellors, such as George Osborne,Clarke did seem to understand something about economics. When a prominent MP like him rebels, the fault’s very much with Johnson, not with him.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/03/the-21-tories-ejected-from-their-party-for-voting-with-their-consciences/

But BoJob also reacted as he threatened. He removed the whip from them, effectively expelling them from the Tory party. But there are also rumours that, following the advice of his adviser Dominic Cummings, he also removed their parliamentary passes so that they’d find it difficult getting into the Commons today to vote against him. One of the rebel MPs, Sam Gyimah, was reported by Sky News to have said that it seemed he had disabled their passes when they came in yesterday evening.

This was followed by the bizarre behaviour of the Polecat himself. It seems that with nothing to do during the debate except wait, Cummings retired to the bar, where he became, as Private Eye would have said, ‘tired and emotional’. Peter Walker, one of the Groaniad’s hacks, spotted him wondering down the parliamentary press corridor, lost and clutching a bottle of red wine, looking for the office of a particular newspaper. Then Cumming lurched over to Portcullis house where, according to Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Murdoch propaganda sheet the Sunday Times, he started yelling at Jeremy Corbyn ‘Come on Jeremy, let’s do this election, don’t be scared’. Shipman claimed the Labour leader was then whisked away by horrified aides. The Labour MP Cat Smith tweeted that, ‘As one of several shadow cabinet members stood right next to Jeremy (who was on the phone at the time) I just thought there was some loud bloke who stunk of booze yelling at us’. Commenting on this bizarre spectacle, Brexitbin tweeted ‘ Drunk & disorderly in Westminster is a new low even for him. The way to beat these people is not to play their game. Put them under pressure and they crack”. To which Zelo Street added ‘Didn’t need much pressure, did it?’ and concluded ‘Cummings is cracking up. Expect more pissed apparitions before he is taken away.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/dominic-cummings-go-home-youre-drunk.html

Did Boris Johnson really cancel Parliamentary passes of rebel Tory MPs? And what did drunken Dominic do?

This really doesn’t look good for BoJob. Corbyn could seize power, as the Skwawkbox says, it Jo Swinson wasn’t so determined to preserve Tory power in order to keep him out. https://skwawkbox.org/2019/09/04/johnsons-majority-shattered-lab-could-form-govt-if-mps-really-want-to-stop-no-deal-time-to-revisit-corbyns-offer/

Johnson has also confirmed that he’s a Stalinist by purging the Tory rebels, who now have absolutely nothing to lose by voting against the government and bringing it down. And as various bloggers, like Zelo Street, have already remarked, it also shows up the horrendous hypocrisy of the press. They were howling a few months ago that Corbyn was an evil Stalinist because he gave the constituency parties the power to deselect their MPs. How terrible and dictatorial, reinforcing internal party democracy like that! In fact, Corbyn hasn’t deselected anyone. But Johnson has. And the Tories are likely to have been embarrassed by it. When BoJob first made the threat, James Cleverly – surely a misnomer? – tweeted out that the party has no mechanism for deselecting MPs. Perhaps not, but Duce Boris has still kicked them out of the party nonetheless. Still, it could have been worse. Dictator Boris could have gone full Hitler and had them all killed like the SA during the Night of the Long Knives. I wonder who would have taken the part of the SS? Conservative Future, perhaps? They seem to be racist enough, if not necessarily that violent.

Here’s the Guardian’s video of Philip Lee crossing the floor:

I hope these are just the first of many defeats leading to this vicious, murderous government finally collapsing. And hopefully taking the whole Tory party down with it for good.

Tommy Robinson Turns Up to Threaten Mike Stuchbery, Free Speech Supporters Fall Silent

More Fascism, this time from the veteran islamophobe Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon, and his thugs. Robinson is the founder and former leader of the EDL and Pegida UK. He makes his living touring Europe and America whipping up hatred against Muslims, claiming that they are a threat to the British way of life, system of government and the welfare of its people. Four days ago, on Sunday 4th March 2019, Zelo Street reported that the bigot and racist had been served legal papers by Brother Neuro, the comedian and anti-racist campaigner Dick Coughlan. This was because Robinson had made a series of defamatory statements about a Syrian refugee, Jamal, who had been the victim of racist bullying at his school. As had Jamal’s sister. Robinson, however, decided that the person, who was really in the wrong was the Syrian lad, despite the bully actually having recorded himself attacking and pouring water over the Syrian lad. So m’learned friends were called, and Robinson found himself being served with legal papers instructing Lennon that he has 14 days either to settle the claim with Jamal or prepare defend himself. In which case, Jamal’s legal team will initiate proceedings against Lennon. Lennon’s receipt of the papers was livestreamed by the Heil, Resisting Hate, the Guardian and Channel 4.

http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2019-03-04T12:11:00Z&max-results=20

Lennon’s response to his critics is thuggish. He doxes them, revealing their identity and home address, and then turns up mob-handed with his goon squad to intimidate them, often in the middle the night. He did it to the good blogger behind Zelo Street a little while ago, when he dared to criticise an article about him in, I think, the Speccie. This time he decided he’d go after historian and anti-racist blogger Mike Stuchbery under the mistaken impression that Stuchbery was somehow involved in delivering the papers. Stuchbery has criticised Lennon before. A week or so ago he was in a livestream with Kevin Logan, another anti-racist activist, discussing how Lennon had doxed  another of his critics, and then driven up north to doorstep the poor fellow’s parents in the middle of the night. He had decided that Stuchbery was one of those involved in serving the legal papers against him, and so turned up in the middle of Monday night and then in the early hours of Tuesday morning, banging on his windows demanding to talk and accusing him of being a child abuser. For which Stuchbery is considering suing him. It shouldn’t be too hard, as one of Lennon’s moronic companions actually filmed the incident and the abuse.

Zelo Street has also written a piece about this disgraceful incident, attacking the various right-wing hacks and politicos, who have defended Robinson. Robinson, they claim, isn’t a vicious bigot spreading hate, but only standing up for free speech. So what do these proud defenders of freeze peach – Fraser Nelson and James Delingpole of the Spectator, Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars, Brendan O’Neil and Mick Hume of SpikedOnline have to say about Robinson’s attempt to suppress someone else’s right to free speech? Not a thing! They are all strangely silent. Zelo Street quotes the Groaniad’s Peter Walker, who advises anyone, who really believe that Robinson stands for free speech, to take a look at Stuchbery’s twitter thread. Robinson’s actions are those of someone trying to shut down someone else’s free speech through intimidation.

Zelo Street concludes

That’s how much all those campaigners care about free speech. They don’t care at all.

http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/03/doorstepping-tommy-robinson-fans-silent.html

The Miners’ Strike and Andrew Neil’s Connections to the Tories

Many of the leading Fleet Street journos and BBC presenters have connections to the Tory party. This has been shown very clearly recently in the public outrage over Laura Kuenssberg’s egregious bias towards the Tory party, but other leading BBC hacks are equally culpable. Nick Robinson was head of his branch of the Federation of Conservative Students at Manchester University, and Evan Davies has also written books in favour of privatisation. Another Conservative on the Beeb’s news and current affairs department is Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunday Times and the Scotsman, and present of the Daily Politics. Mark Hollingworth discusses Neil’s close links to the Tory party in the chapter on the Miner’s Strike in his 1986 book, The Press and Poltical Dissent: A Question of Censorship, in which he notes the personal friendship and collaboration between Neil and Peter Walker, the energy secretary. During the dispute, Neil ran Conservative propaganda in the Sunday Times. However, the relationship between the two goes back further than the strike. Hollingworth writes

The close links between Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil and Walker had a strong bearing on that paper’s coverage of the strike. The two have been close friends since the autumn of 1971 when Neil worker for Walker as his political assistant on the environment desk in the Tory Party research department during the Heath government. They parted ways in November 1972 when Walker was moved to the Trade and Industry Ministry, and the following year Neil joined the rightwing Economist magazine. But they kept in touch. They both share a passion for all things American and Walker would often stay at Neil’s flat in New York between 19779 and 1982 when Neil was the Economist’s US correspondent.

Neil and Walker have similar political views. Liberal on social issues, on economic policy they are both keen advocates of the market economy and the deregulation of business. Although Neil is a firm supporter of privatisation, he says he is ‘left of centre’ on the overall management of the economy. Perhaps this is why he addressed a Tory Reform Group fringe meeting at the 1985 Conservative Party conference. Neil spoke alongside Tory MP Julian Critchley on the theme: ‘Is It Policy or Presentation?’ Walker is, of course, president of the Tory Reform Group.

But when the 1984-5 miner’s strike began Neil and Walker were of one view – the NUM must be beaten. Throughout the dispute, according to former Sunday Times political correspondent Robert Taylor, Walker Telephoned Neil every Saturday morning with his current thoughts and fed him information about the government’s strategy. Another former Sunday Times journalist said that ‘these conversations certainly influenced the way the paper covered the strike.’ Neil declined to comment about his personal links with the Energy Secretary. ‘Any talks with Walker were off the record,’ he said.

And this is one of the right-wing journalists and Tory activists, who are now trying to tell us how impartial the BBC is. It’s a lie, just like most of the crap Neil published about the miner’s.

Vox Political: Thatcher Was Urged to Levy Poll Tax on the Homeless

This piece from Mike over at Vox Political shows not only what utterly contemptible villains were in Maggie Thatcher’s government, but also how they were blissfully unaware that their wretched tax reforms undermined the basis of civilisation itself. Just as their successors are doing now.

Recently declassified documents released from the National Archives show that Thatcher’s Welsh Secretary, Peter Walker, wanted to impose the ‘Community Charge’ not just on those with homes, but also the homeless. He was afraid that if they were exempt, then people would start sleeping on the streets to avoid paying it. Mike says of this

Obviously Peter Walker was scum and the Poll Tax was a disaster – but worse people than him are running the Conservative Government now.

The idea of charging homeless people a tax on property is clearly ridiculous but that wasn’t the point Walker was trying to make.

He wanted to ensure that every last penny was squeezed from the poorest people, in order to support Conservatives and Tory voters who no doubt needed the money to clean the moat in their duck pond or suchlike. He’s further afraid that the intervening years have made people more susceptible to Tory lies, not less, and that they’ll be taken in the next time they peddle another fraudulent scheme.
See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/19/margaret-thatcher-was-urged-to-make-homeless-people-pay-poll-tax-by-senior-cabinet-minister/.

It’s a truly grotty piece of legislation, but what has been missed is the way that it effectively threatened to destroy part of the fabric of society. If people cannot afford to pay a tax, so that they are forced to leave their homes and sleep rough, then you’ve effectively dealt a blow to civilisation. The very word after all comes from the Latin civilis, a city. It’s part of the reasons why Rome fell: the taxes became so great, urban citizens could no longer afford to pay them. The senatorial aristocracy all moved away to avoid paying their whack, and the burden of taxation fell to the free poor, who couldn’t. As a result, they too moved into the countryside. The result was that in the Third Century AD there was rising inflation and a declining number of urban tradesmen – the bakers, butchers, cobblers, carpenters, smiths and so on that form the industrial and commercial life of cities. The Romans tried to stop this steady migration of tradesmen away from the cities by making certain trades hereditary, setting up a caste system rather like Indian. Unlike India’s, it didn’t work. And so the empire tottered on to its doom as the barbarians invaded.

Not that you’ll hear this from the Tories, including classicists like Boris Johnson. Oh, Boris admires the early Roman Empire with its small bureaucracy, but you won’t hear him talk about how, like now, the Empire fell because the senatorial super-rich decided to escape paying taxes by fleeing to their country estates, just as the super-rich today try to shirk their financial responsibility to society by registering their companies offshore. And they really, really won’t want to talk about how they shifted the tax burden on the free Roman poor, just as today’s working and lower middle classes are also required to make up the tax deficit left by the rich.

No, to them, the real threat to western civilisation comes from an influx of foreigners, just like the Romans had during the barbarian invasions.

But their tax policies and continuing impoverishment of the poorest sections of society are undermining our society and weakening it, quite apart from its complete absence of any morality. These are people, who will grind down the poor to the extent it’ll bring down society itself, just to be that little bit richer.
Complete amoral psychopaths.