Oh, what delightful irony! What goes around, comes around. And it’s come around to hit Gary Spedding. Spedding’s one of the ultra-Zionists who took it upon himself in 2018 to join Kieron Monks and the fake anti-racism outfit, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism in smearing Mike as a Jew-hater and holocaust-denier.
Mike had critiqued a piece by Monks that appeared in Prospect claiming that there was an anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Prospect is a moderate, left-wing political magazine very much like Encounter was in the ’60s and 70’s. This magazine was later revealed to have benefited from CIA funding, and there are suspicions amongst the watchers of real conspiracies and the covert activities of the intelligence agencies, like Lobster, that Prospect is similarly a conduit for secret state propaganda.
Mike briefly questioned whether Tony Blair had been influenced by a secret Jewish cabal, but the subtleties of his prose escaped, or, more likely, was wilfully misinterpreted by the anti-Semitism smear merchants. They claimed that Mike had claimed that Blair was influenced by such a cabal, and that this constituted a form of the old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews secretly controlling events and politics. Mike was hauled up before the NEC and then thrown out. The lies against him were leaked by person or persons unknown in that august body to the SunsetTimes. And in an argument with Mike on the web, Spedding repeated the smears, libelling Mike as an anti-Semite and holocaust-denier.
As has been abundantly demonstrated over and again, Mike is neither. He couldn’t afford to prosecute Spedding for libel, but he was able to clear his name by IPSO. As for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, it is in my view nothing but an ultra-Zionist front organisation. It was founded in 2012 by Gideon Falter, who was outraged that severely normal Brits didn’t back Israel during the bombardment of Gaza. It has made so many fake accusations of anti-Semitism that I feel it should really have a new name. Perhaps ‘the Campaign Against Truth?’ Or may be, as so many victims of the anti-Semitism smear campaign are Jews, ‘the Campaign for Anti-Semitism’ or ‘Campaign Against Jews’?
Further confirmation that the Israel lobby and ultra-Zionists in Labour were behind the anti-Semitism smears against Mike and the other victims is shown in one of the other names that crop up in Monks’ tweet: Dave Rich. Rich wrote a book a few years ago claiming that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left was deeply anti-Semitic. Rich, however, was the head of a Zionist organisation, which indicates to me that he was pushing the smears to defend Israel against a Labour leader, who had been a very strong opponent of the country’s brutal oppression of the Palestinians.
Now Spedding himself is facing expulsion on the trumped-up charge of having disseminated material from the Green party during the Hartlepool by-election. Now he is complaining about the unfair and brutal treatment of people like him by Starmer. But Starmer gained the leadership precisely because of people like Spedding. And Spedding now wants to ‘join in the solidarity with the other victims’. Mike therefore doubts his motivations considering his past conduct.
Spedding is asking for an apology from Starmer, so Mike asked him if he would care to apologise to him. He was brusquely refused with the curt reply ‘Why would I apologise to you?’
Which shows very clearly that he’s still convinced of his lies and libels. Mike states that he’s toxic and so doesn’t deserve a minute of anyone’s time.
Quite. Until Spedding acknowledges that the accusations against Mike and the other victims of the anti-Semitism witch hunt are false, there can be no real solidarity between them and him.
Readers of this blog will be very aware of my position on the trans ideology. I believe the ideology is immensely harmful, causing psychologically vulnerable people to believe falsely that they are of the wrong sex. The process of medical transition is long, expensive and very often difficult and there may be serious complications that permanently impair the life of the person undergoing it. At the same time the idea that anyone can validly claim to be a member of the opposite sex simply by saying they identify as that gender has made biological women vulnerable to sexually predatory biological men, who have gained access to female-only spaces. There have been a spate of rapes and sexual assaults in Californian women’s prisons, thanks to legislation backed by Biden granting trans-identified men the right to be housed in them. At the same time transwomen may still retain biological advantages over born women in sport which makes them competing with them unfair. And Trans Rights Activists can be violent and abusive. They do post abuse and threatening imagery against their opponents online, and gender critical feminists – termed TERFS by their opponents – have been assaulted. At a recent demonstration in Spain by feminists protesting against their government’s self-ID bill there were three squads of riot police sent in to protect them against assault by militant pro-trans activists. Eventually so many of trans activists appeared in such a aggressive mood that the police advised the women to leave for their own safety.
Now Rosie Duffield has appeared in the Sunset Times to claim that she’s not appearing at the Labour party conference due to threats from trans activists and LGBTQ+ Labour.
Despite my opposition to the trans Ideology, I have to be fair. It seems that no such threats have been sent to Duffield. She has not produced a single threatening tweet to support her claim.
As Mike points out, it seems she’s copying the tactics of Luciana Berger of smearing her opponents in the party with false claims of abuse. Berger a few years ago claimed that she had received anti-Semitic abuse from Labour party members. It was a flat-out lie. She had received abuse, but it all came from the usual source – the far right. Duffield is a right-winger, and so Starmer has taken the trouble to check her welfare, something I doubt he would do for anyone on the left who had suffered abuse.
Duffield, of course, has form when it comes to trying to get left-wingers and Corbynites thrown out of the party. She marched with Ruth Smeeth in the ‘lynch mob’ of right-wing female Labour MPs in support of the fake anti-Semitism allegations against Mark Wadsworth.
She also demanded that Chris Williamson should be found guilty and thrown out of the party when he was hauled before the NCC’s kangaroo court.
And Mike points out that she smeared victims of her own abuse.
She is deeply untrustworthy and this looks like another lie made up by a right-winger to smear the left.
But unfortunately it’s a lie that the right-wing press and media are all too keen to hear. Alex Belfield has been pushing it this morning.
Duffield’s behaviour not only shows the sheer mendacity of the Blairites, it also shows their complete absence of any positive policies. They say nothing to oppose the Tories, because they support Tory policies and want to steal their voters. They want to turn Labour into a second Tory party, and to do so wish to suppress and expel the left.
But having nothing positive to offer themselves, all they can do is smear and expel them with lies and falsehoods.
This is very interesting. Alex Belfield, the mad right-wing internet radio host, who believes the lockdown should be immediately lifted, hates the immigrants coming over from France in their dinghies, and wants the NHS to be handed over to private management, apart from other high Tory policies and talking points, has just posted up a video today laying into GB News. This is supposed to be the patriotic, private news station, fronted by former editor of the Economist, the Scotsman and the Sunset Times, now head of the company in charge of the alt-right Spectator, Andrew Neil.
And this is Belfield’s first criticism of the station. Neil lives in France, and will be broadcasting from across the Channel. Which looks very bad for a company claiming to be Great Britain News, the patriotic alternative to the ‘wet, woke BBC’. The claim is that Neil has been stranded across La Manche because of the lockdown, although Belfield points out that he’s probably there since the weather’s warmer and the food and wine better. In fact, Neil’s been living in France for years. When he was editing one of the papers he used to hold the morning’s editorial meetings via Speakerphone, which caused the staff no end of embarrassment and doubtless hilarity when they are the sounds of Brillo struggling with his dog, Napoleon, which bit him.
But a more important criticism is in the second half of this video. Belfield points out that GB is not patriotic. It’s part of a multinational, the Murdoch empire. And while its broadcasters will tell us – he means fellow right-wingers like himself – what they want to hear, they aren’t us and are not on our side.
Quite.
This is what the Left and even some Tories have been saying since forever and a day. When Murdoch made moves to buy the Times in the late ’70s or early ’80s, there were Tories who objected to its acquisition by the smut merchant who has ruined journalism and coarsened culture across the civilised world. But Thatcher wanted his support, and so gave in to his request. As did her intellectual heir in the Labour party, Tony Blair, and now the Tory administrations of Cameron, Tweezer and BoJob.
There are of course solutions to the problems of the multinationals. These are to nationalise the utilities to make sure that they receive proper investment and work to serve the British public, rather than provide profits for their foreigner owners and management; end the offshore shell companies which allow the superrich to avoid paying tax; and pass legislation preventing foreigners owning British papers. This is what the Americans did in their country, and its why Murdoch moved to America and took out American citizenship in order to retain Fox News and other parts of his empire over there.
But all this is anathema to the elite who run our country and political parties, who are neoliberals to the core and have personal interests in many of these firms. This includes Keir Starmer, who wants to return the Labour party to being the servant of wealthy, corporate donors rather than a party for ordinary working people.
But in the meantime, this video is interesting as it shows that Belfield is aware that something is seriously wrong with globalisation. He just thinks that somehow it can be resolved within laissez-faire capitalism.
This is another incident which shows the real, intolerant, treacherous face of Starmer’s administration. And it could have come straight out of the Blair playbook. Yesterday Starmer sacked three MPs from their posts as Parliamentary Private Secretaries – Nadia Whittome, Beth Winter and Olivia Blake because they had the conscience and the guts to vote against the government’s Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill 2019-21. The ladies objected to the bill’s provisions that would have exempted British service personnel for prosecutions for torture committed overseas. Starmer, however, had set up a one-line whip demanding that the Labout MPs abstain.
Other MPs from the ‘Corbynite’ wing of the party also had the courage to vote against the bill. They were: Diane Abbott, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Jeremy Corbyn, Ian Lavery, Rebecca Long-Bailey, John McDonnell, Kate Osamor, Kate Osborne, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Zarah Sultana, Jon Trickett, and Claudia Webbe. Kudos and respect to all of them.
Lobster has put up a number of articles about the involvement of British armed forces in war crimes and supporting brutal dictatorships. At the moment the British military is giving training to 17 regimes, including the Chinese, that are on a list of thirty which are of concern because of their history of human rights abuses. The SAS was also involved in training the Sri Lankan army in its brutal war against the Tamil Tigers, which included reprisals and atrocities against the civilian Tamil population. A recent book on war crimes by the ‘Keenie Meenies’, a British mercenary company, also notes that, although they’re not formally part of the British army, they too have been used by the British state to give military support to some very unpleasant movements and regimes at arm’s length. Like the Mujahiddin fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Fascist regimes in Central America in the 1980s. Going further back, British armed forces were also responsible for brutal reprisals against Black Kenyans during the Mao Mao rebellion, including torture and mutilation. The victims of the atrocities were only granted compensation after a long legal campaign a few years ago. For details of the atrocities themselves, see the book, Africa’s Secret Gulags.
Mike also points that Starmer’s order that Labour should abstain on the bill, but not vote against it, is similar to Harriet Harman’s order a few years ago that Labour should also abstain on a Tory welfare bill that would further cut benefits and impoverish claimants. It’s all part of the Blairite strategy of trying to appeal to Tory voters at the expense of the people they should really be standing up to protect. But they try to make it seems that they’re also paying attention to their working class and socialist base by abstaining. It’s unconvincing. To me, it recalls Pilate in the Gospels washing his hands and walking off when the Sanhedrin brought Christ before him to be crucified.
What makes Starmer’s decision particularly noxious, however, what adds insult to injury, is the way it was done. Whittome was not told she was sacked but a Labour ‘representative’ – some of us can think of other epithets for this unnamed person – instead went of an briefed Guido Fawkes. That’s the far-right gossip and smear site run by Paul Staines. Staines is an extreme right-wing Tory and libertarian, who’d like to ban the trade unions and other working class organisations, privatise everything, including the NHS, and get rid of the welfare state. When he was a member of the Freedom Association back in the 1980s, the organisation invited the leader of a Fascist death squad from El Salvador as their guest of honour at their annual dinner. Other guests, I think, included members of the South African Conservative party, who were staunch supporters of apartheid. He was also mad keen on the various psychedelics that were coming into the rave scene in the 1990s, including and especially ‘E’. It’s disgusting that anyone in the news should have been told before Whittome herself, but especially a Fascist like Staines and his squalid crew.
And Mike has pointed out on his blog that this is exactly the same tactic the Blairites in the Labour party used to stab him in the back. Mike was suspended for anti-Semitism the evening before he was due to stand as a Labour councillor in the mid-Wales elections. But he only found about it when a reporter from one of the local Welsh papers rang him up to ask him about it. And then some other weasel at the NEC went off and leaked Mike’s details to the Sunset Times, which then ran a feature smearing and libeling him as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Which Mike has never been, and very strongly and utterly condemns, as he has all racism.
But this also brings to mind the negative briefing Blair himself conducted against those MPs, who dared to go ‘off-message’ during his regime. Notable victims included Clare Short, who I think also clashed with him over his definitely unethical foreign policy. If a Labour MP or senior figure dared to contradict one of the Dear Leader’s policies or announcements, Blair and Campbell called the media hacks in for an anonymous briefing in which they or a representative then attacked the dissenting MP.
And now it seems that these old tactics have returned under ‘centrist’ Keir Starmer.
The Labour party is haemorrhaging members because of the way Starmer has turned his back on the great, socialist, genuinely Labour policies that Corbyn and his team were determined to return to. Mike’s pointed out that so far Starmer has broken 9 of his pledges to uphold them. Including his commitment to add 5 per cent tax to the upper right for big earners. That’s the multi-millionaires who have benefited from massive tax breaks, funded by savage benefit cuts to the poor and starving at the bottom of society, and who have squirreled their money away in offshore bank accounts. Including companies like that well-known patriotic group of papers and media, News International. Black members are particularly bitter and disappointed because of Starmer’s scant regard for the Black Lives Matter movement, which he dismissed as a ‘moment’.
Starmer has done nothing against the intriguers, who cost Labour the 2017 and 2019 elections, and who were responsible for the racist bullying of three senior and respected Black Labour MPs. Instead, the intriguers are arming themselves with lawyers and claiming that they have been smeared. And it shows how low Private Eye has fallen that the satirical magazine is uncritically pushing these claims, just as it was an enthusiastic supporter of the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn and his supporters.
Mike yesterday put up a piece commenting on this grossly shabby action by Starmer, including citing some very excellent tweets from the public. They include people like Tory Fibs, Kelly-Ann Mendoza and Rachel Swindon. But my favourite comment is this from Mark Hebden
Nadia Whittome has essentially been sacked for voting against war crimes.
The Labour Party is the Party of War criminality again then
Yes, just as they were when Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq.
Mike has pointed out that Labour is behind the Tories in the polls, although Starmer himself is actually more popular than Boris. He asks, quite credibly, if this is because the Labour party acts like this to betray its own members.
What comes out of this is that Starmer himself is another intriguing Blairite and that he and his scuzzy advisors really haven’t learnt that not only are such tactics against one’s own unacceptable in themselves, they will also make you unpopular with the public. The press didn’t hold back on using these negative briefings against Blair and Brown when they did it, in order to make them look personally unpleasant and untrustworthy. Which they were.
Starmer is damaging the Labour party. I wish the poll result were the reverse. I wish Labour was surging ahead of the Tories, and it was Starmer behind Boris. It is no more than he deserves.
Tomorrow Bristol South Labour Party is holding its elections for the party’s NEC. If you are a member of that constituency Labour party, please go ahead and register to vote before the meeting begins on Zoom. Registration stops at 6.45 when you should start signing on. It’s a closed meeting, and so people won’t be admitted after it begins at 7.00 pm.
Yesterday evening I and the other constituency party members got an email from our local MP Karin Smyth outlining what she’d been doing in parliament. She’s due to give her report at the meeting. She also told us who she hopes will win our votes for the NEC. And it looks like a pack of Blairites.
‘There are many excellent candidates and I am hoping Paula Sheriff, Theresa Griffin, Liz McInnes, Johanna Baxter, Ann Black, Terry Paul, Luke Akehurst, Gurinder Singh Josan and Shama Tatler will be successful.’
Now I’ll admit my ignorance. I don’t know most of these people, but one name stands out: Luke Akehurst. If you’ve been following Tony Greenstein’s excellent blog, you’ll know that he’s one of the true-Blue Blairites, and a fanatical Zionist. He’s one who has smeared and tried to purge party members as anti-Semites if they supported Jeremy Corbyn or dared to offer the mildest criticisms of Israel. I’m guessing that the others she’s promoting have similar views.
My was one of those smeared and expelled from the party by the NEC, simply because he had the temerity to show that Ken Livingstone was historically correct when he said that Hitler supported Zionism. The Nazi leader signed a short-lived pact with the Zionist organisations in Germany to smuggle German Jewish settlers to Palestine. This was the Ha’avara Agreement, which is recognised history and documented as such in the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. 85 per cent of the initial founding capital for the Jewish state also came from Nazi Germany.
Mike was suspended from the party without being told on the evening before he was due to stand as a councillor in the local elections in his part of Wales. The NEC also went behind his back and told the press before they told him. This included Gabriel Pogrund, a hack with the Sunset Times, who then rang him up for an interview. The Sunset Times then showed its complete absence of any concern for truth by libeling him as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Which he is certainly not, and has never been. These lies were repeated by other newspapers, including the Jewish Chronicle.
Before his expulsion, Mike, like so many other decent, left-wing, genuinely anti-racist members of the Labour party, was subject to a kangaroo court hearing. This was supposed to let him challenge the NEC’s decision, but is really just window dressing designed to put a veneer of justice on what is a flagrantly unjust procedure. The Party then released a statement which again totally ignored and misrepresented what Mike said in his defence. To show how completely uninterested they were in any kind of real justice, one of the members of the hearing said, when asked by Mike if he’d read the parts of his defence in which he showed that he wasn’t an anti-Semite, admitted he hadn’t. He’d been told by someone unnamed not to. And the head of the tribunal wanted to finish early because she needed to catch the train home to Scotland.
Mike is currently suing the Labour Party for breach of contract over his shabby treatment. The hearing is next months, and he’s invited the press. I hope he wins.
Smyth’s support of these scumbags disappoints and infuriates me, but I’m not surprised. She has struck me as something of a Blairite. She was one of those who stayed away when Jeremy Corbyn visited Bristol on the campaign trail next year.
I fully intend to vote for their candidates from the Labour Left if there are any put forward, and I strongly advise others to do the same.
That is if you want a Labour Party that really stands for working people, rather than a nest of Blairite intriguers determined to enforce Tory policies and expel on fake, trumped up charges anyone who opposes them.
Earlier this week anti-racism activists finally succeeded in having hatey Katie Hopkins banned from Twitter. Hopkins started her notorious career as one of the contestants in the British version of The Apprentice. She was one of the runners-up, but her noxious right-wing beliefs nevertheless got her taken on as a columnist for the Scum and the Heil. She lost these thanks to her very outspoken racism.
In this clip from Novara Media’s Tysky Sour, Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani discuss her noxious career. This included such lows as her infamous description of immigrants and asylum seekers as ‘cockroaches’ for whom she had absolutely no love. This made that last sentiment very clear in a Tweet aimed at Philip Schofield after the sinking of a migrant ship and its human cargo in the Med. The newspapers covered this with a picture of a grieving father, who had stopped at Turkey, looking at the body of his infant son, which had just been washed up on the beach. Hopkins went on to say that illegal immigrants should be gunned down if they tried to cross into Britain. But perhaps the nadir came in a Tweet she made after the Manchester bombing in which she called for a ‘final solution’. This was too much even for whatever paper was then employing her, and she was given the heave-ho. But she was still free to spew her hate on Twitter. And now she’s lost even that.
Bastani and Walker agree that her banning is an open and shut case. She deserved it. But they also point out that the people who enabled her by giving her platforms and newspaper columns are still around. Stig Abell was the editor of the Scum who took her on. He hasn’t been damaged, and is now at the Times, where he’s pretending to be the voice of moderation. Well, I’ve absolutely no respect for the Times and its sister paper, the Sunday Times, because of their repeated smears and libels against the left, and particularly of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, including Mike. While they use a much more extensive vocabulary and are aimed at a far better educated readership than the Scum, those two rags are still utter, disgraceful trash. The time’s long past when all of the mendacious Tory press should have been cleaned out of his liars, propagandists and smear merchants.
I’ve no doubt that there are complaints against Hopkin’s ban as well as accusations of censorship, but I don’t think her defenders really have a case. There have been cases like Hopkins’ before, in which a right-winger with very racist or intolerant views has been banned from a social media platform like Twitter or YouTube. Their supporters have always tried to defend them on the grounds of free speech. But in America, this clause of the Constitution only applies to the government. They can’t imprison or persecute citizens for expressing their beliefs. But it doesn’t apply to private corporations.
Twitter is a private company. According to Conservatives and Libertarians, private industry should be left to do whatever it likes within reason in the pursuit of profit. Government should respect the rule of laissez faire economics and not interfere. But Twitter is a private company, and so it can, by the same reasoning, decide who or what it wants on its platform. And if it decides that hatey Katie has violated its terms and conditions, it has every right to throw her off. Also, Britain and other European countries don’t quite have free speech. A wide variety of opinions are permitted, but nevertheless it is an offence under British law to incite racial hatred. I’m not sure if someone has ever tried to prosecute her under the terms of the act, but she has certainly sailed close to the wind.
Hopkins has moved to Parler, which according to Zelo Street is rapidly becoming a cesspool full of racists like her and other extreme right-wingers, like the vile Toby Young. This is bad news for Hopkins as it means that she will probably never recover her popularity or audience. One of her fellows down there is Milo Yiannopolis, formerly of Breitbart. Yiannopolis is gay, half-Jewish and married to a Black man. But he’s another extreme right-wing propagandist, who made his name with attacks on ethnic minorities and feminism. All was going well for him. He had a speaking tour of American universities and a book deal with Simon & Schuster’s right-wing imprint. Then he appeared on the Joe Rogan Show and made comments suggesting he approved of paedophilia. At this point, it all vanished, including Yiannopolis’ invitation to CPAC or some other Conservative event. Yiannopolis tearfully retracted his comments, apologised and said that he now recognised that he also was a victim of child abuse. But it was to no avail. He was also turfed off Twitter, and has no joined in his fellow rightists in Parler.
Yiannopolis was also a massive grifter. He was also begging for money. One of his money-making schemes was appealing for donations for a bursary he was setting up so young White men could afford to go to college. He received plenty of money, but it all went straight into Yiannopolis’ own bank account. There was no bursary, and he never paid any aspiring underprivileged White male student anything. When last I took notice of him, Yiannopolis was claiming that he debts of £4 million. His chances of paying this off are slim. According to Zelo Street, his messages on Parler have included whinges that he now only has 1001 followers, who never go to anything he does, or buy anything from him. Well hard cheese. If only the same thing happened to others like him, who preached race hate and exploited the gullible. Now Hopkins is in the same boat, and likely to have the same difficulty recovering anything like her former success.
The only pity is that Abell and the rest of the ‘respectable’ Tory horrors that facilitated her haven’t also suffered the same treatment.
Remember when Andrew ‘Brillo Pad’ Neil had Alex Jones on his programme years ago? This resulted in farce when Neil asked the right-wing, Libertarian Jones about guns and the high rate of shootings in America. I think it came in the wake of yet another crazed gunman going into a school, shopping mall, church, synagogue or mosque or somewhere and shooting innocents. The right to bear arms is sacrosanct to Republicans and Libertarians, and so Jones responded with a long rant about how Americans will never give their firearms up and that there’d be another 1776 if anyone like Britain tried. He then started screaming nonsense, including ‘metal shark!’ at one point. The camera pulled away from Jones to show Brillo making the ‘nutter’ sign behind his head.
It’s a debatable but fair question whether Jones is mad. He’s promoted some immensely stupid theories, like the Democrat Party operating a paedophile ring out of a Boston pizza parlour, that Obama was the Antichrist, Hillary Clinton a Satanist cyborg, and that the world is being run by ‘the Globalists’ intent on enslaving humanity and turning us all into dehumanised cyborgs to serve demons or malevolent aliens. He is most notorious for ranting about how ‘they’ were putting chemicals in the water ‘to turn the frickin’ frogs gay’. He’s been widely ridiculed for that, but as Blissex, one of the great commenters on this blog reminded me on another post about Jones, he does have a point. Frogs and other amphibians are suffering from industrial pollutants that mimic female hormones and so cause reproductive abnormalities in males. Jones pushes all manner of outlandish theories, but some people have said that off-air he’s calm and rational, and his bizarre antics on camera may just be to garner viewers.
Whatever the real state of Jones’ mind, Brillo is now no longer in a position to sneer at Jones for pushing whacky and dangerous conspiracy theories. Because now he’s done it himself. Yesterday Zelo Street reported that Neil had taken exception to criticism of his comments on a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Colorado, and retweeted the bonkers comments by Spectator USA contributor Andy Ngo. Nadine Batchelor-Hunt had responded to his approving comments about the demonstration in Colorado by telling him that as a White guy, he shouldn’t be telling Black people how to protest. This is essentially the same point some Black Civil rights leaders in America in the 1960s told their White supporters when they said they should ‘be in their own space’. The result was the formation of a radical, White, working-class identity movement, which was crucially anti-racist as some of the White poor turned to their own situation and demanded change. I can’t see Brillo, former editor of the Sunday Times, the Economist and head of the Spectator board, wanting to see that develop. He replied “Looks like most of the folks protesting are white. I’m not telling anybody what they should do; just approving of a particular form of protest. Why make an issue of my colour. I don’t take kindly to what people tell me I should or should not do”.
Zelo Street commented that this was a remark from his privileged perspective. I think however, that Neil has the right to make whatever comment he likes about the protest. It might seem condescending, but people have the right to their own opinions whatever colour they are. But then the great newsman went overboard, and retweeted this from the Speccie’s sister paper.
“‘We are witnessing glimmers of the full insurrection the far-left has been working toward for decades. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was merely a pre-text for radicals to push their ambitious insurgency,’ writes [Andy Ngo]”.
Ngo is a member of the American far right, despite being Asian. He wrote a farcical piece about Islam in Britain, ‘A Visit to Islamic Britain’ for Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and has hosted the infamous Carl Benjamin, the man who broke UKIP, on his podcast. Zelo Street commented that it was shameful for the Speccie to give Ngo a platform, and even more so for Brillo to retweet him. They also wondered if BBC News and Current Affairs would take a dim view of being linked with Ngo through Neil. And this is apart from some of the deeply unpleasant characters who write for the British Spectator, like the anti-Semitic supporter of the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, Taki.
The American far right is riddled with bizarre conspiracy theories. When Obama was ensconced in the Oval Office there were any number of loons proclaiming that he was an anti-White racist who would immediately launch a genocide of Whites. Or that he was closet Muslim, who would impose the Shariah. Or a Nazi, Communist or militant atheist. Jones ranted that Obama would become absolute dictator by declaring a state of emergency, suspending the rule of law and forcing Americans into FEMA camps. It didn’t happen. There are also loony conspiracy theories going around the American and British right about ‘cultural Marxists’ trying to create a new Communist dictatorship through destroying traditional, Christian morality and replacing it with multiculturalism and gay and trans rights. It’s a garbled misreading of Gramsci’s theories of hegemony, and ultimately has its roots in the Nazis’ denunciation of ‘cultural Bolshevism’.
But I’ve got a feeling that the Spectator USA always was a haven for demented conspiracy theories. Way back in the 1990s a magazine with a very similar name, The American Spectator, and a group of Sunday Times journos, got it into their heads that Bill Clinton was at the heart of a vast criminal conspiracy. They believed that Slick Willy was importing drugs from Latin America through a secret airbase in Arizona. Anyone who crossed or otherwise displeased him was then executed by his gangsters. This theory was partly based on the real fact that about 19 of his aides had died, but investigations had shown that their demise had absolutely nothing to do with Clinton. The conspiracy theories were even later denounced and ridiculed by a former believer, one of the ‘Clinton Crazies’. Adam Curtis has discussed this bizarre affair in one of his excellent documentaries.
It looks to me that The American Spectator was a previous incarnation of The Spectator USA, and that, despite the Clinton Crazies having come and gone, there still is a paranoid mentality out there. And Brillo, as former editor of the Sunday Times, and head of the Spectator’s board, shares it.
You don’t have to invoke non-existent conspiracies to explain the protests and riots in America. They come from endemic racism, poverty and lack of opportunity, quite apart from the casual killing of Black Americans by the police. This has been simmering away for several years. Now it’s exploded again. What is needed is calm, rationality and justice.
What we don’t need is more stupid, inflammatory rhetoric by Trump, Ngo or Brillo.
Ho ho! Zelo Street yesterday published a very interesting and amusing article about the continuing decline of the lamestream press. Jim Waterson, a hack at the Guardian, posted a series of tweets about the latest circulation figures for British newspapers. And they aren’t encouraging. Zelo Street has said for the past couple of months that the press has been badly hit by the lockdown. People simply aren’t buying papers. It’s why the Murdoch rags, inter alia, have been pushing for the lockdown to be lifted and actually took to implore their readers and internet followers to #buyapaper. They’re not remotely interested in the welfare of the great British public. But they are worried about falling sales and what Murdoch and the other chief inmates of News International will do about them – like start laying people off.
Waterson tweeted that, although the newspaper sales figures were supposed to be out that day, the industry had insisted that they should no longer be published. The monthly ABC sales charts have also been permanently stopped because they give a ‘stimulus to write a negative narrative of circulation decline.’ Which in English, rather than the garbled version spouted Newslink’s yuppie manager in the comedy series Drop the Dead Donkey, means that it encourages people to write about how the press is in trouble. Nevertheless, most of the papers did publish their figures. The exceptions were the Times, Sunday Times, Torygraph and the Scum. And the paper with the highest circulation was the Daily Heil, with 944,981 copies sold.
Well, as the character, Gus, once said, I’ll just throw that into your intellectual wok and see if it stir fries.
Zelo Street points out that this is the first time no newspaper has sold less than a million a copies. It also suggests that this has happened to the Sun, which is why the super, soaraway Current Bun is not publishing its figures. It’s possibly been supplanted by the Heil for the first time in 40+ years. The Street also argues quite reasonably that both the Heil’s and Scum’s Sunday editions will have worse sales than the dailies. This means that the press is in terminal decline and we’re entering the endgame.
Novara Media’s excellent Aaron Bastiani put an additional boot into the Murdoch title’s shame. If newspapers won’t publish their sales figures, then the Beeb shouldn’t review their front pages every morning. Unless we know these papers’ reach, it’s just giving them free advertising.
Good point.
Zelo Street also states that the press is probably going to lose even more readers when they work out that the papers they support wanted the lockdown lifted for the sake of their own profits, not out of concern for the public’s wellbeing. A number of may well die from Coronavirus infections picked up when the papers told them that the disease was nothing to worry about. And their survivors will put two and two together and decide not to continue supporting them. Or even bringing a class lawsuit against them.
My guess is that the reason the Torygraph and the Murdoch rags aren’t publishing their sales figures is partly economic. Apart from being embarrassed at how pathetically their mighty organs are doing, they’re also afraid of repercussions from advertisers. If they find out how low the newspapers are selling, they may well want the advertising rates reduced. This will mean a further drop in these newspaper’s income. Which means greater losses, and the threat of even more redundancies.
To many people it will come as absolutely no surprise that the Times and the Torygraph are in such a mess. Private Eye have covered many times their problems and falling circulation in its ‘Street of Shame’ column. In the case of the Torygraph, it’s problems are due to bad corporate management, including a devotion to internet gimmicks rather than solid news reporting and deliberately altering news content in their interests of the advertisers. This last policy so infuriated Peter Oborne that he left the paper and went instead to the Heil, making his own criticisms of it very public. There have already been redundancies and cutbacks, but these have failed to halt the paper’s continuing decline. The Eye has also said that the Times’ sales are now so low, that if it were any other paper it would either have been folded or put up for sale by its management years ago. But it’s the British paper of record, and so allows Murdoch to grab a place at the government table because of its prestige. Which means that if its circulation is so low that there’s no reason the Beeb, or anyone else, should take any notice of it, Murdoch’s ability to influence government decisions, even to act as kingmaker in his decision which party to support, is severely damaged.
Ditto with the Scum. It certainly didn’t have the Times‘ prestige or even its journalistic standards – indeed, it’s a matter of debate whether the scabrous rag had any standards at all. But it was Britain’s leading newspaper with a huge circulation, and more visibly influenced British politics through its shrill trumpeting of everything Thatcher and the Tories ever did, until Murdoch decided to flirt with New Labour. Now that’s also been seriously damaged.
Zelo Street is right in that these newspapers still have an influence beyond their print sales through their online presence, but there are problems here as well. Many of their articles are behind paywalls, which means that many casual readers won’t read them because they won’t want to pay or subscribe to the wretched rags. And if they are free, then it comes from money made from print sales. Which mean that when those go down, the paper’s ability to put up their articles free on the net also declines. The situation does not look good.
I’ve no sympathy for any of these foul rags. I suppose it’ll be a shame if the Times folds, after lasting for nearly 300 or so years. But as it, its Sunday counterpart and the Scum are just rightwing, Tory propaganda rags that lies, smear and libel decent people with absolutely no compunction, as far as I’m concerned it deserves to go under. Britain will be better off without them.
And while we’re on the subject, what about the sales figures for Private Eye? I know it’s a magazine rather than a newspaper, but much of it is news. My guess is that it’s circulation is also falling in line with the rest of the press. It’s hostility and snide remarks about left-wing news sites and internet organisations like The Canary and The Skwawkbox also seem to suggest that it’s afraid of their competition. Private Eye does publish some very good stuff, but it has also promoted the Blairites and the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn’s Labour party, as well as other material which is utterly wrong. So I have very mixed feelings about it.
As for the rest of the press, their mostly right-wing propaganda rags, and so absolutely nothing worthwhile will be lost if they go under as well.
In his piece today demolishing the anti-Semitism witch-hunt against the Labour Party, and Jeremy Corbyn’s absolute capitulation to the liars and smear merchants behind it, Tony Greenstein suggests how Corbyn should have handled Andrew Neil in an interview he gave with the broadcaster on his politics show back in November.
Neil challenged Corbyn to apologise to the Jewish community for the anti-Semitism that was rampant in the Labour party and his failure to deal with it. Anti-Semitism was not rampant in the Labour party, and Corbyn had dealt very effectively with real anti-Semitism. Greenstein therefore rightly says that Corbyn should have refused, saying he had nothing to apologise for. And then he should gone on the attack pointing out Neil’s hypocrisy in asking the question. When Neil was editor of the Sunday Times, he hired David Irving to write a piece about the supposed Goebbel’s diaries. That’s the David Irving, who really was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier and was proven in the court case he lost against Deborah Lipstadt. And then he could have raised the issue of Taki’s continuing employment with the Spectator. Taki really is an anti-Semite, who recently praised the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in the magazine’s pages. This would have been extremely uncomfortable for Neil, whose chairman of the board government the wretched rag. When Owen Jones raised this very issue when he was on one of Neil’s wretched programmes, Neil was visibly frightened and asked if he was trying to get him sacked. Greenstein writes
‘That Andrew Neil Interview and David Irving
Not once did Schneider, Milne and Carrie Murphy ask themselves why, if the ‘anti-Semitism’ offensive was genuine, that it was the Right who were its most ardent advocates? One of its most fervent supporters was BBC broadcaster Andrew Neil. Neil crucified Corbyn in an election interview in November 2019 when he asked whether Corbyn would apologise to the Jewish community for Labour anti-Semitism.
It was a predictable question and there was a simple response. ‘I have nothing to apologise for’. Corbyn could then have gone on to condemn Labour’s genuine racism, against Black people:
‘I do however wish to apologise to Britain’s Black community for Labour’s previous support for the ‘hostile environment’ policy and the Windrush scandal. Our decision not to oppose the 2014 Immigration Act was scandalous.’
When Neil responded, listing examples of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’, such as the attempts to deselect Louise Ellman and Zionist diva Luciana Berger, there was a very simple response.
Corbyn could have told Neil that he had no intention of taking lessons on anti-Semitism from someone who, as Editor of the Sunday Times had hired a holocaust denier, David Irving, to examine the Goebbels Diaries which had just been discovered in a Moscow archive! As Jewish historian David Cesarani commented: ‘David Irving denies the gas chambers. Anyone who deals with him is tainted with that.’
And whilst Neil was spluttering Corbyn could have mentioned the fact that when Boris Johnson was Editor of The Spectator he hired Taki, the owner of Takis magazine for whom David Duke of the KKK wrote. Taki himself was no slouch when it came to anti-Semitism. As his biography records:
‘He (Boris) could have dispensed with Taki… but consistently chose not to, despite entreaties from many critics, including his own father-in-law Charles Wheeler. It is down to Boris that Taki was able to run columns on ‘bongo bongo land’, West Indians ‘multiplying like flies’ and one on the world Jewish conspiracy, in which he described himself as a ‘soi-disant anti-Semite’.
Even the right-wing owner of the Spectator Conrad Black, asked Boris to dismiss Taki after he had criticised Black for marrying a Jewish woman. Boris refused. Taki wrote for the Spectator for as long as Boris was editor. And who was Chairman of the Board of Press Holdings Media Group which owns The Spectator? Andrew Neil!
Of course, having accepted the ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative, Corbyn had no response. Not once did he point out the hypocrisy of Britain’s racist tabloids and the BBC for having ignored the Windrush Scandal, in which Black British citizens were deported to their death, instead concentrating on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ which didn’t hurt a single Jewish person.’
This is all absolutely correct. Anti-Black racism is far more prevalent than anti-Semitism, and far more respectable. There would have rightly been a storm had May’s government similarly rounded up Jews of foreign parentage on the same grounds. But Cameron and May felt able to deport the Windrush migrants, who had every right to remain in this country, because of anti-Black racism.
Unfortunately Corbyn caved in to Neil and the other smear merchants in the media and Conservative political establishment. And in doing so he not only allowed himself to be ousted, but also decent anti-racists and his own supporters, people like Livingstone, Mike, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Marc Wadsworth, Cyril Chilson, and Greenstein himself, to be smeared and expelled.
The Sunday Times seems to have caused a massive ruckus today in its piece about Boris Johnson’s abject failure to tackle the Coronavirus when it first emerged. He didn’t take it seriously, and delayed taking any action at all for too long. Two weeks were wasted by his refusal to impose a lockdown until the very last minute. He also wasted five weeks in which he simply didn’t turn up at the Cobra meetings about the emergency. As Zelo Street remarks in his piece about the scandal, this means that during the time he wasted, Johnson ‘went on a killing spree, as sure as if he’d emptied an Uzi into all those poor souls.’
This material isn’t anything new. Mike points out in a couple of his articles today that he had put up posts detailing Johnson’s catastrophic lack of action about the virus on several of the pieces he put up on his personal blog.
The Sunday Times’ article was hidden behind a paywall and Murdoch’s goons are angry that Owen Jones copied the article’s salient points and issued them as a series of Tweets, so that people don’t have pay to see it. A series of hacks consisting of Oliver Kamm, Polly Vernon, Caitlin Moran and Hadley Freeman have moaned about the newspaper not getting its money for the article. They complain that it’s not about giving Murdoch a profit, but allowing the newspaper to continue publishing more quality articles like it. Quality journalism in Murdoch rags is, as Spock’s father says of Klingon justice in the conclusion to the Star Trek film, The Search for Spock, ‘an interesting point of view’. The Sunday Times is the newspaper that libeled Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, and has libeled so many others from the left over the years. It was the Sunday Times, back in the 90s, that was successfully sued by former Labour leader Michael Foot after it wrongfully claimed that he was a KGB spy codenamed ‘Comrade Boot’. Mike has pointed out that all the information was already available on the net long before, and all he needed to do to produce his articles was to collect it and write it up. Zelo Street has also made the point that the Guardian and FT also put out free articles on line. The Sunset Times was also edited by years by John Witherow, who is notorious for using illegal information gathering. And asking people to provide their personal information to Murdoch’s crew to read the articles and others like it is just too much. He acidly comments that ‘they sup some strong stuff in that media bubble.’
Nevertheless there was one aspect about Johnson’s conduct discussed in the Sunset Times article that I found particularly shocking. This was BoJob’s own immense laziness. It appears that Johnson didn’t attend crucial meetings about the virus and dithered because, quite simply, he couldn’t be bothered to get off his well-fed, Eton-educated rear end. The paper quotes one government adviser as saying
“what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be”.
As Zelo Street points out, the explodes the well-crafted Tory spin that Johnson has been working so hard, that he became exhausted and thus came down with the virus. The Street also says that the article has upset the government, and they’ve already set the spin machine going, with Michael Gove appearing on the Andrew Marr Show this morning to rebut it. The delays in tackling the virus mean that many more people have contracted it than would otherwise have done, and many of these have died, or soon will. And the Tory press is again lying to us about how hard Johnson is working. But the real reason Johnson was taken ill is that he was overweight and unhealthy.
The government’s reputation will take a hit from these revelations, but the real damage will be done to that of the press. ‘It is’ Zelo Street says, ‘the craven, courtier, client stenographers of our free and fearless press who will be exposed as preening, shameless, selfish and unprincipled propagandists.’
As for Johnson, he concludes ‘Some of us knew he was worse than useless. This knowledge is slowly, but surely, spreading to others. If only it was as contagious as the Coronavirus.’
Alternative news sites like Mike’s have been telling you this for months, if not years. But now some people have only woken up to how bone idle, incompetent and utterly, utterly unfit to run our great country because, after months of inaction, the Sunset Times has come out and said it.
I’ve blogged many times about how Mike, Zelo Street and other left-wing news sites have got the story before the lamestream media. This is another example. If you want reliable news and informed comment, go to them. Murdoch simply gives you right-wing propaganda and all too often, along with the rest of the press, simply follows them.
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