A Comprehensive Attack on the Decolonisation Movement in British Universities and Education

Doug Stokes, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West (Cambridge: Polity Press 2023)

The murder of George Floyd by a White police officer three years ago sparked a wave of protests across America and then Britain under the banner of the Black Lives Matter organisation. It was loudly trumpeted that western civilisation is institutionally racist and that it was based on ‘Whiteness’, the underlying racist ideology by which Whites maintained the social, economic and educational advantages against Blacks and people of colour. This ‘White privilege’ extended to all Whites, even if they were not personally racist. There have since been demands to dismantle this perceived systemic racism. This has entered the university, where, according to Stokes, it has set off a moral panic. There is supposed to be a gap between the number of Whites and ethnic minorities enrolling at university and the numbers of Whites achieving top grades and Blacks and other people of colour. This is ascribed to personal racism on campus and the content of the university curriculum. This is held to be Eurocentric and too White. Blacks and other ethnic minorities, it is argued, do not enrol in uni because they are marginalised and put off by the overwhelmingly White content and the personal racism they experience, including microaggressions. At the same time, modern science and Enlightenment rationality are attacked as merely western forms of knowledge that are alien to people of colour from outside Europe. This needs to be removed from the centre of European teaching so that proper space can be made for non-White cultures and their ways of knowing.

Decolonisation and the Advancement of Privileged Members of Ethnic Minorities

Stokes is, according to the brief personal bio on the back cover, a director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter, a fellow of the Legatum Institute and a member of the advisory council for the Free Speech Union. He’s also written for a number of right-wing journals like the Times, Torygraph, Spectator and The Critic. Most of the attacks on ‘wokeness’ come from the right, but elements of the left are also turning against it. A few weeks ago the Free Speech Union put up a panel of left-wing writers and academics, who were also very much against it and its malign cancel culture. And there are certainly important points people on the left can take away from this book. Stokes argues that the determination to appoint people to prominent positions in the university and elsewhere is very much a class issue. It allows rich and privileged people of colour like Priyamvada Gopal, a history professor at Cambridge, to present themselves as somehow more marginalised than the Whites underneath. For example, Gopal declared that she was less advantaged because of her colour than the porters at Cambridge. The Beeb’s senior journo is an Asian woman, who declared that she wouldn’t have got her position without the Corporation’s diversity scheme. This is questionable, as her father is billionaire owning one of Britain’s football clubs, and her mother is millionaire in her own right.

The Professional Managerial Class and the Neglect of the Working Class

Stokes also argues that the decolonisation movement is strongly linked with the emergence of the Professional Managerial Class. This is a class of mostly White technocrats, who appeared after the dismantling of the Post-War consensus. As the trade unions were neutered and the welfare state and NHS cut and privatised, the functions of the nation state were increasingly subordinated to the authority of multinational bodies, staffed by ‘anywheres’ – officials with no particular connection to any country, who looked down on the ‘somewheres’ who still retained their loyalty to their particular location or country. And this highly privileged elite particularly despised the White working class. Stokes presents statistics that show, contrary to the image promoted by the intersectional left, it’s the White working class, and particularly boys, who are now marginalised and excluded from the academy, but this is ignored by the university sector. Bristol university set up a bursary worth millions to support 30 more Black students. By contrast, there were only two bursaries set up for people from a generally disadvantaged background. These were only worth £2 million each, compared to the tens given out under the Black bursary scheme. But even one of these two was reserved solely for Blacks. Such schemes proliferate, but only a tiny minority of universities have schemes to support people from a working class background. But Stokes goes through the statistics to show that there are a number of complex factors preventing people from going to uni which have nothing to do with class. The most important is class. Another factor is education. Most Blacks go to state comprehensive schools, which are far less successful at sending their pupils to university than the elite private schools.

Ethnic Racial Oppression Challenged by Statistics

As for the supposed gap between the number of BME pupils going on to university and Whites, the opposite of what is claimed is true: Blacks and ethnic minorities comprise 18 per cent of the population, but 30 per cent of the students enrolling at university. Many ethnic minorities are as successful and some more so than the White population. Indians and other ethnic minorities are as successful as Whites, but people of Chinese origin 30 per cent more. White working class pupils on free school meals are the least successful apart from Travellers.

Stokes cites statistics to show again and again that the Black Lives Matter narrative of racial oppression is wrong, drawn from EU and EHRC reports that claim the opposite. In America, more cops are shot by Blacks than Blacks are shot by Whites. Where there is a statically higher chance of Blacks being shot by the cops than the general population, it’s because Blacks are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes. As for racial offences, while most of these are committed by Whites, 24 per cent of them are so are also committed by Blacks, despite the fact that they only constitute around 13 per cent of the American population.

The stats also show that Britain is a far less racist country than others. 89 per cent of people are comfortable with someone of a different colour being prime minister. Other stats show that most people have no objections with their children marrying people of another colour and with working with people of different ethnicities. The incidence of racist crime is much lower than claimed. Most people from ethnic backgrounds are proud to be British at 65 per cent, slightly higher than Whites, and the police is actually more trusted by Blacks and ethnic minorities than by Whites. As for the university sector, while there are fewer ethnic minority professors than Whites, this is not true of certain subjects. 53 per cent of the students and staff in chemical and electrical engineering departments are Black or Asian. Similarly, the degree attainment gap is closing and for some groups it’s statistically insignificant.

There’s also a gender aspect to this. Increasingly more women are entering university than men. 53 per cent of university students are women, and this proportion is increasing so that it has been predicted that in a few decades’ time women will comprise 73 per cent of all students. They are enrolling in all the professional subjects except the mathematical sciences. This implies that in the coming decades the professions, and particularly medicine, will be female dominated.

Needless to say, these stats attacking the narrative that Britain is racist are not what the intersectional left wants to hear. The book quotes the automatic denunciations of a government report published a year or so ago, which concluded that Britain was not a racist society, by prominent members of the Labour party like Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.

Intellectual Origins

As well as attacking it at the level of statistics, Stokes dissects the history of the movement. It emerged in the early 20th century in the thinking of the Marxist Frankfurt school and the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci. They felt that in order to radicalise the working class it would be necessary to change the culture. This effectively stands Marx on its head, as Marx claimed that the economic substructure created and influenced ideology. This was then taken up in its turn by the American Marxist Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was concerned by the failure of the western working class to adopt revolutionary socialism. Instead, he and other radical decided to appeal to the new marginalised groups, such as gays and the ‘people of the ghetto’ – Blacks. This occurred roughly at the same time that similarly disappointed western radicals adopted the ideology of ‘Third Worldism’. They looked to the new national liberation movements of the colonised peoples around the world as an attack on western capitalism which would eventually result in its destruction. These radicals took over as their texts works like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. And their attitudes show a mixture of White self-hatred and sheer bloodlust. Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s book, declared that if you shot a European, you killed two people: the European and the man he oppressed. Michel Foucault, despite being an openly gay man, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Islamic Revolution in Iran because it was a revolt against ‘western rationalism’. This included the mass purges, including that of homosexuals, by the revolutionary regime.

Foucault and similar thinkers were also responsible for the attack on science and rationality. According to Foucault and the structural and post-structural linguists that preceded him, no objective knowledge about the world is possible due to the all pervasive influence of language. Language structures people’s thinking in binaries – man/woman, Black/White and so on, one of which is always in inferior. Thus language ensures that men enjoy a more privileged position than women, and Blacks and other ethnic minorities are inferior to Whites. At the same time, knowledge is not objective but serves the interest of those in power. It does not advance. Instead, there is merely a change in viewpoint between one historical epoch and another.

Capitalism, Not Science and Rationality, Responsible for Rise of the West

Similarly, the role of the rise of science and the industrial revolution in producing Britain and the West’s global supremacy is also denied. Instead it is argued that a crisis in feudalism in the late Middle Ages led to the rise of capitalism and its institution which created the conditions for European dominance and the enslavement and destruction of indigenous peoples.

Readers of this blog will now that I am particularly concerned about the focus on British and European involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the way this obscures the existence of slavery across cultures from antiquity onwards. Stokes tackles this issue, exposing its existence in China. Arab merchants to China took with them Black African slaves as their personal servants. This started a craze for African slaves amongst the Chinese, but this has been erased from history. Chinese children are not taught about it in schools, nor is it discussed either officially or in popular culture. At the same time, the slave trade within Africa was very firmly in African hands. The largest collection of documents on the slave trade comes from the Dutch East India Company comprising 100,000 volumes. But these documents hardly anywhere mention the Dutch doing the actual business of capturing slaves. It was done instead by Black Africans, who then sold them on to Europeans. And some Black slavers did extremely well, such as Tippoo Tipp, who enslaved Black Africans to provide labour for his plantations on Zanzibar.

As for the supposed role the slave trade played in enriching Britain, historians have said that in fact it played the same role in stimulating the economy as sugar. The real driver of the industrial revolution and Britain’s wealth was textiles. In fact, it may even have been a disadvantage. One historian has estimated that the country would have been £500,000 better off if we didn’t have the West Indies.

Working Class Whites Did Not Benefit from Slave Trade

He also rebuts the assertion that all Whites somehow benefited from the slave trade. This is again untrue on several levels. Imperialism and colonialism were policies devised by the upper classes. Democracy was only established in 1928 when the vote was granted to all adult men and women without property qualifications. Before then, in the 18th and early 19th century, the franchise was severely restricted to only a tiny percentage of the electorate. And most White people’s lives in 19th century Britain was one of desperate poverty and misery. The average life expectancy in the early 19th century was forty. Child labour was the norm, with small children working down the mines. He gives examples of the long hours one seven or eight year old child worked in total darkness operating the ventilation shutters in the pits, and of a mine disaster where flooding killed both adults and children. But the anti-slavery movement was strong amongst the British people as a whole and particularly among the working class. He also points out that almost all civilisations accepted the existence of slavery, and that the anomaly isn’t British and European slavery, but how the British and the West abolished it.

Geopolitical Dangers

He also argues that the decolonisation movement is dangerous on a geopolitical level. The book presents statistics that show that 47 per cent of Africans believe that colonialism benefited their countries, a higher percentage than westerners. However, slavery and colonialism are used by extremely corrupt African politicians to explain their countries poor performance rather than in the massive greed of the kleptocrats running them. One of these was James Ibori, the governor of one of the Nigerian states, who stole over $100 million but was lauded by his admirers as a great patriot. But other states, such as Russia and China, are weaponising Western guilt as part of their own foreign policies against the West. China has particularly attacked the West as racist and White supremacist for opposing the Great Chinese Dream. This includes further commercial penetration into Africa, which has alarmed some observers as a new form of colonialism.

Nations are bound together by their common histories, and the attack on the West’s history as one of shameful exploitation is designed to stop America and its allies exercising any kind of global dominance. But this retreat from a unipolar world will make international politics much more cut-throat. The state of international relations before the rise of America following the Second World War was one of competing empires which attacked and preyed on the weak. Following the Second World War, America set up a number of international bodies to protect and extend the liberal international order. This included western Europe against the Soviet bloc and Japan in Asia. The result has been that the percentage of the world’s population in desperate poverty has declined from 40 per cent to 10 per cent. He recognises that America’s position as the world’s policeman hasn’t been free from terrible mistakes, but argues that without the security afforded by America international affairs will revert to what they were before as nations compete ruthlessly for resources. He also criticises the various anti-colonialist intellectuals who were all too ready to attack the west, but said nothing about rival empires that were just as brutal or even worse. Like Edward Said, who didn’t criticise Russia, China or the Ottoman Empire, whose Barbary pirates also enslaved White Europeans. Said claimed he didn’t have to. As a Palestinian he was quite comfortable in an eastern milieu, which means that there is a shocking bias and one-sidedness in his critique of imperialism.

Decolonisation Mandatory University Policy

Despite these objections, decolonisation has become a mandatory policy across the university sector. It is demanded and enforced by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Universities UK and the Race Equality Charter as well as the Universities and Colleges Union. And it’s extremely authoritarian. Students in some universities are required to attend compulsory courses on anti-racism. This is not the kind of anti-racism which most people grew up with in the 1970s, when Dr Luther King called on us to judge men by their character, not their colour. If a student responds to the questions presented to him or her on questionnaires devised by the activists with slogans like ‘I believe in one race – the human race’, she or he will get a lecture on how this is itself racist and people of different races need to be treated differently according to their culture and background. Ditto if you’re a believer in meritocracy, in which the best people for a job should get it regardless of their colour. In fact Thomas Sowell has shown that sheer commercial necessity has frequently acted against institutional racism. Despite legislation in apartheid South Africa banning Blacks from certain jobs, some employers nevertheless sought to circumvent it to employ Black workers, simply because it made commercial sense. The activists are also vindictive and highly authoritarian. These course will also ask their White students how guilty they are and openly encourage such feelings as part of an indoctrination campaign to turn them into ‘allies’ concerned to make a fairer Britain for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Microaggressions are a part of this programme in some universities. These are gestures or body language that suggest hostility on someone’s part, even if no such hostility is openly expressed. Not sharing a lift with a personal of colour is one such microaggression, as is lifting your eyebrows if a Black person enters the room. These gestures are deemed racist if they are perceived as such by another, regardless of what was meant by whoever performed them. One university department set up a group of seven young spies to monitor and report on students and staff committing such microaggressions. It’s been said before, but this is totalitarian with a distinctly Maoist tinge. You are under authoritarian surveillance with people spying on you, and you must confess your guilt, just as Mao forced ordinary Chinese to do during his wretched struggle sessions.

Stokes has no time for racism, but sees the decolonisation movement as dangerous, not least because it attacks the principles of equality, rationality and the rule of law that have been at the heart of Western society and its success since the Enlightenment. These are values that need to be defended, especially given the global threat of Russia and China. The movement is also causing social division in the West. Polls show that the upper middle classes in America are far more optimistic about the values of diversity than most Blacks, and have an increasing contempt for the White working class. These last are especially the people who voted for Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain, which Stokes denies was primarily racist. They are the people one American politico called ‘semi-fascists’. This attack on the working class also affects Stokes himself, as he states that he grew up in urban poverty in London after his father’s suicide in Canada. But Stokes doubts that the decolonisation movement will get very far outside circles like the BBC and the universities.

Woke Capitalism

As for woke capitalism, the book argues that this is an attempt to prevent criticisms that a corporation is racist or otherwise exploitative, and so a form of virtue signalling and political Danegeld. Even when that corporation is otherwise so, as in the case of those multinational companies that have been accused of using slave labour in China. There is also a political aspect to it. Woke capitalism does not challenge the class structure of society or the nature of capitalism itself. It merely wants better representation of Blacks and people of colour through affirmative action, but does not want to challenge more concrete factors that are holding people from working class backgrounds back. And affirmative action may be a real danger in promoting people because of their colour rather than their ability. If this is done, then it could mean a loss of efficiency and performance in industry, and is actually dangerous in medicine. This aspect of woke capitalism, as something that seems left but actually isn’t, sounds correct. It certainly seems like the reason Starmer has loudly embraced a new set of policies that will supposedly attack British institutional racism and make sure Blacks and Asians get high positions. While not doing anything for the working class as such.

Criticisms

The book’s certainly thorough in its attack on the academic decolonisation movements and its allied campaigns in industry and geopolitics. It’s also going to be controversial. Some may take issue with the reliability of the statistics used, such as the Labour politicos who howled loudly at the last government report. It also has a rosy-eyed view of America as the world’s policeman. America was responsible for some horrific atrocities through supporting genuinely fascist regimes in countries like South America. And the regimes it overthrew as part of its campaign to promote international capitalism were often just left-wing, not Marxist. President Benitez of Guatemala was a democratic socialist, not a commie as he was painted, when he was overthrown in the 1950s. Similarly, the president of Guyana who was also overthrown in an American led coup was a liberal. The Iraq invasion wasn’t launched primarily to give the Iraqi people their freedom from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, but to loot their oil and state industries, as Greg Palast shows in his book Armed Madhouse. And Henry Kissinger, who died a few days ago, was a monster responsible for death, torture and suffering on a global scale.

And while it has to be admitted that capitalism has been successful in raising the world’s people out of poverty, globalisation and neoliberalism have had the opposite effect. Ordinary working people across the world have become poorer as elites have become richer, resulting in social unrest and a destabilisation of international relations.

Conclusion

But this doesn’t alter the fact that Critical Race Theory, the ideology at the heart of the Black Lives Matter and decolonisation movements is a malign, racist, anti-White ideology which ignores the material reasons for poverty and inequality in its pursuit of systemic White racism and has a very skewed, bias view of history. If we are to build a genuinely fair and non-racist society, then it needs to be tackled at every level. Including the universities, where it is actively preventing White working class students from having access to a mechanism that has historically allowed the poor social and economic advancement.

Reading from my Pamphlet against the Work Capability Tests

Hat tip to Mike and Vox Political for the meme on the cover.

These past few days I’ve been putting up videos of myself reading pamphlets I wrote and self-published a few years ago against the privatisation of the NHS and academy schools, which actually don’t perform better than normal state schools but support the corporate chains and the corporatist politicians who run them with an income stream. And they also support the Thatcherites by appearing to confirm their ideological view that private, as opposed to state, is always better.

Trev, one of the great commenters on this blog, left this comment about the destruction of the welfare state and the treatment of those, who are unfit to work, by the authorities and how this is ignored by Labour and the trade unions.

‘I’ve noticed they’re using the same language as the Tories (going right back to Cameron & Osborne), it’s always “working people” and “working families”, or “hard working people”, etc. Never just ‘we’re going to help people and famies’ , or even Working Class people, no, it’s got to be “working people”. Just another way of further marginalising those who aren’t working for whatever reason, the “economically inactive”, i.e.Retired, Unemployed, sick, disabled, carers, but for some reason this definition never includes the idle rich. There is a worrying agenda not being opposed or mentioned by either Labour or the Unions, and that is to force as many people as possible into work, especially targeting the elderly, sick and disabled (hence the mandatory Work and Health Programme). And either Labour nor the Unions are saying anything about the destruction of the Welfare State, including the NHS but particularly also our Social Security system. It is no longer possible to go “on the sick”. The Tories have abolished Sick notes and scrapped Incapacity Benefit, as well as increasing State Pension age. Anyone and everyone now are expected to work and are deemed fit enough to do so regardless of age and infirmity. You can get a ‘Fit note’ that says what you fit to do, and make a claim for LCWRUC (Low Capability fir Work Related Universal Credit) but which means you are still in the DWP SYSTEM, still answerable to a Jobcentre Work Coach and possibly still expected to engage with the world of work to some degree, to do some limited amount of jobsearch and attend jobcentre appointments/interviews as required, or face a WCA (Work Capability Assessment). The Tories are obsessed with getting even the elderly, early Retirees, sick and disabled people into work or hounded to be constantly seeking/applying for work, even though we have a near full employment and those people are not fit to work. And no one is saying anything about it.’

This is true, and getting worse. I’ve noticed the populist right – GB News and the New Culture Forum, for example, lamenting that there are supposedly so many millions claiming sickness or disability and demanding that they be used to supply the necessary labour they can no longer get from migrant workers after Brexit.

A vital part of this system is the Work Capability Tests, brought in by Blair as part of the welfare to work programme. This is a system of tests designed to ascertain whether the claimant is genuinely ill or disabled, or can do some work and so is ineligible for benefit. It was set up on the advice, and following now discredited scientific research of the American private health insurance company, Unum. Which company saw the increased numbers of people thrown off benefits under its system as a huge opportunity to sell them its wares. Blair’s establishment of the Work Capability Tests followed similar legislation, again introduced on the advice of Unum, by John Major’s Tories under Peter Lilley. The system assumes that a certain percentage of claims are always fraudulent, and so this number must always be found fit for work. Even when they blatantly aren’t. There have been cases where terminally ill people have been declared so, and where stupid assessors have asked amputees when they expect their limbs to grow back. And seriously ill and disabled people have died after being thrown off the benefit they need to live on. There have also been a large number of successful appeals.

I wrote the pamphlet when Mike was struggling to get the stats for the number of people who had thus died after being denied benefit. And it was a struggle – the DWP did everything it could not to give Mike the information, although he succeeded in getting some. And the answer of the Tory government to the very many successful appeals has been to introduce legislation to make challenging DWP decisions very difficult, such as denying claimants legal aid.

It’s a profoundly wicked system, but it appeals to the right-wing, tabloid mentality that everyone on sick pay or welfare generally are evil scroungers, as opposed to the ‘hard-working people’ the Tories laud, but never reward. Unfortunately, I have no illusion that Starmer, if he gets in power, will ever reform it.

Not when it was set up by his hero, Tony Blair.

Starmer Now Ready to Ditch ‘Wokeness’?

Okay, there are reports now that Starmer might be ready to ditch another set of policies and attitudes. Yesterday That Preston Journalist reported that Starmer had supposedly told his top team that woke didn’t interest the British public, and condemned the Tory party for supporting it. The Tory Journalist correctly pointed out that this was a bit rich coming from Starmer. The Tories weren’t much better than Labour when it came to these policies, but they had done more to oppose them. And Starmer had still been photographed taking the knee for BLM. The only Labour MP who had stuck up for women against the gender ideology was Rosie Duffield, who had been given no support from her leader and the rest of the party whatsoever. He then quoted Sir John Hayes, a Tory, who said that Labour was totally out of touch with the public on these issues.

In fact, not only has Rosie Duffield received no support for his opposition to the transgender ideology and its detrimental impact on women, but she has been isolated and vilified. Last week Starmer paid a visit to her constituency of Medway in order to boost morale among the Labour activists there. Duffield is the local MP, but was not invited.

I will definitely not be sorry if the Labour party ditches the woke ideologies entirely. I consider them entirely destructive, doing little except to increase grievance and resentment rather than promote real policies to resolve them. Black Lives Matter has become somewhat passe following the revelations about the way Patrice Cullors and the leadership of the parent organisation in America used the donations to enrich themselves and their families, Conservatives have also cited statistics that show that more American cops are killed by Blacks than the other way round, and that more Whites are killed by the police than Blacks. The gender ideology behind the trans rights movement is profoundly dangerous. Apart from its effects in allowing trans identified biological men into women’s spaces, it demands that gender nonconforming young people should only be treated as members of the sex they imitate or identify with, even though this may not be appropriate. It therefore sets them on a path to surgical transition that may severely damage their health and require them to receive additional medical care and support for the rest of their lives. Gender critical gays, like the LGB Alliance, reject the notion that trans rights are merely an extension or continuation of gay rights. Instead, they see them as a continuation of gay conversion therapy, in which society treats gay young people by transitioning them into members of the opposite sex, just as previous medical treatment included castration. But trans activists have denounced the LGB Alliance as a hate group. They were not allowed to attend last year’s Labour party conference while trans activists not only did, but were allowed to speak.

Starmer’s support for wokeness always was conditional. When the BLM protests broke out, he declared that it was ‘a moment’ and it took considerable time for him to be seen showing his support for it. And his remarks now don’t change the fact that he still said that 99.99 per cent of women don’t have a penis, meaning that he thought some do, and his panicked reaction when asked if women have cervixes. His response was that it was a question that shouldn’t be asked. The Journalist says that, whatever he’s said, he still relies on the support of the students and activists who support these policies.

He does, but it looks like he’s prepared to do what he’s done to so many other groups, and ditch them if he thinks they’re a liability. The trans lobby is very loud in its criticism of those who don’t follow their demands, and so if he reneges on his support for them completely, I think he’s going to face some very loud opposition and denunciations from the activists within his party, like LGBT Labour.

Private Eye Declares Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn Anti-Semites and Announces Labour Witch-Hunters After John McDonnell

I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Private Eye. Mostly I like it, but today I find myself wishing there was another satirical magazine around, one that wasn’t captured by the political-media complex. One that genuinely was subversive, crusading and really brought you the news that the papers and the lamestream media wouldn’t, and didn’t want you to know about. Because Private Eye is establishment. Its founders were all public schoolboys, as is its current editor, Ian Hislop. And yesterday it showed.

It ran an article on the imminent departure from politics of Diane Abbott for her letter to the Absurder stating that Jews don’t experience racism, and when they do, it’s like the prejudice against people with ginger hair. Unlike Blacks, who were enslaved and forced to the back of the bus under segregation. She ignored the Holocaust and the fact that across parts of Europe and America various institutions, like the universities, set limits on the number of Jews they would take in case they became dominated by Jews. I’ve also heard from people of Jewish heritage that California at one time wouldn’t allow Jews to own property. Abbott is completely wrong, as she’s been told by everyone.

I don’t believe, though, that Abbott is an anti-Semite. She just doesn’t believe anyone except people of colour, and that means primarily Blacks, suffer racism. And she doesn’t want racism by non-White ethnic groups discussed, because ‘they’ would use it to ‘divide and rule’. Aside from which, as Tony Greenstein has shown citing the stats, there isn’t a lot of anti-Semitism amongst severely normal Brits. 77 per cent of British people have positive views of the Jews. Five per cent hate them, and the reminder don’t care one way or another. Given those stats, it’s easy to see how she forgot about the real persecution Jews have historically suffered.

But this was not enough for the writer of the article on Abbott’s coming fall. The anonymous author, styling himself ‘Steeplejack’, said that her views were normal for Corbyn and his faction. He then quoted some Communist who said that Corbyn never really sympathised with the Jews because of their wealth. Okay, according to the stats 60 per cent of British Jews are upper-middle class. This section of the Jewish community doesn’t vote Labour. They’re Conservatives, as shown by Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, nipping round to No. 10 to congratulate Tweezer on her elevation to Prime Minister. The liberal parts of the community generally vote Lib Dem, according to the same stats, with only a few voting Labour. And some parts of the Jewish community are very right-wing, like the two per cent who voted for the National Front in the 1970s. ‘Steeplejack’s’ article believed that it was quite right that Abbott was going to be retired and that Corbyn had been effectively purged from the party, and ended with the announcement that they were coming after John McDonnell next.

You’ll note that at no time does the article mention that Corbyn had and continues to have the strong support of that part of the Jewish community that hasn’t become entranced by the Tories. They didn’t quote anyone from Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas or the Jewish Socialist Group. Because they are the wrong sort of Jews. They’re all evil self-haters and anti-Semites because they support him and criticise Israel. They didn’t go to Shraga Stern for comment, who welcomed Corbyn into his synagogue. Stern’s a Haredi Jew. Their theology holds that Israel will only be restored with the return of the messiah. Until then, Jews should stay patiently in exile, working for the good of the wider community. The Haredi community has a strong respect for Corbyn as he stood by them when they opposed the commercial development of their historic cemetery. But again, the wrong sort of Jews.

Now we come to the question of the identity of ‘Steeplejack’. The last of the Eye’s correspondents pushing this nonsense was outed as a Blairite Guardian hack. I don’t know who this guy is, but the pseudonym suggests he fancies himself in the mould of Fred Dibnah, the steeplejack and broadcaster. Dibnah was very good at explaining industrial history and Britain heritage of invention, but he had very reactionary views. He didn’t believe that women should go out to work, for example. ‘Steeplejack’s’ monicker suggests he is similarly right-wing, though probably not to that extent. And he’s almost certainly another establishment journalist.

Which is what is wrong with Private Eye. You get the views of the lamestream media. It’s critical, but only up to a certain extent. The magazine thus pushed the line that Starmer was an anti-Semite for all it could, because that was what the establishment was saying, and the magazine and its editor and contributors shared the same fears of a socialist revival. It also won’t tell you that the current Ukrainian president, Volodomyr Zelensky, is a quasi-dictator very much in the same mould as Putin. Because Zelensky’s on our side against Russia, and so the people must not know that the Orange Revolution was stage managed by Obama’s Victoria Nuland at the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. Private Eye aren’t anti-establishment, just a slightly critical section of it.

John McDonnell and the Socialist group of MPs are one of the very few things keeping me in the Labour party. And now it’s clear Starmer wants to purge them, with the support of the media and goblins like Private Eye.

Sturgeon’s Not Responsible for Kids Queuing for Soup: The Tories Are

That Preston Journalist, whose real name, I am assured by the great people who comment here, is Ashley Kaminski, put up a genuinely heart-breaking video last night. People had been queuing outside a soup kitchen in Glasgow. Among the adults were ten children, including a babe in arms. Kaminski thought that this was terrible, as he should. He’s an avowed opponent of Nicola Sturgeon and all her works, dubbing her ‘McKrankie’ after her supposed resemblance to one half of a double act back in the 1980s. From the tone of his piece, he clearly wanted to blame her, but couldn’t quite. It was wrong, he said, whoever was responsible.

Okay, I don’t know what powers the devolved Scots parliament has, especially regarding welfare policies. I am sure that many Scots voted SNP, not because they wanted independence, but simply because they wanted a proper welfare state, something that wasn’t being offered by Jim Murphy’s Scottish Labour party. But this scandalous situation has been around far longer than the SNP’s administration, and it afflicts communities right across Britain. In Scotland there was a parliamentary inquiry into food banks a few years ago. One of those speaking before the committee was a volunteer, who described the intensely dispiriting deprivation and poverty he saw as he did his job. And I can remember putting up a 19th-early 20th century poem about children queuing outside a food kitchen. It’s disgusting that Britain has returned to such levels of poverty.

But Krankie isn’t responsible. The Tories are. They’ve insisted on wages so low working families can’t make ends meet, and cut welfare payments again and again, all with mantra of encouraging ‘welfare scroungers’ to look for work, making work pay and all the other nonsense. They’ve also introduced benefit sanction after benefit sanction, all with the same intention. It also helps to fiddle the unemployment statistics, as if they’re off the DHSS’ books, they aren’t counted as unemployed.

It’s possible that Sturgeon’s policies aren’t helping the situation north of the border. But the ultimate blame lies with the Tories, and it started when Ruth Davidson, the head of the Conservatives up there, was in power. And Sturgeon definitely isn’t responsible for it down south in England and Wales.

The Tories are. It started under Cameron.

They’re starving children.

Get them out!

Tories Have Fiddled the Statistics on Coronavirus Deaths – Is Anyone Surprised?

Last Tuesday, 31st March 2020, Mike put up a piece reporting how the Office for National Statistics had caught the Tories fiddling the figures for the numbers of deaths from the Coronavirus to date. According to the government’s figures, the number of dead up to March 20th, the cut off date for the ONS figures, stood at 120. However, they achieved this figure by only counting deaths in hospitals. When the ONS factored these in, the real number of fatalities increased by 23.5 per cent or more, rising to 210. The official death toll at the time Mike put up his article was 1,408. But if the ONS’ estimation of the real figures is correct, then the real number of deaths was 1,739. This assumes that the proportion of deaths in hospitals has remained constant, but as Mike pointed out, it could be much higher.

Mike pointed out in his article that these stats are important, as they show that the government’s figures cannot be trusted. It also means that the government cannot be trusted when it claims that the spread of the virus is slowing. He was concerned that the government would be tempted to lift the lockdown prematurely, which would allow the virus a whole new lease of life.

Coronavirus: UK government death figures are FALSE

Mike wasn’t the only person smelling a rat with the government’s official Coronavirus stats. The previous Thursday, March 26th, Zelo Street put up a piece about how the government’s statistics had mysteriously changed as they altered the rules regarding how the deaths were counted. That Tuesday, the Department for Health and Social Care declared at 15.51 on Twitter that the number of people, who had tested positive for the virus, stood at 8,077 and 422 had died. But on Wednesday the situation appeared to change. At just past a quarter past two, the Department’s Twitter feed announced that the figures would be announced later that afternoon, but reassured readers that they were working hard to compile them. However, the figures were only released on Twitter at 2300 hours, after they had been given to the media. The number of people, who had tested positive was now 9,529, but there had been only 463 deaths in total.

Sienna Rogers of LabourList reported that it had been claimed that the government was changing the way it was releasing the death figures. The numbers of deaths reported may not be the same as the number of deaths that had occurred in the previous 24 hours, as family consent was now required to release the figures. Luke Cooper of the LSE called it what it looks like. He said that family consent was not required if the information was anonymised. This looked like the Tories were fiddling the stats. Chris Smyth of the Times then added that the low figure of the 28 new deaths that had been recorded wasn’t a piece of good news, but the opposite. There were now so many new deaths that the government had changed the cutoff time from 1 pm to 7.30 am. This was supposedly to give the government more time to inform the families and get the details on the locations of the deaths before releasing them. Zelo Street contrasted this with the situation in Italy and Spain, the two countries worst affected, where the hundreds of new deaths are freely reported to the media. The Street concluded that

‘We are told that there is bad news coming down the track; a new NHS facility is being built at the ExCeL centre in London’s Docklands; that facility, NHS Nightingale, has provision for thousands of beds and two morgues; individual reports of deaths are everywhere; TfL staff report scores of their colleagues falling ill from the virus; and the numbers dry up.

This is the stuff from which conspiracy theories spring. Government must come clean.’

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/03/virus-stats-is-government-being-honest.html

This, alas, is too much to hope for. The Tories are a party of liars – always have been, always will be. Their record on the unemployment stats abundantly testifies to that. When unemployment under Maggie Thatcher shot up to over 3 million – an unheard of record at that time, the Tories immediately changed the way the unemployment figures were counted in order to make it smaller. And they’ve kept doing it. A few years ago, when Dave Cameron was the latest malign presence squatting in No. 10, it was revealed that they’d changed the way the stats were collected once again. The unemployment figures were based only on those currently claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance. Which meant that the peeps, who were unemployed but ineligible to sign on, or who had refused to do so because of the humiliating way they were treated by the staff and the infamous ‘work coaches’, who ring you up at home to harangue you into getting work, weren’t included.

This is a government that prefers to hide embarrassing statistics. The DWP under another malign presence, the utterly vile Iain Duncan Smith, fought tooth and nail to stop Mike and the other great disability bloggers from getting the statistics for the number of people, who had died after being declared ‘fit for work’ by the government assessor, outsourcing company Atos. They stonewalled, tried to claim that Mike’s request was vexatious, appealed against the Information Commissioner’s ruling when he ruled in favour of Mike, and, when they finally had no choice but to release the stats, interpreted Mike’s request to give him a slightly different set of figures than those he requested. But these were damning enough, even so.

And the subsequent Tory leaders, Tweezer and now Boris, really don’t like meeting the public. They run away and hide from unexpected meetings and questions from the media. Tweezer’s appearances on the campaign trail were carefully choreographed with selected groups and closed to the general public. So were Johnson’s, who fled when confronted by someone he didn’t expect. Remember how he disappeared into a fridge when he was visiting a dairy in order to escape questions from a TV journo? And then we had the unedifying spectacle a few months ago of Boris and Cummings trying to divide the media lobby into inner and outer groups. The inner – who were all their loyal supporters – were to be rewarded by being invited to a press conference on Brexit at No. 10. That attempt to control the media didn’t work, as all the media, even those that staunchly support the Tories, immediately balked at such overt, cynical manipulation and walked out in protest.

The Tories are congenital, irremediable liars. No-one should be surprised that they fiddled the stats. They tried to hide the number of deaths of disabled people, who had been falsely declared fit for work. They’ve falsified the unemployment figures. It should come as no surprise that, as they have shown themselves incompetent and out of their depth at handling the Coronavirus crisis, they should be fiddling those statistics too.

And Mike is right. They are a menace. Boris dithered and tried everything possible to delay imposing a lockdown until it was too late, because he was too worried about the economy at the expense of people’s lives. And a sizable proportion of the Tory party and their supporters, like the noxious Brendan O’Neil of Spiked, Toby Young of the Spectator, Trevor Kavanagh of the Scum, still believe that people should sacrificed for the sake of the economy.

There is therefore a very real danger that the Tories will use the falsified stats to justify lifting the lockdown prematurely, and so starting off a new wave of illness and deaths.

Cartoon: The Dead Thatchers – Eton Uber Alles

Hi, and here’s another of my cartoons satirising the Tories and their utterly reprehensible politicos and other members. In this case, the cartoon takes the form of a sleeve image for a non-existent punk band, the Dead Thatchers, and an equally non-existent song, ‘Eton Uber Alles’. It shows David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson and George Osborne in front of the gates of Auschwitz, which bears the infamous slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ and the cartoon’s punchline, as you can see, is ‘You will row for the master race’. It’s a reference to the Eton boating song,which itself got poached and revamped in the 1980s by Paul McCartney into the Frog Chorus.

The cartoon’s inspiration is the American punk outfit, The Dead Kennedys, and their song, ‘Kalifornia Uber Alles’. As punks, the Kennedys really hated hippies, and so the song’s just a rant about how California is some kind of hippy Third Reich. I was never a fan of the Dead Kennedys, but I do remember the song had the lines ‘Hippy Nazis will control you, you will jog for the master race!’ Which in the context of a Britain dominated by Eton would obviously be boating.

Now there’s a lot that can be said about hippies both pro and con, but they definitely weren’t Nazis. There was, apparently, a Hippy Nazi party, but they were in Florida, and from their name sound like a rather tasteless joke. They sound like an attempt to wind up the straights, rather than any serious Fascist organisation. Unfortunately, with the way so many of the British ruling class were initially very sympathetic towards Nazi Germany, flocking to organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship, it’s probably a fair bet that the fathers or grandfathers of many of the boys now at Eton really were Nazi sympathizers. Though I’m not, of course, claiming that those of the four depicted above were.

And there is a serious point for my placing them in front of the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, and it’s the same reason people have scrawled it on the walls of Jobcentres and put up photoshopped images of the same. The pro-Israel fanatics and Tories attacked those images and graffiti as anti-Semitic, claiming that they were somehow turning the Holocaust into a joke. However, as Mike explained in his piece last Saturday about the appearance of the slogan on another Jobcentre, this certainly isn’t a case. The phrase translates into English as ‘Work Makes (You) Free’. According to Tony Greenstein, the slogan was on the gates of all the Nazi camps, including those housing gentile prisoners. It was not used exclusively for the Jews, and first appeared on a concentration camp for non-Jews. It’s been applied to the Tories and their administration of the DWP, particularly by Iain Duncan Smith, because they really do seem to have a very Fascistic attitude to the poor and disabled.

The Tories have a mantra about ‘making work pay’, and have deliberately adopted a policy of ‘less eligibility’ towards the disabled and the unemployed in order to deter and punish them for claiming benefit. It takes five weeks after someone has signed on before they receive their first payment under Universal Credit. This is also less than the amount they would have received under the previous, benefit systems. There is an extensive system of sanctions, in which claimants can be thrown off their benefits on the flimsiest of excuses. The disabled are subjected to work capability tests, in which a certain percentage are always found fit work, even when the poor souls are severely disabled and even in several cases terminally ill. Grieving relatives and friends have even found their loved one’s receiving letters from the DWP informing them that they have been found fit for work, and so no longer liable for incapacity and related benefits after they’ve died. It has also been revealed that Maximus, the organisation responsible for administering the tests, like its predecessor Atos, has regularly falsified the results in order to get claimants thrown off benefits.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/14/firms-that-falsified-thousands-of-benefit-assessments-set-to-get-contracts-to-falsify-thousands-more/

Mike in his article on Sunday, 8th March 2020 put up this meme reminding everyone how IDS started an article for the online edition of one of the papers actually praising the slogan and defending it against its use by the Nazis. The offending paragraph disappeared soon after, but not before shocked and horrified people had taken screenshots of it and put them back up so everyone could see just how low Iain Duncan Smith is. Here’s the meme:

As one tweeter, Paula Peters, quoted by Mike in his article points out, the language used by the Tories about the disabled is very much the same the Nazis used in the Third Reich. They’re denounced as ‘useless eaters’ and scroungers. The term ‘workshy’, used to describe the long-term unemployed, is also taken from the Nazis. It’s the English translation of ‘arbeitscheu’. And the habitually or long-term unemployed were also branded ‘asocial’ and placed in the concentration camps.

The Tories do this because they have a fundamentally eugenicist view of the poor, the unemployed and the disabled. They are biologically inferior, ‘dysgenic’, who threaten the healthy purity of the rest of the human race and particularly the biologically superior. Who are naturally the rich, especially the heads of big business. Hence the Tory policy of forcing them off benefits, even if it means the deaths of hundreds of thousands. It’s estimated that about 120,000 people have been killed by Tory austerity. But there is no apology nor any attempt to alter or improve conditions despite continuing revelations of the hardship inflicted on millions of people. Instead the Tories merely double down, repeated their lies about how, under them, the economy was booming and more people were in work than ever before. As for the deaths, they have done everything they can to hide the figures and prevent disability rights activists and carers, like Mike, from obtaining them. Hence putting the Tories in front of that slogan is very appropriate.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/08/hypocrisy-over-language-used-to-describe-dwp-oppression-of-benefit-claimants/

Here’s the cartoon. As always, I hope you enjoy it. And please, don’t have nightmares. It’s only Iain Duncan Smith!

 

Complaint Sent to Charity Commission about Board of Deputies’ Political Bias

The internet blogger and activist Simon Maginn has complained to the Charity of Commission about the Board of Deputies of British Jews. They have, in his opinion, broken the Commission’s requirement that to qualify for charity status, an organisation should not support or oppose a political party or political candidate, although they may engage in political activity. Yet the Board has done this with its requirement that the Labour Party, and only the Labour Party, has to sign up to its 10 pledges to rid itself of anti-Semitism. When Mr Maginn asked the Board why they insisted that it should only be the Labour party who should do this, the Board said that it was ‘infested’ with ‘anti-Jewish racism’.

This is sheer nonsense. Of course there’s anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, just as there’s anti-Semitism unfortunately throughout British society. But despite what the Board, the Chief Rabbinate, and witch-hunting organisations like the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism would have us all believe, it is actually much lower in the Labour Party. Jewish Voice for Labour, which has larger and far more authentically Jewish members than the sham outfit, the Jewish Labour Movement, real name Paole Zion, has repeatedly pointed this out. And there have been a stream of Jewish Labour Party members, who’ve said the same. They’ve said that, while they know it must exist, they have never come across it themselves. And some of these are members of very long standing. This impression is supported by the Community Security Trust, who gather statistics on anti-Semitic crime and incidents. Their stats show that the incidence of anti-Semitism rises the further to the right you go, and so statistically the Labour Party is less anti-Semitic than the Tories. And three-quarters of anti-Semitic incidents recorded by the CST come from the far right. As you’d expect.

Simon asked the BoD why they were therefore targeting the Labour Party when the stats said otherwise. He states that they offered ‘no statistical rebuttal’.

Simon then says

“Thus, the BoD have made a very public statement that the Labour Party is problematic based on faulty data. They are ‘opposing’ the Labour Party in so doing. The issue is politically sensitive. The BoD’s ’10 point pledge’ has had enormous publicity, with all the Labour leadership candidates signing up to it. This, in my opinion, amounts to the BoD ‘opposing’ the Labour Party by singling them out for opprobrium and not demanding any other party sign the pledge.

“I think this politicisation of the BoD’s activities presents a negative image of charities, which the British people believe to be politically neutral. The suggestion that a charity might be using its charitable status to oppose one party and, by implication, support another is damaging to the reputation of the charitable sector generally.”

Mike in his discussion of this says it’s a strong argument, and will be interesting to see what the Charity Commission does with it. Particularly as it’s already investigating the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism for the same reasons.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/02/18/charity-commission-urged-to-take-action-over-political-activity-by-board-of-deputies/

But this was never about anti-Semitism to begin with.

Not the real hatred of Jews, simply because they’re Jews. This is the dictionary definition of anti-Semitism, and the one adhered to by one of the odious organisations behind modern anti-Semitism, the German Bund Antisemisten. But the Board of Deputies wasn’t interested in that. This was all about getting the Labour Party to adopt the I.H.R.C. definition of anti-Semitism and its examples, in order to prevent criticism of Israel’s oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The BoD, Chief Rabbinate, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and their counterparts in the Labour Party, Paole Zion, er, I mean the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, were frightened of changes to the Labour leadership long before Corbyn was elected. They started screaming that it was anti-Semitic when the Jewish Ed Miliband was elected, because he dared to criticise Israel. And they panicked when Corbyn was elected, because he is a long-time anti-racism activist who has consistently supported Palestinian rights. Along with supporting Britain’s Jewish communities. Mike and other bloggers have put up ad nauseam a long list of Corbyn’s actions to defend the country’s Jews. One of the best known of these is when he helped prevent the redevelopment of an historic Haredi Jewish cemetery. And he is also absolutely not an enemy of Israel. He just wants it to stop persecuting its indigenous Arabs.

Critics of Israel like Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish American academic, have pointed out that Israel is unable to counter criticism of its policies on factual grounds. It has therefore concentrated on smearing its opponents as anti-Semites. This is what the Israel lobby in this country was doing when it attacked Corbyn and the Labour Party. The accusations were very definitely politically motivated, and had a ready audience in the Conservative political and media establishment. These were all too eager to broadcast and amplify these smears to the widest possible audience, while ignoring the very many Jews and Jewish organisations that denied and contradicted these smears.

Simon’s absolutely correct, but I’m afraid I don’t see the Charity Commission acting. I’ve heard a number of stories about serious and flagrant mismanagement of charities. But it seems the Commission is very reluctant to act unless there’s no way it can get out of it. In this, it seems to resemble the Financial Services Authority, which is supposed to police the banking and financial sector. This is so loath to act on cases of wrongdoing that Private Eye has nicknamed it the ‘Fundamentally Supine Authority’.

But I hope the Charity Commission will prove me wrong in this, and hope they will investigate thoroughly this obvious case of definite, selective political opposition by the Board.

Simon has also published a series of Tweets criticising the Board’s 10 pledges and the reactions of the Labour leadership hopefuls to them. He points out that they won’t end the anti-Semitism controversy and Board’s meddling in the Labour Party. They’ll just increase it until the Party is destroyed. See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/02/19/labours-leader-candidates-seem-determined-to-destroy-their-own-party-heres-how-it-works/

 

 

‘I’ Newspaper: True Number of Claimant Suicides May Be Far Higher than Thought

Mike’s already covered this story about the National Audit Office’s criticism of the DWP over claimant suicides. Here’s the I’s report on the issue from Saturday’s edition, 8th February 2020, by Same Blewett.

The suicides of 69 welfare claimants have been investigated by the Government but the true scale of such deaths may be far higher, a watchdog has warned.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said it was “highly unlikely” that the cases completed by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) amounted to all those that could have been investigated in the past six years.

A failure to keep a robust record of investigations in the past and now failing to give clear guidance on when investigations should be launched were highlighted by the government watchdog. Only nine internal process reviews (IPRs) arose from communications with coroners; 19 were prompted by media reports while others were triggered by claimants’ families.

Figures also showed a steady rise in investigations, with the 21 cases investigated between April and November outnumbering the total of the previous two years combined.

“It is highly unlikely that the 69 cases the Department has investigated represents the number of cases it could hvae investigated in the past six years,” the report said.

A DWP spokeswoman said the department was taking the findings “extremely seriously”.

I’ve no doubt that the number of suicides is higher, much higher. But the DWP hasn’t taken them seriously. Or rather, it has, but only as a threat to their policy of culling the sick and the poor. The department did everything it could to dodge having to give the stats to Mike on the number of people, who died after being found fit for work by ATOS. And it persistently denied there was a link between its policy of sanctions and throwing the disabled off their benefits through highly contrived and falsified test results and the suicides of their victims. They even denied it when the evidence was there for all to see in suicide notes left by those victims, in which they blamed DWP polices.

Now Mike reports that yesterday the DWP made a series of pledges, promising that it would learn from the NAO’s report and put in place measures to investigate ‘customer’ experiences and improve procedures, as well as internal communications so that staff are aware of the processes for reporting a suicide.

But Mike states that he has absolutely no faith in all this, as we’ve heard it all before.

And we have. The DWP under the Tories won’t do anything. It will carry on killing people, because the Tories want it to. And every time it gets caught out, it will repeat the same mantra about learning lessons and putting in place procedures to stop it all happening again. Until the next death that can’t be blithely waved away, when it will trot out these same smooth lies.

The Labour manifesto was right. The DWP needs to broken up, its current managers sacked, and the system returned to the structure and ethos of the former Department of Health and Social Security.  

Don’t believe DWP pledge to learn from cases linked to suicide – we’ve heard it all before

Outrage as Iain Duncan Smith Given Knighthood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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