The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte, eds. (London: Pluto Press 2017).
Okay, I realise that this isn’t the kind of book most of us would choose to read at Christmas. We’d rather have something a bit more full of seasonal good cheer. I also realise that as it published nearly three years ago in 2017, it’s somewhat dated. But it, and books like it, are needed and still extremely topical now than 14 million people have been duped into electing Old Etonian Tory Boris Johnson.
I found the book in one of the many excellent secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham. I was particularly drawn to it because of its title, and the titles of the chapters it contains. It’s a collection of papers describing the Tories’ attack on the poor, the disabled, the marginalised, the unemployed, homeless and BAME communities, and particularly women of colour, as forms of violence. This isn’t mere hyperbole. The book discusses real instances of violence by the state and its officials, as well as landlords and private corporations and individuals. Mike in his articles on the Tories’ wretched benefits sanctions has argued time and again that this is a form of state violence against the disabled, and that it constitutes genocide through the sheer scale of the deaths it has caused: 130,000 at a conservative estimate. It’s therefore extremely interesting that others attacking and campaigning against austerity share the same view. The blurb for the book runs
Austerity, the government’s response to the aftermath of the financial crisis, continues to devastate contemporary Britain. Thius books brings together campaigners and writers including Danny Dorling, Mary O’Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that austerity is a form of systematic violence.
Covering notorious cases of institutional violence, including workfare, fracking and mental health scandals, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, community violence and cuts to the regulation of the social protection are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking exposes of the ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.
One of the editors, Vickie Cooper, is a lecturer in Social Policy and Criminology at the Open University, while the other, David Whyte, is professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is also the editor of How Corrupt Is Britain, another scathing look at the UK under the Tories.
The book’s introduction by the editors is on the violence of austerity. After that it is divided into four sections, each on different aspects of austerity and its maltreatment of the poor.
Part 1, ‘Deadly Welfare’, contains the following chapters
Mental Health and Suicide, by Mary O’Hara
Austerity and Mortality, by Danny Dorling
Welfare Reforms and the Attack on Disabled People, by John Pring
The Violence of Workfare by Jon Burnett and David Whyte
The Multiple Forms of Violence in the Asylum System by Victoria Canning
The Degradation and Humiliation of Young People, by Emma Bond and Simon Hallsworth.
Part II, ‘Poverty Amplification’, has these
7. Child Maltreatment and Child Mortality, by Joanna Mack
8. Hunger and Food Poverty, by Rebecca O’Connell and Laura Hamilton
9. The Deadly Impact of Fuel Poverty, by Ruth London
10. The Violence of the Debtfare State, by David Ellis
11. Women of Colour’s Anti-Austerity Activism, by Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel
12. Dismantling the Irish Peace Process, by Daniel Holder
Part III, ‘State Regulation’, includes
13. Undoing State Protection, by Steve Tombs
14. Health and Safety at the Frontline of Austerity, by Hilda Palmer and David Whyte
15. Environmental Degradation, by Charlotte Burns and Paul Tobin
16. Fracking and State Violence, by Will Jackson, Helen Monk and Joanna Gilmore
17. Domicide, Eviction and Repossession, by Kirsteen Paton and Vickie Cooper
18. Austerity’s Impact on Rough Sleeping and Violence, by Daniel McCulloch.
Part IV, ‘State Control’, has these chapters
19. Legalising the Violence of Austerity, by Robert Knox
20. The Failure to Protect Women in the Criminal Justice System, by Maureen Mansfield and Vickie Cooper
21. Austerity, Violence and Prisons, by Joe Sim
22. Evicting Manchester’s Street Homeless, by Steven Speed
23. Policing Anti-Austerity through the ‘War on Terror’ by Rizwaan Sabir
24. Austerity and the Production of Hate, by Jon Burnett.
These are all subjects that left-wing blogs like Vox Political, Another Angry Voice, Pride’s Purge have all covered and discussed. The last chapter, ‘Austerity and the Production of Hate’, is on a subject that Mike’s discussed several times in Vox Political: the way the Tory press and media justifies the savage attacks on the poor and disabled through stirring up hatred against them. Mike has published several articles on the way Tory propaganda has resulted in vicious attacks on the poor, particularly the homeless.
This violence and campaign of hatred isn’t going to stop after Boris’ victory, and his appeal for healing after the election is just rhetoric. He doesn’t want healing, he wants compliance and complacency. He doesn’t deserve them, and should not be given any, because from now on he and his party will only step up the attacks.
Don’t be taken in by establishment lies. Keep working to get him out!
Credit and kudos for this story to Tom Pride. A few days ago I put up a piece about a speech Johnson made in 2003 demanding the end of the ‘monolithic, monopolistic’ NHS for the benefit of private healthcare and health insurance companies. This was dug up by left-wing bloggers to refute Johnson’s lies that he has no intention of selling it off to the Americans, or otherwise privatising it. Despite the fact that’s exactly what he and the rest of the Tory party have been doing and intending to do for over forty years ever since Thatcher came to power.
Trump very clearly stated that he wanted the NHS to be ‘on the table’, despite Johnson’s denials. And Johnson was very definitely in negotiations with the Americans, although these were kept secret. And last Tuesday, Pride’s Purge put up a piece revealing that in 2017, Johnson and his Tory colleagues Liam Fox and Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP for Devon, set up the Institute for Free Trade. They wanted to allow the Americans to compete with the NHS to run British hospitals after Brexit, as well as ending the ban on American chlorine-injected chickens and accept American environmental and food safety regulations.
The Purge concludes
Don’t let our hat-doffing compliant press let Johnson get away with his lies about not planning to sell off the NHS to US private companies after Brexit.
Mikhail Bakunin was one of the towering figures of 19th century anarchism. A Russian aristocrat, he rebelled against tsarism after becoming a member of literary circle studying Hegelian philosophy, and threw himself passionately behind the worker’s struggle. He took part in many worker’s uprisings, and was captured when one of them, in eastern Germany, was put down. He was then sent back in chains to Russia, where he was goaled and exiled to Siberia. He escaped, took a ship to Japan, from whence he sailed to America. And from America he crossed the Atlantic to England, to call in at the home of his fellow Russian expatriate and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin. Although he is notorious for advocating violent revolution, particularly in a pamphlet he wrote with Nechaev, in some of his other writings he seems to believe that the revolution, which will overthrow capitalism, the state and the bourgeoisie, which will essentially peaceful. In one of his writings from the period 1869-1871 he argues for such a situation, and states that if there is violence, it will only be because the bourgeoisie want there to be.
He was bitterly critical of poverty that capitalism and the class structure of society and the state had created. And some of his descriptions of this poverty, and the despair and misery it caused, are still relevant today under Tweezer and the Tories. I found this passage in Mikhail Bakunin, From Out of the Dustbin, Bakunin’s Basic Writings 1869-1871, ed. and trans. by Robert M. Cutler (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1985):
This wealth, concentrated in an ever smaller number of hands and sloughing off the lower strata of the middle class, the petite bourgeoisie, into the proletariat, is wholly exclusive and becomes more so every day, growing in direct proportion to the increasing poverty of the working masses. Fro9m this it follows that the abyss which already divides the wealthy and privileged minority from the millions of workers whose physical labour supports them, is always widening, and that the wealthier the exploiters of the people’s labour get, the poorer the workers get. Simply juxtapose the extraordinary affluence of the great aristocratic, financial, commercial and industrial world of England to the wretched predicament of the workers of that country. Simply read once more the unpretentious, heartrending letter recently written by an intelligent, honest London goldsmith, Walter Dugan, who voluntarily poisoned himself, his wife, and his six children just to escape the humiliations, the poverty, and the tortures of hunger. You will have to acknowledge that from the material standpoint this vaunted civilization means only oppression and ruination to the people. (p. 112).
Dugan’s killing of himself and his children is truly horrific, and is probably better described as a murder-suicide, the type of crime that unfortunately appears every so often on the news. But as various left-wing bloggers like Stilloaks, Pride’s Purge and Mike over at Vox Political have shown, all too many people have died through misery and starvation due to the Tories’ destruction of the economy and the welfare state. Thousands of disabled people have been thrown off the benefits they need due to the Tories’ and New Labour’s fitness to work tests, and thousands of the unemployed have been left without money due to benefit sanctions. Thousands of people have died in starvation and misery, and some, like Dugan, have committed suicide. We have a quarter of a million people using food banks to save themselves from starvation. Something like 549 homeless people have died this year, including a Hungarian man, Gyula Remes, who died outside the House of Parliament. Mr. Remes had a job, but it didn’t pay enough for him to be able to afford accommodation. Meanwhile, Chris Skidmore, the Tory MP from Kingswood in Bristol, who said that austerity couldn’t be too bad because people weren’t lying dead in the street, has said nothing. Probably because he doesn’t want to remind even more people about his wretched comment, and can’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t put him deeper into trouble.
He’s only one of the Tories, who’ve made vile, sneering comments about the truly poor and desperate. I can remember another Tory a few years ago rhetorically asking who the homeless were, and replying that they were the people you stepped over coming out of the opera. And there are many others like him.
You don’t have to be an anarchist to want these people out of office. You just have to want a better Britain for working people, one that will give them proper rights at work, a living wage, a decent welfare system and a renationalized NHS and utilities industries that will safeguard and treat their health, and supply them with water, electricity and transport on the railways at proper prices, rather than exploiting them for the profit of private industry.
Get Tweezer and her profiteers out, and Jeremy Corbyn in!
This is another piece from Private Eye, which shows you once again how grotty the Daily Mail and its sister paper, the Mail on Sunday are, and their historic links with Fascism and anti-Semitism.
Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, resigned last week to start a new job elsewhere in the company. He was succeeded by Geordie Grieg, who was previously the editor of the Mail on Sunday. This fortnight’s Private Eye for 15th-28th June 2018 therefore carried a special, two-page article paying suitable tribute to him and his editorship of the rag, on pages 8 and 9. On page 9, in the section ‘Good Sports Finally Agree’, the Eye describes how both Dacre and Grieg spiked a story about a 1930s German tennis player, Baron Gottfried von Cramm. Von Cramm was an opponent of the Nazis, and was imprisoned by them for having a gay affair. The Mail was considering running a story about this courageous and principled man, up to the point when one of its staff noticed a few lines in the article describing how he had been banned from participating in the 1939 Wimbledon tournament by the All England Club. One of those pushing for the ban was Harold, the first Viscount Rothermere. And so to avoid embarrassing the current Viscount Rothermre, the piece was spiked.
The story was then picked up the Mail on Sunday, which was also considering publishing it, until a hack dug up another connection between events then and the MoS’ editor. It turns out that the president of the All-England Club at the time von Cramm was banned was one Louis Grieg, Geordie Grieg’s grandfather. Who was also a member of Oswald Mosley’s January Club. And so the story was spiked again. This sorry tale was revealed, according to the Eye, in the ‘Mandrake’ column of the New European.
The Mail is infamous for the backing it gave Oswald Mosley’s legions with the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. One of the great left-wing bloggers, I think it was Tom Pride at Pride’s Purge, a few years ago posted up the various headlines and articles the paper had run in the 1930s raving about Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, Mosley and fulminating against Jewish immigration. This was after the Mail did a hatchet piece on Ed Miliband, the then head of the Labour party, which attacked him through his father. The article was headlined ‘The Man Who Hated Britain’, and sought to portray Ralph Miliband, a Jewish Belgian immigrant and an important Marxist thinker, as someone who despised his adopted country. Well, he certainly despised its class institutions, like the public schools and monarchy, but as Tom Pride’s piece revealed, Miliband senior did his patriotic duty like millions of other people, and served in the army fighting the Nazis.
This was in sharp contrast to Dacre’s father or grandfather, I can’t remember which, who spent the war as a showbiz or society correspondent. So, more hypocrisy from the Mail. This won’t surprise anyone, as the Mail’s always been hypocritical in its nasty attitudes.
With all these murky little family secrets about their predecessors’ extreme right-wing views, the editors of the Mail and Mail on Sunday have got no business libelling anyone on the Left as anti-Semites or Holocaust Deniers.
Mike has also put up a piece today commenting on a report in Jewish News Online that Avi Gabbay, the head of the Israeli Labour Party, has broken off links between his party and the British Labour party because of Corbyn’s supposed hostility to the Jewish community, anti-Semitism and his attacks on Israel’s government and security forces, in which the government and opposition in Israel are one. As Mike points out, this is just rubbish. Corbyn has always actively campaigned against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, and his supporters include many Jews and Jewish organisations. Nor is he against Israel. He is just against the Israeli state’s persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Which is what Gabbay is really against. Gabbay is fully behind the dispossession of the Palestinians, and has described the illegal settlements built on land seized from the indigenous Arab inhabitants as ‘the beautiful and devoted face of Zionism’ and sworn that an Israeli Labour government would never include Arab members of the Knesset. He’s a nasty, virulent racist, and I dare say most people would probably think the Labour party was better off not having anything to do with him or the party he leads.
Labour Friends of Israel, however, see things very differently. They were complaining that Corbyn has never responded to their requests for a meeting, or gone with them to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. They have also said that Gabbay’s decision will not affect the Labour Friends of Israel, which will still continue to have ties with the Israeli party.
Mike in the title to his article about this states clearly that no-one’s actually bothered. Martin Odoni, one of the great commenters on Mike’s blog, has said that he believes that 99 per cent of the people in the Labour party probably don’t know that there is an Israeli Labour party, or that it’s linked to Britain’s, and probably don’t care either. Other commenters have also expressed their disappointment with the Israeli Labour party. They’d hoped for something better from it, but while there are some good people in it, it’s as pro-War, neoliberal and corrupt. Joe Sucksmith, another commenter, said that the Israeli Labour Party is institutionally racist and that Corbyn should cut ties with them. The only Israeli parties Corbyn should establish links to should be those dedicated to stopping the building of the illegal settlements, and allowing the Palestinians to return to their ancestral homelands. Both of these are demanded by UN resolutions.
In fact, a look at Tony Greenstein’s websites and discussion of the history of the Israeli Labour Party shows that historically, under Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion, the party was as determined to massacre and ethnically cleanse Israel of the Palestinians as the right-wing parties. Rather than being a mark of shame, it could be said that Gabbay’s decision to cut ties with the Labour party is actually a good thing, as it means that genuine British anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism aren’t members of a party with links to the Israeli Labour Party and its policies of land seizure, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
As for no-one being bothered, I’ve seen little coverage of this in the I. It wasn’t completely ignored, but was the subject of only a tiny paragraph on page 2. So not exactly a major issue for the I then, although I don’t doubt that the Tory press will try to inflate this into a major crisis later on.
As for the Labour Friends of Israel claiming that Gabbay’s decision doesn’t affect them, well, yes, it does, whether they like it or not. By retaining links with Gabbay’s outfit, they have become a group inside the Labour party hostile to its leader, and with links to an outside, hostile party. As have the Jewish Labour Movement. Formerly Paole Zion, the Jewish Labour Movement has said in its constitution that it is the sister party to the Israeli Labour Party. This makes their relationship to the Labour party and its membership as a whole very problematic, especially if they continue to try to undermine Corbyn’s supporters by smearing them as anti-Semites and seeking to get them expelled.
Mike also quotes Tom Pride, of Pride’s Purge, who also points out that while anti-Semitism certainly exists, and must be taken seriously, the real anti-Semites are generally right-wing. They despise Corbyn, the Labour Party and the left in general, and love Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage, Brexit and Trump, as well as the Daily Mail. Oh yes, and they also hate Blacks and Muslims as much as they hate Jews. In my experience, this is absolutely true. You only have to look at the letters pages in the right-wing press, and the comments section for videos about race and immigration on YouTube. The racist readers of the Daily Heil hate Labour, because they see it as the party of unlimited coloured immigration. More specifically, they believe the allegation of a former British civil servant that Blair was determined to increase non-white immigration in order to change Britain demographically and rub the Tories’ faces in a new, multicultural Britain. This civil servant is the only person, who has made this claim, but it was repeated by the Heil and rest of the Tory press, and believed by very many of its readers.
Mike’s article also includes a Tweet from Chelley Ryan, which includes a video with a Jewish lady talking about the issues of anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitism smears under the hashtag #wrongkindofjew. This lady’s family comes from Vienna, and her mother’s family were nearly all butchered by the Nazis. She herself was a member of the Labour party up to the Iraq invasion, when she could no longer be a member. She rejoined as a supporter with the election of Jeremy Corbyn. She has many Jewish friends, with whom she discusses these issues. She states that while she doesn’t say that there isn’t any anti-Semitism in the Labour party, she hasn’t seen it or been subject to it. As for the anti-Semitism smears, she makes three points:
1. It’s a distraction from Israel’s horrific persecution of the Palestinians. This week, 15 unarmed protesters were shot by the IDF.
2. It’s also a distraction from the greater racism in the Tories, for example, Boris Johnson and his vile comments about ‘grinning picaninnies’.
3. It’s also about the forthcoming elections, and the determination of the Blairites to undermine Corbyn so that they can return to power. She also points out that many members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the other Jewish organisations making the accusations of anti-Semitism are Tories. She is also afraid that the appropriation of anti-Semitism by the right will backfire. But unfortunately, it won’t backfire on the right, but on the Jews generally. She has a point. Other people have also warned that the use of allegations of anti-Semitism purely as a political smear is dangerous, because it devalues anti-Semitism, to the point that people may become indifferent to real abuse or brutalisation of Jews, simply for being Jews.
Other Jewish members of the Labour party and Jewish Labour groups have said the same, or similar things. They also have a right to be heard in this debate. But the Thatcherite political establishment – the Tories, press and the Blairites in the Labour party – are determined to make sure that they aren’t. Like Jewdas, they’re ‘the wrong kinds of Jews’.
This is the third part and final part of my article on the interview with Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show. She’s a tireless critic of American imperialism, and the presenter of the Empire Files on TeleSur English, and before that, on RT.
Dore and Martin discuss how the Empire and the Deep State loathes Trump because he ain’t good for the Empire’s image. After Bush had nearly pushed Americans towards revolution, Obama managed to placate people, and win them back to the Empire. But Trump is worse for the Empire because he’s such an a**hole and psychopath. There are people, who are just as psychotic. Paul Ryan, another Republican, hates the poor. But Trump is ramping up the Empire to colossal levels. There are now troop surges in Afghanistan, and the formation of Africom to deal with Somalia. Everybody’s heard of a horrific massacre committed by one of the warlords, and blamed on al-Shabaab. But what you aren’t being told is that week before his village was subject to a bombing raid which killed a load of kids. Martin talks about Trump’s hypocrisy and cynicism. He attacked Killary for the way she sold arms to the Saudis, but has been more than willing to sell them arms himself so they can kill civilians in Yemen. Under Trump, there has been a 400 per cent increase in drone strikes, and a 75 per cent increase in civilian deaths. Under Bush and Obama, the US military just killed every military-age male in a given locality. Now they’re carpet-bombing whole villages. Just like the Israelis kill Palestinians. Well, Trump said he would kill not only the terrorists, but also their families, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, he has not honoured the promises Martin hoped he would, like normalising relations with Russia.
And then they get on to MOAB – the Mother Of All Bombs. This ‘mini-nuke’ – actually a conventional bomb that approached some of the destructive power of a nuclear device – was dropped on a cave system in Afghanistan. They said it only killed terrorists, but there were people in that area, and we won’t know if it only killed terrorists, because nobody’s allowed in there. Martin describes ISIS as a barbaric death cult – which is true – but states that this doesn’t give us the right to kill the people, who live in these countries. She makes the point that the applause which greeted the MOAB attack was a dehumanisation of the Afghan people and the victims of this weapon.
They then discuss whether some of the people on the Right, who supported Trump, may now be disillusioned with the orange buffoon. Many people probably voted for him because they thought he was anti-interventionist. But he hasn’t been. This might be because the military-industrial complex and the warfare state are beyond his control. Martin hoped that this part of the Republican based would speak out, but she was disappointed. The base is just interested in having a more efficient War On Terror. They aren’t speaking out about Venezuela, nor about the push for war with North Korea, they just don’t want us to fund al-Qaeda. As for Trump himself, he was never anti-interventionist. He just appeared so as it was a useful stance against Killary. He doesn’t have to surround himself with generals, who just want war because with every new invasion they launch, they get another star on their jacket. They two then discuss how nobody knows why America was in Niger.
I realise that this is an American programme, discussing American issues. But it also directly and acutely affects us. A number of our politicos have attended Republican conventions, and one of Trump’s British buddies was Nigel Farage. The Tories have been copying and utilising Republican policies since Maggie Thatcher took over as premier in the 1970s. And New Labour did the same with the Clintonite wing of the Democrats, adopting their stance against the welfare state, and introducing neoliberalism, deregulation and privatisation, including the privatisation of the NHS, into the Labour Party.
The situation is rather different over here in Blighty, as we are now lucky enough to have a real Socialist as leader in the shape of Jeremy Corbyn. But New Labour is desperately trying to hang on in the shape of Progress, Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement. And they have been using the smearing of decent anti-racists, the majority of whom are Jewish, as anti-Semites and their expulsion from the party as a weapon to purge their left-wing opponents.
As for imperialism, we are still riding on the back of America’s coat-tails, trying to be a world power by exploiting the ‘Special Relationship’. And so we support their wars in the Middle East, and the looting of these countries’ state industries and the brutalisation and impoverishment of their peoples.
Our media isn’t quite as bad as the Americans’ just yet. The news over here does accept that climate change is real at least, and there are still news reports about the poverty caused by austerity and Tory cuts to the welfare state and health service.
But it is heavily biased towards the Tories. The Beeb is full of public school, very middle class White guys, and its news and editorial staff have contained a number of high profile Tories, several of whom have left their posts to work for the party under Cameron and May. ‘Goebbels’ Robinson and ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg are members of the Tory party. Robinson led a whole series of Tory groups, while Kuenssberg spoke at a fringe meeting in the Tory party this year.
The Kushners noted in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, that the Beeb does not allow anyone to question austerity, and it is just assumed, entirely falsely, as true and necessary by the rest of the media. And academics from Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities have noted that the Beeb is far more likely to talk to Tory politicians and managing directors about the economy, than Labour politicos and trade unionists.
And the war on alternative media is happening in this country as well. The Tories would love to close down RT. We’ve already seen them join in the baying mob accusing it of being Putin’s propaganda arm interfering with British democracy over here. All the while being very silent about how the Israelis were caught trying to get the people they don’t like removed from May’s cabinet. We’ve seen them criticise Labour MPs for appearing on the network, while ignoring their own people, who also have. And May got on her high horse to write a letter to Alex Salmond telling him not to take up a job as presenter with the Network.
And the bots and algorithms cooked up by Google and Facebook to protect us all from ‘fake news’ are having an effect on ‘controversial’ read: left-wing bloggers and vloggers. They direct potential readers away from the sites the corporations have decided are a threat to democracy. Mike’s suffered an inexplicable fall in the readership of some of his articles, and some of his posts have had to be reposted after mysteriously vanishing from Facebook. Even before then, there was an attempt to censor Tom Pride over at Pride’s Purge by claiming that his site was unsuitable for children. The pretext for that was some of the coarse humour he employs in his satire. This is nothing compared to some of the language you will hear on YouTube. It looked very much like his real crime was sending up Dave Cameron and the other walking obscenities taking up space on the Tory benches.
What Abby Martin says about the media and the crimes of Empire describe the situation in America. But it also describes what the neoliberal elites are doing over here.
We have to stop this. We have to take back parliament, and end the warmongering. Now.
Here’s another threat to liberty in the UK: the further expansion of the massive surveillance state erected by New Labour and the Tory-Lib Dem coalition.
After the terrible atrocity in Manchester last week, Theresa May and the Tories demanded greater regulation of the internet in order to crack down on terrorism. At first, this doesn’t look too unreasonable. ISIS and al-Qaeda before it have disseminated their propaganda through the Net. Several British converts, including the stupid schoolgirls, who ran off to the Middle East to be jihadi brides, were drawn to the terrorists through the loathsome beheading videos these butchers put out.
However, there are dangers as well. Further regulation means that the state has greater powers to spy on all of us, and presents a danger to free speech and conscience generally.
In this clip from the David Pakman Show, Pakman and his producer, Patrick Ford, point out the dangers of such legislation. They cite the intelligence whistleblower, Edward Snowden, who made the point that despite the massive expansion in the American surveillance state after 9/11, there is no evidence that the increased policing of the net prevented further terrorist attacks. They also ask their audience to imagine what would happen, if a generation arose, who believed climate change did not exist because all references to it had been scrubbed from the Net, or if the government used its regulation of the Web to whip up support for another war.
Pakman and Ford state clearly that they are afraid we Brits are going down the same road America went down after the attack on the Twin Towers.
Pakman and Ford are absolutely right to be very worried about this. Blair stood for the expansion of the surveillance state in Britain before 9/11, as did John Major, the Tory prime minister before him. And privacy and civil liberties groups have been extremely worried about this intrusion into the lives and private matters of innocent citizens and the threat it poses to genuine freedom.
The terror attack in Manchester was just the latest pretext to take more of our freedoms away. A few years ago it was the threat of paedophilia and pornography. Tom Pride, of Pride’s Purge, found that some of his readers were finding it difficult to view him, because their internet provider had decided that his blog was ‘adult’ and so not suitable for children. The blog is indeed adult, but only in the sense that it’s a political blog, dealing with an adult topic. Which sometimes involves very forthright language from Mr Pride. But it certainly ain’t porn, and its blocking – and those of similar left-wing blogs – looked very much like an attempt by the Tories and their Lib Dem enablers to clamp down on left-wing bloggers.
Just as YouTube has taken the campaign against fake news as the opportune to demonetise left-wing vloggers. This will force left-wing news programmes off YouTube by denying them the advertising money they need to support them.
Britain has some of the harshest anti-terror legislation in Europe. Thanks to Blair, Cameron and Clegg, British law now provides for secret courts, where you can be tried without knowing the precise charges, the evidence against you, or who your accuser is, and where the press and the public are excluded, if the government decides that a normal, public trial would be a threat to national security.
As I’ve pointed out time and again, this is the travesty of justice the great Czech writer, Kafka, described in his book The Trial and The Castle, and which became horrific realities in Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR.
As Pakman and Ford point out, no-one is arguing that governments shouldn’t have the tools they need to prevent terrorism. But this should not mean a further erosion of civil liberties.
I believe we are very much at that point now.
Don’t let May use the terror attacks to create a totalitarian surveillance state, where the only material allowed on the Net is right-wing, Tory propaganda.
Vote Labour on June 8th for a sensible approach to terrorism.
Hi folks! I’ve been leaving off blogging for the past day or so as it’s Christmas, and I’d like to give my readers the opportunity of enjoying the spirit of the season – or Hanukah, for those of them, who may be Jewish – without reminding them of how ghastly and miserable life under this present government is.
However, it’s also at this time of year that the media runs its reviews of the year, looking back over the leading events and personalities of the last 12 months. And so that merry funster Tom Pride has launched his own, end of year competition over at Pride’s Purge! Yes, he’s offering you the chance to vote on a selection of the six toxic personalities and organisations most responsible for the brutal death of satire in 2016.
The nominees are:
* Donald Trump and Nigel Farage
* Anti-NHS Tory MP Daniel Hannan
* Theresa May
* The Scum
* Boris Johnson
* The Daily Heil
After the false accusations of misogynistic and anti-Semitic abuse made by the Blairites and Israel lobby in their campaign to unseat Jeremy Corbyn, last Friday saw the real thing launched against Britain’s first Black female MP, Diane Abbott. Jeremy Corbyn had just made her shadow home secretary. This brought out the various racists and xenophobes, who’ve been encouraged in their abuse by Brexit, to heap one load of vile filth after another on her. Tom Pride over at Pride’s Purge has posted a sample of it. And it isn’t really isn’t pretty. He also makes the serious point that, if you believe the Right, it’s only the Left that are bullies and racists.
Be warned: the language used by these morons is extremely coarse and highly offensive. As well as being racist and obscene, one or two also speculates on her sexuality. Many of them make sneering comments about the Labour party, saying this is the reason why they won’t win, and at least one person urges everyone to vote UKIP. Which shows the gutter racism there is in that party.
It shows the real, visceral racism that exists on the Right, but which is not being commented so much on, because it does not suit the Establishment’s desperate desire to discredit Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters anyway it can. And so entirely false allegations are endlessly recycled and commented upon, ad nauseam, with constant demands for Corbyn to stop what doesn’t exist, and what he is not responsible for, while the real racism poisoning politics goes unremarked.
Yesterday, Tom Pride at Pride’s Purge put up a piece pointing out that the same production company was behind two documentaries attacking Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party, one made for the BBC last year for Panorama, and the other broadcast this week on Channel 4’s Dispatches. The company behind both is Films of Record, whose managing director and executive producer is Neil Grant. Grant is a former chair of Brent East Labour party, who has had a feud going back twenty years with Ken Livingstone.
Mr Pride also concludes this piece with the news that it is cases like this
which have prompted the idea for a new investigative organisation – TORCHLIGHT UK – which will be shining a light into the dark corners of the UK establishment, revealing hidden connections between UK politicians, the media and big business. Keep an eye out in the next few weeks on how you can help. We will be naming names.
Of course, none of this exonerates either the Beeb or Channel 4 of breaking rules on broadcasting impartiality. The commissioning editors at both broadcasters presumably knew the company, and who Neil Grant was and his political history. They would also have made the decision whether or not to broadcast the programmes when they were finally made and submitted. The fact that they did, despite these films’ bias, shows that they are fully complicit. They wanted the programme to smear Corbyn and his supporters, and that’s precisely what they got.
I look forward to hearing more from Tom about TORCHLIGHT UK. This sounds like the kind of thing Lobster has been doing in the field of parapolitics for years now, connecting the dots between big business, the spooks and their influence on the parties and the trade unions. Robin Ramsay’s complaint was that there wasn’t enough of this kind of research being done by the Left any more. This was because the far right had started doing it, and so the Left had dropped it in order to avoid becoming discredited by association. The announcement of the forthcoming appearance of TORCHLIGHT looks like reversing that, and so shining some light into some very murky, grubby little places.
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