Cassetteboi versus Boris Johnson

Cassetteboi are a group of merry pranksters, who take clips of politicians, celebrities and other public figures and edit them so that they appear to say something amusingly insane. One of my faves is the video they made taking the mick out The Apprentice. This began with the announcer stating that Alan Sugar was the self-made millionaire who sold Amstrad from the boot of a car for £8 before getting funnier. Boris Johnson has been one of their targets for years, starting when he was mayor of London. Now they’ve released yet another video lampooning him which contains a high dose of their usual satire. Johnsons word’s have a rhythm to which a beat has been added so that it’s a song or a chant. It begins

‘If you live in Britain today/ I feel sorry for you son/ There are 99 problems/ and I can’t fix one.’

It then goes to sing about the way there is no petrol nor goods on the shelf in the supermarket, the rich aren’t paying their way and Boris’ mates in industry are giving him large donations for government contracts. This goes along with the other issues, such as the £20 benefit uplift being taken away along with free school meals, test and trace not working along with Johnson’s utterly incompetent handling of Brexit and the Covid crisis. He didn’t attend the briefings because he was too busy divorcing his wife, and the song notes that despite Johnson trying to pretend the disease isn’t still around, over a hundred people are dying a day.

The song concludes:

‘If you live in Britain today/ I feel sorry for you son/ There are 99 problems/ And I’m number one!’

Brexit Britain’s Collapse also Reveals Failure of Free Market Capitalism

I wonder sometimes if the Communists and Trotskyites didn’t throw in the towel too soon. They were always looking for the collapse of capitalism, and while that didn’t happen and probably won’t, they would have realised that Thatcherism, at least, isn’t working and made real efforts to make the British public realise it. Communism collapsed with the velvet revolution in eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the countries of the former Soviet bloc threw off their chains and embraced democracy and free market capitalism. Francis Fukuyama declared that it was ‘the end of history’. Liberalism in the broad sense of the mixture of liberal democracy and capitalism, had seen off its rivals and would now reign supreme and unchallenged as the global ideology bringing peace, freedom – both political and economic – and prosperity to everyone.

But it hasn’t worked out like that.

Thatcher’s privatisation of the public utilities here in Britain haven’t brought the necessary investment these sectors needed. As Ken Loach’s superb documentary, The Spirit of 45, makes very clear, the power, water and railway industries are natural monopolies that need national planning and support. This has been particularly shown time and again in the management of the railways. Major’s privatisation of British Rail in the 1990s and its breakup into separate companies resulted in a spate of horrendous train crashes. Insult was added to injury by the rail companies passing the buck and accusing each other of responsibility for the disasters. As a result, the company owning the railway network itself, Railtrack, had to be renationalised in 2002. Privatisation did not work. And it has continued to fail with the private railways companies. Several have had to be taken back into state administration after providing poor service. However, this has always been excused as a temporary measure and the government has insisted on finding some other private company to run those services afterwards. After a series of such failures, this strategy now looks more than a little desperate. It’s an attempt to fend off the obvious: that private enterprise isn’t providing a proper, decent rail service and the only way to run it properly is to renationalise it.

It is very much the same with the government’s part-privatisation of Britain’s schools. Declining standards in state schools led Thatcher to experiment with privately-run schools outside the control of Local Education Authorities. These were then called ‘city academies’. They were another failure, and her education secretary, Norman Fowler, was forced to wind them up quietly. Unfortunately, Tony Blair thought it was a wizard idea and it became a major part of New Labour education policy. Simply called ‘academies’, these schools would be run by private companies. Some of these would specialise in particularly subjects, such as Maths and science. Expertise from private industry would ensure that standards would be high, and they would provide a powerful incentive through their competition for the remaining state schools to improve their performance. Except that didn’t happen either. The academies don’t perform any better than ordinary state schools once the massive difference in funding is taken into account. An academy may receive tens of millions of funding compared to a fraction of million that the Local Education Authority receives to spend on all the schools it runs. Furthermore, many of the academies have only been able to maintain their high standards through being highly selective about their intakes. Pupils that may not reach the marks demanded by the schools, including those with behavioural problems or who come from poorer families, are often excluded and expelled. Educational performance and standards in many academies has been so abysmal that the chains managing them have collapsed and the schools once again taken into public administration. But private enterprise under the Tories cannot be allowed to fail, and so we had the grim spectacle a few years ago of Nicky Morgan, the Tory education secretary, repeatedly not answering the questions on the Andrew Marr show why the government was pushing ahead with turning schools into academies when just a little while ago 25 academies had had to be taken over by the government again.

Now, thanks to a mixture of Brexit and global problems elsewhere, the gas industry is in crisis. There are shortages of gas, a number of the smaller companies have already collapsed and customers are being faced with sharp price rises. Novara Media have even said that the government has admitted that if there are severe problems with the major gas suppliers, then they will have to be nationalised.

Gas, like electricity, should never have been privatised in the first place. When it was initially privatised, the company was not split up into separate, competing companies and so it was able to dominate the market as a private monopoly. Now some of those companies are suffering because they are unable to cope with free market conditions. This says to me very much that Jeremy Corbyn was right – that the public utilities need to be publicly owned and rationally managed as part of an integrated system. This is another point that Ken Loach’s documentary makes very well.

And Brexit has created further problems. The establishment of a customs border with Eire overturns one of the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and so threatens to return Northern Ireland to sectarian violence and chaos. There is a shortage of CO² as a result of which some foods and other goods may suffer shortages. And there may be further shortages, including petrol and other fuels, because Brexit has also resulted in fewer haulage drivers. Some are even now predicting a new ‘Winter of Discontent’, like that in 1979 that resulted in the defeat of the-then Labour government and the election of Maggie Thatcher.

I remember the petrol crisis of the ’70s, when OPEC suddenly raised oil prices and there were queues at petrol pumps. Just as I remember how Ted Heath’s dispute with the coal miners resulted their strike, the three-day week and power cuts. It got to the point that by the middle of the decade the right were expecting a Communist takeover and the end of civilisation as we know it. There were supposedly private militias being formed by bonkers right-wingers while parts of the establishment wanted to overthrow the minority Labour government in a coup to be replaced by a kind of coalition government composed of representatives from all the parties. Well, that was what the Times discussed in its articles. The security services, however, were forming plans to round up trade unionists and left-wing politicians and activists and intern them on a Scottish island somewhere. The editor of the Mirror went to Sandhurst to interest them in overthrowing the government but was met with a no doubt polite refusal. I think he, or one of the other plotters, even went as far as Paris to see if that old Fascist, Oswald Mosley, would be interested in leading the new government.

All that has been used in the Tory myth that socialism doesn’t work, and only creates the economic and political chaos that helped bring Britain to its knees. Chaos that was only ended by the glorious reign of Maggie.

Except that these problems look like they’re coming back, and this time the fault is Brexit and the free market.

I think Boris will be able to find temporary solutions to alleviate, but not cure, some of these problems. He has, for example, introduced new legislation to encourage lorry drivers from the continent to come over here. But the underlying structural problems remain. The only way to solve them is through nationalisation.

The Labour party is in an excellent position to drive this home, at least in the case of gas. Even if it doesn’t go that far, it should still be landing hard blows on Johnson and the Tories because of Brexit’s massive failures. But Starmer isn’t doing that. Instead, as Zelo Street pointed out in a piece published a day or so ago, the Labour leader is more intent instead on destroying democracy in his party as part of his war on the left.

Which is why I’m almost nostalgic for the old Socialist Workers’ Party. They’re still around, rebranded as ‘the Socialist Party’, but they’re nowhere near as active as they were. Whenever there was any kind of crisis or major issue you could count on them turning up with their megaphones and copies of their newspaper to harangue the masses and demand further action against the problem. Unfortunately, in many cases the Socialist Workers’ Party were the problem. They colonised left-wing issues in an attempt to turn protest groups into front organisations, which they could then use to produce further discontent. Rock Against Racism collapsed when the SWP took over the leadership of that organisation, formed to protest against the rise of Fascism. They were also busy infiltrating the Labour party and other left-wing parties here and abroad with the intention of radicalising them. I think the eventual hope was to create some kind of mass revolutionary movement. It didn’t work, and has only resulted in purges, such as that of Militant Tendency by Kinnock in the 1980s. In fact, the policy has helped strengthen the right in the Labour party, as they smeared Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters as Trotskyite infiltrators as the pretext for their continue purge.

The Trotskyites lived, however, in the firm belief that capitalism would eventually fail. Well, it isn’t doing that now, but it should be abundantly clear that Thatcherite free market capitalism isn’t working. The SWP would have realised that and tried to get the message across. The Labour left, which isn’t remotely Trotskyite, realises too that Thatcherism isn’t working. Their solution is simply a return to the mixed economy of the social democratic consensus. This wasn’t perfect, but it operated far better than the free market shambles we have now. And no, mixed economies are not ‘Communist’, ‘Trotskyist’ or ‘far left’. The real Communists and Trotskyists hated it as a form of capitalism, just as they hated reformist socialist parties like Labour.

But Starmer’s leadership is pledged to propping up the same wretched free market capitalism. Which is why I really feel there should be a mass movement driving home the point, again and again, that Thatcherism is ideologically and economically bankrupt. It is doing nothing but producing chaos in the economy and industry, and poverty and starvation to Britain’s working people. And this poverty will get worse. This is why I’m almost nostalgic for the wretched SWP, as they would have been determined to drive this home. And who knows? Perhaps if they behaved like a reasonable party, they might have gained further support and forced the Labour party to rediscover its socialist heritage in order to head off a challenge from real Communists.

Resign! Recording of Interview with Evans Suggests He Deliberately Stripped Corbyn Supporters of Their Rights

Depressingly, David Evans won the vote about remaining Labour’s general secretary, and so will stay to continue his and his fellow Blairites’ wretched purge against socialists and critics of Israel. But further evidence has emerged that these purges really are politically motivated, and are all about getting rid of Corbyn’s followers. The group Red Collective put up an audio recording, which Mike has reblogged on his article about Evans’ winning the vote. In it, Evans says that they were concerned that Corbyn was overshadowing the rest of party, and so they decided to strip members of their rights. He waffles about how this didn’t come easy to him, as he believes in freedom of expression. I doubt that. I doubt that very much, as he and the NEC have been suspending people for too long and for too little for this to be remotely credible. It’s simply a mantra he and other authoritarians say to stop people accusing them of being dictatorial, intolerant authoritarians.

The recording strongly suggests that Evans and his followers have been deeply involved in an organised campaign to subvert Labour party democracy, acting from factional interests against the left. If there was any decency still left amongst the party’s bureaucrats and leadership, this should cause serious questions to be raised about Evans’ suitability to remain as General Secretary. Mike has also said that it is actually a resigning issue. I agree, especially as there are now concerns that the election that confirmed Evans as General Secretary may have been rigged.

Unfortunately, standards in public life have fallen to such an extent that those officials and government ministers responsible for the most appalling incompetence, maladministration and corruption remain in office. Which is how Boris still remains as our blustering, grasping and utterly inept Prime Minister as Brexit Britain collapses from food and petrol shortages.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2021/09/25/after-evans-won-rigged-vote-to-remain-labour-gensec-heres-a-recording-of-him-saying-he-stripped-members-of-their-rights/

Monbiot’s List of the Corporate Politicos in Blair’s Government: Part One

Chapter six of George Monbiot’s book, Captive State, is entitled ‘The Fat Cats Directory’. The book is about the way big business has wormed its way into government, so that official decisions and policy reflects their interests, not those of Mr and Mrs British Public. In the ‘Fat Cats Directory’ he lists the businessmen and senior managers, who were rewarded with government posts by Tony Blair in May 1997. The list gives the name of the businessman, their ‘previous gluttony’ – a summary of their corporate careers, and ‘Subsequent Creamery’ – their posts in the British government. Those lists are:

Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge.–
Chairman of British Airways
– President of the Confederation of British Industry

– Put in charge of Gordon Brown’s energy tax review, and helped promote the government’s campaign against the Millennium Bug, even though his 1999 holiday brochures told customers that they wouldn’t be responsible for any problems caused by computers malfunctioning due to it.

Ewen Cameron

President of the County Landowners’ Association
Owner of 3,000 Acres in Somerset
Opponent of rambling.

Chairman of the Countryside Agency, concerned with tackling the right to roam, social exclusion in rural areas, and someone, who has very definitely contravened the Countryside Agency’s rules on the maintenance of footpaths.

Lord Rogers of Riverside

Architect of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 on greenbelt land
Architect of Montevetro Tower, London’s most expensive building.

Chairman of the government’s Urban Task Force.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville

Chairman of J. Sainsbury Plc
Chairman of the Food Chain Group
Principal backer of biotech company Diatech
Funded construction of the Sainsbury Laboratory for research into genetic engineering
Replaced skilled jobs with unskilled shelf-stacking.

Minister in Government’s department of trade and industry
Minister with responsibility for science and technology
As science minister, led Bioindustry Trade Delegation to US
Ultimate control over Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Chairman of the government’s University for Industry.

Lord Simon of Highbury

Chairman of BP
Vice-Chairman of European Round Table of Industrialists
Under his direction, BP assisted the Colombian government in forcing peasants off their lands, and imprisoning, killing and torturing trade unionists. Gave money to the 16th Brigade, notorious for murder, kidnapping torture and rape.

Minister for Trade and Competitiveness in Europe
One of the ministers responsible for implementing the ethical foreign policy.

Jack Cunningham MP

Adviser to agrochemical company Albright and Wilson (UK)
Member of Chemical Industries Association lobbying for deregulation of pesticides.

Secretary of State for Agriculture
Chair of Cabinet Committee on Biotechnology.

Sir Peter Davis

Chairman of Reed International, which made 900 workers unemployed.
Chief Executive of Prudential Corporation Plc, company most responsible for miss-selling pensions.

Appointed by Treasury head of New Deal Task Force.

John Bowman

Director of Commercial Union, which possibly miss-sold 7,900 pensions.

On the board of the Occupational Pensions Regulatory Authority.

Lord De Ramsey

President of Country Landowners’ Association, sold part of his enormous Cambridgeshire estate for house building, and in doing so destroyed a pond of Great Crested Newts. Lobbies against regulatory burdens on agriculture. Grew genetically modified sugar beet on his land for Monsanto.

Chairman of Environmental Protection Agency.

Paul Leinster

Director of SmithKline Beecham (SB) Plc, which polluted streams in Sussex and Gloucestershire. Previously employed by BP and Schering Agrochemicals, part-owner of bio-tech company AgrEvo, which was publicly shamed for breach of environmental regulations for growth of GM crops.

Head of the Environment Agency’s Environmental Protection Directorate.

Justin McCracken

Managing director of ICI Katalco, responsible for a long list of plants polluting the environment with carcinogens. In 1999 it was listed as the worst polluting company in Europe, responsible for pouring 20 tonnes of hormone disrupting chemicals into the Tees. Also allowed 150 tonnes of chloroform to escape into groundwater at Runcorn. From 1996 to 1997 Friends of the Earth recorded 244 unauthorised pollution incidents from its Runcorn plant.

Regional General Manager, Environment Agency, North-West Region.

Dinah Nicols

Non-executive director, Anglia Water. In 1999 it was prosecuted six times for pollution.

Director-General of Environmental Protection at the Department of the Environment.

Ian McAllister

Chairman and managing director of Ford UK. The company was a member until December 1999, of the Global Climate Coalition, lobbying against attempts to reduce carbon monoxide emissions.

President, Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which has lobbied against the Department of the Environment’s standards on ozone, lead and sulphur dioxide pollution from cars. Also lobbied against European directives against exhaust gases, removal of lead from petrol, and forcing motor manufacturers to install catalytic converters.

Chairman of the Government’s Cleaner Vehicles Task Force.

Chris Fay

Chairman and Chief Executive of Shell UK, the British company with the most controversial environmental record due to pollution incidents in Britain and in the Niger Delta.

Executive director of BAA Plc, attempting to double size of Heathrow Airport.
President of the UK Offshore Operators Association, oil industry group responsible for lobbying against environmental regulations.

Chairman of the government’s Advisory Committee on Business and the Environment.

Brian Riddleston

Chief executive of Celtic Energy, an open-cast mining corporation which destroyed the Selar Grasslands Site of Special Scientific Interest in Wales, wildflower habitat and home of extremely rare march fritillary butterfly.

Member of the Government’s Countryside Council for Wales.

Graham Hawker

Chief executive of Welsh utilities company Hyder, which sp0ent £42.2m on making people redundant, and only £700,000 on research and development. Opposed windfall tax on privatised utilities.

Chair of the New Deal Taskforce in Wales

Martin Taylor

Chief executive of Barclays Plc. Multimillionaire manager of company which made 21,000 redundant in ten years to 1997.

Lord Haskins

Chairman, Northern Foods Plc. Member of Hampel Committee on Corporate Governance. This was criticised by Margaret Beckett for failing to recommend ways for companies to regulate themselves.

Chair of the government’s Better Regulation Task Force.

Peter Sainsbury

Managing director for Corporate and External Affairs, Marks and Spencer.

Head of Better Regulation Taskforce’s Consumer Affairs Group, whose duties include consumer protection. This decided that voluntary measures and ‘consumer education’ were better than regulation.

Geoffrey Robinson

Director of Central and Sheerwood plc, property owned and chaired by fraudster and pension raider Robert Maxwell. C&S merged with Robinson’s TransTec, to form Transfer Technology Plc. Company later collapsed.

Paymaster General.

The Nixonian Politics of David Cameron

As I mentioned a few blog posts ago, I’ve been reading through the works of the great Gonzo journalist and drug fiend, Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson was part of the Hippy scene in the 1960s, and knew Ken Kesey and Jefferson Airplane. He was politically liberal, and had a visceral hatred of the Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, George Dubya and, quintessentially, Richard M. Nixon. Thompson covered the Watergate trials and its aftermath, writing some truly blistering pieces on the man, who has become the epitome of American political corruption.

Now, it seems, history is repeating itself here in Britain, and we have another politico who shares many of Nixon’s worst characteristics – paranoia, a need to spy and control the lives and beliefs of ordinary citizens, and whose policies favour the rich at the expense of the poor.

I found these telling passages about Nixon, which so resonate with the current situation in Britain, in Thompson’s 1974 piece about Watergate, ‘Fear and Loathing in the Bunker’, reprinted in the collection, The Great Shark Hunt.

Thompson believed that Nixon’s corruption had done some good by shaking average Americans out of their political apathy, particularly regarding the massive rise in the unequal tax burden between rich and poor:

The Watergate spectacle was a shock, but the fact of a millionaire President paying less income tax than most construction workers while gasoline costs a dollar in Brooklyn and the threat of mass unemployment by spring tends to personalise Mr Nixon’s failure in a very visceral way.

Rises in petrol prices, mass unemployment and a leading politician, whose a millionaire, who pays less tax than blue collar workers. Well, that all sounds like Cameron. He is an old Etonian toff, and he has radically shifted the tax burden onto the working class.

And on the totalitarian character of Nixon’s administration:

George Orwell had a phrase for it. Neither he nor Aldous Huxley had much faith in the future of participatory democracy. Orwell even set a date: 1984 – and the most disturbing revelation that emerged from last year’s Watergate hearings was not so much the arrogance and criminality of Nixon’s henchmen, but the aggressively totalitarian character of his whole administration. It is ugly to know how close we came to meeting Orwell’s deadline.

Meanwhile in Cameron’s Britain, we’re still on the journey there. Cameron is the man, who introduced secret courts, and has massively extended the remit of the intelligence services and the secret state to spy on British citizens. He also wishes to get rid of the European human rights act, and replace it with a much weaker British bill of rights. And, of course, he and his fellow authoritarians, including Jack Straw, wish to water down massively the Freedom of Information Act, so that the public doesn’t get hold of any information that might embarrass him and the other poor dears in his wretched and corrupt administration.

Well, at least they impeached Nixon. For whatever reason, at least two members of the press kept up and did the job of bringing him down. Our modern media seem just about ready to roll over for him, including the BBC.

Another Angry Voice on the Government’s Introduction of Fracking to the UK

The Angry Yorkshireman has another excellent article up, this time criticising the government’s policy promoting fracking here in the UK. Fracking is the use of pumped fluid to extract natural gas from shale rock that holds it. It has resulted in environmental damage in the US, and George Osborne wishes to introduce it into the UK. The Angry One tells you what fracking is, the dangerous effects on it can have on the environment, and the conflict of interest between the Tories and the fracking industry. Many of the Tories have links to the oil companies involved. The Angry One’s article can be read here:

http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/fracking-tories-osborne-howell-browne.html

I’ve posted the link to this article as there are proposals to start fracking in here in the West Country. Somerset did have a coal industry, and there were mines in Bedminister, now a suburb of Bristol, Pensford, and Radstock. There is naturally an intense debate on these proposals.

I’m interested in the debate as one of the people I knew studying archaeology was an industrial chemist. The man had been part of the geology faculty at a Canadian university, which was doing work on extracting oil from the sand layers for one of the petrochemical companies in the land of the Maple Leaf. He had a look at what his colleagues was working on the for the project, and concluded it was impossible. It violated the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that you can’t get more energy out of a process than you put in. He reported his concerns to his superiors. In fact he had uncovered a piece of academic fraud by some of the faculty to take money from the Canadian taxpayer for fraudulent research. The process developed for extracting the shale oil simply wouldn’t have worked, and had been concocted simply as a way of winning funding from the Canadian government, who were naturally interested in developing the process. The scandal tore the department apart. Many of the whistleblowers were penalised for their exposure of the fraud, including being sacked. My friend managed to escape this as he had been offered a place at a very prestigious French university.

My fear here is that something similar could be going on here. Fracking is now a favourite cause of the transatlantic right. It is being promoted as a way for America and Canada to be independent of the Muslim Middle Eastern oil-producing states. My concern is not just for the environmental damage, which may result from the process, but also that, after the above oil shale fiasco in Canada, flawed or extremely partisan research could similarly be involved in its promotion here.