Posts Tagged ‘Rolf Harris’

Now Johnson Weighs in on the Grooming Gang Scandal

August 5, 2022

I caught a brief look at a video by Mahyar Tousi on YouTube last night. Tousi’s a true-blue, hard-right Tory Brexiteer. He was crowing because Johnson had made a statement that he was going to come down hard on councils like Oldham, which had tried cover up the Pakistani grooming gangs and which were still trying to stop public inquiries into them. Tousi gave as an example of this a stormy public meeting with the council in Oldham last week, where furious citizens did not accept the council’s denials that any such cover-up had taken place. Those citizens who confronted the council on this had ASBOs slapped on them, in what looks very much like a display of totalitarian power by a local authority determined to silence critics of its wrongdoing. Johnson, however, has said he’s going to take action against authorities like Oldham,, and make them apologise to their victims.

This cheered the Tory hordes, but only to a certain extent. Despite their continuing faith in the blonde bozo, Johnson has connection to the working class and absolutely no interest in their welfare. This includes that of the raped and exploited White girls. He’s only interested in gaining a political advantage, and in hanging on to power for as long as possible. But the Tory base, or at least that part of the party that watches Tousi, Nigel Farage and the others like it because it’s primarily an attack on Labour. Tory spin on the issue is that, as most of the authorities where the gangs were allowed to operate while the police and council officials looked the other way, it’s a case of the Labour party siding with the rapists against the White working class. This ignores the fact that, as commenters on this blog have pointed out, Labour MPs and whistleblowers on these councils were heavily involved in the campaign to bring the rapists and child abusers to justice. Furthermore, Telford, the site of further revelations last week about depredations by another gang, has been under Tory control for the last couple of years. Johnson’s interest in the issue isn’t about obtaining justice for the girls, but about exploiting a popular and controversial issue over Labour.

I have to say that in my opinion, the anti-racist movement has badly handled the issue. I wrote various emails last week to the papers and to the local deputy elected mayor of Bristol, Asher Craig, who is also head of equalities and child services, urging multicultural marches against the grooming gangs. I may as well have whistled for it. The letters weren’t published and Craig did not reply to my inquiry. Not that I expected she would. Neither she nor Cleo Lake, the Green councillor in Bristol, replied to an email I sent them months ago criticising the motion they introduced and had passed at a city council meeting supporting reparations for slavery. Craig and others were, however, on local television the other night talking about the importance and legacy of a Mr Hackett, a Black gent who led the boycott against Bristol bus company. He had died at the grand old age of 93. At the time the bus company wouldn’t employ Blacks. Haskett’s actions was not only a victory over discrimination in Bristol, but influenced the passage of the first race relations act.

While it’s entirely right that Haskett should be commemorated and honoured, Craig’s failure to reply to me says much about the attitude of the anti-racist establishment. They are extremely uncomfortable, if not actually opposed, to confronting the issue of anti-White racism. Organisations like United Against Fascism and Stand Up To Racism were formed to combat anti-Black and Asian racism, which certainly was rife and violent. But prejudice, abuse and violence against Whites is generally played down or actively denied. This is largely because of the fear that inflammatory accounts of it,, like Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, will result in further anti-minority feeling and racism. And underneath that is the fear of the Nazis, that noxious organisations like the BNP will exploit it to gain power, dragging Britain into dictatorship and racial murder.

That’s part of the reason, no doubt, why councils and police forces like Oldham’s did not take action against the gangs. The police said they didn’t want rioting to start, while there was also the fear that they’d be accused of racism. And anti-racist organisations like Stand Up To Racism don’t want to touch the issue. A month or so ago, the notorious islamophobe, grifter and thug Tommy Robinson was up in Brum with his Storm Troopers publicly showing a film they had made about the grooming gangs and their rape of the city. Stand Up To Racism turned up and protested against Robinson, shouting ‘Off our streets, Fascist scum!’ and ‘Refugees welcome here!’ But while these slogans are entirely right directed at organisations like the NF, they miss the point with Robinson. He’s been able to exploit the scandal, because Sabby Dhalu and Stand Up To Racism have allowed him by not marching or publicly condemning the venomous anti-White racism of the grooming gangs. Thus to a certain class of alienated working class Tories, Robinson’s a hero. As you could see from the many comments praising the thug on Tousi’s wretched video.

Commenters here have pointed out that Robinson is a bigot with no real interest in combatting child abuse per se. He hasn’t, for example, protested against notorious BBC abusers like Rolf Harris or Jimmy Savile, the last of whom was a friend of Maggie Thatcher. As for Robinson exposing the gangs through his supposed journalism, that’s a lie. Robinson’s often come late to the party after they’ve been exposed by others. And his citizen journalism is a menace. He’s been prosecuted several times for contempt of court for broadcasting his feelings about the trials of various gangs outside the courthouse while the trials were proceeding, making it very clear that in his opinion the accuse were guilty. The problem with this is that there are very strict rules on court reporting in order to make sure the accused have a fair trial. Robinson’s biased reporting, by contrast, threatens that and could lead to the trial being abandoned. Which would mean that, if the men were guilty, they’d get off scot free.

I’m very much aware that some of the commenters here may be uneasy about my call for a multicultural march against the gangs. Several commenters have said, quite rightly, that all the victims of child abuse and rape are of equal value, whatever their colour or the colour of their attackers. None should be regarded as more important than any other. I actually agree. But the case of the Pakistani grooming gangs has racial aspects to it which caused its White victims to be ignored and silenced for decades. And it exposes the deep flaws in an anti-racist political establishment which is swift, or wishes to be seen to be swift, to act against anti-BAME racism while covering up assaults against Whites. This double standard needs to be confronted and torn down, if we are to have a genuinely anti-racist society.

In my opinion, this can only be done by the left, if they can reject their own reluctance to deal with it. And in this struggle, Johnson is definitely not an ally.

Outrage as Iain Duncan Smith Given Knighthood

December 29, 2019

This is a really sick joke, and shows the absolute contempt the Tories have for the poor, the unemployed and the disabled. Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of the Tories welfare reforms, has been given a knighthood in the New Year’s honours. Smith is the pompous nonentity who was briefly the leader of the Tory party at the beginning of this century before David Cameron took over. It was a period of failure, in which the party utterly failed to challenge Blair’s Labour Party. He was, however, a close ally of his successor, and has also served Boris. He tried to stand up for Johnson when our farcical Prime Minister was denied the lectern in Luxembourg, claiming that the Luxembourgers should be grateful to us because we’d liberated them during the War. But we hadn’t. The Americans had. And under Tweezer he’d also peddled the line that there would be no legal divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

But what Smith is most notorious for is mass murder. As head of the Department of Work and Pensions, he was responsible for the welfare reforms, including the Work Capability Assessments and the system of benefit sanctions, that have seen hundreds of thousands denied the welfare payments they need and deserve. He is also responsible for Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments. UC is supposed to combine all the welfare payment into a single system. It has proven catastrophically flawed, with people waiting weeks or months for their payments, which have been significantly lower than the previous system. Mike in his article about it quotes statistics that some of those on UC are £1,000 a year worse off. But this jumped-up, odious little man boasted that Universal Credit would be as significant in lifting people out of poverty as the ending of slavery in the British Empire in 1837.

The result of IDS’ reforms is that at least 130,000 people have died. The true figures may well be higher, as the DWP has been extremely reluctant to release the true figures, as Mike and other disability campaigners have found. His attempts to get the Department to release them under the Freedom of Information Act were refused, then stonewalled. Finally Smith’s Department released some figures, but interpreted his requested so that they weren’t quite the figures Mike had requested.

As well as the financial hardship there is the feelings of despair and humiliation that his reforms have also inflicted on the poor. Doctors and mental health professionals have reported a rise in depression and suicide. The Tories, naturally, have repeatedly denied that their policies have any connection to people taking their own lives, even when the person left a note explicitly stating that this was why they were.

Some sense of the despair IDS’ wretched reforms has produced in young people is given by the quotes from them in Emma Bond and Simon Hallworth’s chapter, ‘The Degradation and Humiliation of Young People’ in Vickie Cooper’s and David Whyte’s The Violence of Austerity. ‘Julie’ said

The way that it feels walking into the JobCentre is that you are there to do what you are told to do and that’s it and then you leave. They are not there to actually help you it is just like, you have to do this and if you don’t do this or you won’t get no money. (p. 79).

And ‘Bridget’ described how she felt so low at one point she contemplated suicide.

I am ashamed to admit it but I did feel suicidal at one point. I felt so down after I was made redundant that I felt that there was no point. I had worked really hard at school and I got good grades but for what? I was happy when I got my job, it wasn’t that well paid but it had prospects and a career path – or so the recruitment agency told me – I had my flat and that and I thought I was OK. But when it [the redundancy] happened I felt like I had been hit by a brick wall. I got really down especially when I went to the JobCentre and they would not help me. I felt so depressed. I could not afford my rent. I lost my flat and the few things I had saved up for. I did not know where to turn. I took drugs for the first time in my life – I felt so wretched. I wanted to die. I was too ashamed to tell my parents that I had lost my job. (p. 80).

But IDS, as Zelo Street reminds us, is the man who laughed at a woman talking about her poverty in parliament. He’s also blubbed on television, describing how he met a young woman, who didn’t believe she’d ever have a job. ‘She could have been my daughter!’ he wailed. But this is just crocodile tears. He, like the rest of the Tory party, have no love whatsoever for their victims as the guffaws with Dodgy Dave Cameron in Parliament showed.

Mike in his piece about the wretched man’s ennoblement has put up a large number of Tweets by ordinary people expressing their outrage. One woman, Samanthab, states how rotten the honours system is when it rewards not just IDS, but other creeps and lowlifes, like the sex abusers Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris.

The outrage is so great that one NHS psychiatrist, Dr Mona Kamal Ahmad, has launched an online petition at Change.Org calling for the scumbag’s knighthood to be withdrawn. She describes him as responsible for some of the cruellest welfare reforms this country has ever seen and notes that Britain is the first country the United Nations has investigated for human rights abuses against the disabled. She states clearly that the suffering and impoverishment in Britain today is a direct result of Smith’s welfare reforms.

30,000 people, including myself, have already signed it. If you want to too, go to Mike’s article at: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/28/will-you-sign-nhs-doctors-petition-to-stop-iain-duncan-smith-receiving-knighthood/ and follow the links.

See also: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/27/chorus-of-derision-greets-announcement-that-iain-duncan-smith-is-to-be-knighted/

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/12/arise-sir-duncan-cough.html

Vox Political on the Silence of the Hillsborough Liars

April 27, 2016

Mike over at Vox Political has posted up a piece giving credit for the Metro laying out today’s cover, so it looked like that of the notorious issue of the Scum which lied about the Hillsborough disaster and the behaviour of the Liverpool fans. He also states that the revelations have been greeted with silence by the Scum and Bernard Ingham, Maggie’s press secretary, who made some of the appalling smears.

See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/04/27/silence-wont-save-the-liars-who-defamed-the-football-fans-at-hillsborough/

I think the Scum has made an apology about the disaster, but only after it changed its editor. The editor of the paper at the time was Kelvin MacKenzie, who has never apologised. Unfortunately, his mendacity hasn’t harmed his career one bit. The last time I saw him on TV, he was a regular, along with Nick Ferrari, another right-wing hack, on the Alan Titchmarsh show on daytime TV.

As for Bernard Ingham, he was nicknamed ‘Thatcher’s Rotweiler’, and had the same hatreds and political instincts as his mistress. He resents being described as a ‘spin doctor’, but as he was her press secretary, that was more or less what he was, and that’s where the rot started, although I’ve no doubt that No. 10 was managing the content of news stories long before then.

Ingham was, along with another of other celebs, caught out on ’90s TV by the edgy funster Chris Morris in his spoof news programme, Brass Eye. This had a section where various celebrities and personalities read out fake messages warning people of some imaginary threat, or campaigning for a very spurious good cause. Like Paul Daniels telling the world about ‘elephant tipping’ in Libya, and the elephant that had got its trunk caught up its bottom. In Ingham’s case, he was made to look very stupid along with his parliamentary colleague, David Amess, the MP for Basildon, and a whole host of TV personalities including Jimmy Greaves, Noel Edmonds, Bernard Manning and Rolf Harris, by reading out a warning about a fake synthetic drug, Cake. Cake was ‘a made-up drug’. One pill was the size of a dinner plate, and it had to be swallowed all in one gulp. It worked by affecting part of the brain called ‘Shatner’s Bassoon’, and was responsible for terrible physical side effects. It was made in Czechoslovakia, and so the goitres it produced on the necks of its addicts were known as ‘Czech neck’. And one girl was so sick with it, she threw up her own hip bone. This is, as you doctor should tell you, physically impossible. And the statement ‘Cake is a made-up drug’ should have alerted Ingham, as it alerted the viewers, that what was coming was a load of rubbish. But Morris and his crew were so persuasive, and Ingham so blinded with his own ego, that he failed to get the joke.

Well, twenty years or so ago, Ingham and MacKenzie lied about the deaths of 96 innocent people, and smeared them and a great British city. And that’s no joke. Their silence about the matter suggests that they are completely unrepentant. Their only remorse is over the fact that they got caught.

Here’s that section from Brass Eye, so you can share some of Morris’ ‘disgusting bliss’.