6 of Its Leading Members Leave the Change Party

Ho ho! What was all that rubbish about the Change Party changing British politics? Earlier this evening I just caught a snippet on the Six O’Clock News that six of Change UK’s MPs have left the party following its poor performance at the elections and the recriminations against its leader, Heidi Allen. Some, but not all, would probably go to the Lib Dems, with whom the party has said they wish to have closer ties.

So much for all that nonsense about being a completely new form of politics, which the British public were crying out for. The British public looked at them, and drew the conclusion that they were the same old politics, pushed by the ambitious and arrogant, who definitely weren’t going to broaden British democracy. Not when they refused to fight by-elections after their defections. They were going to be the next SDP. Well, that got merged with the Liberals, and at their height the SDP were far more politically distinguished than Change UK. Their founding members, included David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, who were senior politicos with quite distinct ideas. All Change UK offered and offers is the same threadbare corporatism and neoliberalism, under a pro-Remain banner. They don’t offer anything which the Tories, Lib Dems and Blairites in the Labour Party already aren’t.

With luck, this will be the beginning of the party’s complete collapse. They won’t be missed.

Beeb Collaborating with the Tories to Run May/Corbyn Debate

Yesterday Mike put up another article showing why the Beeb can’t be trusted to host the proposed debate between Tweezer and Jeremy Corbyn. When May first announced that she wanted to debate the Labour leader over Brexit, Corbyn replied that he would relish it, and that it should be on ITV. That’s his prerogative as the person challenged. He preferred the ITV format, which would simply be the two politicos going head to head.

But this hasn’t suited the Tories nor the Beeb, which would also love to host the debate. May’s director of communications, Robbie Gibb, was a member of the Beeb’s newsroom before joining her team. And he’s definitely been angling for his former colleagues at the Corporation to get the debate. And so the Beeb, and much of the rest of the corporate media, has been claiming that May’s proposal is a challenge to Corbyn, despite the fact that he’s already accepted. According to the Canary, Corbyn’s distrusts the Beeb’s proposal because it gives Beeb editors too much power to frame the questions and rig the debate. Matt Zarb-Cousin and others on Twitter have remarked that the Beeb seems to have been trying to get this debate for several weeks. On the 6th November there was mention of an interview with Dimbleby, and on the Torygraph this last Monday, 26th November 2018, the Beeb said they’d hold a ‘Question Time’ style session if Corbyn refused. Others followed, casting scorn on the idea that the Beeb’s debate would be impartial.

They’re right. As Mike has pointed out, the Beeb has form regarding deceptive political reporting. It was also this Monday, on Newsnight, that the Beeb included Lynn Hayter, a Beeb actress and fake Pastor of a miniscule internet church, in a debate about Brexit, trying to pass her off as a real vicar.

And this is far from the only piece of such deception the Beeb has made. Others have included packing the audience and panel at Question Time with members of the Tory party, and very biased reporting against Corbyn and the Labour regarding the anti-Semitism smears. Quite apart from the fact that one after another of the Beeb’s news teams has been shown to be a member of the party, and has left to join the Tories PR department. Furthermore, Ray Tallis’ book, NHS SOS, also has a chapter on how the BBC’s reporting of the privatization of the NHS actually supported it, instead of challenging it.

Tony Greenstein, I think, in one of his articles mentioned how, when the government passed legislation allowing the CCG commissioning groups in the NHS to purchase private medical services, the Beeb declared that it gave GPs more freedom, rather than describe it for what it was. It was, he states, pure state propaganda. It’s one example of a very long line. I can remember how, in the 1980s when Thatcher was cutting public services and the welfare state, the Beeb declared after the announcement of yet another round of such cuts that it was ‘more self-help’. Which was how the Tories wanted us to view it, rather than realise that it was simply yet more denial of needed state aid to the poor and vulnerable.

And Barry and Saville Kushner in the book, Who Needs the Cuts, have shown that the Beeb gives unequal airtime to those, who have swallowed the pernicious lie that austerity is necessary, and scream down dissenting voices from activists and trade unions. That is when the latter are even allowed on air. And academic media monitoring bodies at Cardiff and Glasgow University have shown how the Beeb gives far more space to employers, Conservatives and bankers over Labour members and trade unionists.

The Beeb is massively biased and should not be allowed to host the debate between Tweezer and Corbyn.

And more and more people are realizing this. A few days ago, the left-wing Vlogger Gordon Dimmack attacked the Beeb for its bias in its reporting of Julian Assange. He has also similarly criticized the Guardian for its bias, partly over Israel. At the end of that video, he announced that the mainstream media was so biased and untrustworthy, that he was going to use instead news from the New Media sources on the internet. This means sites and blogs like the Canary, whose very capable editor, Kerry-Ann Mendoza, so frightened and outraged the hacks at the Guardian a few weeks ago that they tried to ban her from being the speaker at an event to honour Black journalism.

And the new media is also rattling the Beeb. The Radio Times this week carries yet another self-serving article promoting Question Time, and lamenting the fact that politics in Britain is becoming increasingly polarized because fewer people are watching it, preferring instead to get their news from sources that match their own opinions.

I have zero sympathy. If people are switching off Question Time, it’s no-one’s fault but the Beeb’s.

They have been biased towards the Tories for a very long time, and people have always known and realized this. But with other sources of information instantly available on the Net, which can tell you what the Beeb isn’t, the Corporation’s lies and omissions have become glaringly obvious to more and more people. If the Beeb wants to get more people to follow its news coverage, then all it needs to do is become genuinely impartial.

But I fear that this is too much for the Corporation, which responds to any criticism about its pro-Tory bias by sending its critics pompous letters about how its journalists are trained to be scrupulously impartial. Even though a casual glance at the Six O’clock News reveals that the Beeb is anything but.

Corbyn definitely should not bow to pressure to debate May on the Beeb, and viewers are definitely advised to get their news from the other, great news organisations on the Net to correct the bias of the state broadcaster.

Racism, Colonialism and Asian Paedophile Gangs

One of the major news stories this week was the trial in Huddersfield of yet another Asian paedophile gang. From what I gather – I haven’t really followed the story – this was a group of taxi drivers, some of whom were of Pakistani descent, and the case was very similar to the Rotherham and other paedophile gangs. Including the reaction of the authorities to the exploitation of the female victims. The girls – now young women – have said that they have only now come forward because when the abuse was occurring they were not believed. The reporter discussing the case on the Beeb’s News at Six described how the authorities in this and the other cases didn’t act because they were afraid of disrupting ‘community cohesion’. In the case of Rotherham, one of the local authority officials or senior police officers, who could have stopped, stated that they were afraid of it starting riots. As a result, nothing was done for years, and the abuse continued until eventually these thugs were brought to trial.

This issue is delicate, as we’ve seen how the various surviving Nazis and Islamophobes are trying to capitalize on it. The EDL and the racist hooligans of the Football Lads’ Alliance have been goose-stepping up and down, pushing the idea that this is how Islam, and all Muslims, see those outside their faith: inferior beings, whom they can exploit freely without any pang of conscience. I’ve got a feeling that it was this case in particular in Huddersfield that Tommy Robinson was commenting on outside the courthouse when he was arrested and banged up for contempt of court. His followers then declared that it was a free speech issue, and their leader had been unfairly silenced by the pro-Muslim dhimmis of the establishment. It was nothing like that, of course. There are strict regulations covering the reporting of court cases affecting everyone. They’re designed to stop a miscarriage of justice by reporters spreading biased or mistaken information. Robinson violated them, not least with his antics shouting angry questions at the men was they were being taken into court, questions and comments which assumed their guilt. If let unchecked, this could have resulted in them being acquitted or the case collapsing following a motion by their lawyers that the reporting was preventing them from getting a fair trial.

And the Islamophobes of the EDL, FLA, DFLA, and Pegida UK, etc., aren’t interested in protesting against paedophiles per se. There are plenty of cases of the prosecution of Whites for the same offences, at which they haven’t shown their faces. They are only interested in these cases because the perpetrators are Brown, and they can use them to work up hatred against Muslims and the wider Asian community.

And let’s deal with another canard the islamophobes have been repeating about the case: that this shows essential Muslim attitudes towards non-Muslims. If the crew in Huddersfield are like the other Asian grooming gangs, such as Rotherham, then they say absolutely nothing about Islam in this regard. Again, from what I gather, the Rotherham gang were Muslims in name only. They weren’t practicing Muslims and never attended the mosque. Or if they did, it was once in a very, very long time.

But nevertheless, there are racial aspects of this case that do need investigation, discussion and comment. The gangs’ victims were White, and it’s because they were that the issue was ignored. As has been said, the authorities were afraid that if they acted, it would provoke race riots. It’s a gift to the Far Right, who can honestly say that in these cases, the authorities weren’t interested in combating anti-White racism and exploitation. Now I have spoken to Whites, who believe that they have been racially abused and insulted, but that when they tried to raise it with social workers, they were refused help. One man said that the social workers flatly refused to believe him, and said ‘Oh, they’re not like that.’ I’m sure most BAME people aren’t. But some are, just like some Whites. And for a brief moment at the start of this century, round about the time of the Oldham race riots, there was more anti-White racial crime than against Black or Asians. I’m fairly certain that this situation has been reversed following 9/11 and the abuse and violence against Muslims that unleashed, and the immigration crisis.

Paedophiles and those who enslave and sexually exploit children and women exist in all levels of society, and in all colours. The Roman Catholic, Anglican and Methodist churches have been rocked through similar scandals with White clergy, whose crimes were also disgustingly covered up and their perpetrators were protected, in order to avoid a scandal. Paedophiles are also manipulative and enter professions where they can prey on the vulnerable, like teaching. Which is why that profession has very strict regulations about dealing with their charges, as well as reporting and dealing with possible incidents of sexual abuse that they may uncover amongst their students and pupils.

But historically, as well as exploiting those of their own race, nations and ethnic groups across the world have also exploited other races. White racists see Blacks as more sexual and promiscuous than Whites and ethnic groups. But this is a prejudice created through the slave trade. White Europeans and Americans trading and travelling in Africa actually reported that Black African women were very chaste, more so than their own people. What altered this image was the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by White men in the plantations of the New World. And where it did not involve rape, it frequently consisted of prostitution, with the White man giving the woman a few coins for her services. Which may also have been unwilling. And some of this sexual exploitation may have been directed against Blacks partly because White women, or at least of those of respectable status, were protected and the chastity jealously guarded. Which is also not an excuse for the men not controlling themselves and raping and exploiting their slaves instead.

And it does look to me like something similar is going on here. That the men in these gangs, like the Whites who sexually exploit Black women, are doing so because they do consider White women less worthy than their own. Yasmin Alibhai-Browne in the Independent and then the I has written many times about anti-White racism amongst BAME communities as well as ordinary White racism. And she has described how some Asians view White women’s sexual freedom with horror, as promiscuity and a lack of ‘respect’. And so I do wonder if the Asian men in these gangs had the same attitude White planters had to their Black slaves: they could abuse them freely, not just because they were in their power, but because they believed their race also to be more promiscuous than their own women, and so their rape and abuse didn’t matter. They were ‘tarts’, and so deserved it.

I am certainly not suggesting that all or most Muslims or Asians in this country approve of or share the attitudes of these Asian rape gangs. Just as I don’t believe that the majority of Whites in this country think that Black women deserve rape or sexual exploitation. But I am saying that these men’s attitude does show a racial as well as sexual contempt for their victims. And that this needs to be recognized and discussed alongside other forms of racism.

I also think there’s an issue with the racial elements of prostitution and sexual exploitation in this country generally that isn’t being discussed, and of which these cases are a part. For example, one Asian commenter on a similar case complained that there was sexual abuse within the Asian community, which was being hushed up. I’ve also heard of White men using the services of Muslim prostitutes. And way back in the 1980s I can remember a Black friend from St. Paul’s here in Bristol complaining that the Black community there had a reputation for prostitution, but the girls themselves were Whites from Hartcliffe.

Racism and racial exploitation has no colour. People of all races can be prejudiced, abusive, violent and exploitative towards others. And this seems to have happened in the case of these Asian grooming gangs, who are not representative of Asian Britain as a whole. And I’m sure that racism is also an element in other forms of rape and sexual exploitation committed and suffered by people of other ethnic groups. And this needs to be recognized, discussed and acted upon. Rather than swept under the carpet and angrily denied in case it cause further racial friction.

The Anti-Semitism Allegations Show its the BDJ and Jewish Leadership Council Who Are Desperate, Not Corbyn

On Monday, Jeremy Corbyn attended a Passover seder with Jewdas, an organisation of religious, politically left-wing Jews. News of this was then leaked by Guido Fawkes, and the Jewish establishment of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council went berserk, as did the Blairites in the Labour party.

One of the right-winger, John Woodcock, tweeted about how this showed that Corbyn was still being anti-Semitic. Woodcock’s a gentile, and so annoyed very many Jews by telling them what their religion was. Michael Rosen, the poet and, I believe, children’s poet laureate, put his feelings into verse challenging Woodcock to tell him what kind of Jew he should be. I can remember reading some of Mr. Rosen’s poetry when I was a kid, in the verse collection Rabbiting On. From what I can remember, it was largely light, entertaining stuff, which I think children need considering the immense pressure now being placed on them by the school and educational system. Other Jews also shared his opinions, and tweeted their views on Woodcock’s presumption. I can appreciate how they feel. When I was arguing apologetics with atheists, I wasn’t impressed when some of them were amazed that I believed in evolution and told me that I shouldn’t.

Then the Board of Deputies of British Jews decided to wade in, with their partners the Jewish Leadership Council. One of the Board’s leaders appeared on the BBC six O’clock news on Tuesday loftily declaring that Corbyn’s meeting with Jewdas showed how he was ignoring the concerns of mainstream Jews and did not take the allegations of anti-Semitism seriously. A spokesman for the Jewish Leadership Council also denounced Corbyn for attending the seder, and said it was a ‘two-fingered salute’ to mainstream Jews.

Jewdas, however, were very appreciative and praised the Labour leader for taking an interest in the Jewish community and seeking their views on the issues that mattered to it.

As the BDJ and Jewish Leadership Council know, Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite, and whatever they say, the Labour party takes the allegations very seriously. That’s why tens of thousands of people were purged from the party, often just on the unsubstantiated allegations of them or related groups, like the woefullly misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Arbush, the president of the the Board of Deputies is a true-blue Conservative, who hailed the election of Donald Trump and his Alt Right lackey, Steve Bannon. He’s in no position to moan about anti-Semitism to anybody, given Trump’s support for these Nazis. But the Jewish establishment likes him, because Trump is pro-Israel.

This is the real issue here. Corbyn isn’t anti-Israel, but he is pro-Palestinian, which to the pro-Israel lobby is the same thing. If he becomes prime minister, it will mean an end to the automatic deference given to Israel and complete lack of criticism for its continuing persecution and ethnic cleansing of its indigenous Arab population. The Board and Jewish Leadership Council know this. Hence their smears against Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites, even though they are no such thing. Indeed, many of them are decent self-respecting Jews and anti-racist gentiles, who have been abused and assaulted by racists and Fascists. These smears show just how desperate the Israel lobby is.

It seems to me that the Board and the Jewish Leadership Council represent the politically Conservative, neoliberal elite in the Jewish community. The same Conservative, neoliberal business elite which in the wider British community has done so much to wreck the economy and reduce ordinary working people, whether Jews, gentiles or whatever, to even greater extremes of poverty, all for corporate profit.

Corbyn is a left-winger, and it is natural that he should seek the views and company of those, who support him and his plans to undo nearly four decades of Thatcherism. They naturally include Jews, and as the messages of support for him show there are a large number of Jewish organisations and individuals, who do.

This is what worries the Board and the Jewish Leadership Council. They are becoming increasingly unable to present themselves as automatically representing British Jewry. And so they and the Blairites are trying to destabilise Corbyn’s leadership by making false, libellous accusations of anti-Semitism under the pretence that they do.

And even with these, they’re sounding increasing desperate. The Israel lobby has said that such smears are not being taken as seriously as they once were. In other words, ordinary people are waking up to the fact that these scoundrels aren’t concerned with anti-Semitism, only with using it as a weapon to defend Israel. And in America at least, Jewish young people are increasingly either indifferent to Israel, or actively hostile because of its maltreatment of the Palestinians.

Corbyn enjoys the support of a wide cross section of British society for his determination to bring the Thatcherite regime of benefit cuts, outsourcing and privatisation to an end. He is respected because of his decades-long stance against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. He’s a real threat to the Thatcherites, both in the Tories and the Blairites in Labour, as well as the Israel lobby.

But their shrill cries of outrage and smears show that it is they, who are desperate, aware that it is their power and influence that’s waning. And there’s absolutely no reason why Corbyn should listen to them. They’re Tories and Thatcherites to a man and woman, who have tried to unseat him and used the accusation of anti-Semitism to libel his supporters. He has every right to ignore them, no matter how they may try to pose as the representatives of mainstream Jews in this country.

More Warmongering by the Beeb and the Tories over Salisbury Poisoning

Quite a few people have put up pieces tearing great, raw chunks out of the government’s story that the Russians are responsible for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Salisbury. Last week, Leftwingnobody, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted up a link on his blog to a piece in the Irish Times, which stated that it was unlikely the Russians were responsible. Leftwingnobody’s link is at https://leftwingnobody.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/unlikely-that-vladimir-putin-behind-skripal-poisoning/?wref=tp. Go to it, and follow the link for more information.
Craig Murray, who was formerly our man in Uzbekistan, before being kicked out because he had moral objections to our dealing with a corrupt, repressive tyrant, has also cast doubt on the government’s story. And Mike has also posted up continuing developments, which add more questions. Today he put up a piece quoting the Russians, who said that if they had used military grade nerve agents, then far more people would have been affected than the Skripals and the poor cop, who was poisoned. And they would all be dead, not incapacitated. Which is how it struck me. Furthermore, the Russians couldn’t use their original stocks of the Novichoks poison, because this would have decayed after 27 years. Quite apart from the fact that the international chemical weapons authority confirmed the Russians had destroyed them. But as the scientist, who developed the toxin revealed, the knowledge of how to manufacture it is now out in the public sector, and so any number of countries or individuals could be behind the attack. Porton Down has refused to confirm that the Russians were responsible, and stated only that the nerve agent was of ‘Russian manufacture’.

But as far as May and the Tories, and their lapdogs in the Beeb are concerned, the Russians are responsible, and we’re facing a new threat from Putin. Who, according to BoJo, is now like Hitler. At least in the way he’s going to use next year’s world cup in Moscow, which will be like the Berlin Olympics in 1938.

I caught May pontificating on the Six O’clock News about how the Russians were threatening us and our European allies. The report also said she was trying to persuade the other European leaders to join her. Queue a shot of Angela Merkel going down a corridor, looking grim and serious. Then it moved on to Boris, saying that he wasn’t trying to stoke tensions with his wild comparison with Hitler. And on the local news this evening, they were also talking about the Salisbury poisoning and described the chemical used as ‘the Russian nerve agent’, although this is still open to doubt. Back to the Six O’clock News, the Beeb showed an Estonian diplomat talking about the Russian threat.

This is dangerous talk, whatever nonsense BoJo might try to bluster in order to justify his absurd comments. The Russians lost 20 million people fighting Hitler during the War. Millions of their squaddies were starved and worked to death as slave labourers after being captured as P.O.W.s by the Nazis. It’s therefore highly offensive for BoJo to make this stupid, insulting comparison. Also, as Simon Reeve showed in his documentary series about Russia a few months ago, the Russians are genuinely proud of their armed forces and the way they defended their homeland during the Great Patriotic War. Their equivalent of Remembrance Day/ Veteran’s Day is far more like a party, with food and drink, as well as marches and speeches, than the very solemn and austere ceremonies we go through every November 11.

I don’t doubt that Putin will try to exploit the World Cup to promote his government and his country, but the accusation that he will is more than a little hypocritical. Every government uses international sporting events like the World Cup, or the Olympics, to promote themselves. I can still remember the Americans at the Atlanta Olympics in the 1980s. As for Russia threatening Europe, in many cases it’s the other way. Russia is ringed by NATO bases right along its borders. This was after the original treaty with Gorbachev pledged NATO not to expand up to its borders in return for Gorby withdrawing all their troops from eastern Europe and allowing the former satellites to go their own way. I’m sympathetic to the fears of the Baltic States, who were reincorporated into the USSR after a brief period of independence when Stalin threw the Germans back in World War II. But at the same time, the Estonians are building monuments to Nazi collaborators as national heroes. And the supposedly democratic government of the Ukraine includes real, uniformed Nazis, who are now out on the streets of Kiev to keep order. But you won’t find that mentioned on the news, because obviously, the vast majority of people in this country will not want to support a blatantly Fascist regime.

So once again, we’re being fed lies by the Tories and the media, lies which could take us to war. And who benefits? Well, May and the Tories, obviously. She was seven points behind Labour in the polls, and the Tories are looking at being wiped out in London. Thus, she’s trying to copy Thatcher, and act like a ‘bargain-basement Boadicea’, rattling her sabre furiously. The real reason for this tension is less a military threat from Russia, and far more the fact that the American multinationals, who thought they would get to control the Russian economy under Yeltsin, have found themselves stymied by Putin. It’s like the Iraq invasion all over again: dodgy claims of weapons of mass destruction, and economic motives – western corporate interests – disguised as an attack, or resistance to, an evil tyrant.

Putin is a thug, and a real enemy of democracy. Journalists and opposition politicians in Russia have been arbitrarily arrested, jailed, beaten and murdered by his thugs. And I don’t doubt that at least some of the 14 Russians, who’ve died over here in suspicious circumstances, have been assassinated by him. But Corbyn is right about the Salisbury poisoning. It isn’t clear that he’s behind it, and we need far more proof before stoking up international tensions.

But the Tories are doing it anyway, for their own cynical electoral advantage, and those of their corporate financers. And if there is a war, the people who will pay the price will be ordinary working people. When Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the Republican Neocon leadership were very careful to make sure that none of their sons or daughters were likely to be posted to the conflict zone. As opposed to the poor and working class, whose districts were targeted by the recruiting sergeants.

As for Boris, looking at the way he has conducted himself as foreign secretary, I can only agree with the Russians. It is amazing that he is the spokesman of a nuclear power. Actually, it’s downright terrifying.

For all our sakes, we need the media to hold May and the rest to account, to ask the hard questions that Laura Kuenssberg and the rest of the Beeb’s pro-Tory lackeys aren’t asking. Before the Tories start another war for the benefit of multinational capital.

‘Liar, Liar’ – The Anti-May Pop Song the Beeb Won’t Play

Yesterday’s I carried a piece by Adam Sherwin about a pop song against Theresa May that the Beeb definitely won’t be playing. The article reads

‘The BBC will not play a song accusing Theresa May of being a “liar” which has already made the top ten.

“Liar Liar’ by seven-piece band Captain Ska from London, includes soundbites from several of the Prime Minister’s speeches and interviews with the chorus: “She’s a liar liar, you can’t trust her, no, no, no.”

The lyrics include: ‘Where there’s nurses going hungry and schools in decline I don’t recognise this broken country of mine.”

Released last Friday, the song has soared to No. 7 in the Officials Singles Chart midweek update and has made the Download chart top 10. However the BBC said the song would not be included on the Radio 1 playlist or aired during Friday’s Official Chart rundown.

A spokesman for Radio 1 said: ‘We do not ban songs or artists, however our editorial guidelines require us to remain impartial and the UK is currently in an election period so we will not be playing the song.”

Capital FM and Heart have also opted not to play the song.

The band said in a statement: “We’re overwhelmed with the support and our message is that people do have the power to change society if we act together.’

Ordinarily, I’d say the ban on playing very political music during an election was fair. However, considering the massive bias the Beeb has against Corbyn and the Labour party, as shown in their attack on him on Woman’s Hour and the Six O’clock News, the refusal to play the record seems a bit hypocritical. Would the Beeb similarly censor a record if it extolled the virtues of May or Boris Johnson?

Vox Political: Tories Lie about Labour as Set to Lose Overall Majority in Parliament

As I’ve mentioned in a post earlier today, the Heil and Torygraph are spreading more lies about Labour. This time they’re claiming that Labour has drawn up ‘secret plans’ to let in millions of unskilled immigrants after Brexit. And the Mail Online has put up another piece, claiming that Labour will impose a ‘garden tax’.

As you would expect, this is all rubbish and fake news from the two newspapers that hate and fear Corbyn the most. It was the Fail and the Torygraph that were pushing the most the smear that Corbyn was a ‘Trotskyite’. As for drumming up fears of a mass influx of foreigners, well, no surprise there either then. Both papers have been ranting about uncontrolled immigration and ‘unassimilable foreigners’ since the 1960s. Several of the hacks, who’ve written for the Mail, such as Simon Heffer, even contributed chapters celebrating the centenary of Enoch Powell.

Although it’s not being put in such crude, racist language, we’re back to the old smear of ‘If you want a n***er for a neighbour, vote Labour’. And many people in modern Britain do live in multiethnic areas, and get on perfectly well with people of different ethnicities and skin colour, thank you very much. And many White older folk appreciate the respect given to the elderly in other cultures, such as amongst Asians.

Of course, the Mail should be very careful when trying to stir up fears of mass immigration. This brings back painful memories of the 1930s, when the newspaper screamed its support of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists with the notorious headline, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. It was avowedly pro-Hitler, supported the Nazi regime and published tirades warning the country of the supposed threat from Jewish immigration. That is, from people fleeing unimaginable persecution in Germany and eastern Europe. Just as it now attacks the refugees from the Middle East fleeing the chaos and terror western imperialism has inflicted on their native countries.

Mike over at Vox Political has put up a piece showing why the Tories have gone back to playing the race card: they’re set to lose their overall majority in parliament by 16 seats. At the moment they’re set to win 310 seats, Labour 257, the SNP 50, Lib Dems 10, the Greens and ‘Northern Irish’ 1 each, and other parties 18.

UKIP are set to get no seats at all. So much for the mighty revolution in British politics which Farage was supposed to have unleashed.

Mike’s article also graphically shows why no disabled people should vote for the Tories. The article contains a disturbing video by a disabled woman, Aleesha, of the privations she suffers thanks to the Tory cuts. This lady lives in an unadapted home. She cannot walk, and so must crawl painfully from room to room, even heaving herself up painfully onto the toilet. She states that she has fallen off it several times, and knocked herself out on the bath. She has stopped taking her medicines, or some of them, because she could not afford to pay the prescription charges for the four sets of drugs she needs to take each day. The cuts to her benefit also means that she subsists on milk, and has lost many pounds in weight. This has also exacerbated her eating disorder. She also suffers from incontinence, but again, has no money to pay for the special underwear, and so has suffered from the humiliation of soiling her clothes.

It is disgusting that anyone in Britain in the 21st century should suffer such humiliation and poverty.

And this is being done to give by the Tory party and their paymasters in big business massive tax breaks and a cowed workforce, which is prepared to suffer poverty wages in order to avoid the threat of unemployment. There are 100,000-odd people, who have been saved from starvation only through food banks. There are seven million people living in ‘food insecure’ households. That means that they don’t know where their next meal’s going to come from. It means mothers, who are starving themselves in order to feed their children.

It means 600 disabled people and rising have died in misery and starvation.

By contrast, Labour have promised to repeal the work capability tests, the repeated testing of people with severe illnesses or disabilities, so you won’t have any more amputees asked the moronic question of when they expect their limbs to grow back, and increase carers’ allowance by £30. As well as scrapping the sanctions regime.

As Mike point outs in his article, if you’re disabled or care about disabled people, you’ll love Labour’s manifesto. But if you’re a Tory, you’re going to hate it.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/31/want-to-know-why-the-papers-are-printing-lies-about-labour-policies-heres-the-answer/

Don’t be misled by Tory lies. These reforms have all been costed. And they are not, contra the claims of George Alagaiah and John Pienaar on the Six O’clock News yesterday, going to come from extra taxes on ordinary people.

They’re going to come from the rich.

Which is why the Tories and their lapdogs in the press are going berserk and trying to smear the Labour party with everything they have.

And it’s very clear why the Mail and Telegraph are going to hate it especially. Quite apart from the bitter hatred these papers have for the poor and working people, both are owned by rich tax-dodgers. Viscount Rothermere, who owns the Heil, has non-dom tax status inherited from his father. Despite this, he seems very much domiciled in this country, where he has a stately home. The Torygraph is owned by the weirdo Barclay twins, who have their own private island, Brecqou, in the Channel.

Don’t let these people lie to you.
Don’t let any more people die of starvation, or live in fear of it.
Don’t stand for the poverty and degradation they’re inflicting on the disabled.
And don’t let them keep Britain divided by stirring up hatred against ethnic minorities and immigrants.

Vote Labour June 8th.

The Lying Farewells for David Cameron

One of the aspects of the immediate aftermath of the ‘Leave’ vote I found particularly nauseating was the praise the Tories heaped on their leader as he announced his resignation. Well, sort of. He’s going to go, but not for another couple of months. He says he’ll finally pack up and leave in November. So despite Cameron’s promises that he would depart the moment he lost the vote, in practice he’s in no hurry. There, and I can remember Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, getting very animated on Have I Got News For You about how Broon tried to hang to power by cutting a deal with Clegg and the Lib Dems. He would agree to a coalition, but only if he was allowed to remain in No. 10. Clegg disagreed, and the deal fell through.

Well actually, it didn’t, as Clegg had already made a deal with the Tories to enter the coalition with them. His negotiations with Broon were simply lies and verbiage. Nevertheless, it got Hislop very excited, who described as ‘Mr Limpet’ because of his way he was trying to hang on to power like a limpet sticks to rocks.

Now Cameron is doing exactly the same. It seems that there are a lot of limpets in British politics. Though it has to be said, No 10 is a very nice rock for such shellfish.

In his resignation speech – if you can call it that, when he hasn’t actually gone – Cameron of course declared that he had been determined to try to create a fair society, with success and opportunities for all. Well, he’s a PR spin merchant, and his entire political career has been based on telling the voting public these lies, while doing the exact opposite. And after he had finished trying to paint a positive picture of himself and his policies, it was left to his party colleagues to join in.

John Major turned up on the Six O’clock news to declare that Cameron had indeed been a ‘One Nation Conservative’, concerned to provide jobs, opportunities and prosperity for all. ‘One Nation Tories’ are how Conservatives describe themselves, who want to make you think that they’re in favour of the welfare state. It comes from Disraeli’s description of Britain as divided into two nations – the rich and poor, and how this decision needed to be healed. In all fairness, this did have some validity at certain points in the 19th century. Disraeli himself extended the franchise to the whole of middle class and the richer sections of the working class in the 1870s as an attempt to ‘dish the Whigs’. Much of the earliest 19th century legislation regulating factories and mine work came from the paternalist section of the Tory party.

But when this is applied to David Cameron, it’s pure rubbish. Cameron’s reforms have led to Britain becoming more divided than ever before. Social mobility had just about ceased under Blair, and this has continued under Cameron. If, in fact, he hasn’t actually made it worse. The majority of people forced to claim benefits are the working poor, whose wages no longer cover the cost of living. Rising house prices and a lack of affordable housing, and the sale of council houses have meant that there is now a generation that can never look forward to owning their own homes. Or indeed, in many cases, moving out of their parents’. Cameron and his cronies raised tuition fees, saddling even more students with massive debt, all the while proclaiming that they were keen to see more people enter higher education. Nick Robinson, one of Cameron’s cheerleaders in BBC News, went off enthusiastically about how you didn’t need to pay the debt back until you earned a certain amount, so that it was all ‘free money’. Well, as the SF writer Robert Heinlein used to lecture people in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, TANSTAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch. A debt is still a debt.

And it’s when you get to the really poor – the long term sick, unemployed and disabled that the Tories’ policies have become positively lethal. Cameron, Osborne and his crew took over the welfare-to-work ideas of Blair’s New Labour, including the system of sanctions and fitness-to-work tests. As a result, people who have been literally dying have been declared fit for work and have had their benefit stopped. About 500 people have starved to death. Over a quarter of a million more have had their mental health impaired, sometimes seriously. Depression and anxiety has increased massively.

But all this is swept under the carpet, as Cameron and John Major have claimed that Major is a ‘One Nation’ Tory concerned with working peoples’ welfare. He isn’t, and never was. Just like he’s in no hurry to leave his rock.

Vaucanson and the First Strike against Automation

The week before last the BBC’s Panorama current affairs programme, amongst others, discussed the possible threat posed to jobs in Britain by further automation. There were extensive trailers for it, and the programme was plugged on that Monday’s six O’clock news. The usual opinions pro and contra were offered. One talking head for the automobile industry announced that there wouldn’t be massive job losses due to automation in the coming decades. They had already automated several of their factories, and as a result had to taken on hundreds, if not a thousand more people.

Well good luck to them.

For the rest of us, the news did not seem to be so bright and rosy. Panorama predicted that about a third of all jobs could go in the coming decades, particularly in the customer service industries. This meant, basically, that shop workers could look forward to losing their jobs due to the introduction of further machines like the self-service tills that have already been set up in libraries, shops and supermarkets. I got slightly irritated with this part of the news, due to bright and cheery way the presenter broke this piece of highly ominous forecasting. It was as if the spectre of millions more low paid workers being slung out of their jobs was just another piece of light, airy, and ultimately inconsequential pieces they usually put at the end of programmes, like the stories about surfing dogs and snails that enjoyed a pint.

There’s nothing new in this issue. It’s been around since the days of Ned Ludd in the Industrial Revolution, when craft workers facing unemployment rioted against the introduction of the new machines, which either replaced them, or reduced the need for their skills to mere ‘knacks’. Marx and Engels themselves protested against this in the Communist Manifesto.

Gaby Wood, in her book, Living Dolls, describes how the first modern strike against the replacement of human beings with machines occurred in 18th century France. The silk weavers struck against the invention of a new loom by Vaucanson, which made their skills obsolete by allowing almost anyone to operate it. Vaucanson was one of the leading makers of automata, creating mechanical people and creatures so lifelike that they raised and still raise disturbing questions about the nature of humanity and human uniqueness. Wood’s discussion of the strike is noteworthy for the way she takes the side of the workers, rather than castigate them for holding up the march of progress, as others have done. She writes

In his funerary tribute to Vaucanson, the Enlightenment mathematician and philosopher Condorcet defined a mechanician as one who ‘sometimes applies a new motor to machines, and sometimes makes machines perform operations which were previously forced to be reliant on the intelligence of men; or he is one who knows how to obtain from machines the most perfect and abundant products’. This, according to the silk workers of Lyon, was precisely Vaucanson’s wrongdoing. They rebelled against his automatic loom by pelting him with stones in the street; they insisted that their skills were needed, that no machine could replace them. In retaliation, Vaucanson built a loom manned by a donkey, from which a baroque floral fabric was produced, in order to prove, as he said, that ‘a horse, an ox or an ass can make cloth more beautiful and much more perfect than the most able silk workers’. This spiteful performance, surprising in the son of a craftsman, was the reverse of his golden duck: instead of producing excrement from a precious metal, he made luxurious silk emerge from the end of a live animal. The first was designed for man’s entertainment; the second was meant to show man that he was dispensable.

The biographers Doyon and Liaigre blame the silk workers for stalling the march of progress, for France’s Industrial Revolution lagging behind England’s; and Condorcet comments melodramatically that ‘whoever wishes to bring new enlightenment to men must expect to be persecuted’. The point of view of the workers seems to have been sidelined altogether in favour of the grant Enlightenment project. The Encyclopedie devoted sixteen pages (not including illustrations) to the making of silk and other stockings. ‘In what systems of metaphysics’, it reads, ‘does one find more of intelligence, wisdom, consequence, than in machines for spinning gold or making stockings? … What demonstration of Mathematics is more complicated than the mechanism of certain clocks?’ In the Encyclopedie’s illustrations, the men are secondary to the machinery. Vaucanson and his contemporaries contributed to a widespread sleight of hand: like wine into vinegar or base metal into gold, men were turned into machines. The new automata were not replicas, but real humans transformed. throughout the next century, factory workers came to feel they had been reduced to the mechanical pieces they were in charge of producing, hour after hour and day after day.

Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber 2002) 38.

There’s been that tension in process of mechanisation ever since, between deskilling and obsolescence, and industrial and scientific expansion, improvement and the emergence of new technical skills and industries. Kevin Warwick, the professor of cybernetics at Reading University, makes that very clear in his book, March of the Machines. Among the reasons he lists for automation are ‘reduction of labour costs’ – in other words, replacing expensive human labour with cheap machine production. I’ve a friend, who takes a very keen interest in these issues. He told me that we may well be at the end of the process, in which mechanisation creates new jobs as it replaces old. The traditional example is that of the mechanical digger. The number of people made unemployed through mechanical diggers, goes the saying, are made up for by the people taken on at the factory making them. Except with the mechanisation of the production of machines, this may now not be true. And so the kind of future predicted by some Science Fiction writers, of a society where there is mass unemployment and despair caused by mechanisation, may be about to become reality.

Welcome to the Megacity One of Judge Dredd, where nearly all the work is performed by robots, so that there is a 95 per cent unemployment rate.

I did wonder if some of the managers and engineers, confidently working on replacing their human workforce with machines would be quite so complacent about the process if they were faced with the same threat. Instead with retiring with plaudits, patents, and a generous pension, they had to look forward to joining the dole queue tomorrow, to be harangued by their job coach about how they were only being prevented from getting a job through their laziness. Then perhaps a few perspectives might change, and a few presenters on the Beeb might not be so jolly and complacent about millions more facing the dole.