This weekend, our murderous, clown Prime Minister Boris Johnson added more weight to the argument for the House of Lords. At the moment the membership of the upper house is something like 800+. It has more members than the supreme soviet, the governing assembly of assembly of China, which rules a country of well over a billion people. Contemporary discussions are about reducing the size of this bloated monster, many of whose members do zilch except turn up in the morning in order to collect their attendance before zipping off to what they really want to do. Since Blair, it’s become a byword for corruption and cronyism, as successive prime ministers have used it to reward their collaborators, allies and corporate donors. The Tories were outraged when Blair did this during his administration, but this didn’t stop David Cameron following suit, and now Boris Alexander DeFeffel Johnson. Johnson has appointed no less than 36 of his friends and collaborators. These include his brother, who appears to be there simply because he is Johnson’s sibling, Alexander Lebedev, a Russian oligarch and son of a KGB spy, who owns the Metro and the Independent, which is a particular insult following the concerns about Russian political meddling and the Tories’ connections to Putin; the Blairite smear-merchants and intriguers, who conspired against Jeremy Corbyn to give the Tories an election victory, and Claire Fox.
Fox has managed to provoke outrage all on her own, simply because of her disgusting views on Northern Irish terrorism. Now a member of the Brexit Party, she was a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party which fully endorsed the IRA’s terrorism campaign and the Warrington bombing that killed two children. She has never apologised or retracted her views, although she says she no longer believes in the necessity of such tactics. But rewarding a woman, who has absolutely no problem with the political killing of children has left a nasty taste in very many people’s mouths. It shows very clearly the double standards Johnson and the Tories do have about real terrorist supporters. They tried smearing Corbyn as one, despite the fact that he was even-handed in his dealings with the various parties in northern Ireland and was a determined supporter of peace. Ulster Unionists have come forward to state that he also good relations with them and was most definitely not a supporter of terrorism. The Tories, however, have shown that they have absolutely no qualms about rewarding a real terrorist sympathiser. But even this isn’t enough for Johnson. He’s outraged and demanding an inquiry, because he was prevented from putting his corporate donors from the financial sector in the House of Lords.
Demands for reform or the abolition of the second chamber have been around for a very long time. I remember back c. 1987 that the Labour party was proposing ideas for its reform. And then under Blair there were suggestions that it be transformed into an elected senate like America’s. And way back in the first decades of the twentieth century there were demands for its abolition altogether. I’ve been reading Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s A Constitution of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, which was first published in the 1920s. It’s a fascinating book. The Webbs were staunch advocates of democracy but were fiercely critical of parliament and its ability to deal with the amount of legislation created by the expansion of the British state into industry and welfare provision, just as they were bitterly critical of its secrecy and capitalism. They proposed dividing parliament into two: a political and a social parliament. The political parliament would deal with the traditional 19th-century conceptions of the scope of parliament. This would be foreign relations, including with the Empire, the self-governing colonies and India, and law and order. The social parliament would deal with the economy, the nationalised industries and in general the whole of British culture and society, including the arts, literature and science. They make some very interesting, trenchant criticisms of existing political institutions, some of which will be very familiar to viewers of that great British TV comedy, Yes, Minister. And one of these is the House of Lords, which they state very clearly should be abolished because of its elitist, undemocratic character. They write
The House of Lords, with its five hundred or so peers by inheritance, forty-four representatives of the peerages of Scotland and Ireland, a hundred and fifty newly created peers, twenty-six bishops, and half a dozen Law Lords, stands in a more critical position. No party in the State defends this institution; and every leading statesman proposes to either to end or to amend it. It is indeed an extreme case of misfit. Historically, the House of Lords is not a Second Chamber, charged with suspensory and revising functions, but an Estate of the Realm – or rather, by its inclusion of the bishops – two Estates of the Realm, just as much entitled as the Commons to express their own judgement on all matters of legislation, and to give or withhold their own assent to all measures of taxation. The trouble is that no one in the kingdom is prepared to allow them these rights, and for ninety years at least the House of Lords has survived only on the assumption that, misfit as it palpably is, it nevertheless fulfils fairly well the quite different functions of a Second Chamber. Unfortunately, its members cannot wholly rid themselves of the feeling that they are not a Second Chamber, having only the duties of technical revision of what the House of Commons enacts, and of temporary suspension of any legislation that it too hastily adopts, but an Estate of the Realm, a coordinate legislative organ entitled to have an opinion of its own on the substance and the merits of any enactment of the House of Commons. The not inconsiderable section of peers and bishops which from time to time breaks out in this way, to the scandal of democrats, can of course claim to be historically and technically justified in thus acting as independent legislators, but constitutionally they are out of date; and each of their periodical outbursts, which occasionally cause serious public inconvenience, brings the nation nearer to their summary abolition. Perhaps of greater import than the periodical petulance of the House of Lords is its steady failure to act efficiently as revising and suspensory Second Chamber. Its decisions are vitiated by its composition it is the worst representative assembly ever created in that it contains absolutely no members of the manual working class; none of the great classes of shopkeepers, clerks and teachers; none of the half of all the citizens who are of the female sex; and practically none of religious nonconformity, or art, science or literature. Accordingly it cannot be relied on to revise or suspend, and scarcely even to criticise, anything brought forward by a Conservative Cabinet, whilst obstructing and often defeating everything proposed by Radical Cabinet.
Yet discontent with the House of Commons and its executive – the Cabinet – is to-day a more active ferment than resentment at the House of Lords. The Upper Chamber may from time to time delay and obstruct; but it cannot make or unmake governments; and it cannot, in the long run, defy the House of Commons whenever that assembly is determined. To clear away this archaic structure will only make more manifest and indisputable the failure of the House of Commons to meet the present requirements. (Pp. 62-4).
When they come to their proposals for a thorough reform of the constitution, they write of the House of Lords
There is, of course, n the Socialist Commonwealth, no place for a House of Lords, which will simply cease to exist as a part of the legislature. Whether the little group of “Law Lords”, who are now made peers in order that they may form the Supreme Court of Appeal , should or should not continue, for this purely judicial purpose, to sit under the title, and with the archaic dignity of the House of Lords, does not seem material. (p.110)
I used to have some respect for the House of Lords because of the way they did try to keep Thatcher in check during her occupation of 10 Downing Street. They genuinely acted as a constitutional check and wasn’t impressed by the proposals for their reform. I simply didn’t see that it was necessary. When Blair was debating reforming the Upper House, the Tories bitterly attacked him as a new Cromwell, following the Lord Protector’s abolition of the House of Lords during the British Civil War. Of course, Blair did nothing of the sort, and partly reformed it, replacing some of the peers with his own nominees. Pretty much as Cromwell also packed parliament.
The arguments so far used against reforming the House of Lord are that it’s cheaper than an elected second chamber, and that there really isn’t much popular enthusiasm for the latter. Private Eye said that it would just be full of second-rate politicos traipsing about vainly trying to attract votes. That was over twenty years ago.
But now that the House of Lords is showing itself increasingly inefficient and expensive because of the sheer number of political has-beens, PM’s cronies and peers, who owe their seat only because of ancestral privilege, it seems to me that the arguments for its reform are now unanswerable.
Especially when the gift of appointing them is in the hands of such a corrupt premier as Boris Johnson.
As I said, I’m glad Boris Johnson has recovered enough from the Coronavirus to be sent home. I really don’t want anyone to die from this disease, including BoJob. But his recovery also means that I can at last put up the cartoon below. I was drawing just when it was announced that Johnson had been taken into hospital, and to lampoon the man when he was fighting for his life would have been unacceptable. But Johnson’s illness doesn’t change what he is, or what he and his party stand for. And so they’re still suitable subjects for ridicule and satire.
Johnson prides himself on his classic learning. He presented a series a few years ago on ancient Rome, and had a column in the Spectator when he was its editor, in which he discussed what lessons the classics had for us today. I remember one piece he did in his series about Rome, in which he contrasted the early empire, which was governed by just 12 men, with the army of MEPs and bureaucrats that administer the EU. The obvious lesson there was that smaller government equals good government. Of course the argument falls apart when you consider the vast distance in time, morals and social and technological sophistication, as well as the simple fact that the EU and its constituent nations are meant to be democracies. Ancient Rome wasn’t. It was an oligarchy, in which only a narrow section of the population had the vote, and the only real political power was that of the emperor and the army. The senate continued to meet under the empire, but their debates were so meaningless that I think they more or less stopped having them. One emperor was forced to send them a message requesting them to debate something. With his background in the classics and admiration for ancient Rome, it therefore made sense to lampoon Boris as a Roman politician.
But readers of this blog of a certain age will also remember the late, great Frankie Howerd and the comedy, Up Pompeii. This was set in the famous Roman city, and starred Howerd as the slave, Lurcio. It would start with Lurcio leaving the house, sitting down on a convenient seat, and saying ‘Salute, citizens. And now, the prologue -‘ at which point he would be interrupted by some commotion. And thus would begin that week’s episode. It was a ’70s BBC TV show, but in the winter of 1990-1, it was revived by ITV. Howerd was once again Lurcio. But the show had moved with the times and changed one character. In the original series, I think the son of the family that owned him was supposed to be gay, and the butt of various jokes about effeminacy by Lurcio. This was before the gay rights movement had had quite the impact it has now, when jokes about gays were still acceptable. By the 1990s they weren’t, and so the gay son was replaced by a eunuch, so they could still carry on making the same jokes about lack of masculinity. Sadly, it only lasted one episode, as Howerd died after the first episode was shown.
His material, like the ‘Carry On’ films, is dated now, but Howerd was a great comedian and genuinely funny man. He lived in the village of Mark in Somerset, and after his death his home was turned into a museum. He was very popular and respected there, because whenever they had a village fete, he’d turn up to do a turn and give them his support. He also, I heard, used to rehearse in the church hall. A friend of mine told me he’d actually been in a church service while Howerd was rehearsing, and his lines could be heard coming through the hall. Let’s hope they weren’t the monologue where he pretended to be a vicar, and joked about how last Sunday he held a three-hour service for the incontinent. ‘There wasn’t a dry aisle in the house’, is the punchline to that one.
So I’ve drawn Johnson as a Roman patrician politician, being jeered and pelted with mud, cabbages and buckets of water by the mob. Behind him is Howerd’s Lurcio, looking at once shocked and puzzled, and underneath is one of Howerd’s catchphrases ‘Titter ye not’.
As Johnson and his party are authoritarian and extremely right-wing, I’ve tried to show their Fascistic tendencies in the decoration at the top. The pattern around the panel is based on a Roman design, although I’ve taken a few liberties. If you look at it, it’s composed of repeating swastikas. It also has the fasces, the bundle of rods with an axe attached. This was the ancient Roman symbol of the lictor, a Roman official. The rods symbolised his right to beat, and the axe to behead, Roman citizens. It was also adopted by Mussolini’s Fascists and their counterparts in other nations, like Oswald Mosley’s disgusting BUF.
Here’s the cartoon. I hope you enjoy it, and it helps cheer you up in these dreadful times.
I’ve blogged several times before about how the visceral, personal hatred of Jeremy Corbyn by Countdown numbers woman Rachel Riley and ‘jobbing’ actor Tracy Ann Oberman seems to be driving them towards the abyss of sheer madness. Oberman seemed to believe a few months ago that the Labour leader was personally stalking her. Because he showed up at a Manchester theatre in which she was performing. His presence had nothing to do with her. He’s a patron of the theatre, had been personally involved in setting up and was there to see the show. Now Frances Barber, another Z-list celeb with a deep hatred of the Labour leader appears to be joining them on their journey towards the funny farm.
Yesterday an Islamist terrorist started attacking people with a knife around Fishmongers’ Hall in London. Tragically, he killed two people with a knife before London’s finest turned up and shot and killed him. The murderer had been imprisoned on terrorism charges, but had been paroled and released. He had absolutely no connection with the Labour leader whatsoever, but Barber decided he had to because, as everyone knows, because the Tories and anti-Semitism smear merchants have told them, Corbyn is a friend of terrorists.
Corbyn, as well as Boris Johnson and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick had all praised the actions and extreme courage of the public. But despite this praise for the victims of the attack, Barber tweeted out
People died.Innocent men & women going to work were stabbed by a terrorist. Jeremy Corbyn is on their side. I fucking hate him.
When somebody pointed out that this was quite a leap of logic, she replied
How fabulous! I leapt he’s a total shithead.
When someone else told her that she may have been deceived by a fake tweet going around, she said that she had no interest in it, and that Corbyn was a ‘terrorist sympathizer’. At this point, someone suggested that she needed help, at which point, as Zelo Street says, ‘the paranoia set in’. She accused that tweeter of having been sent by Aaron Bastani, whom she decided to call ‘Bastardi’. Back to the fake tweet, she denied ever seeing it and declared that Corbyn had ‘loved terrorists all his god damn life’ and was ‘a vile anti-British Communist’.
She then went back to claiming that all her detractors had been set on her by Bastani, declaring
Bastardi has released his demons . Nasty upsetting. Who needs it. But I’m ok.
Which was followed by
This is the way politics is conducted now? Pillory the enemy. Hateful . It’s why after 40 years I left this poison.
By this time the peeps on Twitter were wondering about Barber’s mental health. Responding to Kate, a woman obviously concerned for Frances’ sanity, she tweeted
“Kate thinks I’m mentally ill because I don’t adore Corbyn. Hahahaha”.
Another person, Ian Fraser, decided that she was just deranged. So Barber declared he was ‘a journeyman’.
And then it was back to blaming Bastani for all the peeps coming to tell her that she was wrong, or plain nuts.
Asshole Bastardi has sent all you little ants. Honestly guys it’s too tragic.
When someone suggested that Barber should stop typing, ’cause it was gone midnight, she replied
Bastardi is now so desperate he is pretending fake worrying about The Grand Masters life. Oh my days.
Covering this little interchange, Zelo Street concluded
‘Frances Barber would blame Corbyn and Bastani if her train was late. Sad, really.’
Looking at her weird accusations and her personal hatred of Corbyn and Aaron Bastani, it’s hard not to agree with two of the commenters to that article. One, who was anonymous, posted
The woman is either seriously ill or shouldn’t mix a keyboard with The Curse Of John Barleycorn.
‘Jonathan’ concurred, saying
The likes of Frances Barber like other the other minor slebs Rachel Riley & Tracey Ann Oberman, are either seriously suffering from a delusional disorder or more likely been at the sauce or possibly both.
And according to ‘Mark’, somebody had briefly amended her Wiki page so that it read that she ‘was an anti-Islamic Zionist with a Corbyn fixation who does some acting, when she’s sober enough.’
I got the impression that Barber is part of the circle around Oberman and Riley, who have swallowed the toxic nonsense that Corbyn is anti-Semitic and that British society is now so full of Jew-hatred, that it’s like Nazi Germany c. 1937. This is the exact opposite of what’s happening. There are no brown-shirted hordes marching through the streets chanting anti-Semitic slogans. Nobody is burning books or proposing any kind of anti-Semitic legislation. Nobody wants Jewish Brits to be forced out of their jobs, their homes and their country. Even the I’s repulsive Simon Kelner, who has been pushing the anti-Semitism smears as hard as any of the other liars and propagandist hacks, has said that if Corbyn does take power on 13th of next month, nothing will happen to Britain’s Jews. In fact, as Jeremy Corbyn has shown time and again, he has actively supported Jews against discrimination and persecution. But, well, as Boy George once sang in the ’80s ‘And truth means nothing in some strange places’.
But Barber’s rants also say much about her, Riley’s and Oberman’s twisted view of the world. They really are so twisted with hatred, that in my view they really can’t accept that anyone who takes a different view of Corbyn isn’t part of a troll army or defended by one. Mike had similar accusations flung at him during a spat with one of the anti-Semitism smear merchants. When ordinary people turned up to defend him, the smear merchant accused Mike of having set his followers upon him. Mike had done no such thing. They were defending Mike entirely willingly and unprompted, because they like and trust Mike, and know he’s telling the truth. Just like the people telling Barber she was wrong and possibly unhinged were also doing it spontaneously. But to me it looks like Riley and Oberman do deliberately set their followers on people. Indeed, Oberman is part of a network of trolls, which includes David Collier and the Gnasherjew outfit. So when Barber accuses her critics of being sent to attack her by Aaron Bastani, I believe that it not only shows her own personal fixation with him, but possibly that it’s also a bit of projection on her part. It’s the kind of thing she’d do, or like to do, and so they must be doing it.
It also reminds me of the rants of Steve Renstrom, AKA She-Bop Steve, an American artist who believes that the Californian senator Alan Cranston is at the heart of global conspiracy and is responsible for killing, amongst others, the acts Jim Belushi and Natalie Wood. Of the latter Renstrom’s written
Star Magazine T.V. ad, Natalie Woods’ close friend, Wadkins, tries to wink to indicate B.S. info as to how and why she died. The hog who drowned her remotely from the Federal Building downtown, fooling millions, replaces Wadkins’ wink with a “detectably hog” mechanical wink to say to the ‘Dupe Troops’ “No secret we’re involved since you knew already via, say, Ms. Woods’ “Brainstorm” Flick.
They had to wipe out that simple wink! (Frakin, squirmin, insane, desperate Nazis.) In “Brainstorm” an actor reaches over and touches her neck letting us 20,000 “meat puppets” material witness’ know she was in danger.
Or the notoriously rants of Dr. Francis E. Dec, who believed he was being persecuted by the police and their Black puppet underlings as part of the ‘COMMUNIST GANGSTER GOVERNMENT’ conspiracy which was turning people into ‘GANGSTER FRANKENSTEIN EARPHONE RADIO SLAVES’. In one of his truly barking screeds, Dec claimed that the cops and their Black assistants
SPRAY ME WITH POISON NERVE GAS from AUTOMOBILE EXHAUSTS AND EVEN LAWN MOWERS, DEADLY ASSAULTS EVEN IN MY YARD WITH KNIVES, EVEN BRICKS AND STONES, EVEN DEADLY TOUCH TABIN, or ELECTRIC SHOCK “FLASH LITE”, EVEN REMOTE ELECTRONICALLY CONTROLLED AROUND CORNERS TRAJECTION OF DEADLY TOUCH TARANTULA SPIDERS.
Looking at the increasingly nonsensical rants Riley, Oberman and Barber are making about the Labour leader, I really begin to wonder how long it will be before they start writing similarly deranged and paranoid pieces about him.
And now from one Australian Fascist, Senator Fraser Anning, to another, a home-grown one: ‘Hatey’ Katie Hopkins. Zelo Street yesterday posted a long article commenting on a nasty piece Hopkins had put up on Facebook, stating that people should not feel sorry the victims of mosque shootings in New Zealand, because they were Muslims, and we were at war with a religion trying to replace us.
The Sage of Crewe gives a few, pungent quotes from Hopkins’ keyboard, beginning with this one.
“A war for the world is underway. And watching the media, the mouthpieces and the multitudes desperate in their search to be the most sorry, I fear that the sad truth none of us want to face is that the victor has already been declared”
She goes on to voice her feelings of pity for Fraser Anning, and deride everyone who sympathised with the victims as pathetic, before claiming that the media has been singled out for blame for this atrocity by the media. Zelo Street states that this is simply untrue. She then goes on to say that the police told us that the real danger was islamophobia after every islamist terror attack in the UK. Which isn’t true either. She then says that after this attack on a mosque by a white bloke, the real enemy is once again islamophobia, and that whatever the terror, the real problem is islamophobia. She then talks about Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria, ISIS bombing a Roman Catholic cathedral, and so, as Zelo Street says, to tell us all that it’s really all Islam’s fault and we are not to feel sorry for the victims.
And then she goes full Enoch Powell with the words about the truth behind the violence
“You can’t see it, can’t hear it, can’t witness it – because you are not allowed. It can’t be recognised without fear of arrest. You can’t talk about the problems of conflicting cultures. Of being threatened by one religion, seeming determined to take over all that was once ours … the future is grim. People are desperately unhappy and feel lost. Forced out from within, strangers in their own lands, separated by fear. On both sides, all sides”.
Zelo Street comments very succinctly that this is White Genocide and the Great Replacement.
She goes on “We are sitting on a volcano, the hot lava of anger forced down by the constant suppression of our words, repression of our emotions, policing of our thoughts. Controlled by blatant lies”.
There was no announcement over a cracking radio. No Churchillian speech to rally us. But the silent exodus of Jews from Europe, of Christians in Britain looking Eastwards for a new place to call home, makes us refugees all the same.”
“And watching the media, its mouthpieces and the multitudes desperate in their search to be the most sorry, waving their white flags in advance, shutting their Churches and Synagogues in deference to the Mosque, I fear that the sad truth none of us want to face is that the victor has already been declared”.
Zelo Street comments
In the world of Katie Hopkins, we should not show empathy for the victims, because she is convinced that Muslims don’t show it to the victims of Islamist attacks, so we should behave in that way too – except, of course, that she is making that bit up. It allows her to conclude that by showing that empathy, we have shown “deference” – her term – to Islam, and therefore that in her imaginary war of cultures, Islam has been victorious.
He goes on to make the point that no-one is suppressing Hopkins’ speech or her thoughts, or is going to arrest anyone who shares her views. But she has to shape her narrative like that in order to push her paranoid, White supremacist fears. He concludes
It is a continuation of the story arc piloted by the likes of Enoch Powell. Then, it was simply about frightening Britons about brown and black people. Now it is about religion, too. But it is still racism, still bigotry, still hatred, and it is still wrong.
The reality is that most people want to end the hatred. Katie Hopkins does not, as it is in her interest for it to continue. She will not prevail. That is all.
What really chills the blood is that Hopkins’ sentiments are very similar to those expressed by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the architect of the Holocaust, in a speech he made to his ranks of mass murderers calling for them not to have any sympathy for the peoples they were to kill – Czechs, Russians and Jews – in order to safeguard the German race.
The speech is quoted in the chapter on Himmler in The Face of the Third Reich by Joachim C. Fest (London: Penguin 1970). I give it here for comparison with Hatey Katie’s words.
It is absolutely wrong to project you own harmless soul with its deep feelings, our kindheartedness, our idealism, upon alien peoples. This is true, beginning with Herder, who must have been drunk when he wrote the Voices of the Peoples, thereby bringing such immeasurable suffering and misery upon us who came after him. This is true, beginning with the Czechs and Slovenes, to whom we brought their sense of nationhood. They themselves were incapable of it, but we invented it for them.
One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them up among us. Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; apart from that it does not interest me. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany. We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them to bring them ideals.
I shall speak to you with the full frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things which it is easy to say. ‘The Jewish people is to be exterminated,’ says every party member. ‘That’s clear, it’s part of our programme, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we’ll do it.’ And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it. Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet – apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness – to have remained decent, this has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and never shall be written. (pp. 177-8)
Okay, Hopkins isn’t Himmler and she isn’t standing in Auschwitz urging troops forward as they beat, butcher and gas innocents in their millions, all the while preaching a twisted morality that salutes the atrocity as somehow decent, even noble. But this is where such sentiments end up. And as you can see from the above, it wasn’t just the Jews, but also the Slavs – the Russians, the Czech, the Slovenes in the above speech, but also the Poles, Ukrainians and others. Hitler himself said of the Czechs that the Germans should be utterly ruthless with them, as ‘it’s either us or them’.
Hopkins words are sick and dangerous. They come from a woman who has declared that we should fire on immigrant boats. I don’t know how serious she is about all this. She’s a troll, who feeds on the hatred she gets for upsetting decent people with her obscene views. She might even by like Himmler himself, who, for all his tough talk, was personally squeamish when it came to the Nazis’ murder. In one famous story, he was attending an execution by firing squad. The unit failed to kill their victims with their first salvo, and they had to fire again. Himmler shrieked, and had to be carried off hysterical. It wouldn’t surprise me if, decent her thuggish comments, Hopkins would behave like that herself if she personally had to witness people carrying out the mass murder of immigrants. She’d almost certainly say that she never meant people to start the mass killing of Muslims and immigrants.
But this is where Hopkins’ words can all too easily end up. And that’s no stupid piece of trolling.
Here’s an inspiring story. Fraser Anning, an utterly repugnant far-right Australian senator, who literally blamed the victims of the Christchurch massacre for their own murder, got his just comeuppance. As he was speaking, a White kid hit him over the head with an egg. And the lad is now an internet hero.
The story’s covered by the I, whose article in today’s edition for 18th March 2019, on page 9, runs
Online accolades for boy who egged far-right senator
Will Connolly, the 17 year old boy who egged the far-right Australian senator Fraser Anning, has become an online hero.
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested yesterday that the anti-Muslim senator should be charged after he slapped a teenager who cracked a raw egg over his head.
Mr Anning has been condemned for blaming Muslim immigration for the racist attacks on two New Zealand mosques. Mr Morrison said: “The full force of the law should be applied to Senator Anning.”
Posting on after the mass shootings on Friday, Mr Anning tweeted: “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?”
“The real cause of the bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration programe which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place, ” he said later. A GoFundMe page set up to raise A$2,000 (£1,0000) to pay for Connolly’s ‘legal fees’ and ‘more eggs’ had exceeded A$25,000 yesterday.
The site says most of the money will go to Christchurch victims.
The I’s columnist Eleanor Margolis wrote a further piece about, When words fail, some people need egging, adding a bit of historical context to Eggboy’s act. She mentions the egging of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jeremy Corbyn at Finsbury Park mosque last week, and John Prescott, how it was used against people in the stocks in the Middle Ages, and by less than impressed audiences in Elizabethan theatres. She said of Eggboy’s strike against Anning that
For anyone slating Eggboy for food wastage, maybe supermarkets should start keeping the eggs that pass their sell by date specifically to see to people with grievances against our leaders. Becuase the thing about egging is, it’s sort of effective. When Eggboy matter-of-factly broke that egg on Fraser Anning’s racist head, millions of people soon saw a display of solidarity -from a White non-Muslim kid – with those impacted by the Christchurch shooting and the victims of today’s rampant islamophobia in general. When words fail, some people just need an egg to the face. It’s probably the most physical, yet mostly non-violent, way of showing the world you disagree with someone and their entire schtick. (p. 18)
Let’s add a bit more detail to this. Anning didn’t just blame Muslim immigration for the violence, he specifically suggested that the victims of this atrocity were themselves violent and to blame for it. He issued a statement essentially saying that Islam is a violent religion, all Muslims were violent, and the massacre victims were ‘not armed yet’. Very many religions and ideologies, including Christianity, have their violent as well as peaceful aspects, and Islam is no different. At times it has expanded through military conquest and at others through peaceful preaching and simply commercial interaction. It’s believed that Islam spread into sub-Saharan African, for example, through merchants, and that many of the African peoples, who adopted it did so because the majlis, or assembly of religious scholars, offered a constitutional check to the power of the kings. It’s also obviously untrue that Muslims are violent, as clearly shown by the peaceful behaviour of the vast majority. And Anning’s statement about the victims of the massacre is both wrong and obscene. They weren’t armed at all, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that they were going to be.
Kevin Logan dealt with this lie in his livestream he did with feminist professor Kristi Winters. It’s on YouTube, entitled ‘We Love You Kiwis’. I haven’t reblogged it, because it’s over an hour long and Logan, as an internet atheist, makes a series of gratuitous attacks on Christianity. But on a more positive note, he did post this video celebrating Anning’s nemesis. Enjoy!
Warning: Contains language.
Margolis’ article is also interesting for how she describes the attack on Corbyn. She repeats the falsehood that he was hit with an egg – he wasn’t. He was punched in the head. But she admits he was attacked by a racist. Which is interesting, as this is a tacit admission that Corbyn isn’t. And if he isn’t a racist, he can’t be an anti-Semite, by definition. But I doubt you’ll find the I going that far to buck the anti-Semitism witch-hunt against Labour.
This is a video posted on YouTube by the Sinn Fein senator, Niall O’Donghaile, of his speech in the Irish Senate last May demanding sanctions against Israeli and the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador for Israel’s continued bombing of Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Senator O’Donghaile pays due tribute to the efforts of the Dublin government to reach a diplomatic solution to the crisis, but he rejects this approach. He says it assumes that the conflict is between two equal countries, and that Israel is interested in diplomacy. They are not. And the bombing is not a one-off situation either. It is part of the continued genocide of the Palestinian people. He also says that the Americans would block any diplomatic attempt to end the Israeli action. He states that they know from their own history when to support diplomacy and when not. He therefore calls on the Irish government to boycott Israeli goods and follow South Africa’s example and expel the Israeli ambassador. He also states that, as Ireland has also suffered from imperialism and colonialism, they should stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
I realise that this going to be a controversial video, not least because of the speaker. I remember how Sinn Fein was the mouthpiece of the IRA during the Troubles and the carnage caused by Ulster terrorists. I am also very much aware that it was through efforts of Sinn Fein politicians like Gerry Adams that the Good Friday Agreement was reached and peace and normality returned to the Six Counties. A peace that remains fragile, and has been upset thanks to the breakdown of government at Stormont and Brexit, which threatens the open border to the South.
And I am also very much aware how desperate the Tories and their lackeys in the press and media have been to find any link between Jeremy Corbyn and Irish Republican terrorism, as well as Palestinian and Arab groups.
But Senator O’Donnghaile is right here, and his speech is a very statesmanlike summary of the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli state is not interested in a just and equitable peace. It is only interested in carrying through its decades long policy of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The speech also shows that I was correct in linking the Irish boycott of Israeli goods from the Occupied Territories with the Irish nationalist campaign against British imperialism. And possibly more closely than Mr. O’Donnghaile realizes. A few weeks ago Tony Greenstein put up on his blog a very long piece describing how Britain promoted and armed Saudi Arabia in the 1920s to attack and overthrow the traditional Arab and Muslim authority in the region because they would not support the region’s partition and continued to support the Palestinians against the nascent Jewish settlements. And it was very much about preserving and extending British power in the region.
After Ireland passed its BDS legislation, Netanyahu went on a predictable rant about them being anti-Semitic – they weren’t: Ireland still recognizes Israel and purchases Israeli goods. They just won’t purchase them if they’re made in the West Bank. The Israelis also called in the Irish ambassador for a telling off.
Senator O’Donnghaile says in his speech that Ireland is a small country on the world stage. Which is true. But as I pointed out in a previous post, Ireland has massive cultural cachet through its music and literature, especially in America and Australia, which have very strong Irish populations. In America the Irish formed a major constituency for the Democrats, at least in New York, while I understand that in Australia they were the backbone of the Labor Party. What Ireland says or does about an issue therefore carries weight far above the country’s economic or demographic figures.
I’m also very sure that Mr O’Donnghaile’s speech is what Israel fears the most, and why the Israel lobby has been so keen to smear Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites. They are afraid of him standing up in parliament to make a speech like this, and of Britain also passing BDS legislation. Hence also Shai Masot’s shenanigans a year or so ago, where he took it upon himself to decide who should be in Theresa May’s cabinet, forcing Alan Duncan out because he was insufficiently loyal to Israel.
Unlike Ireland, Britain is a major economic power. Or we were up to the point the Tories decided to wreck it with their inept plans for Brexit. If we ban goods produced in the Occupied Territories, it will be a profound blow. And it would encourage more countries to begin criticizing Israel. And the Israeli state cannot tolerate that. We can expect more hysterical denunciations of decent people for anti-Semitism as the Israelis try to stop more people following Ireland’s example.
Cynthia McKinnon is another Black female politico that the Israel lobby has tried to silence. She was an American congresswoman, whose career was targeted and destroyed by AIPAC, the very well-funded and powerful pro-Israel lobby group in the US, because she refused to sign the pledge they foist on American politicians. This pledge is an agreement that they’ll support Israel in return for funding from AIPAC. She was also targeted because she tried to reach out to the Muslim community in the US.
In this video, she talks to Press TV’s Marzieh Hashemi. McKinnon states that she went to Congress simply to concentrate on the Black community, who were in need, and America’s policy towards Africa, which she describes as abhorrent. She wasn’t interested in any other areas. But she bumped into special interests at every turn, and none of them have more influence than the pro-Israel lobby. She states that she bumped into the Israel lobby when she tried to reach out to the Muslims, because what they really didn’t want was a politicised Muslim community, which is as large and as wealthy as the pro-Israel lobby. She said that the political assaults on her were so bad that he father had to ask publicly ‘What does Stone Mountain, Georgia, have to do with Israel?’ She says with justifiable passion that she was prevented from serving her community because she did not toe the line on America’s policy towards Israel.
She describes how every candidate for Congress was given a pledge to sign, including herself. The pledge had Jerusalem as the capital city and the military superiority of Israel. She said that this was almost like water-torture for her. She would receive a phone call from someone saying that they wanted to organize a fund-raiser for her, she’d get excited about it, and then two or three weeks into the planning they’d ask her if she signed the pledge. And when she admitted she hadn’t, the fundraiser would go ‘kaput!’
She also says that the pledge also commits you to voting to support the economic assistance the country wants. Hashemi makes the obvious point that this means that American politicians, who are supposed to be representing their country, are pledging allegiance to a foreign state. McKinnon agrees, and says that she made it public, which nobody had probably done before. And then came the excuses that this was just overzealous advocates for Israel.
After she did this, the tactics changed. But this is what is done for the 535 members of Congress, 100 senators, 435 representatives, now have to write a paragraph, more or less amounting to the same thing. You are also expected to attend forums at the synagogues. If you don’t perform, you don’t get the money to run your campaign. It doesn’t matter if this is women’s organization or an environmental organization. She says that you can read about this on the internet, and directs the viewers to Thomas.loc.gov, the official US website, and put in the name ‘Gus Savage’, because Savage was a Black member of Congress, who was targeted by the Israel lobby. He had the foresight to put his experience on the Congressional record. Savage wrote that it was the Garden Club of New Jersey that gave his opponent $5,000. But it wasn’t really the Garden Club of New Jersey, but the activists associated with AIPAC.
McKinnon then moves on to talking about how she represented many different districts over her career, as her opponents used re-districting to try to eliminate her from Congress. Her original district comprised rural Blacks in what she describes as the Black belt of Georgia. These are people, who have never had access to equal opportunity at all. She said that when she went into that district, she found such poverty that she didn’t know existed in her own country. There were people in that district, in 1992, who didn’t have running water in their homes. She says that in the four years she was in Congress, she was able to bring Blacks into areas of power, which they never thought they could possess. And then the district was dismantled. It was challenged in the Supreme Court with the assistance of the Anti-Defamation League.
Hashemi notes that she lost the last election, thanks to the Zionist lobby, and asks her what her plans are. McKinnon states that she has a target on her forehead for taking the political positions she did, for supporting human rights and the Palestinians. This means that the Israel lobby will use whatever means to stop her occupying a position of authority. She states that fortunately for her, there is a very large peace community that is interested in change, that would like to have a tested, experienced voice in Congress so that at least they could have their voices heard, even if they can’t get the policy changed. The problem for her is that it will require an awful lot of money. She doesn’t have to match the others, because she is able to amass and organize people power. But even with that you need a lot of money to cover the basis of a political campaign – this is a minimum of $500,000 and could do great things with a million.
This video has much to say about the rotten state of contemporary American politics, quite apart from the pernicious influence of AIPAC. It’s disgusting enough that this clearly capable and efficient woman was prevented from serving her constituency and the Black American community because she dared to defy the Israel lobby and support American Muslims and the Palestinians.
I am also not surprised by what she says about the grinding poverty she found in rural America. One of the alternative American news shows, I can’t remember whether it was the David Pakman Show or Sam Seder’s Majority Report a little while ago tore into Trump’s speech, where the Orange Buffoon said that if he wasn’t successful, America would become a ‘Third World country’. They said that there were areas of America that already had that level of poverty, and not even of the most developed and prosperous countries within the Developing World.
And these area’s aren’t always Black. One of the poorest, if not the poorest, is a southern country where the population is 98 per cent White. But these folks vote Republican, partly because the Repugs tell them that the Blacks are dependent on welfare and state intervention in the economy. And this needs to be stopped, in order to turn Black Americans into sturdy, self-reliant citizens. The result is that the aid that could also give these people work and jobs is also cut, throwing them on welfare as well.
As for redistricting, I’m not surprised to hear about this either. Both Democrats and Republicans have gone in for voter suppression, and the Tories in this country are following the Americans in introducing legislation to stop the poor, students and ethnic minorities from voting under the pretext of stopping voter fraud. And the Tories over here are also talking about redrawing constituency boundaries, just like they redrew them under Thatcher to stop Labour getting a bigger percentage of the vote.
The Israel lobby has to be opposed and fought. But there’s also a strong argument for getting corporate money out of politics, so politicians return to serving their constituents rather than donors. And also for uniting Black and White – seeing that the Republicans and Conservatives in America and Britain are using racial prejudice to divide working people and keeping them down.
Last week I put up a post about the internet petition demanding a referendum on the House of Lords. In this report from RT, Polly Boiko discusses the statement from Jeremy Corbyn that he wants to abolish the House and replace it with a democratically elected upper chamber. She states that this is an issue that comes up every so many years. Corbyn’s spokesman, Seamus Milne, states that the House of Lords is an anachronism, and that Labour means to carry out its pledge to abolish it. In the meantime, the Labour leader has said that he will only appoint Labour politicians to the House if the promise to support its abolition, which Boiko rightly describes as them voting themselves out of a job. She points out that people have accused the Lords of being unrepresentative. The average age of its members is 69, and they collected £300 in expenses from the state per day, sometimes for not doing very much. She also discusses how, in its 700 years of existence, the Lords has also had its fair share of scandals and sleep. This is followed by a clip of one of the Lords disturbing the Lady sitting next to him by telling the rest of the House that she is one of the very few still alive from the time of the Second World War. A second clip shows another member of the Lords apologising for not being in his place to answer a question, and announcing that he intends to tender his resignation.
Boiko goes on to discuss how the government is also attacking the House of Lords after they rejected its Brexit legislation. This has been thrown back at the government by the peers 15 times in the last two weeks. She points out that there has always been tension about the Lords and its role. Its opponents claim that it is undemocratic and blocks legislation from the elected lower House. It’s supporters maintain that it does its job of holding the government to account.
She goes on to add that this time there is the internet petition about the House of Lords, which has reached 150,000 signatures. This means that it has passed the threshold for discussion in parliament, and is due to be debated on June 18th.
I can remember when this issue was raised way back in 1986, when the Labour party recommended the abolition of the House of Lords and its transformation into an elected senate. Or something like it. It is an anachronism of feudal, hereditary privilege, and has far too many members. There are about 900 of them, which is more than the members of the Chinese parliament. It’s one advantage, from what I’ve heard, is that it’s cheap, while Private Eye considered that an elected senate lacks any popular enthusiasm and would only attract second-rate politicians.
I think that the continued existence of the House of Lords will become increasingly controversial as prime ministers continue to stuff it with their cronies and supporters, as Tweezer wants to do to push through her Brexit legislation. The House of Lords desperately needs to be properly reformed and for its membership to be considerably reduced, if it is not to fall into further disrepute.
This is a very short video from RT, reporting that 165,000+ people have signed an internet petition calling for a referendum on the House of Lords. The petition states that the House of Lords should be abolished because peers have too much power over elected representatives. The number of signatories means that it has passed the number required for it to be debated in parliament. However, a spokesman for May’s government declared that they are committed to keeping the Lords as a revising and examining chamber.
I’ve put this up as it shows once again that an unelected House of Lords is a real issue for some people. I can remember back in the 1980s when one of the policies being suggested by the Labour party was that the House of Lords should be abolished. There was some discussion of it being turned into an elected chamber, like the American senate, under Blair. But he just satisfied himself with packing it full of ‘the people’s peers’. The Tories, meanwhile, carried out about how this was a terrible assault on tradition. One right-wing journo declared that the peers were the best people for the job through breeding and upbringing to sit in the House, examining legislation. This was before Rees-Mogg, who began his political career at about the same time campaigning on the same platform. The arguments are, of course, eugenic, and show how the aristocracy really does believe it’s biologically superior to the rest of us. Of course, the argument against that is Boris Johnson. I rest my case.
The Tories have recently been moaning about the House of Lords after they told Tweezer that her legislation for Brexit was not acceptable, and that it should involve parliament, rather than just her own cabinet. So now she’s thrown a strop and threatened to pack the Lords with her own cronies in order to get her way. So what the Tories condemned and screamed about when Blair did it, is perfectly all right when it comes to them. Which shows once again the party’s hypocrisy.
We do need an independent chamber to examine and revise legislation as a constitutional check. And the Lords has done that. I can remember how they used to annoy Thatcher back in the 1980s by throwing her reforms back at her. But there is a problem with the chamber. It has far too many members – almost 8-900. Seats there have become rewards for services to the government of the day. This really does need to end.
Regarding the possibility of it’s transformation into an elected senate, Private Eye considered that there was no real enthusiasm for this idea, and it would only result in second-rate politicians campaigning for seats there. I also remember an old workmate stating that the House of Lords was a complete anachronism, but it had the advantage of being cheap.
At the moment, the size of the House of Lords and the cynical way it has been used by successive prime ministers is calling it into disrepute. But it needs genuine reform, not more peers packed in as political favours, rather than abolition.
William Blum, the veteran and very highly informed critic of American imperialism, has put up a new edition of his Anti-Empire Report. This is, as usual, well worth reading. In it he attacks the new Cold War being fought with Russia, and reminds us of the stupidity and hysteria of the first.
Blum does a great job of critiquing the claim that the Russians interfered in the American election. He points out that the American intelligence services actually know how to disguise the true origins of Tweets, and questions the motives imputed to the Russians. He states that the Russians presumably don’t think that America is a banana republic, which can be easily influenced and its government overthrown by an outside power. He also questions the veracity of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Clapper is one of those claiming that the Russians did influence the election. But as Blum reminds us, Clapper himself is a liar. He lied to Congress when he was asked if the American intelligence apparatus was spying on its citizens. He said ‘No’. The answer, as revealed by Edward Snowden, was very definitely ‘Yes’.
He then gives a long list of instances from the First Cold War where people were unfairly accused of Communism and persecuted. For example, in 1948 the Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses and places of work of 1,000 people, who had signed the form backing the former vice-president, Henry Wallace’s campaign for the presidency, as Wallace was running for the Progressive Party.
Then there’s the case of the member of a local school board, who decided that the tale of Robin Hood should be banned, because he was a ‘Communist’. Which is good going, considering that the tales of Robin Hood date from the 14th/15th centuries and are about a hero who lived in the 13th – six centuries before Karl Marx. However, this woman wasn’t the only one to dislike the tales for political reasons. The compiler of a children’s book of stories about heroes deliberately left him out in favour of Clym of Clough, a similar archer outlaw, but from ‘Bonnie Carlisle’, partly because Hood was too well-known, but also because he thought there was something ‘political’ about the stories.
Blum also covers the way Conservatives claimed that the USSR was responsible for the rise in drug abuse in America, and was deliberately creating it in order to undermine American society. He also states that the Russians were also trying to destroy America through fluoridation of the water. As General Jack D. Ripper says in Dr. Strangelove: ‘We must keep our bodily fluids pure.’
Then there are the pronouncements that American universities were all under Communist influence, and the reason why American sports teams were also failing was because of Communist influence.
The anti-Communist hysteria was also used to denounce and vilify the United Nations. Blum writes
1952: A campaign against the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) because it was tainted with “atheism and communism”, and was “subversive” because it preached internationalism. Any attempt to introduce an international point of view in the schools was seen as undermining patriotism and loyalty to the United States. A bill in the US Senate, clearly aimed at UNESCO, called for a ban on the funding of “any international agency that directly or indirectly promoted one-world government or world citizenship.” There was also opposition to UNESCO’s association with the UN Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was trying to replace the American Bill of Rights with a less liberty-giving covenant of human rights.
Oh yes, and rock and roll, pop music and the Beatles were also seen as part of a Communist plot to destroy American moral fibre. A few decades later, in the 1980s, the same right-wing pastors were saying the same thing, though this time the tendency was to blame Satanists rather than Commies.
And the list goes on, including instances from the 1980s when visiting Russians were subjected hostility and abuse because they were perceived as a danger to the US, thanks to films like Rambo and Red Dawn.
The report ends with Blum discussing Al Franken, a Democrat politician and broadcaster, who is now accused of sexual assault. Blum argues that the real issue that should get people angry at Franken is the fact that he backed the Iraq War, and went out there to entertain the troops, showing that he was perfectly happy with the illegal and bloody invasion of another country.
He also reveals that the list of people, who have been on RT, was compiled by a Czech organisation with the name European Values, which produced the report The Kremlin’s Platform for ‘Useful Idiots’ in the West: An Overview of RT’s Editorial Strategy and Evidence of Impact. Blum states that it’s not exhaustive, as he’s been on it five times, and they haven’t mentioned him.
He also notes the RT’s Facebook page has four million followers and that it claims to be ‘the most watched news network’. It’s YouTube channel has two million likes. And so is this the reason why the American authorities have thrown away freedom of the press and forced it to register as a foreign agent.
He also comments on the way Theresa May has also got in on the act of blaming the Russians for everything, and is accusing them of interfering in Brexit.
But what I found interesting was this piece, where quotes another writer on the real reason the Americans are stoking another Cold War:
Writer John Wight has described the new Cold War as being “in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter.”
This makes sense of a lot of murky episodes from the Cold War. I think Lobster has also commented several times on the way Conservative have accused the USSR of causing the drug crisis. I distinctly remember one of the columnist for Reader’s Digest, Clare Somebody, running this story in the 1980s. If memory serves me right, she also claimed that the Russians were doing so in cahoots with Iran. The Iranian theocracy are a bunch of thugs, but somehow I don’t think they can be accused of causing mass drug addiction in the West. They’re too busy fighting their own. I can’t remember the woman’s surname, but I do remember that she turned up later as one of the neocons frantically backing George W. Bush.
As for the campaign against the United Nations on the grounds that internationalism is unpatriotic, that’s still very much the stance of the Republicans in America. It’s part and parcel of the culture of American exceptionalism, which angrily denounces and rejects any attempt to hold America accountable to international justice, while upholding America’s right to interfere in everybody else’s affairs and overthrow their governments. ‘Cause America is a ‘shining city on a hill’ etc.
As for wishing to bring down Putin, because he’s shaken off the chains of American economic imperialism, that’s more than plausible. American big business and the state poured tens of millions into Yeltsin’s election campaign back in the 1990s, including his crash privatisation of the Russian economy. Which just about destroyed it. In which case, it shows that Lenin was right all those decades ago, when he described how pre-Revolutionary Russia was enchained by western economic imperialism. And perhaps the world, or at least, anybody who does not want their country to be bought up by American capitalism, should be grateful to the Archiplut for showing that a nation can defy American capitalism.
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