I got this message from the Labour leader celebrating Labour’s victories in last Thursday’s local elections, and praising the great work he expects the new Labour councillors will do.
‘David, last week’s local election results saw Labour become the largest party in local government.
Labour offered a positive alternative, and people have given us their trust. It’s now our duty to tackle the Tory cost of living crisis and ease the burden on working people.
Now, we cannot waste a day in delivering on the Labour commitment to put money back in people’s pockets.
That’s why we’re setting the pace. I’m working with our new council leaders to create emergency cost of living action plans and review local housing plans.
We’ll act now, to ease the squeeze on people’s pockets, and support their aspirations.
Our new leaders will review their inheritance and pull every lever possible to relieve the pressure that this government has placed on working people.
Because, where Labour is in power, we deliver. We make fairer choices for working people and their families, and we improve lives.
I’m proud of the gains we made last week, but that pride will now fuel our pursuit of change.
We have a chance to show that Labour can not only improve communities across the country, but that we have plans to build a better Britain for everyone.
It’s time for change and Labour will make that change happen.
Thank you,
I’m sure the new councillors will work hard for their communities, but last week’s elections weren’t the golden victories Starmer seems to believe. To many people, Labour doesn’t offer an inspiring alternative that fills them with enthusiasm for a Labour government. It’s why the cephologists are predicting a hung parliament. Starmer has rejected all the socialist policies that gave working people such hope for real change under Corbyn. And Starmer has also shown himself to be personally vindictive, persecutory and untrustworthy. When Rachel Reeves was called upon to defend him during a brief TV interview and the list of all the promises he’s broken was mentioned, she could only reply with telling the interviewer all he policies he had kept: that’s right, all three of them. Policies to tackle the cost of living crisis and provide proper, affordable housing are sorely needed. But I’m not sure Starmer can be trusted even here. His promise that the new Labour councillors would cap council tax was meaningless. By the time he stated the policy, the tax had been set for the year. And it was only a cap. The tax would still remain at a level many citizens would find difficult to afford. Any true reform could only come from a Labour government.
There are a whole range of local issues that require reform at the national level. Bus services have been cut so that many working class, suburban communities around the country – my home city of Bristol is one example – don’t have them are effectively cut off. Privatisation of the bus companies has failed. But national legislation passed by Thatcher prevents local governments from renationalising them. This needs to be repealed, but I doubt that Starmer will do it. Similarly, we need a return to council housing, but Thatcher again banned local councils from doing so. A piece of legislation that also needs to be repealed. But I doubt he’ll do that either.
Labour offers to make things a little better than the Tories, but that’s all. It won’t do any more when the leadership, the bureaucracy and the parliamentary party are still in thrall to Blair and his brand of Thatcherism. I’m glad Labour did do so well last Thursday and want it to win the national elections. But I also want a leadership that recognises that, whatever the establishment says, Thatcherism is a dismal, destructive failure.
I got this comment from Rachel Reeves by email criticising Sunak’s budget. She calls it a budget of ‘managed decline’, with another tax cut for the 1 per cent, from a hopelessly divided party devoid of ideas, responsible for low growth and high taxes. She goes on to contrast it with the attempts Labour has made to cut energy price increases and impose a windfall tax, and their promise to deliver the highest growth in the G7.
‘David, today was a chance to unlock Britain’s promise and potential. But the budget announced by Jeremy Hunt has put our country further down the path of managed decline, while giving the richest 1% a tax cut worth £1 billion.
No belief in the possibilities of the future. No plan to boost living standards.
Just a hopelessly divided party caught between a rock of decline and a hard place of their own economic recklessness, dressing up stagnation as stability, as their expiry date looms ever closer.
Our economy needs major surgery. But what we got today was more of the same sticking plaster politics.
It’s been the same old Tory choice for thirteen years. No growth for the many and working people paying the price.
Thirteen years without wage growth.
Thirteen years stuck in a doom-loop of low growth, higher taxes and broken public services.
Working people are entitled to ask – am I any better off than I was before? And the answer is a resounding, no.
This crisis is not over and the long-term plan isn’t there. They are continuing to paper over the cracks of thirteen years of economic failure.
Labour pushed to stop energy price rises.
Labour pushed for a proper windfall tax.
With Labour, there is another way.
Britain has immense potential.
That’s why the first mission of a Labour government is to secure the highest sustained growth in the G7, we will create good jobs and productivity growth across every part of our country.
We’d make sure Britain competes in the global race for the jobs and industries of the future, rather than being stuck in the slow lane under the Tories.
Where the Tories have thrown in the towel, only Labour will build a better Britain.
Thank you,
Rachel Reeves MP Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer’
While I agree with her totally about the budget, I am not confident that Labour under Starmer will be much different. Reeves and Starmer are Blairites, and Blair’s tactic was to fish failed Tory polices like academy schools out of the bin and go ahead with them. Or else just carry on with them as they were, but claim they were doing so more efficiently and effectively. I don’t see Starmer, with his record of betraying and persecuting anything remotely socialist, as at all different.
Brexit, we were told, was all about regaining Britain’s “sovereignty” and being in control of our own destiny. But big money in British politics is a more significant threat to our future than unelected EU bureaucrats ever were.
Even though the Brussels bureaucrats have been removed from the equation, people still don’t feel they have a proper say in how this country operates. One big reason for that is the amount of money, often from opaque sources, sloshing around our political system.
Have you ever thought that the national picture painted by the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Rishi Sunak differs significantly from the one you see when you look around your own family and friends? You’re not alone.
Britain ranks among the most socially liberal countries in the world on key issues, and a substantial majority now reject many of the established economic assumptions of recent decades. But you won’t see any of that reflected in the current government’s agenda. Westminster is becoming an island of irrelevance, increasingly detached from the concerns of ordinary people.
There’s a reason for that. The government cannot hear the concerns of ordinary people over the hubbub of wealthy donors and other lobbyists with shady financial backers.
As part of our Parliamentary work, we’ve been researching just how broken the system is. In this longer-than-usual email, we’d like to share some of that with you.
Dark Money and Foreign Influence
The UK has particularly lax campaign finance laws. As a result, many donations get through that probably shouldn’t. Yes, there are permissibility requirements in place, but there are plenty of ways to evade them if you want to.
The term “Dark money” refers to donations whose origins are untraceable. Because the ultimate source cannot be confirmed, there is no way of knowing whether that money comes from the kind of person or organisation that shouldn’t have influence over our lawmakers.
One example of dark money is the “Proxy Donation”. These are donations made by one person, who would not be a permitted donor, in the name of another who is. Some examples include:
Ehud Sheleg, art dealer and former Conservative party treasurer, gave over £600k to the Tory party. Documents later showed that the money originated in a Russian account of Sheleg’s father-in-law – a former official in the old pro-Putin regime in Ukraine. Proxy donations are a complete blindspot in the law, so there was no legal mechanism to hold him accountable for it.
Lubov Cherdukhin – back at it again – gave money to the Conservative party while her husband was receiving funds from business deals with sanctioned Russian oligarchs. She gave £50k to the Tories 8 days after Putin invaded Ukraine.
Mohamad Amersi has given over £200k to the Conservatives and worked closely with Boris Johnson on key policy decisions. Prior to the donation, he was given a large deposit from a Kremlin-linked company secretly owned by Putin’s telecoms minister Leonid Reiman.
“Shell Companies” are another way for dubious donors to evade the rules. According to Transparency International, 14% of LLPs established in the UK between 2001-2021 (21,000 companies) show signs of being shell companies. Here are some examples:
Conservative mega-donor Lubov Cherdukhin, who once paid £160k to play tennis with Boris Johnson, was being paid out by a shell company secretly owned by Russian senator and Putin ally Suleiman Kerimov, according to the BBC.
The offshore company Aquind is owned by a former Russian oil magnate and a Russian arms manufacturer. The company has donated heavily to the Conservative party.
Top Labour MPs Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, and Dan Jarvis received a combined £345,000 from a company called MPM Connect Ltd, which has no staff or website and is registered at an office where the secretary had never heard of the company.
“Unincorporated Associations” are nebulous groups with little oversight or legal classification. It’s essentially like ticking the “miscellaneous” box on a donation form when asked what kind of organisation you are.
Tory minister Steve Baker’s “Covid Recovery Group” organisation (a parliamentary coalition of anti-lockdown Conservative MPs) received tens of thousands from a UA called the Recovery Alliance. It has no digital footprint, no registered members, and its finances are completely opaque. Opendemocracy has linked it to a number of other covid conspiracy campaigns and anti-lockdown groups.
Richard Cook’s “Constitutional Research Group” – of which he is the only listed member and chair – gave £435,000 to the DUP’s Brexit campaign. No one knows for sure where the money came from, but investigative journalists discovered his involvement in a number of illicit trades, including underground trash-dumping and fire-arms sales.
According to Byline Times, 29 different opaque UAs donated £14 million to the Conservative party between 2010-2022.
Big Money
Between 2001 and 2021, one-fifth of all political donations in the UK came from just ten men with an average age of 70. If that doesn’t indicate that we have a big problem, we’re really not sure what would.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with political donations, huge amounts of money coming from multinational corporations and the mega-rich does raise questions about who really calls the shots. Especially when they seem to get things in return.
Here are some situations where extremely wealthy individuals and corporations used their financial heft to influence things:
In 2021, the Conservatives received £400k in donations from oil and gas companies while the government was deciding on new oil and gas licences.
More generally, the Tories took over a million from oil companies between 2019 and 2021.
From 2020-2022, the Conservatives took £15 million from the financial services industry, which they were certainly kind to when it came to dealing with banker’s bonuses.
Labour MP Wes Streeting received £15k from John Armitage, former Tory party donor and manager of a hedge fund that owns half a billion dollars in US health insurance and private healthcare. Streeting recently came out in support of private hospitals.
The “Leader’s Group” is a dining club of Tory super-donors that has given over £130 million to the party since 2010. The club’s billionaires and business moguls have been known to dine with Boris Johnson.
In 2022-2023, controversial groups, including gambling giants, climate sceptic organisations, and evangelical Christian groups, made over £1 million in donations for staffing the Labour front bench. Recipients include MPs Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, and Yvette Cooper. Reeves alone received nearly £250k.
Recently, Crossbench peer Caroline Cox received large donations from American evangelical Christian activists against gay marriage that used hateful language about Muslims.
While the Conservatives often top the list when it comes to money in politics, remember that this is a cross-party systemic problem. The real issue is that the rules that are supposed to prevent the wealthy from buying influence just aren’t strong enough. We’ve allowed a situation to emerge where money can buy outcomes almost directly, and the mechanisms to detect the sources of that money are ineffective. Our system just isn’t fit for the 21st century.
The first step to fixing any problem is admitting that there is a problem. Our political system is addicted to money, to the extent that we’re now shutting real people’s voices out on a regular basis.
As you know, Open Britain’s mission these days is to deliver a democracy that works for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. That means a political system primarily driven by people, not primarily driven by money. That’s what democracy was always meant to be about.
As you might expect from what you’ve read above, we don’t take donations from shady think tanks or Russian oligarchs. All our work is funded directly by you, our supporters. We believe that having our work funded through small donations from a large number of people is the healthiest model of all, one that allows us to say what needs to be said to whoever needs to hear it. We hope you agree.
And they aren’t cheap, either. I got this message from the Labour party yesterday
‘Dear David,
Labour South West are proud to be hosting a Business Dinner with Rachel Reeves MP. We have some fantastic guests and businesses attending the dinner and would like to invite you to come along.
Tickets to our Business Dinner are priced at £120 per head or £1000 for a table of 10 if CLPs or businesses wish to purchase them. Tickets include a three course dinner, wine for the table, and a welcome drink on arrival, as well as an opportunity to submit a question to our guest speaker and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
We would be delighted to have you join our event which we are hosting at The Bristol Hotel, Prince St, Bristol, BS1 4QF on Thursday 2 nd March 2023. The drinks reception will start at 6.30pm.’
I am very definitely not going. Not just because of my health, and the fact that I don’t have that kind of money to waste, nor the fact that I don’t want to see the woman who said that Labour would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories, but also because I despise this kind of politics. It’s fundamentally Tory, and is very much a form of lobbying and influence peddling. If Reeves wants to meet the Labour rank and file, it should be a meeting organised for them and/or trades unionists. These are the people she should be meeting, in an open forum. It shouldn’t be business people who can afford to pay such costly amounts just to get to sit at some kind of banquet with her.
This seems to me to show how Labour is moving away from its socialist traditions towards an attitude that prizes corporate donors above working people and ordinary members. But as this has been going on for years, this probably won’t surprise you.
I got this message on Thursday. I’m glad that the Labour party are preparing to confront the Tories, but I am concerned by the serious lack of detail about policies. I think Labour’s already been challenged about that in parliament this week, and it looks like Starmer is just playing the game of letting the Tories hang themselves rather than present any real concrete alternatives. If he’s anything like Blair, he’ll just pick up their old policies and carry on as they did. Or go even further and complete his betrayal of Labour’s real activists and supporters.
‘Dear David,
As we approach the end of 2022, we find ourselves in a worse place than where we started.The mess we are in is not just a result of 12 weeks of Conservative chaos, but 12 years of Conservative economic failure.
Inflation is spiralling. Growth is plunging. Living standards are falling.
And today, Jeremy Hunt delivered a fiscal statement with less for public services and more tax rises for working people.
Yet again with this Tory Government, it is working people who will foot the bill.
David, Britain is a great country, with fantastic strengths. But the Tories are holding us back.
They have pick-pocketed the purses and wallets of the entire country.
A double whammy of frozen tax thresholds and inflation eroding people’s wages.
The stealth taxes, excuses and unfair choices announced by Jeremy Hunt make one thing very clear: the Tories do not deliver for working people.
No plan to deliver economic growth, no plan to fix our crumbling public services and crucially, no plan for the future.
What we need is a serious, long-term plan to get our economy growing again – powered by the talent and effort of millions of working people and thousands of businesses.
We need a greener, more dynamic economy, creating jobs across every part of the country, with a modern industrial strategy where government works hand in hand with business.
That is what Labour will deliver.
David, after 12 years of failure, Britain can no longer afford the Tories. It’s time for a fairer, greener future with Labour.
Thank you,
Rachel Reeves MP Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer’
I had this mass email from Reeves ripping apart Queasy Kwarteng’s wretched minibudget. As much as I despise her as a true-blue Blairite, who vowed Labour would be harder on the unemployed than the Tories, she is right. Especially about trickle-down economics. Robin Ramsey, the head honcho of conspiracy site Lobster, has a background in economics. He pointed out that the Thatcherites had cottoned on to the fact that trickle-down economics was rubbish, and so were trying to justify their vile economics policies with arguments about morality. Trickle-down economics was recognised as bunk long ago, so it shows how threadbare Cheeselab Truss’ policies and ideas really are. And as terrible as I find Starmer, I’d far rather have him in No. 10 than Truss or another Tory.
‘David James, last week, the Tory government laid out their budget.
And with it, they crashed the economy by handing enormous, unfunded tax cuts to those who earn millions and the very richest companies.
Because of this, working people will be paying higher prices and higher mortgage rates for years to come.
This isn’t some global issue – it happened as soon as the government stood up last Friday. They’ve damaged the UK’s reputation for good.
Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have no one to blame but themselves. This was a crisis created entirely in Downing Street, a direct result of this government’s reckless decisions.
Labour is urging the Prime Minister to bring Parliament back as soon as possible and reverse their disastrous budget.
I have been clear: there should be no return to the failed idea of trickle-down economics – the theory where you make the rich even richer and hope that somehow, some of it trickles down to the rest of us.
Labour knows that growth comes from the talents and efforts of millions of people and thousands of businesses across our country.
As a government we will make different choices. Just this week, Labour set out our plans to deliver economic growth with our Green Prosperity Plan to guarantee a fairer, greener future for all.
After 12 years of the Tories lurching from one crisis to another, Britain deserves better.
Labour is ready to deliver it.
Thank you,
Rachel Reeves, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer’
More radical songs for you to enjoy. This is another piece by left-wing pop musician Attila the Stockbroker, from dprkspacemarine’s channel on YouTube in a homage to two of the radical sects of the British Civil War. The Levellers were a radical group that demanded an extension of the franchise to the male heads of households, as well as state-supported schools, hospitals and almshouses. Naturally, they were far too radical for Oliver Cromwell and were duly suppressed after attempting an uprising in May 1649. However, their influence still remains in the Labour party as part of the continuing British radical tradition, though I can imagine Starmer, Reeves and the rest of them trying to play this part of British radical history down. Mustn’t frighten all those Thatcherites they want to appeal to. I gather from reading the comments that the Leveller’s March was originally composed and performed by Leon Rosselson, another radical folkie.
The Diggers were communists, who occupied the wasteland at St. George’s Hill in Surrey, declaring that it was now under their communal ownership and would now be cultivated by them, on 1st April 1649. They were harassed by Cromwell and the local landlords, but managed to last two years before finally fizzling out in 1651. They were supported by Gerard Winstanley, who wrote a number of pieces defending them. One is the song performed by Attila, while another was his pamphlet A New Yeere’s Gift. Attila goes from the Diggers’ Song itself to a modern song about the Digger movement, which explains who they were. This may give the impression that they were atheists, but I don’t think this was the case. Winstanley was a heretical Christian and the impression is that their socially radical views came from their religious beliefs, in which they felt that private property contravened the true spirit of Christ.
Nearly a year ago now I posted this video of myself trying to play the Digger’s Song. Unfortunately I hadn’t heard it performed at the time, and the music and the text of the song were printed separately. I thus just played the music without singing the lyrics, and then recited the lyrics afterwards. It’s not the best performance, but I hope you enjoy it.
I found this very interesting snippet in Jonathan A.C. Brown’s Slavery & Islam. Brown’s an American lecturer on Islam and a White convert to the religion. The book is an overview of slavery in the Muslim world and its abolition. Brown was partly moved to write the book from the horror and outrage the vast majority of Muslims around the world feel at the revival of sex slavery by ISIS’ monstrous fanatics. But it also attempts to tackle a series of related problems this raises – how can slavery be effectively condemned when it can differ so immensely across different times and places; and how can ancient religious, philosophical and political authorities still be respected and used for moral guidance when all of them, until very recently, accepted slavery. Slavery was accepted not just by Islam, but also by Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism. Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant also believed it was acceptable on rational grounds. The book therefore not only provides a detailed study of slavery in the dar al-Islam, but also western attitudes and arguments concerning slavery and its legitimacy from the ancient world onwards. And one of the interesting facts it discusses regarding western slavery is that during the 18th century three British philosophers argued for the enslavement of the British poor as a way of saving them from poverty.
‘Slavery was a choice made, sometimes by the powerful and sometimes by the vulnerable, because it was the preferred solution to the material, economic challenges at hand. This is how we explain three British Enlightenment thinkers, each an advocate of the natural right of liberty, separately proposing that the problem of widespread and severe poverty in eighteenth century Britain be dealt with by enslaving the poor to save them from ruin. Liberty was of tremendous importance to these philosophers, but it could not be enjoyed by all people all the time. They concluded that, in the case of the very poor in their society, it had to be sacrificed to stabilise what they saw as the bottom rung of that society. (Ironically, their description of this restricted form of slavery was similar to riqq in Islamic law.) (p. 180)
This sound very much like the Tory MP in Blackadder III whose policies included slavery for everyone who didn’t have a knighthood, and Dean Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ that the poor should eat their children, but made seriously. And I wonder if it’s also the ultimate endpoint of the welfare to work programmes, which send the unemployed out to work for the profit of private companies for their welfare cheques.
Should we expect Boris to include it in the next Tory manifesto, enthusiastically supported by Iain Duncan Smith and embraced by Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Jess Philips as true Labour values?
I got this newsletter from Bristol’s elected mayor, Marvin Rees, via email yesterday. In it he lays out his policies for Bristol and how his administration is working to stamp out housing discrimination against people on benefits. He also promotes the Labour candidate for the Southmead ward in the forthcoming council by-election, Kye Dudd. The mayor writes
‘I hope you’re keeping well.
I’m writing to you regarding the Council’s budget – including our plan for homes – and the upcoming election. If you have any questions, then please do get in touch.
On Tuesday, our budget came to Cabinet for sign-off. Drafting this budget was always going to be difficult. The circumstances are challenging: a decade of Government austerity and the pandemic which has simultaneously reduced council revenues and increased the need for council services. This has resulted in us needing to find £19m worth of savings in the General Fund.
These are challenges facing councils across the country. Across Britains major cities budget gaps average £30m and range from £7m to £79m. In Bristol we’ve worked hard to protect our frontline services by delivering these savings by reducing the Council’s internal expenses, such as through selling off buildings and leaving unfilled posts vacant. As a result, we remain the only Core City to still maintain the 100% Council Tax Reduction Scheme, which means Bristol’s most vulnerable don’t have to pay any Council Tax. We have protected all of our libraries and children’s centres, our parks, and our social care plans that enable people to stay in their homes for longer. Budget decisions are never easy, but I’m proud that we have managed to find a way to prioritise helping the worst-off and our transition to net-zero.
It’s important that our General Fund is not taken in isolation, because it is only part of the budget. We have also set the Housing Revenue Account which commits £1.8bn of investment in housing delivery, and a separate investment budget for social housing. This is one of the most ambitious plans in the country and will enable the Council to:
Build over 2,000 council homes by 2028, and 300 more every year after
Invest an additional £80m in to retrofitting (making council homes more energy efficient, saving them money and reducing Co2 output) bringing funding to a total of £97m.
£12.5m to upgrade council tenants’ bathrooms improving quality of life and improving water efficiency in thousands of homes
£8.7m investment into communal areas
£350k for council tenants’ in financial difficulties
£13.5m funding to adapt homes to make them more accessible
Building affordable, quality homes is one of the single most significant policy tools we have for shaping life chances and the carbon and ecological cost the planet will pay for meeting our population’s needs. Housing remains at the forefront of our priorities.
Benefits discrimination
Cllr Tom Renhard, Cabinet Members Homes and Housing Delivery, recently put forward a motion to stamp out anti-benefits discrimination in Bristol. If you have tried to rent a home in Bristol, you will be familiar with seeing advertisements listed as ‘working professionals only’, meaning people on benefits aren’t allowed to rent the property. This is discrimination – plain and simple – and we’re committed to eradicating this practice from Bristol.
In the past few years, we’ve been expanding our Landlord Licensing scheme, meaning rogue and slum landlords are no longer allowed to rent out properties in Bristol. This has driven up standards where it’s been in place and we intend to expand the scheme to cover the whole of Bristol. This, combined with our anti-discrimination motion, means that landlords who discriminate against people on benefits won’t be allowed to let properties in Bristol.
It will take some time to expand the licensing scheme citywide so in the meantime, we will be carrying out other policies to help renters. The Council will now assist tenants’ efforts to take discriminatory landlords to the appropriate authorities, will run a public awareness campaign on tenants’ rights, and will create a local action plan to formulate policies to build on these in future – among other things.
Southmead by-election
As former councillor Helen Godwin stood down in the new year, a by-election has been called to fill her vacant seat in Southmead. I am delighted that Kye Dudd has been selected as our candidate for the seat. Kye has been a stalwart of the trade union movement, working for the Communication Workers’ Union for fifteen years, and has served as the Cabinet Member for Transport, Energy, and Connectivity – leading our work to expand our bus and active travel infrastructure, develop our work on mass transit, and decarbonise our energy systems. More recently, he has been working with Empire Fighting Chance, a boxing charity who work with some of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable young people in our city.
He will be running on a campaign of:
· Investing in Southmead’s youth services
· Investing in Council homes
· Protecting local green spaces
· Making Southmead safer for all
· Supporting the community-led regeneration of Arnside’
It ends with the statement that it is vitally important to get Mr Dudd elected and the email address Southmead Labour party if I wanted to be involved.
I broadly support mayor Marvin, as I think he has done a good overall governing the city. He has tried to remain impartial about the controversy over the wretched statue of Edward Colston, despite his justifiable hatred of it as a man of colour. I believe the policies outlined here are excellent. My problem is with the Labour party as it stands under the leadership of Keef Stalin. Starmer has done everything he can to purge the left and turn it into another version of the Tories. One of his favoured MPs, the vile Rachel Reeves, added insult to injury a few days ago when she described those who have left the party in disgust at Starmer’s factionalism and treachery as ‘anti-Semites’. As I’m sick of saying, the people Starmer and his collaborators in the NEC have smeared and purged are most definitely not Jew-haters. They are decent people, many of them with proud records of fighting racism and anti-Semitism. About four-fifths of those he’s thrown out are actually Jewish, decent, self-respecting people, often the victims of real anti-Semitic abuse and vilification. They are not ‘self-hating’. But then, truth means nothing to the liars of the right, the British media and political establishment, and the Israel lobby.
I had a series of emails from the Labour party over the past week or so asking me if I would care to campaign for Mr. Dudd and help get Boris out, and Starmer in. Well, my health at the moment prevents me from getting out much. Southmead isn’t my ward, and the buses from where I live have become very unreliable, so I simply won’t be able to join them. And obviously I do want to get Bozo out.
But I don’t want Starmer in.
I see no difference whatsoever between him and Johnson. Both are lying, treacherous right-wingers with precious little real ability to govern and an intense contempt for the working class. They both want to privatise whatever has been left, including the NHS. I don’t trust him to restore the welfare state to anything like the level that’s needed, nor to strengthen the trade unions. He won’t give workers much needed rights at work. And he definitely won’t do anything to improve public services by nationalising them, despite the obvious fact that they’re decaying as we look under private ownership.
And the voting public aren’t enamoured of Starmer either. I’ve got the impression that at the moment Labour’s haemorrhaged support to the Greens so that they’re almost neck and neck with Labour on the local council.
Now I do support Marvin and hope Mr. Dudd wins the council election when it comes.
But I very much do not want Starmer to get anywhere near No. 10 and definitely want him out as leader of the Labour party.
Since the furore broke over Johnson and his flagrant disregard for the rules everyone else has to abide by with his scummy parties, the politicos have on TV to promote themselves. I think the Conservatives were on earlier in the week to try and present themselves as caring, efficient and concerned about the British public, rather than the gang of liars, profiteers and entitled scumbags. Then it was Labour’s turn the other night. I caught it, but fortunately it didn’t last long, and thanks to finding some great stuff on YouTube, I was soon over it. In the Book of Job in the Bible, Satan is described as walking up and down on the Earth, looking for people to torment and tempt. He wasn’t present in the film, at least not physically. Instead we had Rachel Reeves and Stalin walking about Britain, meeting and greeting ordinary people. Yes, those two. It shows what a state the Labour party is now in: Labour’s Thatcherite hard right. They were promising to raise people out of poverty and introduce reforms that would end VAT on electricity bills and so cut it by £200, and there would be help for people unable to pay.
It sounds good, but it’s far less than what Corbyn was offering. He wanted to have the electricity companies nationalised, or part of the industry nationalised, along with water and the railways. Because this is what these utilities need, and the majority of the British public want. It represents a chance to get real investment into them – privatisation hasn’t worked. And it would have allowed the government to cut people’s bills. But that, and Corbyn’s promises to restore the welfare state, union power, give the proles real rights at work and renationalise and properly fund the NHS upset the Blairites. So they went and joined the Israel lobby in smearing this profoundly anti-racist man of principle as an anti-Semite. Just as they did to his supporters, also very largely and vocally anti-racist themselves. And as I keep pointing out again and again, many of them were proud, secular and Torah observant Jews, who had suffered real anti-Semitic abuse and assault.
All Starmer has offered during his leadership of the Labour party is just one lie after another. He promised to keep Labour’s election policies, then ditched them as soon as he could. When the subject of nationalisation came up again, with a kind of endorsement from Ed Miliband, he declared that Labour wouldn’t. And every pledge he made to reform the welfare system so that the disabled, the long-term sick and the unemployed has either been scrapped, watered down or else he’s hummed and hahhed and told everyone they’d review. He has said that he will do anything to get his bum in No. 10. In my opinion, he has no morals, no principles except a powerful sense of his own entitlement. Psychologically, he’s kindred to Johnson and the former orange clown running the US down to the ground, Donald Trump.
In the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, the principle of evil, opposed to the benevolent God Ahura Mazda, is Ahriman. One of Ahriman’s demons is Druj, which means ‘Lie’, In the Persian medieval classic, the Shah Nameh, the world’s corruption begins when Druj, disguising himself, begins to corrupt one of the first Persian emperors, worming his way into his confidence as an advisor. This culminates in him kissing the emperor on his shoulders. Two serpents spring up where he kissed him, which then demand to be fed on human brains. Nothing so dramatic has happened to Boris or Keef, but I see no reason to trust anything whatsoever either Keef or Rachel Reeves say. Like Johnson, he lies through his teeth. This country will only ever have a real future for ordinary people when we get rid of him and the Tories.
And unfortunately, after the purges, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
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