John Bercow Denies Jeremy Corbyn Is Anti-Semitic

More evidence to add to the plentiful pile of it showing that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a Jew-hater was given by John Bercow the other day. Bercow, who has just stepped down as Speaker of the House of Commons, was interviewed by Alistair Campbell for GQ magazine. Campbell told him that he realised Bercow was a Jew, and asked him about the issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Bercow responded cautiously and diplomatically, pointing out that racism was a problem across society. He said that anti-Semitism was an issue in the Labour party, and that it needed to be dealt with and that he respected those, who were concerned about it. But in all his time in parliament he had never encountered it from a member of the Labour party, and in the 22 years he had known and worked with Corbyn he had never experienced it from him either. This was not even when Bercow was a right-winger. Campbell joked with Bercow about Corbyn, as a long-time opponent of New Labour, probably voting with the Tories more often than he voted with the Labour party. Bercow chuckles, and admits that he always got on well with Corbyn, and found him personally very supportive.

Okay, it’s not a refutation of the lie that anti-Semitism is rife in the Labour party. It most definitely isn’t anywhere near as serious as the Tories and the right-wing media are making out. Anti-Semitism has actually dropped in the party since Corbyn became leader, and he himself has led numerous initiatives to root it out. But Bercow has said that Corbyn isn’t anti-Semitic, which contradicts what Stephen ‘Goysplaining’ Pollard of the Jewish Chronicle and Rabbi Jonathan Romain in the Torygraph have been telling people this week.

Tory Fibs has put a short clip of this part of Bercow and Campbell’s discussion in a tweet, which Mike posted on his blog yesterday. Along with twitter comments from other people supporting the Labour leader. Many of these messages came from Jewish Labour supporters, who have also found themselves abused as anti-Semites by those taken in or responsible for these lies.

Also, Mike and another twitter commenter, ‘Paul’, point out that Corbyn rarely voted with the Tories. The Conservatives mostly voted for New Labour policies, which is hardly surprising as both groups were Thatcherites. Corbyn, as an old-fashioned Socialist, would have opposed them.

There was also a tweet from RedCountessa, who said that there were plenty of left-wing Jewish people, who support Corbyn, but it was also very noticeable that they were rarely interviewed by the lamestream media to get the other side of the argument.

And Jill Gore showed a twitter response from a Mark Fleischmann to show the odious response some individuals have towards Jews, who support Corbyn. So convinced was Fleischmann that no true Jew could ever support the Labour leader, that he was demanding the Jews who did to prove their Jewishness. I’m not Jewish, but this strikes me as a form of anti-Semitism itself. It’s as racist as Richard Spencer ranting about ‘octaroons’ to smear Blacks and people of mixed race, and in my opinion, anti-racist Whites, ’cause he can’t understand how real White people don’t hate Blacks.

And there were other tweeters attacking Ian Austin, who was in the news yesterday telling everyone to vote for Boris.

Pauline Lane retweeted a message from Children’s Poet Laureate, Michael Rosen, asking the Tory party to stop using the Holocaust and the threat of anti-Semitism to attract people to the party of Windrush, the Hostile Environment Policy, the anti-refugee and 20 years of austerity.

There was also a tweet from ‘Norman’ of Austin interrupting Michael Rosen’s testimony before the Education Committee for Holocaust Education. Norman states that he was aware of Austin, because of his support for Phil Woolas. Woolas was a ‘moderate’ Labour candidate, who got deselected because he ran a dirty campaign designed to get White voters angry and smearing the rival candidate, a Muslim, as a supporter of terrorism. But his interruption of Rosen showed how really horrible Austin is. Rosen testified that when the Nazis invaded the Channel Islands, all nine Jews were deported. Austin says something about how we cannot know what would have happened in Britain, because we fought back and stood alone against the Nazis. Rosen corrects him about this, stating that we had the support of two major powers, the US and Russia.

Rosen is quite correct. We didn’t stand alone. We not only had the support of America and Russia, but we were also supported by the entire resources of the British Empire. If we hadn’t, I gather that we too would probably have only lasted a week. As for what happened on the Channel Islands, Norman states that his grandfather evacuated from Jersey, and that Austin ‘is wrong’.

Absolutely right there, too. The Nazis did invade UK/ Britain, as the Channel Islands are part of it. And the people there were starved, they saw Russian P.O.W.’s worked to death as subhuman slaves, as they were seen by the Nazis, as well as the deportation of the islands’ Jewish citizens. And we can be sure that what happened there, would have happened elsewhere in Britain if the Nazis had invaded. Years ago Anne Applebaum wrote a piece in the Spectator saying that Brits would have collaborated with the Nazis, which I think was probably based on the evidence of the collaboration of the island authorities with the Nazis. This comes from the Speccie, which is the arch-Tory magazine.

And Josh tweeted a clip from Question Time, in which a Jewish lady stood up and attacked the Tories and the Conservative media for using anti-Semitism to smear and demonise Corbyn and the Labour party. The lady states that she and all her family are Jewish, and they’re not scared of leaving the house because of anti-Semitism. The Tories and the press take quotes of context to vilify Corbyn. But only 7 per cent of the time do they discuss his policies. 80 per cent of the time, she says, they’re just attacking his character, because his policies are right.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/11/08/never-mind-the-newspapers-bercow-buries-claims-of-anti-semitism-against-corbyn/

Clearly, not all Jews buy this rubbish about Corbyn being an anti-Semite by a long chalk. Ken Livingstone, who has now resigned from the party because of the smears and suspensions, said in an interview with George Galloway that he had Jewish people walk up to him in the street and tell him that they know he’s not anti-Semitic.

Perhaps that explains the desperation of the Tories to keep repeating the claim. Because now more and more people don’t believe it!

John Mann Joins Tories – Real Labour Members and Supporters Celebrate

It’s finally happened then. John Mann has finally done what he should have done long ago and crossed the floor to join the Conservatives. One of the leaders of so-called ‘moderates’ – in reality Thatcherite entryists – who flung false accusations of anti-Semitism at socialists and genuine anti-racists in the party, has gone off to be BoJob’s ‘anti-Semitism Tsar’. One of Mann’s stunts was to turn up with a camera crew to accuse Ken Livingstone of anti-Semitism. Red Ken had committed the horrible crime of actually knowing some Zionist history. It was the kind the fanatics of the Zionist right really hate, and so they misquoted Leninspart and fabricated an utterly fake accusation of anti-Semitism.

The Trotskyite newt-fancier and bane of Tony Blair had said that Hitler initially supported Zionism. He did. The Nazis and the German Zionists had reached an arrangement – the Haavara agreement by which they would work together to smuggle Jews into Palestine, then under the British mandate. It was an utterly cynical arrangement. The Nazis merely wanted to get Jews out of Germany, while the Zionists wanted to get colonists for the embryonic Jewish state. It didn’t last long either. The Agreement was short-lived as the Nazis moved from the simply forcing Jews to emigration to the horror of the infamous ‘Final Solution’. Unable to countenance genuine history, Mann and his fellow bullies claimed instead that Leninspart had said that Hitler was a Zionist. He was therefore brought before one of the witch-hunters’ kangaroo courts and expelled. And the accusation that he was an anti-Semite was parroted by the British media, who can’t stand historical truth either.

The title of ‘anti-Semitism tsar’ is an infelicitous one, putting it mildly. The tsars viciously persecuted the Jews. They were forbidden to live anywhere else in the Russian Empire except in the area of the Jewish Pale. Legislation was passed limiting the jobs they could do, and they were the victims of pogroms and forced conscription into the Russian army. This was a form of forced conversion, as it was believed that the bullying and victimisation in the Russian military would encourage them to convert. Additionally, the last tsar, Nicholas II, was a full-on believer in the notorious Jewish Blood Libel. That is the murderous myth that Jews kill Christians to use their blood in the matzo bread eaten at Passover. Nicholas was so convinced of this, that he was determined to prosecute an innocent man, Beilis, against all the evidence to the contrary. This was one of the many acts that discredited the regime, and was an embarrassment even to the tsar’s anti-Semitic supporters.

As for Mann himself, while he himself is keen to fling accusations of anti-Semitism around, he has found it difficult to substantiate them. Tim Fenton has put up on his article about this the court judgement from the case when he and MacShane accused a university and college lecturers’ union of anti-Semitism, because it supported the BDS campaign. The judgement noted that while Mann eagerly denounced the campaign as anti-Semitic, he couldn’t say why. Of course he can’t. Because it isn’t. The BDS campaign is not against Jews or Jewish businesses per se, nor even against Israel. It is again Israeli goods produced in the Occupied Territories. It is an attack on apartheid and colonialism, just as the sanctions campaign against apartheid South Africa was. The only difference is that Israeli is a Jewish state, though that is not the reason for the sanctions.

Mann also is in absolutely no position to accuse anyone whatsoever of racism. He was behind a pamphlet published in 2016 which had a passage on Travellers, informing its readers that the police had the power to remove them and any vehicles or property in cases of trespass. Ben Bennett, a Gypsy, referred this to the police complaining that it was racist in that it singled out Travellers specifically. And the Rozzers concurred. They wrote back to Bennett stating that they had advised Mann that if the booklet was reprinted, that section would have to be revised and called it ‘a hate incident’.

Mann was also a mate of Phil Woolas, another Labour ‘moderate’, who stoked up racism during his local election campaign. Woolas had produced a pamphlet claiming that the Lib Dems were ‘soft on immigration’ and smearing Muslims as supporters of terrorism. He was also disappointed in the timing of his defection. He had arranged it so that it would coincide with the 10 O’clock news. Unfortunately for him, Amber Rudd chose to walk out of BoJob’s cabinet, and this overshadowed his attempt to grab a bit of publicity. It also says much about him – and nothing complimentary – that just when every decent Tory was walking out on Johnson, Mann was running towards him.

The Sunset Times, a newspaper with a proud future behind it, claimed that Mann’s defection had sparked civil war in Labour. Er, no. Not a bit. Instead of hand-wringing and recrimination, the general mood was wild celebration. See Mike’s piece about all this, which reproduces various tweets from people up and down the country rejoicing that Mann, a racist, bigot, and islamophobe, had finally gone and joined the Tories. At last the people of his constituency could look forward to getting a real socialist to represent them.

On a serious note, one of the tweeters posted this, which included this monument to Sinti and Roma – the European Travellers – murdered by the Nazis in the Porajmos, the term for the Nazi extermination of their people.

Mann claimed that he was leaving Labour because racism always started with the persecution of the Jews. This is massively hypocritical, considering his own history of racism. The Nazi extermination of the Roma – the Gypsies – was a development of the anti-Traveller racism of people like him. And the methods the Nazis used for the extermination of the Jews – killing them with cyanide gas – was first used against the disabled. Just as the Tories have murdered tens of thousands of disabled people through starvation and deprivation after throwing them off benefits through the fitness to work tests.

Mann is a racist hypocrite, a Thatcherite, who gone off to join a racist, hypocritical Thatcherite party. Labour is better off without him. 

For further info, see

Celebrations in Labour as Mann quits to become Tory anti-Semitism ‘tsar’

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/john-mann-anti-semitism-non-expert.html

Anti-Black Racism and the Anti-Semitism Smears

Looking back at two of the most notorious instances, where decent anti-racists have been smeared as an anti-Semites, it occurred to me that behind them there’s a very nasty strain of anti-black racism. These two cases were the attacks on Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of Momentum by the Campaign Against Truth and the Jewish Labour Movement, and against Marc Wadsworth by Ruth Smeeth. Both were not only passionate and committed campaigners against all varieties of racism, they were also Black.

Walker is Jewish by descent and faith. Her partner is Jewish, and she sent her daughter to a Jewish school. She is an outspoken opponent of Israeli apartheid, and began attacking it through her activism against its counterpart in South Africa. Because of this some Zionist organisation has apparently identified her as the second most dangerous threat to Israel along with Jeremy Corbyn.

She was accused of anti-Semitism when snoopers from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism dug up an old Facebook conversation between her and two or three other historians and scholars discussing Jewish financial involvement in the slave trade. Walker made it clear that she was looking at it partly from the angle of being a Jew herself. She said that the Jews involved were ‘my people too’. It’s a legitimate area of historical research, and Jackie has subsequently very ably defended herself by citing studies of this by mainstream, respectable Jewish historians. Nowhere did she claim that the Jews were solely responsible for the slave trade, or even its main investors. She has made it clear that the responsibility for the slave trade lies with the Christian monarchs of the states that engaged in it.

Nevertheless, her words were taken out of context and further distorted, and she was the subject of a vile article in the Jewish Chronicle claiming that she had. This formed the basis for a complaint against her to the Labour party demanding her expulsion. She was also accused of anti-Semitism by the Jewish Labour Movement. They secretly recorded her at a workshop on the proper commemoration of the Holocaust for Holocaust Memorial Day. Jackie complained that she was unable  to work with their definition of anti-Semitism and objected to the way Holocaust Memorial Day concentrated exclusively on Jewish suffering to the exclusion of other groups, who had also suffered similar genocides, like Black Africans. I believe the definition of anti-Semitism to which she objected wasn’t the normal definition that it is simply hatred of Jews as Jews, but the IHRC definition, which conflates it with opposition to Israel. And while Holocaust Memorial Day does mention the holocausts of other ethnicities, there is increasing hostility amongst some Zionists on their inclusion. As Tony Greenstein has shown, the Israeli state is keen to present the Holocaust as a unique phenomenon which targeted only Jews, despite the Nazis’ determination to murder other groups and races, like the Roma and the disabled, not to mention the Slav peoples they intended to enslave and turn into a class of peasant serfs.

Jackie was duly expelled from the party, though not for anti-Semitism, which he accusers couldn’t prove, but on other, spurious charges, like bringing the party into disrepute or some other nonsense. Since then, she has been the victim of sustained, vicious abuse. She has been told that she should be hanged from trees, or killed and her body dumped in bin bags. This is so vile, that she has forbidden her daughters from reading her email, because she doesn’t want to see them upset by the abuse their mother is getting. And amongst these accusations is the claim that she cannot be properly Jewish, because she’s black. Which is itself definitely racist.

Now it seems to me that at the heart of these smears against Walker is the assumption that, as a Black anti-racist activist, she must be an anti-Semite. This is based on the very public comments several decades ago of two leading Black American figures, Louis Farrakhan and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Farrakhan is, or was, the head of the Nation of Islam, the religious movement led by Malcolm X. Although it sees itself as a form of Islam, it is by Muslim standards highly heretical. It’s based around the worship of W.D. Fard, a Syrian immigrant to the US, as God incarnate. It also has elements of those new religious movements centred on UFOs, like the Aetherius Society. Farrakhan claims that he was taken up by a UFO from a mountain in Mexico to an orbiting ‘mother wheel’, where he was told that W.D. Fard and Jesus were alive and well on Venus, where they would direct the future war against Whites.

As well as bitterly hostile to Whites, Farrakhan is also vehemently anti-Semitic. He really does believe that the Jews were responsible for the slave trade. This is definitely rejected by every proper scholar of the subject, including Jackie herself. 

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Farrakhan organised a series of events protesting against the conditions of Black people in America. One of the most spectacular was the ‘Million Man March’, in which a million Black men were to march on Washington D.C. It was supposed to be a men-only event, as the religion has very traditional views on sex and gender roles. Women were supposed to be at home, looking after the children. And it was supposed to be for Blacks only. In the event, the organisers could only reach the numbers they wanted through letting Whites join.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson was a Christian minister, who was also a Black anti-racism activist. He was popular, and at one stage it looked like he might win the Democratic presidential nomination. Eddie Murphy in his stand-up comedy routine included jokes about the shock White racists would get after they drunkenly voted for him as a joke, only to wake up the next morning to find Jackson in the White House. It’s possible that two decades before Barack Obama, America could have seen its first Black president. Jackson’s political ambitions took a nosedive, however, when he began to move close to Farrakhan and made anti-Semitic comments. The most notorious of these was when he called New York ‘Hymietown’ because of its large Jewish population.

It therefore seems very strongly to me that the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jackie Walker were partly intended to recall the real anti-Semitism of Farrakhan and Jackson. The implication there seemed to be that because she dared discuss Jewish involvement in the slave trade, she must share Farrakhan’s odious views. Not least of which is because she’s a Black anti-racist activist, and so was he.

Ditto with Marc Wadsworth. He was smeared by Ruth Smeeth because he caught her passing on information to a Torygraph journo next to her at a Labour party event. She then claimed that he was guilty of using the anti-Semitic trope of Jews as leaders of a conspiracy against her. The lamestream press had a field day with this, repeating this lie and even screaming that he was the Labour activist, who made her cry.

Wadsworth is not Jewish, but he is a committed anti-racist activist. Among his achievements was getting the parents of the murdered Black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, to meet Nelson Mandela. He also worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to formulate improved legislation to protect Jews from real anti-Semitic violence after a spate of attacks by the NF/BNP in the Isle of Dogs in the 1980s. He’s very, very definitely not a racist. But truth doesn’t matter to these scoundrels, and they libelled him as such anyway.

Like Jackie Walker.

I think part of the underlying assumption here is that both Jackie and Marc must be racist themselves, because they’re Black. When riots broke out in Black communities across Britain in the first years of Thatcher’s reign c. 1981/2, the Tory press claimed that they weren’t caused by poor social conditions, lack of opportunities, high unemployment suffered by British Blacks, or institutional racism in British society. No! The real reason Blacks in Toxteth, Liverpool, St. Paul’s, Bristol, and Brixton in London, was because they were anti-White racists. And although nearly four decades have passed since then, I think that’s still the assumption, or the implication, behind the accusations against Marc and Jackie. Black anti-racism activists must be anti-White, and anti-Semitic, because of the assumptions and events of over three decades ago.

Meanwhile, it’s noticeable how uninterested in combating racism, or actively racist those making the accusations of anti-Semitism are. the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has precious little to say about real Fascism and anti-Semitism, preferring to rail instead against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Margaret Hodge did so little to combat the NF/BNP in Islington, that when the BNP’s Derek Beacon and his storm troopers got onto Tower Hamlet’s council, they sent her a bouquet of flowers. Tom Watson, who has done his best to facilitate these accusations in the Labour party, was a friend of Phil Woolas, who was prosecuted for running an islamophobic campaign portraying Muslims as terrorists. David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group has written on his blog about how the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s did their level best to prevent Jews from going on anti-racist marches and events like Rock Against Racism. The ostensible reason was that they were afraid Jews would be exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda. But others suspected that the real reason was that the Board did not want them mixing with people from different races and communities. And the respected historian of Jewish community in Britain, Geoffrey Alderman, was put under pressure by the Board in the 1970s to remove from his book his finding that 2 per cent of the Jewish community in the UK voted for the BNP because they hated Blacks and didn’t want their children going to school with them.

Of course, the people making these defamatory accusations of anti-Semitism against decent people don’t confine them to Blacks. They also make them against Whites, and particularly against Jews critical of Israel. These latter, who obviously include Jackie, are subjected to the most vile abuse, which would automatically be considered anti-Semitic if it came from non-Jews. Like some of the comments Tony Greenstein has received by Zionist Jews, telling him that they wish he and his family had died in the Shoah.

But it seems to me that behind the smears of Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth there is nevertheless a very strong undertone of anti-Black racism, a racism that permeates their accusers and the right-wing media, which supported those smears.

 

 

Tom Watson’s Racism and the Anti-Semitism Smears

Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, is one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most vocal critics. He’s one of the most important Blairites in the Labour party spreading the anti-Semitism smears and witch hunt. But, as Tony Greenstein has pointed out time and again, Watson himself has actually backed real racists in the Labour party, and promoted their fearmongering and scapegoating of ethnic minorities.

Greenstein mentions some of these incidents in his post today, in which he urges Corbyn’s supporters to join a protest in support of Chris Williamson. Williamson is an important Corbyn ally, and Greenstein and very many others fear that if he is removed, then Corbyn’s position becomes untenable. What Williamson said about Labour being too apologetic over the anti-Semitism smears wasn’t itself anti-Semitic. The scale of anti-Semitism in the Labour party is low, very much lower than in mainstream society, and much lower, I would imagine, than in the Tories. It has been exaggerated and blown out of all proportion by a right-wing political and media establishment desperate to find any means of discrediting a genuine socialist and his supporters, and an unrepresentative Jewish establishment desperately trying to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel’s slow genocide of the Palestinians.

Greenstein mentions several instances of the Blairites’ racism, which involved Watson. Neither Watson  nor the other ‘moderates’ opposed the illegal and very racist Windrush deportations. He also states that Watson bullied Yvonne Davies to prevent her standing for Sandwell Council, because she opposed a BNP-style march.

Watson also supported Phil Woolas, who ran a very racist campaign against his Lib Dem opponent. This portrayed all Muslims as Islamist fanatics and claimed that the Lib Dem candidate supported them. Greenstein produced this image of the offending, and very offensive leaflet.

Greenstein states that Woolas’ agent stated that their strategy was to ‘make the White folks angry’, because if they didn’t, Woolas was ‘gone’. It was because of this leaflet that Woolas was removed as MP by the High Court. Watson complained in an article in Labour Uncut, in the article ‘Tory Lies, Lib Dem Lies, Phil Woolas and the Mystical Shaman of Truth’

‘I’ve lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas and his leaflets.’ He felt ‘like a piano has been dropped on my head. It is the most brutal truth of all – the realisation that you are on your own in politics.‘

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/07/if-you-cant-defend-chris-williamson-you.html

It’s clear from all this that Watson is very far from being an anti-racist activist, genuinely concerned with protecting Jews from anti-Semitism. It’s just the latest convenient pretext for an entirely politically-motivated attack on Corbyn. Because Corbyn wishes to empower working people, which includes Jews, against the neoliberal elite. And in this, Watson has much in common with this guy, whatever he pretends about anti-racism and anti-Semitism.

The march in support of Chris Williamson against the NEC is on Tuesday, July 9, 9 a.m., at 105 Victoria Street, London SW1.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BBc Drama about Fascist Radicalisation of Deprived White Youth

Next week’s Radio Times also says that next Wednesday, 10th July 2019, there’s a drama, The Left Behind, on BBC 1 at 10.35 pm after the news about young White men drawn into Fascism. The play’s set in an unnamed Welsh town, and is about a working class lad, Gethin, who becomes increasingly radicalised as his life collapses through poverty. The blurb for it on page 78 of the magazine runs

Factual drama from the Bafta award-winning team behind Killed by My Debt and Murdered by My Boyfriend. Gethin is a working-class teenager in a south Wales town with no secure job, housing or future. As he seeks solace online, he is increasingly attracted to anti-immigrant sentiment as a way of explaining why he’s been “left behind” in his own country.

The additional piece about it by Alison Graham on page 77 runs

Gethin is a nice lad, part of a fractured family, but he is close to his sister and niece. He has a handful of good mates and not much of a job – he’s on a zero-hours contract in a fast food takeaway shop.

But the fates conspire to send Gethin (Sion Daniel Young, who is excellent) completely off the rails as the fragile thread that hold his life together unravel and snap, leading to tragedy.

The Left Behind looks at the rise of far-right extremism in the poorer parts of Britain through the prism of Gethin, a young man looking for easy targets who blames outsider for robbing him of everything worthwhile.

The mag also has a feature about the programme on pages 20-21 by Claire Webb, pointing out the working class roots of the play’s author, Alan Harris. Harris’ parents were forced to sell their house in Tonteg, near Cardiff, when he was a child, and he grew up in a caravan on his grandfather’s smallholding. After he graduated, he had a series of poorly-paid jobs, including selling Santa hats in the street and working in a car park. He was also homeless for a time, sleeping on friends sofas or in their spare rooms. He got his break into theatre after training as a journalist and submitting scripts to a theatre group encouraging new writers. The article quotes him as saying ‘We don’t see honest stories of White working class men.’ It also states that he spent a lot of time talking to people using food banks and a community centre in one of Cardiff’s most deprived suburbs. He says

“They told me people feel powerless,” he says. “It is a case of being left behind, but it’s also a case of being left out. There are a lot of people in the UK who have no hope of progressing, and once hope is gone, a wedge is driven between different sections of our society and extremism is very good at exploiting that wedge. Online radicalisation does that well: it turns personal problems into a crusade.”

The article contains the chilling statistic that in 2018 there was a 36% increase in the number of far-right extremists referred to the government’s Prevent programme. Harris spoke to a counterterrorism expert working on the programme as part of his research. It says he was frightened by how quickly people can become radicalised, and how the far-right organisations have smartened up their act.

“These are well organised, respectable-looking organisations,” he explains. “They don’t turn up in red braces with a skinhead. They turn up in a suit with a much more professional attitude. They realised that the old model wasn’t working from a recruiting point of view.”

The article also states that these organisations’ supporters are concentrated in Britain’s post-industrial towns and cities, which is why the drama’s producers set in south Wales.

To the possible objection that the programme is a sympathetic treatment of a violent extremist, Harris replies that we need to under where they’re coming from if we are to tackle domestic terrorism.

“Society tries to ignore these things but they’re happening, whether we like it or not. Understanding these people is a movement towards making society better.”

For one scene, in which a chipper councillor is confronted by residents angry at the lack of social housing, the producers used working class extras drawn from that area, and asked them to improvise. And their raw, pent up anger exploded. They ripped the councillor to shreds to the point where Harris felt sorry for the actor.

Asked if he was apprehensive that Cardiff’s working class communities would be offended by the drama, Harris replies

“Not at all. I think it’s a good thing to shine a light on the problems that some people experience. Hopefully those issues of housing, of employment, will ring true with a lot of people from Cardiff and the surrounding area. Hopefully it’s bits of their lives reflected back at them. I don’t have all the answers, but at least we can ask questions.”

While this isn’t a programme I can I’d like to watch, it does seem to be an honest attempt to grapple with the underlying issues behind the far-right’s attempts to reach out and recruit disenfranchised working class Whites. But the responsibility for the growth in racism goes far beyond the Fascist right itself, right to the heart of the neoliberal establishment. At one level, the Nazis are only building on the extreme nationalism and racism that’s been pushed for decades by the Tories and the Tory press – the Scum and the Heil are two notorious examples. But it also includes the supposedly more upmarket Spectator, which, as the Sage of Crewe has pointed out, employs the anti-Semitic Taki and is increasingly Alt Right.

And among the causes of the growth of Fascism in this country is Blair and the New Labour project. Blair abandoned socialism and the party’s traditional working class base to appeal instead to Tory swing voters. They fully embraced and participated in the destruction of the NHS and the welfare state, with Gordon Brown particularly enthusiastic about encouraging a flexible job market. In other words, job insecurity. And Tony Greenstein has repeatedly pointed out how hollow and non-existent are the Blairites’ attempts to deal with Fascism. Margaret Hodge, now the darling of the anti-Semitism smear merchants, was so negligent in her treatment of the growth of Fascism in her constituency, that the BNP actually sent her flowers when seven of their stormtroopers were elected on to Tower Hamlets local council. As for Tom Watson, he was a friend of Phil Woolas, a New Labour politico, who ran a very racist campaign against a Lib Dem opponent, claiming that he was soft on immigration and encouraged Muslim radicalisation. Woolas said that his campaign was about getting White men angry. And David Rosenberg on his blog warned that the anti-Semitism witchhunt was designed to purge the Labour movement of genuine Left-wingers and anti-racists, and that this was damaging real opposition to Fascism in working class communities. The witchhunt and Blairism meant that recent anti-racist counterprotests were, for the first time, outnumbered by the Fascists. And to add insult to injury, the Nazis chanted ‘Anti-Semites! Anti-Semites!’ at their genuinely anti-racist opponents. Rosenberg has shown repeatedly on his blog how proper campaigning in working class communities, by socialists determined to give working people better opportunities and conditions, will devastate Fascist organisations by depriving them of the real, social and economic issues they exploit to misdirect rightly angry Whites into hating Blacks, Asians and other ethnic minorities.

The play looks like a good, honest account to deal with the growth in working class racism by showing that it is partly caused by the real despair in these communities at their poor and declining conditions. And tackling those and combating Fascism means attacking and combating the Tories and New Labour, who have caused them and seek to exploit the anger they’ve caused in turn by scapegoating ethnic minorities.

Kudos and Thanks to Mike and Supporters for £5000 Donations Raised in Single Day

Okay, I realise I haven’t put anything up for several days, so apologies to everyone, who’s been reading this blog and waiting. Your patience is greatly appreciated. Also greatly appreciated are the people, who sent £5,000 worth of donations to Mike’s crowdfunding site in a single day. Mike set this up to allow him to fight the threat of a libel action by TV celeb bullies Rachel Riley and Tracey Ann Oberman. Riley and Oberman take after the late, unlamented owner of the Mirror, Robert Maxwell, who used to threaten anyone, who said anything against him, with a libel writ. Riley and Oberman have been doing the same to everyone, who have criticised them for bullying a vulnerable schoolgirl with anxiety, who they claimed was anti-Semitic. Mike was one of those threatened by their pet lawyer. Thanks to everyone, who contributed. And please keep the donations coming, as he still needs to reach a target of £25,000 in case the gruesome twosome go ahead.

Thanks and respect to Robert Lincoln-Samwell, who defended Mike on twitter from attacks by someone calling himself the Caped Joo Sader. The Joo Sader is one of those sadly misled individuals, who still labour under the delusion that Mike’s an anti-Semite, thanks to the lies and vilification of the CAA, Labour Right and the press. He was tweeting, trying to stop others from supporting Mike, claiming that Mike had been expelled from Labour for anti-Semitism, and must be an anti-Semite because Riley and Oberman are Jewish, and that he published a comic strip depicting Hitler as a superhero. Mr Lincoln-Samwell refuted these accusations against Mike. He also told him that Mike had forced the DWP to come clean about the people, who had been found fit for work and died shortly afterwards. He praised Mike for defending for defending the poorest and most vulnerable in society, which included his family and people, despite being a carer himself. He then asked what the Joo Sader did. When the Joo Sader replied that he fought racism, Mr Lincoln-Samwell answered

So absolutely nothing that benefits the Homeless, disabled, low-income workers and Children in Poverty then.

which are bigger issues than Racism.

Mike is a bit more than just a Keyboard warrior mate.

Mike takes racism very seriously, and says that he thinks Mr Lincoln-Samwell meant with his comment that it’s not a big issue that the DWP and its policies have caused more deaths in the UK than racism. He’s deeply impressed and moved by Mr Lincoln-Samwell’s testimonial. He concludes his article thanking everyone for their help by asking them to keep donating, and promises to do the best he can with the money.

Joy as Vox Political crowdfunding page raises £5K in a single day

This shows just how much Mike’s work trying to bring the DWP to account for the deaths they’ve caused, along with the all the great left-wing and disability rights bloggers, like Tom Pride, Another Angry Voice, the Disability News Service and so on is massively appreciated. And that people don’t believe the smears of a right-wing establishment trying to smear decent people as anti-Semites. Tony Greenstein, a Jewish anti-Zionist and fierce opponent of Fascism and racism in all its forms, has said that this is racists smearing anti-racists as racists. He’s exactly right. It is. Greenstein has pointed out that none of the Labour right-wingers supporting the smear campaign in the party have lifted a finger in defence of the Windrush migrants illegally and unjustly deported by May. And one of Tom Watson’s supporters, Phil Woolas, actually ran a campaign in his constituency that was based on ‘getting White people angry’.

As for the supposedly pro-Hitler comic strip, ‘Hardboiled Hitler’, this is anything but. It’s an exercise in mock-heroic, a literary genre in which you present the object of ridicule in a heroic form in order to parody them by showing their faults even more clearly. In Mike’s case, Hitler tries to strut as the Aryan superman, but is a massively physically inept clown. He isn’t just clumsy, but also constantly farting. Which Hitler really did suffer from in real life. It was chronic meteorism, not helped by the fact that the Fuehrer was being given pills by his homeopathic healer which included Strychnine and human faeces. The strip determinedly exposed what a shabby figure Hitler was, and definitely did not glamorise him nor his vile regime. Those, who’ve read and examined it recognise this. But I guess it’s just too subtle for the close-minded and bigoted.

But thanks and respect to everyone, who’ve supported Mike through all this. You’re great, and your support is greatly appreciated.