Who Decided ‘Jewish Community’ Meant ‘United Synagogue’

Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension was lifted yesterday and he was readmitted to the Labour party. So there was, unsurprisingly, a mass outcry by the usual troublemakers, liars and smear merchants. Starmer responded by fudging the issue and refused Corbyn the Labour whip. This is, as Mike has pointed out, gross political interference of the type which the EHRC report into anti-Semitism in the Labour party condemned in the first place. He has also broken any number of Labour party internal regulations, as the Skwawkbox has clearly demonstrated. He’s done absolutely no good, except to annoy people with an unacceptable compromise. Unacceptable, because Corbyn’s supporters are still outraged by his unjust treatment of the Labour leader, while the smear merchants won’t be satisfied by anything less than his expulsion and the complete prostration of the Labour party to their own ultra-Zionist views.

Margaret Hodge

Among those crawling out from under the rocks to attack Corbyn were Margaret Hodge, Jessica Elgot, Rachel Riley, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Community Security Trust, none of whom are unbiased by any means. Hodge is the stupid, lazy and arrogant Labour MP who got herself suspended for calling Corbyn a ‘f**king anti-Semite’ in parliament. She then got herself readmitted after she started bleating about how terrifying her suspension was, and that it must have been like the terror experienced by German Jews under the Third Reich when they were waiting for a knock from Gestapo.

Her treatment was nothing like that horror, and she insulted the victims and families of those, who really had been imprisoned in the concentration camps. Her suspension was extremely lenient, no doubt helped by the fact that the media was very definitely on her side. Others would have received far harsher punishment. And her stupid, facile comments prompted an outrage response from Jews and gentiles, whose relatives had been victims of the Nazis.

But we shouldn’t be quite so surprised at her tactlessness. This is a woman who signally failed to do anything about real Nazism and anti-Semitism in her constituency. So much so that when the BNP had seven members elected to the local council in Tower Hamlets, their leader, Derek Beacon, sent her a bouquet of flowers in appreciation. She was also responsible for suppressing a report into child abuse in the council, then tried to blame its suppression on Corbyn. Apparently she was threatening to the leave the party if Corbyn was readmitted. If she did, it would be no loss to anyone, but unfortunately she hasn’t.

Jessica Elgot, Israel Lobbyist

Jessica Elgot is another Blairite, and if memory serves me right, she used to work for one of the Israel advocacy organisations. Which should immediately tell you that she isn’t concerned about genuine anti-Semitism, but simply protecting Israel.

Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Gaza and Islamophobia

The same applies to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and its odious boss, Gerald Falter. Falter founded it in 2014 or thereabouts because he was shocked at the way British public opinion had turned against Israel because of the bombing of Gaza. His wretched organisation is tinged with Islamophobia. On its website it declares that most anti-Semites are Muslims, and one of its patrons is a Hindu bigot who hates Islam, Christianity and those at the very bottom of the Hindu caste system. This character founded Operation Dharmic Vote to mobilise right-wing Hindu voters partly because he was outraged that high-caste Hindu doctors had to treat the people previously described as ‘the Untouchables’.

Community Security Trust and Violence Against Protesters

Then we come to the Community Security Trust, a volunteer police force set up to protect Jews and their property from attack. This would be all well and good, if that was all it did. But its members are supposedly trained in self-defence by the Israeli security forces and have been responsible for instances of violence themselves against protesters demonstrating against Israel. In one case Jewish and Muslim demonstrators were forcibly separated. Others were struck and beaten, including women, the elderly and a rabbi.

There’s also more than a little racial favouritism being shown in the establishment of the CST. I don’t know of any other ethnic group, which is allowed to have its own volunteer police trained by a foreign country. It can be argued that other ethnic groups deserve such a force more, as this is relatively little anti-Semitism compared with the prejudice against Blacks, Asians and Muslims. Can you imagine the reaction of our absolutely unbiased right-wing press if, say, Britain’s Black community had their own police force organised and trained by the Jamaicans or Nigerians? Or the Hindus trained by the Indian army? Or British Muslims with Saudi Arabia, Iran or Pakistan? They’d have a screaming fit and yell that we were being taken over by foreigners. But the CST is allowed to continue with the full cooperation of the British state and police.

Rachel Riley

As for Rachel Riley, this is a woman, who seems to have a visceral, personal hatred for the Labour leader and his supporters. She was on Talk Radio yesterday telling the world how terrible the Labour leader was, because he laid a wreath on the grave of the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the murder of the Israeli Olympic team in 1974 when he was attending some kind of gathering in Tunisia. This would have been extremely difficult, as Zelo Street has pointed out, because those monsters are buried in Libya.

Corbyn’s critics have been presented as representative of the British Jewish community as a whole. They aren’t. They are representative only of the right-wing, ultra-Zionist British Jewish establishment. Corbyn had many friends and supporters in the Jewish community, as have others, who have been smeared as anti-Semites, like Ken Livingstone. Corbyn was particularly respected by the Haredi community for his help in preserving their historic burial ground from redevelopment. He was also supported by Jewish Voice for Labour and Jewdas, with whom he spent a Passover Seder. Which enraged the Board of Deputies, who claimed it was a snub to the ‘Jewish community?’

Jonathan Sacks, Sectarianism and the March of the Flags

What Jewish community? As many Jewish left-wing bloggers have pointed out, there is no monolithic Jewish community, and the Board of Deputies only seems to represent the United Synagogue. And many of Corbyn’s other critics seem to be members, such as the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. Sacks died last week, and obituaries appeared praising him and his work. I’ve no doubt he was an excellent fellow in many respects, but he was also a sectarian bigot with a fanatical devotion to Israel. He caused outrage a few years ago when he, an Orthodox Jew, declared that Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’. This is the language of religious hatred, uttered by bigots before launching terrible attacks on their victims. Christian anti-Semites no doubt have said the same when persecuting Jews. Sacks was also an opponent of homosexuality, before opportunistically changing his mind and declaring that people had to be more open and accepting. He also led a group of British Jews on the annual March of the Flags in Jerusalem. This is the Israeli equivalent of the various Orange marches in Northern Ireland, when the Protestants of the Orange Order march through Roman Catholic areas. In the case of the March of the Flags, it’s when Israeli boot-boys march through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem to provoke and intimidate them. During these marches, Palestinians are insulted and abused, and their property vandalised. Liberal Jewish organisations asked Sacks not to go, but he refused. But what I also found interesting was that he seemed to be another member of the United Synagogue. The obituaries mentioned that he belonged to the Union of Hebrew Congregations, which looks to my inexpert eye as the United Synagogue by any other name.

The United Synagogue and the Corbyn Smears

Some of the Jewish journos, who took it upon themselves to write pieces smearing Corbyn as an anti-Semite are also members of the United Synagogue. The I published several of these pieces, noting at the bottom of the article the writer’s membership of the denomination. Which raises a few questions.

Are all, or the majority of those smearing Corbyn as an anti-Semites members of the United Synagogue? And if they are, who decided that the United Synagogue and its members spoke for all of Britain’s Jews? After all, it’s as if someone decided that only Tory Anglicans represent British Christianity. And when they produce stats claiming that Israel is important to the identity of 77 per cent of British Jews, is this really representative of all of the British Jewish Community? Or is it once again just confined to the United Synagogue?

All of Britain’s Jewish community deserve to be heard on the issue of Corbyn and Israel, not just Tory-voting ultra-Zionists and the United Synagogue.

Trump Post-Brexit Trade Deal Will Bring Hardly Any Real Benefits

This is very revealing. According to the BBC World Service, a post-Brexit trade deal between Britain and America would only increase the economy by 0.1%. And that would be 15 years from now.

As the Skwawkbox and Mike over at Vox Political have both pointed out, this means that the Tories will have sold Trump and the American companies backing him our NHS, workers’ rights, and environmental and consumer protections for hardly anything. In fact, Mike points out that even the 0.1% growth may not happen, as the economy is already faltering, and so any gains made later may be swallowed up by the losses that are occurring now.

This is despite yesterday’s Times enthusiastically hyping Trump’s offer of a trade deal with America. Zelo Street effectively ripped that piece of propaganda apart by pointing out that we would only get the deal if we became America’s poodle, a point that was also made by one of the columnists in today’s I. The Sage of Crewe also refuted what Trump’s negotiator, John Bolton, and the Times clearly thought would be an attractive demonstration of the deal’s benefits. Bolton stated that it would be easy to make such deals quickly for manufacturing and industry, but that service sector would take a bit longer. Nevertheless, next year could see cheap American cars coming into Britain. The Sage of Crewe pointed out the other side of the coin: British cars would be undercut by cheap American imports.

I can remember when something similar happened to the motorcycle industry with the Japanese way back in the 1990s. This was when the Japanese economy started contracting and there wasn’t quite so much a market for their bikes. Their solution was to start exporting cheap bikes to Britain, which would undercut our own, domestically made machines. Even those produced by Japanese manufacturers over here. As you might expect, British bike manufacturers, including the management of Japanese companies over here, were extremely upset and started arranging meetings about what they could do about this threat to British industry and jobs. I’d be interested to hear if British car firms are planning something similar to combat the similar threat John Bolton is making to them. But guessing from the glowing way the Times was pushing Trump’s grotty trade deal, I doubt we’d read of one in that Murdoch rag.

But the Americans would wait until after Brexit before requiring us to fall in line with their policy over Iran and the involvement of the Chinese firm Huawei in the 5G network.

Put simply, this deal would make us into America’s poodle. We’d have our industries and agriculture picked off by the Americans for their benefit, as the Zelo Street article also points out. He also states that Bolton is lying through his teeth about Congress easily passing such a deal. Congress’ Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has said that it won’t pass any deal unless the Good Friday Agreement is honoured.

The Zelo Street article concludes by stating that BoJob loves to say that Britain is a vassal state of the EU, but doesn’t mention how this deal would make us a vassal state of America by the back door.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/08/us-trade-deal-if-well-be-their-poodle.html

And Mike and the Skwawkbox point out how the BBC hid the news that Trump’s deal would bring hardly any benefits to Britain by putting on the World Service. This is the Beeb’s service for the rest of the world, not Britain. Presumably the people actually affected by it don’t count. Mike concludes in his turn that its shows once again that the Beeb is the Tories’ propaganda arm, and wonders if Ofcom are aware of it?

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/08/14/boris-johnson-would-sell-out-our-nhs-and-our-rights-to-trumps-us-for-practically-nothing/

I’m not surprised by any of this. The Americans were less than altruistic in the deals they made for their entry into the Second World War. They drove a very hard bargain with us after the War. They and the Russians both wanted the dismemberment of the British Empire so that their goods could be allowed into our former colonies. It was also thanks to their demands for payment that Newfoundland became a province of Canada. Before then it was another British colony. However, we had to give it, or sell it to the Canadians in order to raise the money to pay the Americans.

I’ve also met former members of the aircraft industry, who were also very bitter at the way America had demanded cutting edge technical information from this sector after the War. The Americans’ breaking of the sound barrier by the X-1 rocket plane, flown by Chuck Yeager, was a tremendous achievement. But it was solidly based on British research, some of which was, in its turn, based on captured German material. But the British project had to be closed down and its results and information handed over to the Americans as part of their price for coming to our aid.

Counterpunch and some of the American left-wing news sites on YouTube have also pointed out that the lend-lease arrangements under the Marshal Plan also weren’t altruistic. This was the American economic scheme to build Europe and the rest of the free world up after the War using economic aid. But there were also strings attached, which meant that the aid went chiefly to American companies.

You can conclude from this that the American state and capitalism drives a very hard bargain, and that such deals are very one-sided. As many left-wing sites have argued over and over again in their discussion of the ‘Special Relationship’. Which actually means far less to the Americans than it does to us. That was shown very clearly by Clinton’s reaction to German unification. This made Germany the strongest economy in Europe, and Clinton showed, as Beeb newsman John Sargeant managed to get the Prime Minister to acknowledge, that Germany was now America’s most important partner in Europe, not Britain.

And I’m also not surprised at the Tories and Murdoch ardently supporting this sell-out of our country. The Tories admire American capitalism and its lack of worker protection and welfare state. I can remember previous episodes where the Americans were promising a better economic deal if we abandoned Europe and joined them. And the Tories cheering such schemes nearly always owned businesses in America. And in fact, as far back as 1925 the Tories, or a section of them, were forming plans for the political reunion of Britain and the US.

And that shows exactly what Johnson and the Tories are like. Now and in the past, and I’ve no doubt in the future, they are willing to sell out British industry, the welfare state, our precious NHS and workers, all in return for the victory of unfettered capitalism and their squalid economic gain.

Abusive Message Sent to Jenny Manson, Head of Jewish Voice for Labour

Mike today has put up a piece about the vile, abusive message sent to Jenny Manson, the chair of Jewish Voice for Labour. Unlike the Zionist hate group, the Jewish Labour Movement, this is a group that represents all Jews and members have to be members of the Labour party. Unlike the JLM, where they don’t have to be either. The JVL supports Jeremy Corbyn, and like Jewdas and other Jewish groups, it points out what the lamestream media and the establishment really don’t want people hearing: that Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite and has always been supportive of Jews. Indeed, 21 rabbis wrote and signed a letter about this last year.

Manson was on Newsnight last week defending Jeremy Corbyn, and I gather that she has also been on two other programmes as well doing the same. This was too much for one member of the public, who stalked her and left an abusive message on her phone. The anonymous caller calls her  ‘Nazi scum’ and says that he wishes she burns ‘in the gas oven’ and ‘burns in hell in acid’. She has also said that she is regularly stopped in the street by aggressive individuals, angered at her support for Labour.

Mike in his article states that it seems to him that this is exactly what the witchhunters want. He mentions that this week Jeremy Corbyn was punched in the head by someone angry about his stance on Brexit, and wonders how long it will be before someone is physically attacked or worse by the supporters of the anti-Semitism witchhunt.

He speculates about what they would say if caught, and who they would claim had incited them to it. Mike states that it’s time the people stirring up this hatred were held to account. He concludes

Next time they make unfounded accusations, perhaps we should lodge complaints against them under the Public Order Act – fear or provocation of violence.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/03/15/listen-to-the-vile-hypocrisy-of-the-anti-semitism-witch-hunters/

If you want to hear the message, go to the Skwawkbox at: https://skwawkbox.org/2019/03/15/listen-horrific-antisemitic-voice-message-sent-to-left-wing-jewish-labour-activist/

The Skwawkbox also has another story about an Orthodox Jewish man, Shraga Stern, who was abused because he appeared with Jeremy Corbyn in a photograph taken at Finsbury Park Mosque commemorating the terrorist attack there last year. The message wasn’t as vitriolic as that directed at Manson. It just said ‘You appeared with Corbyn. Shame on you. Be careful’.

Orthodox Jewish man threatened over appearance with Corbyn

I don’t know if the people leaving these obscene messages are Jewish. Quite honestly, given some of the weird characters in organisations like Sussex Friends of Israel and North West Friends of Israel, they could well be gentiles. One Jewish anti-Zionist described some of the bizarre, twisted members of one of these group. One of them was a bloke, who claims to be an Orthodox Jew, despite the fact that he is very obviously not. But unfortunately, this kind of abuse is no aberration, whether it is hurled by Jews or gentiles. Tony Greenstein has described on his blog how he has received messages from Zionist Jews telling him that they wished he and his family had died in the Shoah, the Holocaust. He was also physically assaulted in Brighton by a Jewish American. To add insult to injury, Greenstein was himself arrested following this attack, though released without charge. And one of the videos for Jackie Walker’s one-woman performance about her unjust suspension from the Labour party on a fake charge of anti-Semitism included her reading out some of the vile hate messages she got. And they were absolutely horrific. She was called a ‘court Jew’ – the Jewish equivalent of the Black slur ‘house n***er’. She was also told, amongst other threats, that she should be lynched. As the video of her performance shows, this is especially horrific because her mother was an American civil rights activist, at a time when Blacks were really being lynched.

From the descriptions of their behaviour on a number of Jewish blogs, not just Greenstein’s, it’s very clear that the Zionist groups who turn up to protest events criticising Israel are very aggressive. They scream, shout, sneer and giggle at description of the IDF killing Palestinian children. They will also try to block the entrances into the venue where the event is being held. If flyers and leaflets are being handed out, they will try to snatch them from the grasp of the ordinary members of the public who ask for them. They also hobnob with members of the islamophobic mainstream Fascist right, like Britain First. The Israel lobby will also demonstrate with members of the Jewish Defence League and idiots wearing T-shirts supporting Kach, a far-right Israeli terror group. Given this, it seems to me that it may only be a matter of time before someone from these Fascist organisations takes out their rage physically on an innocent person, whose only crime is to be a Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn.

As for the anti-Semitic abuse hurled by Zionists at non-Zionist or Israel-critical Jews, this goes back a long way. A week or so ago I posted up a piece about how the language Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, used about diaspora Jews in his Das Judenstaat mirrored and prefigured Nazi and Fascist rhetoric. Herzl described contemporary diaspora Jews as ‘Yids’, who were small, dark, cringing and ugly, in contrast to the strong, proud, beautiful Hebrews who would arise with the new Jewish state. Alfred Kepel, in his book on the rise of Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, The Revenge of God, also talks about the bitter feelings Zionists have towards non-Zionist Jews. Many Zionist partly blamed the non-Zionist Jewish organisations in eastern Europe for the Holocaust, arguing that more Jews could have been saved if they’d encouraged them to emigrate to Israel. It’s a highly questionable assertion. Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of the Hungarian Zionists during the Second World War, struck a deal with the Nazis, in which tens of thousands of ordinary Jews were sent to the death camps in return for a minority being sent to Israel. It’s also been argued that what stopped Israel suffering the same fate as European Jewry was Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein. If the Nazi forces had broken through, then they would have occupied Palestine and murdered its Jewish inhabitants. Amongst the rhetoric Zionists use against their non-Zionist fellows, according to Kepel, is casting them as ‘Yids’, capering for the entertainment of their gentile, aristocratic lords. I think this is a literary trope, but it is obviously part of the accusation that non- or anti-Zionist Jews like Jackie Walker are ‘court Jews’.

It seems to me very strongly that the ugly abuse Jenny Manson and Shraga Stern have suffered is part of the racist, anti-Semitic rhetoric of Zionist fanatics.

And Mike is absolutely correct. It may well only be a matter of time before one of these fanatics takes it further, and physically attacks or kills a decent, self-respecting Jew, because as a Corbyn supporter they have to be ‘Nazi scum’ or a ‘court Jew’. Quite apart from the non-Jewish opponents of anti-Semitism and racism, who have suffered the same abuse.

It’s time to halt the racism by calling it what it is: hate speech, incitement to racial hatred and incitement to violence.

Guy Debord’s Cat on the Deceptive Charm of Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Fascist Entryism in the Tory Party

The current popularity amongst the Tories and their lackeys for Jacob Rees-Mogg is a particular concern of mine. Mogg is the highly privileged son of William Rees-Mogg, a titled member of the aristocracy, who wrote at various times for the Times and Independent. Rees-Mogg senior lived in one of the villages around Bath, if I recall correctly. His son is the Tory MP for north Somerset, just south of where I live in Bristol.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has somehow endeared himself to the Tories and part of the British public through his polite, aristocratic and anachronistic demeanour. He’s been called ‘the minister for the 18th century’. He now has a fan club, Moggmentum, in imitation of Corbyn’s support group of Momentum. He also has 25,000 followers on Twitter. One fan of his in Somerset is such a mad fan of his, that he had Mogg’s face tattooed on him, which became one of the evening’s news stories for the local news programme, Points West here in Bristol a few weeks ago. He’s so popular indeed, that he’s being touted as a possible successor to Theresa May.

This should terrify anyone, with any real idea of politics and the true state of this country. For his smooth, cultured and quiet-spoken politesse, Mogg’s own views are highly reactionary, and frankly horrific. He began his career as a politician campaign in Fife, where the major platform of his campaign was trying to convince impoverished fisherfolk that retaining an hereditary House of Lords was supremely important and beneficial. And as a blue-blooded aristo, he is convinced that the poor should be kept firmly in their place, serving and transferring whatever wealth they have to the rich and powerful. A little while ago Mike did a feature on him on his blog. He discussed the numerous instances in which Mogg had consistently voted down bills, which would improve conditions for the poor and disabled, and voted instead for cutting benefits and privatizing what’s left of the welfare state.

It probably isn’t too much to say that many of those, who vote for him either believe themselves to be of the same class as him, and so will also benefit by his efforts to restore aristocratic privilege. Or else they’re members of the lower classes, who have been convinced through repetition of the same claims down the generations that the aristocracy are the country’s natural rulers, and working people should know their place. Like the various servants Mum met while working in that part of Somerset, who voted Tory because that’s the way Master voted.

Guy Debord’s Cat has written a very good piece over on his site, describing just how vile Mogg and what he represents actually are. He writes

It’s a sure sign of the Conservative Party’s dearth of talent that Jacob Rees Mogg should be talked up as a possible successor to the hapless and utterly useless Theresa May. Many people find Moggy endearing. They love his plummy RP accent. They love his double-breasted suit jackets. They love his fustiness. They love his toffee-nosed demeanour and they love his apparently Waugh-esque wit. At Nowhere Towers we take a different view: we find him tiresome and representative of an ages old problem with Britain. Namely, he reeks of privilege and his accent and ‘eccentric’ charm masks a ruthlessness and cruelty that is common to many members of his class.

When it comes to loving one’s oppressor, the Brits have both rationalized and elevated their oppression a fine art. We love our posh bastards. Don’t we? Remember how people fawned over Bozza? I haven’t forgotten. Both of them went to Eton and Oxford. Both of them are seen as rather buffoonish, though for very different reasons. And both are seen as thoroughly British eccentrics. But that’s the problem: many people refuse to see through their media-constructed façades and choose to see oh-so-disarming posh twits instead. Please, wake up!

That Moggy should be touted by some Tories as a counterweight to Jeremy Corbyn’s soaring popularity speaks volumes about the parlous condition of his party and the dire health of our media.

He goes on to mention three articles taking apart Mogg, his highly deceptive appeal, exposing what he really represents, from Skwawkbox, the New Statesman and Victor Lewis-Smith. But he goes on to discuss an event the other articles don’t. This is the time in 2013 when Mogg went off to a formal, black tie dinner with the Traditional Britain Group. His article includes a photo from the evening, showing Mogg seated next to two truly horrific fixtures of the British Far Right, Jack Buckby of the Cultural Nationalists and the BNP, and Gregory Lauder-Frost.

The Traditional Britain Group itself, from what I’ve seen of it, is another xenophobic, anti-immigrant, racist group, which particularly despises Islam. They also want to restore the old class system and privatize the NHS. Gerry Gable of the anti-Nazi organization, Searchlight, warned Mogg not to attend. But he did. When he was exposed by the press, he made a gushing Mea Culpa condemning racism, distancing himself from them, and claimed he had been misinformed and acted in ignorance.

To me, this is less than convincing. As the French philosophical feline points out, most people if invited to attend a function by a group they know nothing about would try to know what it stood for first.

The article then goes on to discuss just how unpleasant Buckby and Lauder-Frost are. As well as founding the National Culturalists, which was banned on campus as a racist, Fascist organization by the Students’ Guild at Liverpool University, Buckby was also a member of the BNP. He was their candidate for the Batley and Spen bye-election, caused by the assassination of Jo Cox. Which shows this character’s complete lack of class. He was also press officer for Liberty GB. The Cat’s article states that it is anti-immigration. That’s true, but it’s also specifically against one ethnic group of immigrants: Muslims. It was founded as part of the Islamophobic ‘counter-jihad’ movement by many of the same people involved in the EDL.

Demonstrating Buckby’s personal nastiness, the Cat’s article has a clip of him being interviewed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 News, along with an Irish expert on White supremacist and Fascist movements and a young Black woman from Black students’ group. Guru-Murthy makes it very clearly that he despises Buckby’s views, but has to interview him as part of the programme’s mission to investigate minority opinions. Buckby spends much of the interview vehemently denying that he is at all racist, while loudly declaring that we shouldn’t allow more Muslim immigrants into the country because of their inherently violent, criminal nature. When one of the two women argues against him, he replies by saying ‘I hope you don’t get raped.’ Because all Muslims are rapists, right?

Lauder-Frost, it seems, is a former member of the Monday Club, who used to chair their Foreign Affairs Committee, and is the Traditional Britain Group’s vice-president and treasurer. Before joining them, he was one of the steering committee of the Conservative Democratic Alliance, formed by disaffected members of the Monday Club. There’s also a clip of him being interviewed on Vanessa Feltz’s radio show. Lauder-Frost spends much of the interview sneering at Doreen Lawrence, whom he feels should not have been elevated to the House of Lords. Because she’s ‘a nothing’, who he claims hasn’t done anything for this country and despises it. It’s not hard to see behind his attitude a mixture of racism and sheer class snobbery. Doreen Lawrence is a Black woman, and not a member of the British aristocracy. Hence Lauder-Frost is utterly horrified at her taking a seat in the upper house.

Now it’s true that Doreen Lawrence has made statements where she has said she doesn’t have any love for this country. Or that’s how it’s been reported. It grates, but she has every right. Her son, Stephen, was murdered by a gang of racist thugs, who got off scot-free. The Met investigating his murder was corrupt and riddled with racism, and the thugs were the sons of notorious gang bosses. See the press coverage at the time, and also Private Eye passim ad nauseam. She then dedicated her life to trying to obtain justice for her murdered child. This is a far better reasons for being given an honour than simply being Dave Cameron’s hairdresser.

Lauder-Frost also waffles on about how immigrant groups don’t support this country at sports matches, which recalls Norman Tebbitt’s infamous comment about coloured immigrants not supporting Britain at cricket. He also recommends that we should go back to the Tory party’s 1970s promise for ‘assisted repatriation’ for coloured immigrants to go back to their countries of origin. Feltz is definitely not impressed, and pointedly asks him where she should go, as she’s Jewish, and one set of her grandparents came from Poland, while another of her antecedents was also not British. Lauder-Frost simply says that if he was a Zionist, he would say she should go to Israel. To cap it all, Lauder-Frost is also a massive fan of the Nazis. No wonder Feltz was unimpressed. As were no doubt every other decent person listening to the programme, regardless of ethnicity or religious beliefs.

The TBG was also invited to a dinner by the Bow Group, another outfit like the Monday Club on the extreme right of the Tories. The Cat cites Louise Haigh, the Labour politico, who managed to get the Nazi youth group, Britain First, banned, who states very clearly that Lauder-Frost’s comments about Doreen Laurence and assisted repatriation are racist, and that the Bow Group should not invited them to their functions.

The TBG’s other vice-president is Professor John Kersey, a traditionalist Roman Catholic clergyman, a professor at a right-wing university with branches in the Caribbean and West Africa, who is nostalgic for the old days of feudalism. If you follow the link on the Cat’s blog, you come to a site for the British followers of the Austrian Libertarian, Von Mises. Kersey is also the Director of Cultural Affairs of the Libertarian Alliance.

Other members of the Traditional Britain Group are Stuart Millson and Jonathan Bowden. Together these two charmers founded the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus. Millson was also a former member of the BNP and an officer in Western Goals, which the Cat describes as ‘semi-Fascist’. He’s not alone in this assessment. Western Goals also got into the pages of Lobster as a Far Right organization. Also in the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus was Mark Cotterill a former member of the NF. The Cat then describes how Millson joined the Tories despite being a member of the BNP and having had dinner with Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Tories refused to throw him out, and Millson only resigned after this was exposed by the Mirror.

The Cat’s article concludes

The Tories may deny it, but many of their members are sympathetic to groups like the TBG. Indeed, in the 1970s NF members joined local Conservative Clubs and were members of the Monday Club. Others are members of The Freedom Association, the faux libertarian pressure group that talks warmly about their idea of ‘freedom’, while working hard to deny it to others. Tories may complain about ‘entryism’ in the Labour Party, but for decades extreme-right entryists joined the party and they’re still joining.

Moggy’s antiquated views are only matched by his sartorial style. If you find him amusing or endearing, you might want to ask yourself this: what kind of friends are the TBG? Rees Mogg only apologised when he got caught by Liberal Conspiracy. If that had never happened, Moggy would have got away with it. Makes you wonder…

The Cat’s article also has a link to the original piece by the Liberal Conspiracy website.

For more information, see: https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/friends-like-these/

The Cat certainly ain’t wrong about Fascist infiltration of the Tory party. Lobster a few decades ago devoted several pieces to exposing this. And it’s something else you won’t see being reported by the Beeb. Way back in the 1980s the BBC was due to screen a Panorama expose, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’, on the Far Right’s infiltration of the Tory. Maggie and the Tories, however, threw a strop and the BBC was forced to spike the programme.

As for the Libertarians, their definition of liberty is definitely reserved only for the upper classes. They hate socialism, trade unions and organized labour. I can’t remember which one of the libertarian organisations actually did it, but one of them invited the head of a central American death squad to their annual dinner. As for Kersey being a fan of feudalism, this adds a new dimension to Von Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom. Von Hayek thought it was socialism, but as subsequent events show, it’s really the far right-wing economics he advocated.

Libertarians have always denied being Fascists, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that’s exactly what they are. I’ve put up several pieces from the American YouTuber, Reichwing Watch, on how Libertarian not only shares many of the same tenets and attitudes of Fascism and Nazism, but that its adherents are beginning to admit this quite openly. One Black YouTuber, ‘That Guy T’, discusses and advocates ‘anarcho-Fascism’ on his vlog.

As for Mogg, while he denies sharing the Traditional Britain Group’s racism, he certainly shares their attitude towards aristocratic privilege, and keeping the poor and marginalized so. It shows how corrupt and class-ridden this country is that this man is at all popular, let alone an MP and possible successor to May.

The Euthanasia of the Elderly in Stephen Baxter’s ‘Titan’

A few days ago I put up a post about the nightmare, alternative future described by the British SF novelist Stephen Baxter in his novel, Titan. Baxter’s a writer of hard SF, a subgenre in which the fiction is nevertheless grounded in solid, known science fact, though often with an element of artistic license. Titan was written in 1995, and is partly set in the decaying America of the first decades of the 21st century. A militantly anti-science president, Maclachlan, has been elected with the support of the Ku Klux Klan and Christian fundamentalists. Maclachlan shuts down NASA for good after a shuttle disaster. The launch complexes are closed down. Those that aren’t demolished become simply tourist attractions, as do the agency’s headquarters and mission control. One of these, a museum to the Apollo moon landings, is altered so that it promotes instead the spiritual experiences many of the astronauts did have during their missions. Maclachlan also introduces legislation demanding that only the Aristotelian cosmology of Thomas Aquinas, with its crystal spheres, is taught in schools. What is left of the agency is given over to the USAF under the paranoid and nationalistic General Hartle, who is very much like the rogue American General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s classic nuclear black comedy, Doctor Strangelove.

Against this, the agency attempts to launch one last, great space mission, a crewed voyage to Titan, where the Cassini probe has found evidence of active biological chemistry.

I commented in my post on the remarkable similarity between the policies of the fictional Maclachlan and Donald Trump. Maclachlan is fiercely nationalistic, and withdraws American peacekeepers from their stations around the globe, as well as pulling America out of NAFTA and the various other free trade agreements. America also pulls out of the World Bank and the IMF, and the UN is kicked out of New York. Like the real anti-Semites of the America Far Right, Maclachlan believes that the US is under ‘Israeli occupation’. Maclachlan also dismantles the country’s welfare programmes, especially those benefiting Blacks and other minorities, and starts building a wall with Mexico.

He also devises a policy to deal with America’s increasingly aging society: euthanasia chambers for the unwanted or neglected elderly. These are euphemistically called ‘Happy Booths’. There’s a very touching scene in which the last, fictitious surviving Apollo spaceman, Marcus White, is gassed to death in one of these chambers by a couple of nurses, who are every bit as malign as Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. By this time, however, White is so confused with dementia, that he is lost in the delusion that he is back as a middle-aged man at NASA in his prime, suiting up and breathing the pure oxygen in preparation for another flight to the Moon.

This is interesting, as it completely turns on its head one of the truly despicable pieces of propaganda the Republicans were running ten years ago to make sure the American public didn’t get single-payer healthcare. Instead, we had Sarah Palin and the rest of the maniacs screaming that the introduction of single-payer healthcare, where all Americans would have free medical treatment financed by the state, would lead to ‘death panels’. Palin herself made a speech about how she didn’t want her children facing them. The idea was under a socialist system, medical care would be rationed. Those individuals deemed to be a waste of state money and resources, such as the elderly, would thus be humanely killed.

It was a disgusting piece of propaganda, based partly on the murder of the disabled in Nazi Germany. The Nazis were also pro-euthanasia, producing propaganda forms with titles such as I Don’t Want to Be Born. It was also based partly on the vile views of some of the founders of the Fabian Society, particularly H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, who were very much in favour of eugenics and the sterilization of the biologically unfit.

Unfortunately, many Americans were taken in by this bilge. There was a BBC report on the truly horrific state of American healthcare, in which a clinic offering free treatment in California immediately attracted 50,000 + prospective patients. These are the 20 per cent of Americans, who couldn’t afford their private healthcare before the introduction of Obamacare. The Beeb’s reported also attracted the attention of Republican supporters, who’d believed all the rubbish they’d been fed by Palin and her stormtroopers. One of these was an elderly man, who rushed up to the Beeb’s crew and shouted ‘Your healthcare system stinks!’ When they politely asked him how so, he looked confused, and began to mutter about ‘death panels’.

There are no death panels in Britain, or anywhere else with a socialized, or state-funded medical system. As for Germany, state financing of medical treatment for the workers was introduced by Bismarck in the 1870s, nearly fifty years before the Nazis seized power. There is a problem, where dying individuals may be refused treatment of expensive and/or experimental drugs or other procedures on the NHS because the costs far exceed any chance of success. This is very much a controversial issue, as we’ve seen the past week with the parents fighting to send their dying son over to America for treatment. However, there are no death panels.

The ‘Happy Booths’ described in the book are a piece of artistic invention by Baxter. Conventional Christian morality rejects euthanasia for the same reasons it has traditionally ruled out abortion, except in certain very restricted circumstances. This is because both judge that there are certain forms of human beings, such as the unborn and the disabled, who are held not to have the same rights to life. If it is permitted to kill the disabled and the unborn, it is argued, there is a danger that the same attitude will spread to other groups also considered inferior, like the Jews and other ‘untermenschen’ in Nazi Germany. And Baxter is aware of this, as elsewhere in the book he describes how the British relative of one of the astronauts, stricken by CJD or ‘Mad Cow Disease’, is going to a euthanasia clinic even though their parents consider it unchristian.

A president dependent on the support of right-wing Christian fundamentalists would alienate a sizable part of his constituency if he did. What happens instead is that, through its hostility to state medicine and the welfare state, Republican politicians of Maclachlan’s type make it impossible for the poor, severely ill to support themselves. Hence Bernie Sanders’ chilling statistic that 50,000 Americans die each year because they cannot afford private medical treatment.

This is basically the same attitude of Tory party under David Cameron and Theresa May. They have extended the sanctions system and the Work Capability Tests to make it as difficult as possible for the unemployed and the disabled to quality for state support. The result of that has been that researchers at Oxford University found that in 2015 alone, 30,000 people died through the Tories’ austerity policies. And Mike over at Vox Political reported yesterday that, according to the Skwawkbox, there’s a nasty clause in Universal Credit, which means that the claimant has to find a job in two years, or they lose their benefit.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/07/17/uc-gives-disabled-people-just-two-years-to-find-a-job-or-lose-everything/

This is a right-wing ‘genocide of the disabled’, as Mike, Johnny Void, Stilloaks, Tom Pride and the Angry Yorkshireman have said on their blogs, and Jeffrey, one of the great commenters here, has said on this. But it’s carefully hidden. The victims aren’t actually killed, they’re simply left to die. And the few politicos, who dare to call it what it is, are denied their ability to sit in parliament.

On Friday Mike commented on a piece in the Disability News Service about Mr. Jared O’Mara, a disabled Lib Dem MP, who has called the Tories’ policies towards the disabled ‘eugenics’, and stated that they want disabled people to ‘suffer and die’. Mr. O’Mara is to be commended for the way he tried to tackle Iain Duncan Smith, the former head of the DWP and therefore the government’s chief minister responsible for implementing this policy. However, Mr. O’Mara finds it impossible to find anywhere in the House of Commons to sit during debates. There is insufficient seating for all 650 MPs, and there is no form available for disabled MPs to fill in stating that they have particular seating needs. As Mike says, this is all very suspicious.

Disabled MP accuses Tories of ‘eugenics’ – is that why they won’t let him take a seat?

As a religious person, I can’t say I’m happy about the anti-religious stance of Titan. I went to a Christian college for my undergraduate degree, and some of the students were Creationists. I am not saying that their literalist reading of the creation story in Genesis is correct, but I have to say that they were, by and large, decent people. Those I met weren’t racists or political extremists, and I know that one or two were actually left-wing. I also can’t say that they were anti-science, outside of the very specific field of evolution. Moreover, since the election of Donald Trump there has been the emergence of a religious Left in America, something which couldn’t have been predicted when Baxter wrote the book back in the 1990s. One of the authors of the collection of articles attacking the Neo-Cons, Confronting the New Conservatism, pointed out that the Neo-Cons were not necessarily going to be politically dominant for ever. Kansas, and many of the other mid-western Republican states, had in the 1920s been centres of the Social Gospel movement, which combined Christianity and Socialism. It’s possible that as more Americans recognize how truly disgusting Trump and his party are, Christians over the other side of the Pond may return to it.

However, Trump and his administration are anti-science. The Republican party is strongly opposed to climate change, and so there has been a concerted attack on environmentalism since Trump took office. Legislation protecting America’s glorious natural heritage has been repealed, and federal scientists responsible for monitoring the environment have been effectively gagged. They may not publish any scientific papers supporting climate change, and the federal agency itself has been effectively gutted.

Titan also portrays a future suffering from global warming and catastrophic climate change, as do very many of the SF novels written during the same decade, such as Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather. So far Trump hasn’t wound up NASA, though I don’t doubt that the agency is still under considerable pressure to keep expenses under control. But the real harm is being done by Trump’s deliberate rejection of climate change to appease powerful donors from industry, particularly the Kochs in big oil. This denial of climate change, and that of the other world leaders, will lead to the deaths of millions worldwide. If it hasn’t already.

Lobster on Blair and the Israel Lobby

On Sunday, Mike reported a story from the Skwawkbox, that Louise Ellman, the MP for Riverside, and Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement and vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, and her cronies blocked calls for an investigation into Israel’s influence in the Labour party. The Skwawkbox noted that the Jewish Labour Movement was notorious because of its links Havoda, the pro-apartheid Israeli Labour party, while the latter, Labour Friends of Israel was mentioned by an official at the Israeli embassy, who was filmed by al-Jazeera talking about how he set up pro-Israel groups within the Labour party. And both organisations are behind the discredited, but still persisting, slurs about anti-Semitism in the Labour party.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/02/05/jewish-labour-movement-chair-and-exec-block-call-for-investigation-into-israeli-interference/

Ellman and her friends are staunch Zionists, so of course she’s going to do whatever she can to stop an inquiry into the grubby activities of her organisations in manipulating the Labour party.

In response to the Al-Jazeera’s revelations, Robin Ramsay, the editor of Lobster, has put up a piece from his 2002 book, The Rise of New Labour, describing how Blair’s contacts with the Israel lobby were partly responsible for his rise to the Labour leadership. Ramsay notes that Blair had always been sympathetic to Israel. When he became an MP, he joined Labour Friends of Israel, and he shared chambers with Eldred Tabachnik, head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. In January 1994 he and his wife, Cherie, went on holiday to Israel, all at the expense of the Israeli government. Two months later, Blair was introduced to the businessman Michael Levy at a dinner party arranged by the number two diplomat at the Israeli embassy, Gideon Meir. Levy was impressed with Blair, and after John Smith’s death was responsible for raising £7 million for Blair’s personal use. Ramsay’s article gives the names, duly sourced, of some of those who donated money to the future Labour leader. They were

‘….a group of businessmen involved in Jewish charities whose decisions to give to Labour have been crucially influenced by the party’s strong pro-Israeli stance under both Tony Blair and his predecessor John Smith……Levy brought the world of North London Jewish business into the Labour Party…..some of the names whom Levy persuaded to donate include Sir Emmanuel Kaye of Kaye Enterprises, Sir Trevor Chinn of Lex Garages, Maurice Hatter of IMO Precision Control and David Goldman of the Sage software group…it is clear, however, that for this group Blair’s (and Smith’s before him) strong support for Israel is an important factor, especially with those such as Kaye, Chinn and Levy himself, who raise large sums for Israeli causes. Nick Cosgrave, director of Labour Friends of Israel, says Blair “brought back Labour Friends of Israel into the Labour Party, in a sense …….before the majority of supporters of Labour Friends felt uncomfortable with the Labour Party”.’

This allowed Blair to become independent of the Labour Party and the trade unions. He used the money to hire Alistair Campbell as his press officer and Jonathan Powell as his chief of staff.

Gideon Meir was also credited by Israel’s Jabotinsky Institute as cultivating both Blair and Gordon Brown, and making them favourable to the Israeli side in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Ramsay concludes

Blair joined Labour Friends of Israel and the Israelis helped to get him elected leader. He might have made it on his own – after four general election defeats the Labour Party was ripe for a televisual, middle class, Thatcherite, young careerist – but the money raised by Levy helped and made him independent of the Party.

See: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster73/blair-israel.pdf

This explains the very close relationship between the Blairites and the Israel lobby, and how both of them were deeply intertwined in the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum.

Ramsay’s article is also interesting as it notes that Blair hated the Labour party and viewed it as his enemy. According to the Daily Mail, c. 1997, an unnamed barrister friend of Blair said that he joined it simply because he thought he’d rise faster in Labour than the Tories. Ramsay remarks that it sounds like the authentic statement of a careerist, but then again, it does come from the Daily Mail, which Michael Foot called ‘the Forger’s Gazette’.

Vox Political on the Unreported Bullying by the Blairites

Mike yesterday also published an excellent piece supporting an article by Rachel Heeds in the Huffington Post. Heeds had writing an article about the bullying of Corbynistas by the Blairites. She talks about how, far from seeing violent racist thugs at Momentum rallies, she has just seen normal people talking and discussing. Occasionally the discussion gets heated, but she’s never seen anyone storm the stage or hurl abuse. As for Momentum supporters, many of them are ladies of a certain age more likely to bake cakes for events in support of Corbyn than anything remotely violent or abusive.

But the Blairites have resorted to abuse and bullying in order to shout down their opponents. Mike states he’s suffered from it in the last few days. I know other people, who’ve also commented on the sheer venom and scatological abuse directed at Corbyn and his supporters on social media. But Tom Watson has done nothing. Indeed, he and the other Blairites in the Parliamentary Labour Party have taken the lead in hurling this abuse, through the hysterical accusations of Trotskyite infiltration. Heeds has also talked to Corbyn supporters, who have been left seriously distressed by some of these allegations, including those in the Mirror about ‘Gulags’, and Mark Foster’s splenetic denunciation in the Mail Online last Sunday about Momentum as a gang of Nazi stormtroopers.

One of those left distressed and upset by that article is Rachel Nesbitt, the other of the Facebook page, Jeremy Corbyn’s Terrible Thugs – #Thuginistas. Nesbitt is Jewish, and part of the distinguished Horvitz family, a group which played a leading role in European Judaism for centuries. Like very many British Jews, she also lost family members during the Holocaust. Now she finds herself smeared as the very people, who murdered her family, by Foster. You don’t need much imagination to sympathise with her deep outrage at this vile smear.

And all this is done to shut down debate, by people who are accusing Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters of doing so.

See Mike’s article http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/19/labour-party-bullies-like-tom-watson-and-michael-foster-must-not-be-allowed-to-win/ and following the links to Heed’s piece in the Huffington Post.

One of the worst hypocrites in this bullying is Angela Eagle, who stood up and stated that ‘we need a kinder, gentler style of politics’ while spouting the lie about Corbyn supporters shoving a brick through her constituency office window. There’s also more than element of hypocrisy in Foster’s vile smear about Momentum supporters being Nazis. There’s the obvious fact that Momentum supporters aren’t anti-Semites, and Corbyn’s supporters include many Jews and people of Jewish heritage. Mike also covered a piece by the Skwawkbox, which did a point-for-point rebuttal of Foster’s allegations, starting with the fact that he had walked calmly through a Momentum demonstration for quite a long time before anything happened. If they Momentum really was a hard-right organisation of Jew Haters, quite simply he wouldn’t have been able to do this. The real Fascist organisations are violent thugs, many of whom have committed murder. They have absolutely no qualms about attacking and savagely beating trade unionists, Jews, Blacks, Asians and Leftists when- or wherever they find them. If Momentum were like them, Foster wouldn’t be able to walk around them for five minutes before the abuse, threats and violence started.

But there’s another issue surrounding Foster’s slur. Foster has accused other Jews of being Nazis, which is exactly the same accusation that was leveled at Red Ken. Leninspart was accused a few years ago, if you remember, of anti-Semitism because he had allegedly compared a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard. I’ve read accounts of the incident by others outside the Right-wing media, which recited this allegation. I’ve forgotten the details, but it’s not quite like they portrayed. Livingstone isn’t an anti-Semite. I’ve made this point again and again. You only have to read his condemnation of racism, and the British state’s active recruitment of Nazis, including those actively involved in the Holocaust and pogroms, in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, to see that. And the same accusation has been made against Jews and people of Jewish heritage like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and now Rachel Nesbitt, either personally or simply because of their membership of Momentum.

But Foster has not been accused of anti-Semitism for his allegations like Livingstone, or the Jewish people he smeared. This shows very clearly the hypocrisy and double standards of the Blairites and right-wing media. It’s disgusting, and shows once again why these papers and broadcasters can’t be trusted.

Vox Political on Jeremy Corbyn Turning Down Media Hustings

Mike over at Vox Political yesterday also put up a very good article about a piece in the Huffington Post. This article claimed that leaked emails from Corbyn’s office showed how paranoid the Labour leader was, because his campaign manager, John Lansman, had attacked the Mirror, Guardian, New Statesman and Channel 4 as hostile outlets, who could not be trusted. The three papers and TV channel had offered to hold hustings debates between Owen Smith and Corbyn. Mike makes the point in his article that Corbyn and Lansman aren’t actually paranoid about turning them down. All of these organisations have been hostile to Corbyn, including the Huffington Post itself. They aren’t impartial and can’t be trusted as moderators. He also shows how the press distorts any pro-Corbyn message by pointing to the way Billy Bragg was treated by the Times, Mail, Express and Metro.

See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/18/corbyn-is-right-to-turn-down-hustings-events-due-to-concerns-about-bias/

Rather than undermining Corbyn, this may have the opposite effect of further isolating and undermining the press. James Curran and Jean Seaton in their Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (London: Routledge 1987) point out that large corporate conglomerates purchased many of the newspaper chains in order to influence public policy in their favour. But the press is in serious decline. It’s threatened by the rise of social media and bloggers. People are getting their news from other sources, and the reaction of the established old media is defensive. I’ve commented before about how journalists and news people, including those in the Beeb, have huffed at the supposed threat to journalistic standards by the rise of independent media, and warned that this is a dire threat to society as it will break up the social consensus provided by the major news outlets. Which is a frank admission that they’re very worried about the decline in their power and ability to influence public thinking towards what they see as the correct view. Obama was credited as winning the election that thrust him into the White House eight years ago largely through support on the internet. This was put forward on British television by the American comedian Reginald D. Hunter at the time. Mike’s also blogged about a piece on the Skwawkbox blog, pointing out how well Corbyn has done by cutting the Tories’ lead from 16 points to five when the entire press is against him, arguing that the Fourth Estate has shot itself in the foot. See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/18/as-corbyns-labour-closes-to-five-points-has-the-establishment-shot-itself-in-the-foot-the-skwawkbox-blog/ and follow the link to the original article.

Corbyn is therefore a major threat to the media’s corporate power. They depend for much of their income on advertising. One of the radical Labour papers that folded in the 1950s/60s did so because, as a working class paper, it couldn’t attract the advertising it needed to keep itself afloat. At the time it had 1.25 million readers, which was five times more than the Times. The section in Curran and Seaton on this issue in the above book. The circulation of the Times and Torygraph is rapidly plummeting to the million level, if it hasn’t done so already. The Torygraph has shed reader at a colossal rate, not least because of the shameless way it distorts content to please the advertisers. If Corbyn gets re-elected as leader of the Labour party, as it’s almost certain he will, this would demonstrate the increasing inability of the press to influence politics. And if, as I sincerely hope, he becomes Prime Minister, then that’s it. It’ll show just how impotent the press and broadcasting corporations have become. And they will suffer for it. Advertisers will probably want reductions in the fees charged because their proven inability to influence the population as they claim. They will also find themselves treated much less seriously as sources of news and information by the rest of the population, which will really damage their sense of importance.

In short, the press has far more to lose from being ignored by Corbyn than he has. And as this carries on, their desperation will become very evident.

Vox Political on the Skwawkbox Interview with the Man behind the anti-Blairite T-Shirt

The Skwawkbox blog, which was partly set up to campaign against the privatisation of the NHS, has managed to track down and interview ‘Ged’, the elderly gentleman wearing the notorious anti-Blairite T-shirt. Ged was photographed wearing the shirt, bearing the slogan ‘Eradicate Blairite Scum’, flanked by two of the very people the shirt condemns: Lewis Parker of Portland, and Anna Philips of Progress. In the past few weeks there have been numerous stories about that shirt. It was said that Ged was tricked into wearing it by the two jokers as part of a smear campaign against the Corbynites. I was taken in by this story, and repeated it on my blog. However, Ged states that the T-shirt is genuine. Ged states that he’s a genuine follower of Corbyn, and, like millions of others, was inspired by his opposition to Thatcherism. He said he had the shirt made after the May Day rally. He also states that most people realised that the shirt was talking about political eradication.

This has changed after he was photographed with Phillips and Parker. Neither of the two told him, who they were. And so the rumour has grown up that he was part of their campaign to smear the Corbynites. This has reached the extreme of a story that he is part of an underground group inspired by the murder of Jo Cox. Ged strenuously denies this, calling it ‘absolute filthy rubbish’. Ged states that he was not part of any such campaign to smear Corbyn, nor did he intend to incite anyone to violence, especially as he is a union health and safety officer.

Ged’s own health is not good. He has been treated for mouth cancer, this added additional worry about his physical safety. Nobody assaulted him, but he did become paranoid because people gave him a wide berth and stared at him.

Mike states that Ged has been so clearly misrepresented by the two Blairites, that he has an excellent case for bringing a libel action. He says

It seems ‘Ged’ may have a very secure case for libel against the other people in the photograph. Clearly it would not have been used in the way it has if they had not taken it, and then spread lies about it.

Would any lawyer care to take on the case? It seems easy money, to This Writer!

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/07/27/vermin-t-shirt-wearer-tracked-down-its-not-what-weve-been-told-the-skwawkbox-blog/

and following the links to the original interview.

I think losing a libel action brought on behalf of ‘Ged’, and the wider community supporting Jeremy Corbyn, would have a very salutary action on the Blairites. Their whole campaign has been one long stream of abuse and misrepresentation after another. Eagle claimed she was abused at a Labour party meeting because of her sexuality, when no such thing occurred. The mother of another woman, who had married her female partner, testified to that. Eagle also lied about a brick being thrown through her office window. That also never occurred. And then there were the accusations of anti-Semitism brought against Red Ken, Naz Shah, Jackie Walker and others. Leninspart is many things, but he is demonstrably not an anti-Semite. You only have to look at his speeches and writing condemning all forms of racism, including against the Irish and anti-Semitism. Indeed, he devotes pages in his book, Livingstone’s Labour, to attacking the Labour party because it gave sanctuary after the War to Nazis, convicted of the most horrendous crimes against humanity, including active participation in pogroms against the Jews and the Holocaust. These monsters were given safety in Britain, because it was believed they could assist British intelligence in the Cold War against Communism. Jackie Walker is of mixed Black and Jewish heritage. Her Black British mother was thrown out of America for participating in the Civil Rights agitation. Her father is a Russian Jew, and therefore probably knows more than most about anti-Semitism. Walker is also an ardent campaigner against racism and prejudice, including anti-Semitism, and her partner is also Jewish. As for Naz Shah, she was on good terms with her local synagogue. This should say for itself that she isn’t anti-Semitic.

I’d say that these people have an excellent case for libel against the Blairites accusing them of anti-Semitism, particularly Jackie Walker. She said in an interview that her partner’s family had broken off contact with her. Clearly, this should constitute proof that the accusation has cause demonstrable distress and harm to her interests.

I’m not sure whether such libel actions would succeed, however, as in Britain you’re guilty unless proven rich. And New Labour had some very rich donors. Nevertheless, in my eyes and opinion New Labour has committed libel, and any attempt to claim otherwise in a court of law is flagrant perjury.

From 2011: Government Appoints A4E to Design Contracts for Private Welfare Schemes

This is another story from Private Eye, this time from 2011. According to the Eye for 30th September – 13th October 2011, the government was awarding A4E the contract for designing the rules under which A4E, amongst other contractors, would bid to provide public welfare and social services.

Welfare Reform

Contract Claws

The Cabinet Office has appointed A4E, one of the government’s biggest contractors, to design the kind of contracts for which it will itself bid.

A4E will design the “payments by results” rules for the welfare contracts funded by “social impact bonds”, the government’s new big idea for public services. By putting its main welfare contractor in charge of designing welfare contracts, the department is effectively repeating one of the central failure of the private finance initiative.

The contract is worth up to £300,000 and covers pilot schemes in four regions to help families with multiple problems. Private investors fund welfare and social work schemes and the government then pays the investors back over years based on the public money “saved” by unemployed people finding work or ex-offenders staying out of jail.

The Cabinet Office is seeking “more innovative financiers, with a bigger appetite for risk”, so it will take very tight contracts to prevent these aggressive investors getting big returns over long periods for ill-defined “savings”, as the PFI example shows. Asking A4E to guarantee the “robustness of the savings estimates” seems perverse as the firm has repeatedly failed to give good results on its existing welfare-to-work contracts (Eyes passim), and it has every interest in government contracts being as soft as possible.

A4E may be excluded from bidding for the contracts it is drawing up in Birmingham, Leicestershire, Hammersmith and Westminster (all Conservative councils); but exclusion is not automatic; A4E is being asked to guard against “cream skimming/cherry picking” and ensure “value for money” – but critics say that A4E is itself guilty of the former and does not offer the latter.

Such conflicts of interest and soft corruption are, of course, no strangers to welfare reform and the public-private contracts governments since Maggie Thatcher’s have pursued. The Skwawkbox today blogged on the close links between George Osborne and the company, which bought up many of the Royal Mail shares at a discount. Way back in the 1990s, one of big accountancy firms being employed by Major’s government to adjudicate the bids of companies competing for a government contract, then decided to bid themselves as they decided they were the best candidate. A4E in this instance is merely part of a long line of such cases. It was all part of the ‘sleaze’ of the Major years, of which a French politician said ‘You call it ‘sleaze’. In France we simply call it corruption.’ The point of such contracts in any case isn’t to guarantee quality of service, or provide transparency and accountability, but simply to award lucrative government money to big companies that will then reward the politicians concerned with directorships.