On the 18th of this month, Mike at Vox Political wrote a piece noting a YouGov poll that found that the majority of Tory members are hellbent on getting Brexit, even if it means the break-up of the United Kingdom, significant damage to its economy and even the destruction of the Tory party itself.
The poll found that, when asked the question whether they would be willing to avert Brexit if it meant Scotland or Northern Ireland leaving Britain, 63% and 59% of Tories would be quite happy to see those nations leave Britain. 61% said they would also be prepared to accept significant damage to Britain’s economy if we left the EU. 54% also said that they would be happy to see the Tory party destroyed for Brexit. Only 36% put their party’s survival before Brexit.
Commenting on this, Mike predicted in his article that Scottish SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon would mention it in her speech marking 20 years of devolution.
And now, according to the front page of today’s I, 28th June 2019, the leaders of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davidson, has warned that Boris’ determination to achieve Brexit whatever the cost – ‘do or die’ – risks breaking up the UK. She was therefore backing Jeremy Hunt instead. Davidson said
‘I want to see him [Johnson] make assurances that it’s not Brexit do or die, it’s the Union do or die. That’s exactly what we’ve seen from the other candidate in the race and that’s why he’s going to get my vote.’
The newspaper also reports that
Polling has suggested that if the former foreign secretary becomes prime minister it could boost support for Scottish independence. (p.6).
Mike reported that the only thing that would stop the Tories from demanding Brexit at the first opportunity is the likelihood that this would lead to Corbyn taking up the reigns of government. But, he concluded
such a government is more likely if they choose a leader committed to Brexit at any cost.
And at the moment, Boris Johnson is the the leading candidate in the Tory leadership contest, despite his determination to force through Brexit whatever the cost. The I has also reported that he’s said that those Tories opposed to a no-deal Brexit will not get posts in his government.
And I’m not at all surprised that the Tories are willing to risk the break-up of the EU. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve heard rumours that the Tories were on the verge of collapse during Blair’s tenure of office. So much so that they were considering changing their name to the ‘English Nationalists’. And I do remember reading an opinion piece in the Heil, which considered that the departure of Scotland from the Union would not significantly harm Conservatism. This claimed that it was only recently that the Tories in Scotland had called themselves Conservatives. Before then they were called the Unionist party. But this still goes back to the period after the early 18th century union with Scotland. What would be the point of having a unionist party, if there was no union, and no real likelihood of ever reviving it?
It just confirms that Brexit is very much an English demand, and the Tory Brexiteers are bitter English nationalists, neither more nor less.
And it flies in the face of the way the Tories under Thatcher appropriated Britishness, its symbols and history. I can remember one headline in the Sunday Telegraph, unsurprisingly about how wonder Thatcher was, had the headline ‘Don’t Call Them Boojwah, Call Them British!’ I think it was a quote from Maggie herself. But the Conservatism she promoted was deeply bourgeois and nationalistic to its core. They seemed to waste no opportunity to drape themselves in Union Flags, like Tim Brooke-Taylor in his Union flag waistcoat on the Goodies, but without the comic trio’s irony. In one programme about Thatcher and the Tory party, her husband, Dennis, declared that his favourite song was Rule Britannia. Which he then tried to sing, only to realise he didn’t know the words. And then there was their infamous 1987 election film, which seemed to show that they had singlehandedly won the Battle of Britain. This showed old wartime footage of Spitfires chasing about the skies, while an excited voice declared ‘Man was born free. It’s our fundamental right.’ Really? I thought the complete quote, from the first sentence or so of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract was ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ Which effectively describes the condition of everyone, who isn’t massively rich, under the Tories. The sadly departed Alan Coren commented drily about it on the News Quiz, calling it the Royal Conservative Airforce, and saying what a pity it all was for the Tories that after the War the servicemen all came back and voted Labour. Quite. But it does show how the Tories appropriated British patriotism.
And it also shows the reverse: how the Tories demonised anyone who didn’t share their chauvinism and racism – who wasn’t, as Thatcher put it, ‘one of us’ – was really an evil subversive intent on destroying Britain. Left-wing members of the Labour party, who supported the ‘troops out’ movement, like Tony Benn, land who made the reasonable point that to stop the violence we had to talk to Sinn Fein, were vilified as supporters of the IRA. And the same people, who wanted to thaw relations with the USSR instead of ramping up tensions like Reagan and Thatcher, because of the very real danger of nuclear Armageddon were also vilified as Communists by the Tories, the Tory press, and the press secret state.
Oh yes, and if Labour got in power under someone like Benn, Foote, Livingstone or even Neil Kinnock, when he actually believed in traditional Labour values, would destroy the economy.
But it isn’t Labour threatening to destroy the UK. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t telling the world that they’re content to break up the EU or consciously wreak the British economy, provided they get a disastrous policy through. It’s the Tories.
They’re the real subversives and destroyers of this nation. Which is why they have to make up bogus stories about the Labour party being full of anti-Semites, Trotskyites and Stalinists.
If you want to see a genuinely prosperous, united Britain, that’s fair to working people of every nation in this great country, vote Labour.
Because the Tories are happy to see it destroyed and impoverished.
Now that Tweezer is floundering about trying to keep herself and her wretched party from sinking on the black rocks of Brexit, they, the Blairites and the Israel lobby both within and outside the Labour party have taken to repeating the anti-Semitism. One of those who decided that he was going to try to whip up the witch hunt there again was Wes Streeting, who took it upon himself to dox and smear a 70-year old woman using a fabricated image on twitter.
Doxing is publishing someone’s name and personal details, like their address, on the internet without their consent. It’s against Twitter’s rules and is very dangerous. People have been personally threatened, attacked and their homes vandalized through others maliciously putting their personal details on the internet. In this case, Streeting decided he was going to dox Annie W-B because he’d decided that she’d dismissed anti-Semitism as a smear. He tweeted
Meet Ann . Ann dismisses anti-Semitism as a smear and says that hatred is being perpetrated by Emily [Benn] and Luciana [Berger] against innocent people who have never in their lives been anti-Semitic’.
He then goes to say ‘Let’s take a look in her back catalogue’.
But the tweet he was referring to did not dismiss anti-Semitism as a smear. It only dismissed the witch hunt against innocent people in the Labour for alleged anti-Semitism as a smear. Ann W-B actually posted this tweet, replying to Emily Benn raving about how brave Luciana Berger had been for standing up to anti-Semitism.
Oh please go away. Luciana Berger has done everything she possibly can to smear Mr Corbyn & over 500k members. #EnoughisEnough of the cost hatred being perpetuated by you and others towards innocent people who have never in their lives been antisemitic.
That these accusations are nothing but baseless lies and smears is amply shown by some of the very upstanding people, who have been accused. People like former Momentum Vice-President Jackie Walker, a Jewish woman of colour and civil rights activist; Marc Wadsworth, a Black anti-racism activist, who campaigned with the Board of Deputies of British Jews against anti-Semitic assaults by the BNP in the 1980s; Cyril Chilson, a former member of the IDF and the son of a Holocaust survivor and a heroic Russian Jewish airman; Ken Livingstone, who has always been notorious for his opposition to racism and the recruitment of real, genuine Nazis by the British secret state; Tony Greenstein, a Jewish anti-racism activist and campaigner. Because he campaigns against Zionism for the good reason that it is just another form of apartheid and Fascism. Tony Odoni, another Jewish anti-racist, for the same reason. And, of course, Mike, for defending Livingstone and Walker.
Then Streeting moved on to smearing Annie W-B with a doctored image. She was shown tweeting her approval of an image posted on Twitter by another person, which contained a spurious quote from Voltaire ‘To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize’. This was next to a giant hand coming down crushing a group of people. On its sleeve is a Magen David, a Star of David. Mike points out that the quote doesn’t actually come from Voltaire. It comes from an American Nazi and Holocaust-Denier Kevin Alfred Storm. As for the image, it has a variety of forms in which the symbol on the sleeve differs. In its most common form, there is no symbol. It’s possible that Annie W-B may have genuinely believed the quote was from Voltaire. I’ve come across it several times, and until Mike’s article did not know who was really responsible for it. Mike suggests other Labour members and supporters may have been tricked into liking it because of its similarity to Tony Benn’s ‘Five Essential Questions of Democracy’, which as Mike says, are ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?’ And the dodgy quote does look like something Voltaire would say as an Enlightenment philosopher and defender of free speech against institutional religion and absolute monarchy.
He also decided that she had to be an anti-Semite because she had also posted a series of comments attacking the Rothschilds. Mike says of this
Interesting subject, the Rothschilds: A hugely wealthy and influential business/banking organisation that is apparently immune from investigation under any circumstances because those questioning its actions may always be accused of anti-Semitism. Does anybody – apart from a witch-hunter – think that is reasonable? We can see that Mr Streeting does, but then, he stands with the witch-hunters.
And the family has immense personal power. Last year one of the continental members of the family appeared in a very brief article in the I. It reported that this man was having the indigenous people in one region of Zaire cleared out of their homes in order to make it his personal hunting preserve. It’s because of its wealth and power that the Rothschilds feature in many of the Nazi conspiracy theories about Jews, Freemasons and the Illuminati plotting the downfall of the White race. But they also have a very sordid past. They lent money to the Third Reich, even when it was known that the Nazis were persecuting and exterminating the Jews. But because the Rothschilds themselves are the subjects of so many conspiracy theories, any person asking serious questions about their influence and power is automatically tarred as an anti-Semite themselves.
The peeps on Twitter immediately pointed out to Streeting that what he had done to Annie W-B was wrong. Not only had he published her name, but it, and the story, had been picked up by BBC news. This was far too far, and they began writing complaints to the Labour party about Streeting, with one person stating it was a sackable offence. Unbelievably, the complaints team said that Streeting’s actions did not contravene Labour policy. Which made them all the more determined to press their complaints and escalate it.
As for Streeting, he then went off and attacked Mike for being an anti-Semite using the old, and now absolutely discredited Sunday Times article. Which left Mike demanding that, if it was an attempt to smear him, he wanted an apology.
The controversy continued when Jenny Formby got involved. She was upset that Streeting was being ‘tried by twitter’ and so asked everyone to send their complaints into the Labour party’s Compliance Unit instead, so that they could all move on to attacking the Tories. She was then bitterly attacked in her turn by angry Labour party supporters, furious that the Blairites were able to smear and bully ordinary party members as they pleased without Formby or anyone else for that matter taking any kind of disciplinary action. As proof of this, Mike cited the example of one individual, who was thrown out for liking the music of the Foo Fighters, while Streeting himself went unpunished for what should have been a disciplinary offence. Some people stated that it was high time the Blairites were kicked out of the party. The sheer number of complaints about their behaviour on Twitter showed how deeply unpopular the various right-wing members of the Parliamentary Labour Party are. Finally, to show just how unfair the system is, Mike put up the case of Karen, a Labour party member, who told Formby that when she sent in a complaint against Tweeting, one of his little minions reported her in turn for ‘bullying’. Mike asked if Karen was also going to be penalized.
You can understand why Formby doesn’t want a fuss kicked up about Streeting, or any of the other Blairites and supporters of the Israeli apartheid state. They’re actually a tiny minority in the party, but they have the full support of a deeply biased right-wing media. Whenever they are even lightly embarrassed or taken to task, their immediate response is to whine about how they’re being bullied by evil Trotskyites, Stalinists, Communists and anti-Semites. As Joan Ryan did after she lost her local party’s vote of ‘No Confidence’. And these lies are automatically retailed as absolute truth by the Beeb and everyone else.
But time is not on their side. They are only a minority and the strength of the response to Streeting’s smears and doxing, and Formby’s attempts to hush it all up, show how much ordinary party members have lost patience with them. And it is becoming glaringly clear to an increasing number of people outside the party that people like Streeting do not represent the real heart of the Labour party, and that their smears and accusations of anti-Semitism are nothing but grotesque lies. As for their own threats and bullying, it’s high time the leadership stood up to them and called them out on it. That would have saved a lot of grief if it had been done at the very start, no matter how hard they may have whined and moaned in response.
Another week, Labour ahead of the Tories once again in most polls, except those the Beeb and the rest of the lamestream media pay attention to, and once again the Blairites in the party are threatening to leave. According to yesterday’s and today’s papers, it’s all about the anti-Semitism, you see. Again. I caught a glimpse of the Beeb’s news today, and it showed the far-right islamophobic hate group, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism once again camped outside parliament, or Labour HQ, waving their lying placards against ‘anti-Semitism’. While inside parliament, the Thatcherite entryists were all ready to up sticks and leave if Jenny Formby doesn’t satisfy them that enough is being done to tackle anti-Semitism.
But this isn’t about anti-Semitism. Never has been. And the row erupted long before Corbyn was elected leader of the party. On Sunday, when the threats were first made, Mike put up a piece reproducing the Tweets of CremantCommunarde, who showed very clearly that it all blew up when the Jewish Ed Miliband was leader of the Labour party. He was accused of anti-Semitism, despite his Jewish heritage and conspicuous absence of genuine Jew-hatred, because he had dared to recognize Palestine as an independent state. Veteran actress Maureen Lipman left the party in disgust. Just as she claimed to have left the party in disgust last year because Corbyn is an anti-Semite. Except that he isn’t, and has worked tirelessly to counter all forms of racism, including genuine anti-Semitism. Being pro-Palestine does not mean hating Jews, or even Israelis. It means attacking a bigoted, racist state imposing apartheid and a slow genocide on the indigenous population. A state that was set up as part of imperialist machinations by us and then maintained and supported for geopolitical reasons to maintain western, US and UK, dominance in the region.
As for the people angrily denouncing anti-Semitism in the Labour party, their true moral stature is shown by their own actions. Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks a few years ago led a contingent of British Jews to Jerusalem to participate in the March of the Flags. This is an ultra-nationalist occasion where right-wing Jewish Israeli thugs parade through the Muslim quarter of the Holy City vandalizing Palestinian property and threatening and intimidating its people. The same people claiming Corbyn is the next thing to Adolf Hitler included the kind of people one Jewish Israeli scholar called ‘Judaeonazis’. Like the couple who decided that they would show their racial tolerance by wearing T-shirts with the symbol of a banned Fascist Israeli terrorist group, Kach. As well as members of the Jewish Defence League and other Zionists, who mix easily and unashamedly with the EDL and various unsavoury characters from Britain First. The kind of people who, if they were not Jews and not connected with Israel, would automatically be denounced by everyone as Fascists and Nazis.
And now the Blairites are trying to use the pretext that Labour is riddled with genuine Jew-haters to threaten once again to split the party and leave. Just like the ‘Chicken Coup’ plotters threatened to do a few years ago. And then again a little later, when the media reported that they would leave the party to join a new centrist, pro-EU party that was being formed. A party that boasted the backing of millionaire corporate donors. An exciting new party that has since fizzled out and vanished without a trace.
But never mind! We are reliably informed by a corrupt, mendacious media, that there are more than six right-wing Labour MPs ready to depart. And Vince Cable is hoping they’ll come over and join his gang of morally corrupt corporatists and sell-outs in the Lib Dems.
The right-wing Labour MPs supposedly ready to depart aren’t really upset because they honestly believe that Corbyn’s an anti-Semite. They’re upset because they’re Blairites, Thatcherite entryists, who believe in continuing her poisonous, destructive policies of privatization, outsourcing, the destruction of the welfare state, and selling the NHS off to private healthcare firms. And destroying the trade unions in the name of creating a cowed workforce ready to accept any kind of work, no matter how ill-paid or precarious. A party so enamoured of the corporate elite that they eagerly took their donations and then gave the chairmen of these companies and senior management positions in government. All in the name of creating a properly business-friendly environment, introducing the alleged greater expertise and efficiency of private industry, creating a fluid labour market. And generally rewarding the corporate elite, who also offered them not just donations but nice, lucrative places on their boards when they left office.
Corbyn threatens all that, because he believes in a genuinely socialist Labour party, overseeing a mixed economy where the utilities, including the railways and water industry. A Britain whose working people are properly served by strong unions and have job security and rights at work from day one. A Britain whose poor are supported by decent benefits, where the jobless don’t have to wait weeks or months for welfare payments, and where a quarter of a million people aren’t forced to use food banks to stop themselves from starving in misery. A Britain where the disabled aren’t deprived of the support they need because they’ve been found ‘fit for work’ by a rigged system of tests, based on pseudo-scientific bogus theories. In other words, everything that threatens the Tories’ and Blair’s precious, poisonous Thatcher revolution.
That’s really why the Blairites have been trying to undermine Corbyn from day one. It’s why the press and people like Joan Ryan have been sneering at him and his supporters as Trotskyites, Communists and Stalinists, and why they are so desperate to claim that he’s unpopular and that he’ll never get elected by the general public. Because he threatens the Blairite policy of taking over the ideology and policies of the Tory party. Because they’re scared that he will get elected, and the Thatcherite policies they admire uncritically will be consigned to the dustbin.
I’ve had enough of their constant attempts to undermine a democratically elected and popular leader, as well as their disdain and contempt for the party’s grassroots and this country’s working people as a whole. I’m sick of them constantly threatening to leave, only to stay in the party to threaten to leave again later, whenever they feel they can do the most damage. Or whenever they think anyone will back them. I just now want them to go. They’re Conservatives anyway, and really don’t have any place in a party that genuinely supports working people instead of the corporate elite.
But as Mike has pointed out on his blog, they won’t. Because the moment they resign the party whip, their constituents will vote against them at the next election. And so they’re determined to hang on, all the while fraudulently claiming that they’re the really Labour party and whining about ‘Labour values’. They aren’t really Labour, and the party’s real values go back to Clement Attlee, Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan and the Webbs and Fabians. Genuine socialists, whose achievements Blair and his cronies have done their best to destroy.
They should now either leave for good, or shut up and support their leader. But whatever they do, it’s going to be glaringly clear to an increasing number of people that, despite their lies, they’re not interested in anti-Semitism. They’re only using it as ploy to destroy Corbyn for the same reasons as the press and the Tories they claim to want to defeat electorally.
Joan Ryan is one of the chairs of Labour Friends of Israel, and a week or so ago lost a vote of ‘No Confidence’ brought by her constituency party because of her continual undermining of her party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and attacks and smears on other Labour activists and members.
Such as her utterly baseless and malicious complaint to the party that Jean Fitzpatrick was an anti-Semite. This was simply because Fitzpatrick had come to her stall at the Labour Party Conference last year, and asked her a question Ryan couldn’t answer. She asked her what Labour Friends of Israel were doing to achieve the two-state solution, and how would this be possible with the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. She also said that she believed the LFI had money and influence, because a friend’s son had got a good job at Oxford Union on the basis of having worked for them.
Ryan, of course, couldn’t give a straight answer, was deeply embarrassed, and then decided that instead of talking about Oxford University, Fitzpatrick had claimed that her friend’s son had got a job in the City of London. Which was anti-Semitic, because anti-Semites believe the Jews dominate banking.
It was all rubbish, and even Ryan and her cohorts at the stall didn’t know whether it was really anti-Semitic. But they decided that as it had made them feel uncomfortable – the delicate snowflakes – then it must be.
After she lost the motion, Ryan reacted with her customary grace and conciliatory attitude. Well, no: she ranted about how it was all down to Trotskyites, Communists, Stalinists and the hard left. And the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn responsible for bringing her down were obviously anti-Semitic, ’cause PressTV was in there filming the proceedings.
PressTV is the Iranian state news agency. The Iranian theocracy is a deeply reactionary, oppressive regime. It has reduced its country’s working people to grinding poverty, denied them union rights and in the camps for the oil workers in Khuzestan reduced them to slave workers, like those in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Women are denied many of the basic rights they enjoy in the West. Gays are given the choice between execution and undergoing sex-change surgery. And the regime is extremely hostile to Israel, and expresses this in deeply unpleasant, genocidal rhetoric. However, Iran’s remaining domestic Jewish population, like the Zoroastrians, are actually treated well.
Below is the PressTV video on the vote by Roshan Muhammed Salih. And unless I’ve missed something, it’s actually reasonably impartial and well balanced. It begins by describing the vote as another incident in the battle for the soul of the Labour party, and states quite rightly that it was brought by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn against her.
It quotes Ryan as saying ‘I love Enfield and the people who live there. There is nowhere else I’d rather live and work’. It also says that she is chair of Labour Friends of Israel, and that before the vote was taken there were speeches both for and against.
Salih stated that one of the speakers on behalf of the motion was a local Jewish woman, who said that all the media had been attacking Corbyn, and she didn’t think it had anything to do with anti-Semitism. She added that Corbyn is critical of Israel oppressing the Palestinians, and that was what Benjamin Netanyahu is scared of: that if a Labour government comes to power, this might force peace on Israel. He goes on to say that another pro-Corbyn speaker spoke against Ryan personally. He asked what had really been sowing division in the party, and concluded that it was Joan Ryan.
He reports that Ryan herself spoke in her own defence, trying to rally support by declaring that Nelson Mandela was a strong influence on her when she was growing up, and quoted him as saying that it was possible to change the world with your own hands. However, this didn’t save her, and there were cheers when the results started coming in. He notes that this meant much to pro-Corbyn members. Her future now hangs in the balance, although she says she won’t resign. The video homes in on her tweet stating that she is ‘Labour through and through’ and stands for ‘Labour values’. He ends by saying that the battle for Labour’s heart is far from over.
In this snippet at least, there’s no loud denunciations of Jews, no anti-Semitism. It quotes the Jewish lady stating that the anti-Semitism accusations against Corbyn are all about Israel and not about anti-Semitism. Which is correct, though a view which is angrily denied and shouted down, again with cries of ‘anti-Semitism!’ from the Israel lobby. But that shows the Israel lobby’s vicious prejudices and biases, not those of the people they accuse.
So while the Iranian regime is deeply unpleasant and hostile to Israel, their coverage of the ‘No Confidence’ vote looks very much like proper, impartial journalism. It’s the kind of journalism that is conspicuous lacking in the lamestream media, and which we could do with more of. Despite the howls of outrage and anger by Ryan and those like her.
I’ve posted many pieces of my blog from Private Eye criticizing the Tories and Tony Blair. Yesterday I put up a couple of pieces, one of which was about the magazine’s cover in 1998 which showed Blair watching a bank of monitors and demanding a leftie be thrown out of the Labour party. However, today’s Private Eye for 21 September – 4 October 2018 carries a story on page 13 which seems to suggest that the satirical magazine is firmly behind the anti-Semitism smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.
It’s a response to a letter they had in their last issue from a reader, Dorothy Macedo, who was outraged at the false accusations of anti-Semitism. The Eye writes
Eye 1478 featured a letter from Dorothy Macedo cancelling her subscription and saying: “Accusing someone of being anti-Semitic isn’t funny. (This is particularly true when there is no evidence, just accusations.) By repeating the sort of crude smears favoured by the Daily Mail, Private Eye has crossed a line.
Many thanks to the Eye reader who pointed out that Ms Macedo crops up on Facebook as one of the team members involved in running the Worthing and Adur chapter of Labour’s hard-left Momentum movement. The official stance of Momentum HQ is that there’s actually lots of anti-Semitism in the Labour party – the group claimed in April that it’s “more widespread in the Labour party than many of us had understood”, and that “accusations of anti-Semitism should not and cannot be dismissed simply as right-wing smears.” Just fancy that!
There are a number of features about the Eye’s reply that need criticizing. Firstly, there’s the sneering attitude to Macedo herself as a member of Momentum, which they characterize as hard left. Momentum isn’t, not by a long chalk. It’s very traditional labour as I’ve stated over and again, ad nauseam. It favours a mixed economy, renationalization of the NHS, strong welfare state and unions, and decent wages, job conditions and security for working people. It’s members are not ‘Trots’ nor ‘Stalinists’ or whatever else the right wants to smear them as. But Private Eye has consistently repeated the right-wing claim that Corbyn is far left, despite this being refuted by MPs like George Galloway. I stopped reading the Eye for a little while because I was sick and tired of these persistent smears. As well as casual comments, the Eye ran a series of cartoons, ‘Focus on Fact’, which attacked the Labour leader for events in the 1980s.
As for the claims about anti-Semitism being far more widespread in the Labour party than previously believed, this appears to be the attitude of Momentum’s leader, Jon Lansman, and his fellows. I don’t believe it’s held by Momentum’s base, and certainly isn’t held by Jewish Voice for Labour. Their members said at the counterrally they held against the demo against Corbyn by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies that genuine anti-Semitism in the Labour party was probably much smaller, and made it clear that while it probably existed, it was something they personally had not encountered. These sentiments have been echoed by some of the Jewish commenters and supporters of Mike’s blog. But they made those comments YouTube, while Tony Greenstein’s criticism of Lansman and his apparent belief in the anti-Semitism claims are at his website. And so presumably have not been seen or consulted by the Eye and its contributors, who appear not to be entirely conversant with social media.
Besides, as Tony Greenstein, Mike, Martin Odoni, David Rosenberg and so very many other people have pointed out, the genuinely left-wing Jews, who support Corbyn, like Jewish Voice for Labour, the Jewish Socialist Group and Jewdas, are ‘the wrong kind of Jews’. They are not part of the Jewish establishment, which appears to be solidly Zionist and Tory, and which actively despises them. And the Israel lobby bitterly attacks and smears them, calling them ‘kapos’, self-hating, anti-Semitic and even denying that they are Jewish at all. That’s clearly seen in the video I put up the other day of Jackie Walker calmly and politely refuting Jonathan Hoffman’s claims. When Hoffman finds that she has an answer for his questions, he tells her that she isn’t a Jew. Which gets a very appropriate response from Walker, who is properly roundly applauded by the audience.
The right’s distinction between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kind of Jews is anti-Semitic, as Mike and the others have also pointed out. The Nazis made that distinction, as did Hitler’s hero, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, Karl von Luegerer. And the Israel lobby does it too, and expresses its hatred of the ‘wrong’ kind of Jews in language that, if it came from a gentile, would be unequivocally condemned as anti-Semitic.
But the Eye appears to have followed the rest of the press in ignoring Corbyn’s Jewish supporters. They, apparently, don’t exist. As far as the lamestream media goes, they’re ‘unpersons’, the name Orwell gave to the people written out of official history in 1984. Just like Stalin and his faction rewrote Russian and Soviet history to erase the individuals they despised and had killed.
It seems very clear from this that the Eye has not investigated whether the claims of anti-Semitism leveled by the Blairites and the Israel lobby are true, and it seems very clear that the magazine has absolutely no intention of doing so. It seems very content to regurgitate the standard, establishment narrative.
But thousands of people have been smeared as anti-Semites, including Mike. This is a real issue, and needs to be exposed. It is absolutely scandalous that decent, anti-racist people, who are very definitely not anti-Semites, should be libeled as such. And its especially odious when applied to Jews and others, who have suffered racially motivated abuse and violence, and who have lost family members in the Nazi concentration camps.
You’d have thought that the Eye, which claims to be determined to show up falsehoods and wrongdoing in politics, business and the unions, would have been keen to investigate this scandal. But it seems the reverse is true. They either can’t be bothered to investigate whether they are, or are quite happy to see innocent people libeled if it brings down Corbyn.
I have been tempted to write a letter of polite criticism to the Eye inquiring why they haven’t investigated or criticized this massive injustice. But I haven’t. I don’t think I’d get a proper reply, and am afraid that I’d simply be setting myself up for attack and smear myself, as Mike has been.
I like Private Eye, but find this piece and its complete silence over the anti-Semitism smears absolutely disgusting. My sympathies here are resolutely with Dorothy Macedo, whose comments were absolutely correct. But it seems clear that no-one will ever change the Eye’s editorial policy on this issue. In this, the magazine seems to share all the prejudices and is part of the mass groupthink as the rest of the lamestream media.
This is the cover of a very old Private Eye for Friday, 2nd October 1998. The caption reads ‘Blair Calls For Unity’, and has Blair saying in the speech bubble ‘There’s a leftie – chuck him out!’
This was the time when Blair was trying to modernize the Labour party by removing Clause 4, the part of its constitution formulated by the Fabians and other socialists, which committed the party to the nationalization of the means of production and distribution. In short, socialism. Blair instead was determined to turn it into another Thatcherite party committed to privatization, including that of the NHS, welfare cuts, and job insecurity. Its traditional working class base were to be ignored and the party instead was to concentrate on winning swing voters, who might otherwise vote Tory. He attempted to win over the Tory press, including the Murdoch papers. Despite owing the start of his career to union sponsorship, he was determined to limit their power even further, and threatened to cut the party’s ties with them unless they submitted to his dictates. His ‘Government Of All the Talents’ – GOATs – included former Tory ministers like Chris Patten. Tories, who crossed the floor and defected to New Labour were parachuted into safe seats as the expense of sitting MPs and the wishes of the local constituency party. Blair adopted failed or discarded Tory policies, including the Peter Lilley’s Private Finance Initiative and the advice of Anderson Consulting. This was satirized by a computer programme that made anagrams from politicians’ names. Anthony Blair came out as ‘I am Tory Plan B’.
The direction in which Blair wanted the party to move was clearly shown by him inviting Margaret Thatcher to 10 Downing Street to visit the day after he was elected. And she thoroughly approved of him, declaring that New Labour was her greatest legacy.
Blair and New Labour were also staunch supporters of Israel. It was money from Zionist Jewish businessmen, raised by Lord Levy, whom Blair had met at a gathering at the Israeli embassy, that allowed him to be financially independent from the trade unions.
Now all that is being threatened by Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Which is why Blairite apparatchiks and MPs have done their level best to purge the party of them by smearing them as Trotskyite and Stalinist infiltrators and anti-Semites. The charges are ludicrous, hypocritical and offensive. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t far left: they’re traditional Labour, supporting a mixed economy. And far from being anti-Semites, the vast majority of those accused are decent, anti-racist people, including self-respecting Jews and dedicated campaigners against anti-Semitism. People like Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Mike over at Vox Political, Martin Odoni and many, many others. Many of the Jews smeared as anti-Semites are Holocaust survivors or the children of Holocaust survivors, but this is never reported in the media. Except when the person supposedly attacked is a good Blairite or member of the Israel lobby.
The cover was made in jest when it came out, though it had an element of truth even then. Now it’s even more true. Blair has left the party leadership, but his supporters in Progress and similar groups are determined to cling on to power by carrying out a purge of Corbyn and his traditional Labour supporters.
Just as Blair himself emerged to urge Blairite MPs and Labour members to leave and join his proposed ‘Centrist’ party.
New Labour’s desperation to obtain and please donors and sponsors from private industry is clearly displayed in this old snippet from Private Eye’s edition for Friday, 2nd October 1998. Entitled ‘The Lobby Party Conference’, it runs
Clear proof of Labour’s commitment to cash-for-access comes in a memorandum from party organizer Chris Lane to “all MPs and MEPs in the South-East Region and any staff or guests accompanying you to party conference in Blackpool.”
Lane urges the MPs: “Please make a priority in your conference diaries for Thursday evening for a reception sponsored by Seeboard PLC. This is a generously-sponsored event, on condition that we enable the company to maintain contact with regional MPs and MEPs.” In other words: come and talk to the bosses of privatized Seeboard which supplies electricity to the south-east, or the party doesn’t get the sponsoring money. If that’s not cash for access, what is?
The reception was due to take place at Yates Wine Lodge, Blackpool, on 1 October. The subject of pay awards for the fat cats of the electricity industry was not high on the agenda. (p. 5).
Lane’s letter is a very clear example of the corporativism that has corrupted politics both in this country and America, where private companies donate and sponsor the political parties and individual politicians. The result is that those parties and politicos, once in power, work for their donors and not for their constituents. It’s why less than 20 per cent of Americans feel their government works for them. And a few years ago, Harvard University published a report that concluded that because of this, America was no longer a functioning democracy but an oligarchy.
You can read how far Blair took the policy in George Monbiot’s Captive State, which describes how Blair’s New Labour passed legislation that enriched the corporate donors at the expense of public services and small businesses, like farmers and local shops. And Blair also rewarded the donors by giving them or their senior management positions in government.
But this cosy relationship between private industry and the Labour party is threatened by Jeremy Corbyn and his policies of reviving the traditional Labour policy of a mixed economy, strong welfare state, workers’ rights, strong unions and a proper, nationalized NHS.
Blair’s policy was to court private industry and Tory voters at the expense of ignoring the wishes of ordinary party members and Labour’s traditional, working class electorate. He and the rest of his coterie arrogantly assumed that the working class would continue voting for them because there was nowhere else they could go. The result was widespread disaffection with New Labour. Many members left the party, and the number of people voting for Labour actually went down. The party won elections because even more people were sick and tired of the Tories.
This has been massively reversed under Jeremy Corbyn. Millions have joined the Labour party since he became its leader, and its now the largest Socialist party in western Europe.
Which is why the Tories, the Blairites, the Israel lobby and the mainstream media are so desperate to destroy Corbyn’s leadership and even the party itself. It’s why Corbyn and his supporters have been and are being smeared as Trotskyites, Stalinists, Communists and the Hard Left as well as anti-Semites. It’s why the Blairites in parliament have tried coups, and threatened to split the party. And why Blair crawled out of whatever vile hole he’s been living in since he left office ten years ago to warn that the Hard Left had taken over the Labour party, and that ‘moderates’ – meaning far right Thatcherite entryists like himself – should leave and join a new, ‘centrist’ party. Which sounded very much like ‘Unite for Change’, which seems set up to carry on the old, corporatist politics of Blair’s New Labour.
I know this is coarse, rude and therefore not at all adult, but I thought the advert below was still very relevant to today’s political situation. I found it on page 30 of Private Eye’s edition for 4th-17th February 2005. I haven’t reproduced all of the advert. The piece I’ve not copied contained details of how to pay for the shirts, and as I don’t know if the company still exists, I don’t really want to see people potentially wasting their money ordering stuff from a firm that may have vanished over a decade ago.
I think it’s obvious that the shirts and their slogan were aimed squarely at Tories bitter at Blair’s government and New Labour. However, it’s still relevant, because only a few weeks ago Blair stuck his head up from wherever he’s been skulking since leaving office and turning the Middle East into a bloody, smoking battlefield. As you will remember, he emerged to tell the media that the far Left had taken over the Labour party, and it may not be possible for ‘moderates’ to retake it. He therefore urged people to consider supporting a new, centrist party. This new, centrist party is presumably Unite For Change, the new party that’s been set up by what looks very much like people connected to Blair and New Labour donors. Blair appears to have been hoping that the ‘moderate’ Labour MPs – in reality, Blair’s supporters and therefore, like him, extreme-rightwing Thatcherite entryists – would leave the party to join this new outfit.
In fact, as John McDonnell has pointed out, Corbyn and his supporters are the real moderates. Corbyn’s proposals for renationalizing the NHS, giving workers better rights, reviving the welfare state, the nationalization of the railways and the partial renationalization of the electricity grid are traditional, centrist, Old Labour policies. These stressed a mixed economy, the nationalization of the utilities to serve the interests of the British public, not their owners or private investors, strong unions to protect working people, and a proper welfare state to support the poor and the disabled. They aren’t the policies of Trotskyites, Stalinists, Communists and the Hard Left, or whoever else Joan Ryan, the Blairites, Tories and the lamestream media feel they can use to smear Corbyn and his supporters.
As for Blair’s new centrist party, no-one is interested in it, it has precious few members, and its only policy so far seems to be that it wants Britain to remain in the EU. But apart from that, it seems simply to be a rehash of New Labour, where the party raised most of its money from rich, millionaire donors, who the party then did its best to please by adopting legislation that suited them, but not Britain’s working people, and placing the same donors or their senior management in positions of government.
I believe this country would definitely be better off if we remained in the EU. But Blair’s new centrist party has absolutely nothing to offer ordinary people except more poverty, more job insecurity, more welfare cuts, more privatization and the destruction of the NHS as it is sold off to private healthcare firms. Just as Thatcher, Major, Blair, and Cameron wanted, and which May is continuing.
The message is coarse, rude and nasty, but in a Britain in which 4.5 million children are in poverty, and a quarter of million people are using food banks to save themselves from starvation, it’s all too appropriate. It’s just a pity there isn’t a similar set of shirts now for May and the Tories.
Mike over at Vox Political has posted a number of articles on the way the media, including the BBC, has done everything it can to attack and discredit Jeremy Corbyn. This video by Still Incorrigible shows Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics attempting to do the same, using the extremist political views of the leaders of the Stop the War Coalition. The Coalition’s leadership is mostly, according to this, composed of Marxists of various kinds – Trotskyists, Stalinists and Communists. They have some fairly offensive and wretched views. Neil mentions a post on the Coalition’s blog where they declare that the British forces in the Middle East are just as much a bunch of mass murderers as ISIS. Neil goes on to report that a Green politician has resigned from the group in disgust at the leadership’s views. He then interviews Peter Tatchell, who has done the same. Later on he interviews Burgon, a Labour politician, who sticks up for Corbyn by pointing out that the grass-roots members are drawn from a wide variety of people, and very largely definitely not hard-line Marxists. Still Incorrigible himself points out that Neil deliberately avoids talking to the Green politico, as she wrote a piece in the Independent attacking such attempts to malign and misrepresent Corbyn as false and manufactured. Here’s the video.
This is purely guilt by association, designed to reinforce the current line that Corbyn is a dangerous Communist and a threat to our liberties and economy. The leadership of the Stop the War Coalition are all Communists of one description or another, therefore Corbyn must be also. In fact, as Burgon points out, the people who marched against the war in 2003 included grandparents and vicars. He’s right. I know. One of our parish priests was one of them. And apart from the Stop the War Coalition, there are a whole range of Christian peace organisations, including Pax Christi, the official Roman Catholic peace movement, that are also very firmly against the War.
I am not surprised that Brillo Pad tried to smear Corbyn. Neil is very much a man of the right, having edited the very establishment of Sunday Times as well as the Scotsman after it was bought by the weirdo Barclay Twins. Despite its claims to impartiality, the Sunday Politics also presents the establishment view. And Corbyn’s clearly got them very rattled.
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