Cartoon: The Dead Thatchers – Eton Uber Alles

Hi, and here’s another of my cartoons satirising the Tories and their utterly reprehensible politicos and other members. In this case, the cartoon takes the form of a sleeve image for a non-existent punk band, the Dead Thatchers, and an equally non-existent song, ‘Eton Uber Alles’. It shows David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson and George Osborne in front of the gates of Auschwitz, which bears the infamous slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ and the cartoon’s punchline, as you can see, is ‘You will row for the master race’. It’s a reference to the Eton boating song,which itself got poached and revamped in the 1980s by Paul McCartney into the Frog Chorus.

The cartoon’s inspiration is the American punk outfit, The Dead Kennedys, and their song, ‘Kalifornia Uber Alles’. As punks, the Kennedys really hated hippies, and so the song’s just a rant about how California is some kind of hippy Third Reich. I was never a fan of the Dead Kennedys, but I do remember the song had the lines ‘Hippy Nazis will control you, you will jog for the master race!’ Which in the context of a Britain dominated by Eton would obviously be boating.

Now there’s a lot that can be said about hippies both pro and con, but they definitely weren’t Nazis. There was, apparently, a Hippy Nazi party, but they were in Florida, and from their name sound like a rather tasteless joke. They sound like an attempt to wind up the straights, rather than any serious Fascist organisation. Unfortunately, with the way so many of the British ruling class were initially very sympathetic towards Nazi Germany, flocking to organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship, it’s probably a fair bet that the fathers or grandfathers of many of the boys now at Eton really were Nazi sympathizers. Though I’m not, of course, claiming that those of the four depicted above were.

And there is a serious point for my placing them in front of the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, and it’s the same reason people have scrawled it on the walls of Jobcentres and put up photoshopped images of the same. The pro-Israel fanatics and Tories attacked those images and graffiti as anti-Semitic, claiming that they were somehow turning the Holocaust into a joke. However, as Mike explained in his piece last Saturday about the appearance of the slogan on another Jobcentre, this certainly isn’t a case. The phrase translates into English as ‘Work Makes (You) Free’. According to Tony Greenstein, the slogan was on the gates of all the Nazi camps, including those housing gentile prisoners. It was not used exclusively for the Jews, and first appeared on a concentration camp for non-Jews. It’s been applied to the Tories and their administration of the DWP, particularly by Iain Duncan Smith, because they really do seem to have a very Fascistic attitude to the poor and disabled.

The Tories have a mantra about ‘making work pay’, and have deliberately adopted a policy of ‘less eligibility’ towards the disabled and the unemployed in order to deter and punish them for claiming benefit. It takes five weeks after someone has signed on before they receive their first payment under Universal Credit. This is also less than the amount they would have received under the previous, benefit systems. There is an extensive system of sanctions, in which claimants can be thrown off their benefits on the flimsiest of excuses. The disabled are subjected to work capability tests, in which a certain percentage are always found fit work, even when the poor souls are severely disabled and even in several cases terminally ill. Grieving relatives and friends have even found their loved one’s receiving letters from the DWP informing them that they have been found fit for work, and so no longer liable for incapacity and related benefits after they’ve died. It has also been revealed that Maximus, the organisation responsible for administering the tests, like its predecessor Atos, has regularly falsified the results in order to get claimants thrown off benefits.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/14/firms-that-falsified-thousands-of-benefit-assessments-set-to-get-contracts-to-falsify-thousands-more/

Mike in his article on Sunday, 8th March 2020 put up this meme reminding everyone how IDS started an article for the online edition of one of the papers actually praising the slogan and defending it against its use by the Nazis. The offending paragraph disappeared soon after, but not before shocked and horrified people had taken screenshots of it and put them back up so everyone could see just how low Iain Duncan Smith is. Here’s the meme:

As one tweeter, Paula Peters, quoted by Mike in his article points out, the language used by the Tories about the disabled is very much the same the Nazis used in the Third Reich. They’re denounced as ‘useless eaters’ and scroungers. The term ‘workshy’, used to describe the long-term unemployed, is also taken from the Nazis. It’s the English translation of ‘arbeitscheu’. And the habitually or long-term unemployed were also branded ‘asocial’ and placed in the concentration camps.

The Tories do this because they have a fundamentally eugenicist view of the poor, the unemployed and the disabled. They are biologically inferior, ‘dysgenic’, who threaten the healthy purity of the rest of the human race and particularly the biologically superior. Who are naturally the rich, especially the heads of big business. Hence the Tory policy of forcing them off benefits, even if it means the deaths of hundreds of thousands. It’s estimated that about 120,000 people have been killed by Tory austerity. But there is no apology nor any attempt to alter or improve conditions despite continuing revelations of the hardship inflicted on millions of people. Instead the Tories merely double down, repeated their lies about how, under them, the economy was booming and more people were in work than ever before. As for the deaths, they have done everything they can to hide the figures and prevent disability rights activists and carers, like Mike, from obtaining them. Hence putting the Tories in front of that slogan is very appropriate.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/08/hypocrisy-over-language-used-to-describe-dwp-oppression-of-benefit-claimants/

Here’s the cartoon. As always, I hope you enjoy it. And please, don’t have nightmares. It’s only Iain Duncan Smith!

 

Vox Political: Why Is the Media Silent about Tory Anti-Semitism?

A few days ago Mike over at Vox Political put up a piece commenting on the lamestream media’s reaction, or lack of it, to the photos published in the Mirror of a group of Tory students at Plymouth University wearing some very offensive messages on their T-Shirts. These idiots had all thought it would be jolly japes to scrawl slogans like ‘F**K the NHS’ on their shirts. One of these clowns was wearing a Hitler moustache, and had drawn a Star of David and the word Jude. This was not the name Jude, as in the Beatles’ song ‘Hey, Jude’, or that of the actor, Jude Law. Or the Christian saint, St. Jude. No, this was the German Jude, meaning ‘Jew’. And the two together were a disgusting parody of the identifying marks Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, before they were deported and murdered wholesale under the Final Solution.

Mike in his article mentioned how the Beatles opened a fashion shop in the 1960s, only to find it physically attacked because of suspected anti-Semitism. They called it ‘Hey, Jude’, after their song. Unfortunately, some people thought that this was some kind of anti-Semitic message, as it brought back memories of Kristallnacht, the night when the Nazis systematically attacked Jewish shops and businesses, scrawling the word Jude on them. The night got its name, which means ‘Crystal Night’ in English, after the shards of broken glass when the Nazis smashed the shop windows. Now Macca and the Fab Four were and are anything but Nazis, but you can see how some people could make that mistake. And a decade later in the ’70s, some of the punks really did wear Nazi regalia in order to provoke that kind of outrage. Sid Vicious apparently went all the way through the Jewish section of Paris dressed as stormtrooper in a gratuitously tasteless and offensive display.

But while the media has gleefully seized upon and played up the entirely invented claims of anti-Semitism within the Labour party, they are very, very quiet about any such incidents in the Tories. The Mirror reported that the both the Tories and Plymouth University were planning to hold inquiries into the behaviour of these toff idiots and punish them. But that’s it. I think it was only the Mirror and possible one other newspaper that reported the incident. If it had been young members of the Labour party, there’d have been no end of outrage and denunciations in the media, by politicians and the public. And further calls for Corbyn to resign as he would be held responsible. But as it was the Tories all you could hear was a deafening silence.

Not only does the media not want to report Tory anti-Semitism, but the Jewish establishment wishes to deny that such a thing even exists. Marie van der Zyle (below) stated in one of her attacks on the Labour party that, in contrast to them, the Tories had always been ‘good friends of the Jews’.

You know I’m not going to get tired of this joke!

Van der Zyle’s bizarre claim whitewashes a very long history of anti-Semitism in the Tory party. One of the left-wing Jewish blogs was so upset by it, that they put up a list of some of the more notorious of incidents in the Tory party. This went, I seem to recall, from the British Brothers’ League and the passage of the Aliens Act by the Tory government at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th to ban Jewish immigration, to the comment by one Tory about the number of Jews in Thatcher’s government. He remarked that there were far Estonians there than Etonians. Apart from being anti-Semitic, it also shows the very distinct class prejudice and sense of entitlement in the Tory party. Etonians were expected to make up a good proportion of cabinet ministers, not the children of eastern European Jews.

In the 1930s a fair number of Tories sympathized with Nazi Germany and supported Oswald Mosley’s infamous British Union of Fascists. Amongst the various pro-Nazi outfits, like the Anglo-German Fellowship, was one specifically dedicated to purging Jews from the Tory party. By the 1970s certain sections of the Tory party had become so notorious for their anti-Semitism, that they had to take steps to assure the Jewish community that they were anything but. Thus the Monday Club, which has long been infamous for its racism and opposition to non-White immigration, opened its membership books to the Board of Deputies of British Jews to show that they didn’t have any Nazis among them.

David Cameron at the beginning of this century made gestures to expel and ban Nazis from the party during his modernization campaign. The party severed links with the Monday Club, and those with links to BNP and racist right were thrown out. But the Tories are still a very racist party, no matter how many BAME people they may make ministers or make MPs. Zac Goldsmith ran an islamophobic campaign against Sadiq Khan for mayor of London, smearing him as a supporter of terrorism. They put up posters and sent round vans calling on illegal immigrants to hand themselves in. And Tweezer herself was responsible for drafting the legislation that allowed them to deport the Windrush generation, who were British citizens and had every right to remain in this country. And I can remember when some branches of the Tory party, including the Union of Conservative Students, were debating adopting ‘racial nationalism’ as their official policy. That’s the doctrine of the BNP and NF: only those who are British by race, which here means ‘White’, are really citizens. Everyone else should be repatriated, voluntarily or involuntarily.

And you can bet that it isn’t just non-Whites that certain sections of the Tories loathe and despise. Somewhere there’s going to be real, anti-Semitism, no matter what Cameron, Tweezer and van der Zyle may say.

But the lamestream media aren’t going to poke their noses into this question. The press is almost wholly dominated by the Tory party, especially now that the Guardian and Observer have decided to throw in their lot with them. And just about all the papers seem to want to see Corbyn thrown out of power because of the threat he poses to Thatcherite neoliberalism.

And so the media is going to continue the lie, that on the one hand the Labour party is a party of anti-Semites, led by an anti-Semite, and on the other hand that the Tories are completely innocent of such ugly racism. No wonder people are choosing to get their information instead from the Net.

Thomas Klikauer: Nazism Enters the Reichstag with the AfD

The German elections two days ago saw the extreme right-wing Alternative fuer Deutschland gain 12 per cent of the votes, and has become Germany’s third largest political party behind the Christian Democrats, Germany’s equivalent to the Conservative party, and the Social Democrats, their equivalent of Labour. The party’s militantly xenophobic with a deep hatred of Muslims. Thomas Klikauer today published a very frightening analysis of the party and its history in Counterpunch. He states categorically that they’re Nazis, backing up this claim with a chilling amount of supporting evidence. Some of which is absolutely horrifying, such as a speech made by one of these modern stormtroopers in which he announced that they would ‘build a subway to Auschwitz’.

Klikauer states that the Alternative fuer Deutschland has all the racism, stupidity and anti-intellectualism of the original Nazis. Their nickname across the Nordsee is the Alternative for the Dumb, here in the American meaning of ‘stupid’. He argues that the party has its roots in Germany’s failure to denazify after the War. When the Cold War began c. 1950, the arrest and prosecution of Nazi officials and collaborators ceased, and many were recruited by the allies into senior positions in politics, the judiciary and civil service. He also makes the point that like the old Nazis, whose rise was assisted by the Hugenberg press, a compliant media has also helped the AfD. All the main TV stations in Germany invited their members on to speak, asking them about immigration. This was the first time a neo-Nazi party had been invited onto the media, just as this is the first time since the War that Nazis, in the guise of the AfD, have entered the German parliament. Many Germans have been shocked by the fawning treatment given them by the media, and one person commented that the first part of a 100-minute debate on them looked like an advert for them instead.

He also links the party’s rise to an upsurge in racist and political violence. Between 1990 and 2013, 184 people were killed in right-wing attacks. The victims were Turkish Germans, Muslims, the homeless, punks, and refugees, amongst others.

The part was founded in 2013 by Bernd Lucke, a nationalistic capitalist, in Klikauer’s phrase, as a more rightwing party than the Christian Democrats. However, more extreme right-wing elements soon entered and took it over in a process that included the election of Frauke Petry as its leader in 2015. From 2014 onwards it has had its representatives in several of the governments of Germany’s constituent laender. it is bitterly opposed to abortion, racist, ultra-nationalist, fiercely xenophobic and embraces the Nazi past. Petry herself wishes to reintroduce the volkisch ideology of the Nazis, along with Reichsburgerschaft: racial citizenship. Alice Weidel, one of the party’s chief activists, has denounced Merkel and her cabinet as ‘pigs’ and ‘puppets of the winners of World War II’, and claiming that Germany was not ‘sovereign’. Klikauer doesn’t mention it, but this is very much like the Nazis’ denunciation of the chief parties of Weimar coalition – the Catholic Centre Party, the Social Democrats and the two Liberal Parties as the ‘November criminals’ following Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Klikauer states that Pegida is the AfD’s modern equivalent of the old Nazis’ SS and SA. The head of the party’s youth wing, Markus Frohnmaier has connections to the German Defence League. He also made a speech saying that the AfD ‘would clean Germany out’, which he states is very much the language of the Nazis.

Like the American Nazis in Charlottesville, the stormtroopers of the AfD believe that there is a Jewish plot to replace Europeans with peoples from outside the continent, mainly the Middle East. The AfD author Wolfgang Gedeon blames the world’s evils on the Jews, America, Zionism, Muslims, gays and the left. One of the other leading figures in the AfD, Stephan Brandner, declared that Angela Merkel should be locked up, just like Trump raised the same chant against Hillary Clinton. And like Trump, he claimed that the Antifa are the modern equivalents of the SA.

Frank Magnitz, one of the party’s people in Bremen, put up a picture on a net with a red button and group of praying Muslims, saying, ‘If you could push a button and wipe out all Islam, you’d do it. Yes!’ The genocidal language and ideology as the Nazis. The party’s second-in-command, Alexander Gauland, said at a neo-Nazi meeting at Kyfferhausen, another Nazi pilgrimage site, that he was extremely proud of German soldiers in the First and Second World War. Klikauer makes sees this as an affirmation of the Holocaust, as the Wehrmacht was involved in the Final Solution, along with the rest of the German security apparatus.

Like Nazis everywhere, they also deny the Holocaust. Bjorn Hocke has described Germany’s Holocaust Memorial as ‘a memorial of shame’, while Wilhelm von Gottberg, an outright Holocaust denier, was an electoral candidate in Anhalt-Saxony. The party’s supporters also shout the old Nazi slogans of ‘Germany Awake’ and ‘Whatever it takes for Germany’, both of which are illegal.

He also notes the party’s connections to big business. The Alternatives are funded by the Movenpick ice cream company, and the ‘Swiss Goal Corporation’. It is also funded by the billionaire August von Finck, who bought the company name Degussa. Degussa was the company that delivered the Zyklon B to Auscwitz, and then extracted the gold teeth from the bodies of the murdered Jews. Finck’s father was also responsible for the removal of Jews from Germany’s banks under the Third Reich. Von Finck has supported a number of right-wing parties, as has Beatrix von Storch, who used to run a ‘citizen’s’ movement against the German welfare state.

He notes the work of BuzzFeed’s Marcus Engert in analyzing the extreme right-wing views of 396 of the Alternatives’ candidates, and the fears of a German academic, Hajo Funke, that the modern German parliament is incapable of dealing with this threat. The article briefly touches on the recruitment of former members of the Nazis party by the authorities during the Cold War. These include Hans Globke, the architect of the German race laws, who became a minister under Germany’s first post-War president, Konrad Adenauer; Georg Kiesinger, who served as chancellor from 1966-9, and who was slapped by the great anti-Nazi, Beate Klarsfeld. Other Nazis include Hans Filbinger, the Christian Democrat premier of Baden-Wurttemberg from 1966 to 1978, and Carl Carstens, the German president from 1979-1984.

Klikauer’s article concludes

Since 24th September 2017, Germany has Nazis in its parliament. Contrary to the 1960s, these days Germany has not yet seen another Beate Klarsfeld who will tell the AfD’s anti-Semites, racists, and Holocaust deniers that their politics will not go unchallenged. Today, Nazism is much more widespread compared to the 1960s. Today, we have many young and still a few old Nazis joining forces in an unprecedented way. In the 1960s, old Nazis never had a chance to form their own party and to be elected. In the year 2017, AfD Nazis have already fulfilled some of their ideological missions: honouring the Nazi Wehrmacht, denying the Holocaust, and fighting against democracy and the left.

Being furnished with parliamentarian status will only encourage Germany’s new Nazis. Like in 1933, they will not moderate themselves. If history is anything to go by, the gravest danger for Germany, the left and ultimately Europe and the world comes not only from the new Nazis. It comes also from a conservative coalition government that includes the new Nazis (AfD). By 1933 Hitler’s Nazi party was already in decline in electoral polling. His Nazis actually came to power through a conservative coalition government making Hitler Reichskanzler (chancellor). It was German conservatism that made Hitler possible. In 2017, one might hope that German conservatism has learned its historic lesson.

It isn’t hard to see from this that the notorious ’70s terrorist group, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, or to give them their official name, the Rote Armee Fraktion, had a point. They too felt that Germany had never denazified, and were enraged that so many of them had not been prosecuted for their crimes, but instead settled down into very comfortable lives in the new Germany. And so they rose up in arms and carried out a wave of assassinations and bombings.

And Red Ken also devoted a chapter or two in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, to discussing and condemning the recruitment of Nazis during the Cold War, including those responsible for the Holocaust and pogroms against the Jews. Livingstone clearly and unequivocally condemned all forms of racism in the book, including anti-Semitism, and prejudice and discrimination against Blacks and the Irish. Yet last year he was smeared as an anti-Semite by the Blairites and Israel lobby within Labour, because he stood up for Naz Shah and said, quite rightly, that Hitler supported sending Jews to Israel. Which Hitler did for a time.

Meanwhile, those responsible for the smears, the Jewish Labour Movement and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, have defended genuine anti-Semites, like the Hungarian premier Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, because they support Israel. As Tony Greenstein has pointed out, the Zionists have shown themselves repeatedly willing to ally themselves with real Nazis against Diaspora Jews, in the hope that their victory will result in more Jews emigrating or fleeing to Israel. Thus we’ve had Richard Spencer, the head of the Alt-Right, and Andrew Anglin, the head of the Nazi website the Daily Stormer, appearing on Israeli TV. And Sebastian Gorka, another Trump aide, who’s been active amongst the Hungarian extreme right and who sports a medal commemorating Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, who collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust, was invited to a big conference of Israel’s military establishment.

The AfD aren’t unique to Germany. You can see the same type of genocidal rhetoric and images on American and British anti-Islamic ‘counterjihad’ websites. There’s one showing a gigantic blast crater centred in Saudi Arabia, which annihilates most of the countries in the region as far as Egypt in the West. This has the caption ‘Problem Solved’. And the victory of the extreme right in one country will encourage its activists elsewhere in the West.

We have to help and assist our friends and partners in Germany and elsewhere tackle the AfD and the rest of the Nazis, just as we have to tackle the racists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes in Britain, like Britain First, National Action, the BNP, London Forum and the Traditional Britain Group, as well as the Anglo-American Alt right, whose British members include Paul Joseph Watson, Carl Benjamin, AKA Sargon of Akkad, Milo Yiannopolis and Katie Hopkins.

And to do it properly we need people like Ken Livingstone and the others like him, who are prepared to talk frankly about real anti-Semitism, western imperialism and racism, and stand for Jews and the other ethnic minorities threatened by these thugs, who wish to remain in Britain and the other countries in which they were born, or to which the fled to escape genocide in their countries of origin.

Underground Comics Legend Robert Crumb Lays into Donald Trump

This is another satirical piece I found on the SF/ weird art website, Tomorrow and Beyond, laying into the day-glo generalissimo, Donald Trump. It’s a strip by Robert Crumb from 1987 in which orange braggart gets his comeuppance and his head flushed down the toilet by a group of very offended liberals. They include two angry ladies, who given his very overt misogyny, have every right to give him an entirely unwelcome hair wash.

The site comments on the strip that although it was published thirty years ago, it’s still relevant. Quite. I think Crumb passed away a few years ago, so alas we’ll never know how he would have sent up his presidency. But odds on, it would have been extremely vicious, and guaranteed to be so offensive that it would have sent Republicans into orbit.

As a character study of Trump’s weird psychology, it’s amazing how much of it is still very accurate, and unfortunately well on display in his government and public pronouncements: the boasting, the lavish displays of personal wealth, the vanity, the need to attract the attentions of the opposite sex and the absolute incapability of believing that any woman could ever resist him, in short, the whole vulgar, materialistic vanity of the man.

This should have been a warning to everyone.

Unfortunately, it appeared in an underground comic, so the only people, who read it were the hippies, punks, stoners and other countercultural peeps, who weren’t going to vote for him anyway.

Starvation: the Latest Part in the Tories Long Campaign against Young Mothers

Mike this evening put up a piece reporting that a survey of 300 young mothers found that they were experiencing severe financial problems. Two-thirds of those questioned said that they were only just managing, and a quarter had been forced to use food banks.

This is disgusting, and Mike takes apart the equally revolting attempts of the DWP to put a positive spin on these statistics. They claimed that it was ‘encouraging’ that more children were living in ‘working households’. Mike points out the obvious: this has absolutely nothing to do with child poverty. Similarly, doubling free childcare for three and four years may look like an improvement, but it’s questionable how many this will actually help.

And he also shoots down the lie that ‘work coaches’ are ‘encouraging people into jobs’. They don’t encourage. They just bully, adding more stress to people already under considerable financial strain.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/03/28/young-mothers-are-starving-because-they-are-shortchanged-on-benefits-and-cant-find-paying-work/

Mike makes clear the reasons why these young women are starving: they’re being short-changed on benefits, and can’t find paying work. This is, of course, all part of the Tories long campaign to create a cowed, impoverished workforce willing to accept any job, no matter how poor the conditions and pay.

But it’s also part of the deeper Tory hostility to young mothers. Mike acknowledges this in his article, stating that the Tories’ hidden policy here is to prevent people having children at a young age. He’s right, and some of them have expressed their hatred of young mums in particularly grotesque rhetoric. Way back in the 1970s Maggie’s mentor, Keith Joseph, declared that unmarried teen mothers were ‘a threat to our stock’ – a nasty eugenicist turn of phrase, for which he was rightly pilloried. It’s even more sinister when you realise that Sweden continued sterilising people on eugenics grounds right into the 1970s. Among those targeted for sterilisation as a threat to Swedish genetic stock were promiscuous young women. I don’t know if Joseph wanted to see such legislation introduced here, so he could sterilise a few British unmarried mothers. Given his comments, it really wouldn’t surprise me.

A little while ago I posted up here episodes I found on YouTube of a BBC series broadcast in the 1980s investigating government secret and the way this undermined democracy. In one edition of the programme, they discussed the way the police had compiled secret reports and records of ordinary people they found suspicious, even though they had committed no crime. These included young people simply following the latest fashions in dress and music, like punks. In one area, they were also writing down the names of young pregnant women, who did not appear to have boyfriends.

And then in the 1990 there was the unsavoury spectacle of Peter Lilley prancing about the stage at the Tory conference one year, reading out his ‘little list’ in what he thought was a parody of the Mikado. On it, amongst all the other people, like the unemployed and welfare recipients he and the rest of the attendees hated were unmarried mothers.

This is why so many young mothers are finding it so difficult to cope now. The Tories have always despised them as part of the ‘undeserving’ poor, to use the language of the Victorians that Maggie thought was so ‘virtuous’. And so I doubt very much whether they are at all sorry to see these poor young women starve. In fact, given the eugenicist views expressed by Keith Joseph, I can imagine some are probably only too delighted.

Which raises the question whether these women are also part of those targeted for ‘chequebook genocide’ – the term Mike has coined for those the Tories seem happy to see starve to death after having their benefits removed. Mike coined the term in response to the deaths and mass poverty caused by the DWP and their wretched Work Capability Assessment. As Jeffrey Davies on here has pointed out, the congenitally disabled were the subject of Nazi extermination as well as the Jews, Gypsies and others they considered subhuman. Mike and many other bloggers from the Left and disability rights movements have speculated whether the Tories have the same policy, but heavily disguised. The news that a quarter of young mothers now have to use food banks makes you wonder if they’re also targeted for extermination as a threat to ‘our stock’, in the same way that the Swedes also forcibly sterilised promiscuous young women.

The Independent on Wearing a Safety Pin to Show Support for Immigrants

I’ve put up a couple of posts today about the massive growth in racist incidents after the Brexit vote. Unfortunately, some of the Nazis lurking in British society have decided that the vote to leave the EU now means that it’s permissible and accessible to intimidate immigrants to our great nation. One of the pieces I put up was sent by Michelle, one of the commenters here, who posted a link to a pamphlet from a Peace Studies prof at Bradford University on personally challenging and standing up to racist incidents.

Joanna, one of the other commenters to this blog, has also sent in her comment on the piece, which links to an article published on Tuesday in the Independent. It’s another great piece on how people can show their support for immigrants against rising racism. An American woman in London, Allison, has started a campaign to encourage people to wear a safety pin to show their solidarity. It’s inspired by the ‘I’ll ride with you’ campaign in Australia, which was launched last year after the Sydney Café killings. Here’s the comment and the link:

hi beast have you seen this?

http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/safetypin-the-simple-way-to-show-solidarity-with-the-uks-immigrant-population–ZJzeRPz6kHW

She also assures us that she’s going to wear one!

Of course, to some of us of a certain, wearing safety pins as jewelry brings us back to the heady days of 1977, when the Sex Pistols were in charts scandalising everyone, and in addition to brightly coloured hair and mohicans, punks were also sporting safety pins through their noses. This was when Johnny Rotten, now John Lydon, was intoning ‘No future! No future!’ I think it’s a great idea that the safety pin has come back as a fashion item to show no future for their racists after Brexit.

Police to Interview Suspects By Bodycam

According to an article in The Canary last week, the government is considering passing legislation to allow the rozzers to interview suspects in the street instead of in an interview room back at the cop shop. These interviews will, however, be recorded by bodycam.

The article begins

Pilot plans to allow police officers to interview suspects on the streets via body cameras, rather than at police stations, has raised concerns among civil liberties groups.

Currently, while the formal caution that police recite when arresting somebody states clearly that anything they say may be used in evidence against them, officers are not formally able to interview someone until they have been taken to a police station. Crucially, once at the police station, the suspect has the right to independent legal advice, and they are entitled to pre-interview disclosure.

This pre-interview disclosure is vitally important as it is designed to ensure the person and their legal representative understand why the person has been deprived of their liberty, the nature of the allegations made against them, and the reason why they have been arrested. Without this disclosure, and access to a solicitor, the suspect is extremely vulnerable, especially if unfamiliar with the complexities of the law.

Unsurprisingly, given the cuts to the police service, these proposals have nothing to do with access to justice, and are primarily concerned with saving money. Hampshire Chief Constable, and national police spokesman for body-worn video, Andy Marsh stated:

‘I think this will lead to swifter, fairer and more importantly cheaper justice.’

The emphasis seems to be most definitely on cheaper justice, with fairness coming a very poor second. The article quotes two critics of the scheme, who point out that current practice is based on decades of experience of the abuse of police powers. And that the people, who will suffer through this innovation won’t be the experienced, hardened crims, but inexperienced suspects unsure of their rights and the law.

The full article can be read at: http://www.thecanary.co/2015/11/11/fears-raised-cheaper-justice-policing-plans/

A number of points can be made here. Firstly, there’s the danger of serious breaches of justice in allowing the police to interview suspects away from the interview room and the presence of a lawyer to represent them. The government seems to think that allowing the interview to be recorded by bodycam will somehow be an acceptable substitute for removing established procedures involving formal, recorded interviews. It looks simply like they’re desperate to get convictions, and are willing to use this technology as a pretext for removing established judicial safeguards. Hey, it’s all recorded on camera, so it’s properly supervised. It can be wrong, can it?’ This seems to be the attitude.

It also shows how the government seems to be believe that increased surveillance technology is automatically a solution. Now, I’m very much aware that there is the view that Paris was targeted by ISIS for their butchery, instead of London, because the City of Light had much less CC TV coverage. But surveillance cameras, as the French also knew, carried their own dangers of creating a pervasive, surveillance state. Alan Moore when he wrote V for Vendetta in the 1980s placed surveillance cameras on the streets in his Fascist future Britain, thinking that this would really scare its readers. Well, it’s now thirty years or so after the strip, and surveillance cameras are everywhere and no one takes any notice, a fact the great man himself has remarked on. I’m sure surveillance cameras have an important use, but they should be adjuncts to, not substitutes for, traditional policing.

I also wonder what will be done about recorded interviews in which the individual is left off without charge. Will they still be retained? What about a person’s right to privacy, and not to have the state keep records on them when they are innocent? There have been cases where innocent citizens have found that the rozzers have continued to keep files on them even after they were released and declared innocent. I’m very much afraid something similar could happen here.

And there is the danger of the wider misuse of such technology as the Tories make Britain become ever more authoritarian and Fascistic. Way back in the 1970s the police were required to compile useful intelligence on potential suspects. This ended up with the bluebottles deciding someone was suspicious, based no more on the fact that they were a Punk, or a pregnant teenager. And one of Cameron’s brilliant ideas was for the cops to take the names and particulars of strikers on picket lines. He’s had to climb down on that, but given the backing the Tories have always received from rabidly anti-union groups, I doubt believe this has gone away. Not completely. So there’s a real threat to civil liberties there.

And lastly, there’s the rather more fantastic threat that this is the start of something like the Borg. They’re the cyborg race from Star Trek, who have merged into a single, collective intelligence – a group creature, so that their society resembles a giant ant’s nest. We’re nowhere near that level of cybernetics yet, but one of the more interesting comments about the Google Glass computer spectacles was that it practically made the wearer one of the Borg. Google Glass were the hi-tech specs that allowed you to surf the internet while walking about, and for your on-line friends to see what you were seeing. I can remember back in the 1990s there was a similar experimental arrangement being tried out by the computer geeks at one of the American unis. A friend of mine, who played Shadowrun, a Dungeons and Dragons-type game based in the world of cyberpunk and computer hacking, seemed unsurprised when I told him about it. He called the technology and the people who used them ‘gargoyles’, which was the term used in the game for people, who used cyberspace technology to experience the sensations experienced by another person.

So, in the game’s parlance, this technology effectively makes the rozzers the justice ministry’s gargoyles. And with others seeing what they see, it’s almost ‘1984’ and the Borg. It’s just that they haven’t been mentally connected to the internet yet, so they aren’t yet like the Robomen of the Dalek Invasion of Earth.

But it’s early days yet. Give the Tories time. They are Borg. Resistance is futile. We will be assimilated.

The Young Turks on America’s Death Squad Drone Programme

This is yet another video from The Young Turks, which is acutely relevant to what is happening in Britain, and to British citizens. The Turks are here reporting and commenting on the revelations by another whistleblower from the shady world of American covert operations. This whistleblower has handed over secret documents from the drone programme. These show how the drone operators are effectively a death squad used to kill their targets rather than capturing them for trial, or for supplying potential valuable intelligence.

The methods used to target their intended victims are also extremely flawed. The drone homes in on the signal from their cell phone or their computer, regardless of who is actually using it. That person may not actually be the intended terrorist, but their mother or daughter. Moreover, several times the signal used does not actually belong to the terrorist’s own phone or computer, but that of a family member, like their mother. As well as the terrorists themselves, drone strikes have also killed the people with them at the time, who may well be innocents.

The result has been that of 200 people killed by American drones during a specific period, only 35 were actually terrorists. Nevertheless, everyone killed by a drone is automatically designated an EKIA – Enemy Killed In Action. This status is only revised if they can prove otherwise. As Cenk Uyghur, the Turks’ main man says, this is the most Orwellian thing he’s ever heard. How can they challenge their status when they’re dead? Family members perhaps?

British citizens have also been targeted for drone strikes, rather than arrest and trial. The Turks’ video includes the case of one Berjawi, who was killed by a drone strike in Africa. British and American intelligence tracked him going to and from Africa, but did not intercept and capture him. Rather, he was simply stripped of his British citizens and then assassinated by drone.The Turks also criticise the way the gathering of the metadata used to guide the drones is presented as being harmless intelligence gathering without any dangerous consequences, which it is now clearly shown not to be.

Here’s the video:

I’m posting this up as it is directly relevant to the way Cameron is gradually constructing a highly secretive and extremely brutal judicial system on the pretext of protecting us from terrorism, and the nuisance and disruption of trade union strikes and popular protests. I reblogged a piece from Mike over at Vox Political the other day, who was concerned about Cameron’s apparent discarding of the principle ‘innocent until proven guilty’ in his anti-terrorism bill. This provides for a person to be prevented from working with children or vulnerable adults, if they are believed to be terrorists. The obviously problem there is who decides that they are, and on what grounds? As I pointed out on piece on it, there were numerous cases during the Cold War in which perfectly ordinary citizens were mistakenly blacklisted as Communists or potential troublemakers, simply for the most trivial reasons. Such as wearing punk clothing, being an unmarried mother, or having spoken to a Communist in a pub. Will British citizens also be executed by drone strikes simply because someone believes they’re a terrorist, but can’t or won’t prove it in a court of law? The evidence from the extra-judicial killing of Berjawi suggests this is a real possibility.

Vox Political on Cameron’s Rejection of ‘Innocent Until Proven Guilty’

Mike over at Vox Political has written this piece, Whatever happened to ‘innocent until PROVEN guilty’, David Cameron? discussing David Cameron’s intention to prevent people, who are only suspected of terrorist sympathies or connections, from working with children or vulnerable adults under new, anti-terror legislation. It begins

Public Relations Prime Minister has shot himself in the foot again, with a plan that mocks the very bedrock of the British justice system.

David Cameron wants to ban suspected extremists from working with children. Suspected? In what way? Because they read a different holy book? Because they follow a different religion? Because their skin is a different colour? Because they ‘don’t look right’ in the eyes of parents who may be prejudiced themselves?

There is a reason British justice holds that a person is innocent of any crime until they are proven to be guilty of it – it’s there to prevent exactly the kind of extremism that this Cameron policy will provoke – extreme paranoia; sectarianism; racism.

Perhaps Cameron thinks he can get away with it because he’s been doing this to the sick and disabled for years. The assessment system for incapacity and disability benefits takes as its fundamental assumption the idea that claimants are making up their illnesses in order to have an easy life – and they are taken to be guilty of this until they are able to prove their innocence.

Mike goes on to point out the potential harm this piece of legislation could do by mistakenly stigmatising perfectly innocent people as terrorists, simply based on racial or cultural prejudice against their skin colour or dress. He goes on to point out that this could well have the opposite effect than intended by radicalising young Muslims, who feel victimised because of their religion or ethnic origin.

He goes on to conclude that this is ‘divide and rule’ tactic to stir up resentments and divisions in order to prevent the emergence of a solid, cross-cultural opposition.

Mike’s absolutely right about the dangers of innocent people being targeted as potential terrorists for the most trivial reasons under his projected new law. There have been ample examples of this in the past, when the authorities and the secret state kept ordinary people under surveillance as suspected Communists. One of the Beeb’s journalists wrote a piece in the Radio Times in the 1980s about a man, who had been blacklisted by the intelligence services as a Communist traitor simply because he was seen talking to one in the pub. In that same decade, the Beeb also broadcast a series on the British secret state and governmental secrecy, which revealed that in the 1970s the police were required to note down potential troublemakers. They did so, often for the most trivial reason, such as being a Punk. One young woman was earmarked as a potential criminal, who needed watching, simply because she 16 and pregnant. Now, this is probably not the most ideal situation for a young girl, and teenage pregnancy is a social problem. But they aren’t criminals or a dangerous threat to undermine society. Or at least, not unless you’re a Tory MP. Then they need locking up as a threat to the ‘stock’, as Sir Keith Joseph put it.

If you want an example of the terrible consequences such prejudices can lead to in times of crisis or national threat, there’s the case of the killing of civil servant as a suspected German spy during the Second World War. The bureaucrat was sent round to assess farmers’ fields as part of the government’s wartime agricultural policies. The local people noticed him writing in a notebook, and concluded that he was a German spy. A group gathered to arrest him, and a member of the Home Guard was sent for. The civil servant began to argue his innocence, which the locals refused to believe. Then he made the mistake of trying turn to run. The Home Guards soldier raised his rifle and shot him. It was later revealed that rather than being a Nazi spy or Fifth Columnist, he was indeed just a bureaucrat doing his job.

This looks like it’s just an incident from the past, but similar events to this have occurred much more recently. Way back in the 1990s the IRA exploded a bomb in Warrington, resulting in the deaths and injury ordinary people at work or simply out for the day. Apart from the victims of the bomb, workers from a nearby branch of McDonald’s were also attacked and abused. Some of the burger chain’s employees were the first on the scene, genuinely trying to give aid to the bombs victims. They were attacked because they were seen as IRA sympathisers, based on the rumour that McDonald’s gives money to the IRA. There was even some totally spurious proof of this, in that the deductions column of the workers’ payslips included ‘IRA’. This was, however, ‘Internal Revenue Account’, and referred to a pensions scheme, not the Irish Republican Army.

Now think what could happen today. ISIS and al-Qaeda have declared war on Britain, just like Nazi Germany and Irish paramilitaries. All it takes is bomb outrage, such as that suffered during 7/7, and frightened and angry people will naturally turn to find and punish those responsible. And in attention to those murdered by the terrorists could be perfectly innocent British Muslims, who were lynched because somebody decided to blacklist them because he was once overheard criticising Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or something equally trivial.

I’m well aware that there may be problems tackling genuine terrorists because of problems of collecting evidence that would stand up in a court of law. And I’m not complacent about the threat to human lives terrorists like ISIS and the Islamist terror groups pose. But the reason we have the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is to prevent terrible miscarriages of justice and the persecution of the innocent by the power of the state. And it’s a principle that David Cameron and the other Tories have been determined to persistently undermine.

And this isn’t just an issue for Muslims. If they can get away with doing it to them, they will do it to the rest of society, just as they’ve done it to the sick and disabled and to trade unionists. This is part of their campaign to craft a totalitarian state.

The article’s at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/10/19/whatever-happened-to-innocent-until-proven-guilty-david-cameron/ Go and read it.

Jolyon Rubinstein and Politicians’ Failure to Connect with the Young

This is a continuation of the comments I posted on my reblog of Tom Pride’s interview with Jolyon Rubinstein. Rubinstein is on a campaign to get the politicos to take the young seriously. He laments that while there are certain politicians across the House in all parties, who want to get more young people interested in politics, the majority don’t. In his interview with Mr Pride, he seems to feel that the established position among the parties is that they don’t trust the young, as engaging them would upset the ‘status quo’.

Patronising with Pop Stars

I think he has point. When politicians have tried to engage the young, it’s been patronising and rather half-hearted. The prime examples of this was when various Tory MPs suddenly started telling the world, who their favourite pop musicians were. Almost as if there’d been a meeting at Central Office, which said, ‘Okay, chaps, next on the agenda: young people. They like pop music, so you’ve all got to have a favourite band or pop star. The PR people have had a look at what’s in the charts, and compiled a list of who you’re going to like.’ It was hardly surprising that the bands selected include the Spice Girls and the Scissor Sisters. They were in the charts and were highly popular. The Scissor Sisters seem to have been deliberately chosen to show that the Tories were now at ease with gays. Of course the bands they chose weren’t anything too challenging or potentially controversial, like Public Enemy, NWA, Megadeath, or the Mission. They were either too obscure, or would have put too many potential voters off, in the case of Public Enemy and NWA, with their angry, racially alienated stance. And the bands definitely did not include PIL.

MPs Younger but Not Interested in Young People’s Problems

The other way the parties have tried to appeal to the young is by having progressively younger Prime Ministers and members of their cabinet. I’ve got a feeling that when he was elected, Blair may have been Britain’s youngest prime minister. Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are also young. Well, young-ish. They’re still in the ’40s. As they should be. I want senior politicians old enough to have a proper, lived experience of the world and its trials and problems. Age shouldn’t necessary be a barrier. It shouldn’t matter how old the MP is, provided that they actually have some understanding of what life really is like for most young people. Simply saying that they are concerned with young people’s problems, because they’re parents, or from talking to parents and young people themselves, simply and unostentatiously, and actually showing they have, would overcome a lot of this alienation.

But they don’t. They simply dole out to the under 30s the same patronising flannel they give to the rest of the population. They might state that they understand their problems, but the very next thing they say in their next breath shows that they don’t. They then go back to talking in the abstract about economic predictions, without actually seeming to take on board that this has real consequences for their audience. They seem just interested in the abstract, economic reality without taking on board that to their audience, this means whether they can afford a proper house, decent clothes for the kids, run a car. Or for the unemployed and disabled, getting enough to eat that month.

Distrust of Youthful Radicalism

And I think Rubinstein is right about the parties distrusting the young. Young people have dangerous ideas. They can be dangerously and embarrassingly radical. Bliar deliberately closed down democracy in the NUS, probably because too many of the delegates were too extreme. And the Tories had troubles with their youth wing becoming increasingly racialised and supporting apartheid and racial nationalism.

Possibly going further, they may well be afraid of the spirit of ’68 and the radicalism of the 70s. The ’60s were a revolutionary decade, where youthful rebellion merged with and supported a number of then-radical, liberal causes: feminism, Civil Rights and ant-racism, militant peace movements against imperialism and particularly the Vietnam War. The election of Thatcher and Reagan was partly a reaction against all that, and succeeding administrations have tried to stress how responsible and sober they are, rather than youthful radicalism and revolt. Even as these administrations have taken over some of the liberal causes, like equality for women and ethnic minorities.

Tory Portrayal of Blair as Punk

You can see how much the Conservatives in particular hated youth culture, its fashions and political radicalism, by the cover of one of the books written by one of the Tory journos attacking Blair. Blair at the time was busy reforming the House of Lords, or stuffing it with his own supporters, whichever way you want to look at it. He was also engaged on other constitutional reforms, like suggesting possibly that judges might after all look a bit better if they didn’t have the horsehair wigs stuck on their heads. This was too much for that particular defender of the British Constitution. The cover showed Blair as some kind of punk or rocker, in black leather jacket and combat trousers. The terrible, slovenly, ignorant sprogs of the great unwashed were out there, and about to tear down tradition and decency. Kenny Everett’s thick punk character, Sid Snot, had risen up and somehow got into No. 10. If Middle England didn’t act pronto, he’d be followed by Harry Enfield’s Kevin and Perry. Quick! Give them proper haircuts and make them do National Service!

All of this has created a political culture in which young people are marginalised and distrusted, no matter how youthful country’s leaders are. Politicos don’t have to adopt their dress or youth culture to engage with them. My guess is that when it comes to conducting business, most people would prefer to see their politicians and public officials dressed conservatively in jacket and trousers. That said, I used to work in the Benefits Agency just before they passed the law requiring everyone to where suitable business clothing to work. You did see some of the younger staff wearing jeans and T-shirts for rock and pop bands. My guess is that while some of the older clients may have found it objectionable, most of the people actually going in probably couldn’t care less what the civil servant opposite them was wearing, so long as they were able to get them some money and properly process their claims.

Mass Politics in Decline from Concentration on Rich Donors

Another contributory factor in the alienation of young people from politics is undoubtedly the fact that the parties have concentrated on getting funding and support from rich, frequently corporate donors, rather than party subscriptions. The result has been that party membership generally has plummeted. The local Conservative Associations in particular have stated that they feel they are ignored and sidelined by the Tory party machine. Rubinstein has identified part of it in his recognition that people feel that the only thing that’s important to politicians is money, not people.

Politicians desperately need to reconnect with the young, along with much of the rest of the population. Indeed, just about everyone, who didn’t got to public school and has an income less that £50k. But as the Tories are doing their level best to stop people from registering to vote, and even taking the franchise away from resident Irish people and Commonwealth citizens, I can’t see Cameron taking any initiative in this direction at all.