Last week was not a good one for Andrew Neil, the presenter of the Beeb’s politics shows ‘This Week’ and ‘The Daily Politics’. It was reported on ITV News on Friday that his show, ‘This Week’, was being axed. The article about it in this weekend’s I for 16-17th February 2019, by Keiran Southern on page 16, entitled, ”This Week’ ends as Neil quits his late-night show’ read
The BBC’s long-running politics show This Week is to end after presenter Andrew Neil announced he was stepping down.
The BBC1 show, which airs on Thursdays after Question Time, will be taken off air this summer when its current series ends, the corporation said.
Neil has fronted the show since it began in 2003 and regular guests include the former Tory MP, Michael Portillo, and Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott.
Fran Unsworth, BBC’s director of news, said: “We couldn’t imagine This Week without the inimitable Andrew Neil, one of Britain’s best political interviewers. After 16 years, Andrew is bowing out of late-night presenting on the show, at the top of his game.”
Neil will continue to present Politics Live on Thursdays, Ms Unsworth added, and the BBC wants to keep the 69-7ear-old “at the heart” of its political coverage.
This Week is known for its informal look at politics, while Ms Abbott and Mr Portillo formed an unlikely TV double act, despite being on opposite sides of the political divide.
The announcement comes amid uncertainty surrounding the BBC’s news output – it is under pressure to cut £80m from its budgets and to attract younger audiences.
Earlier this week, BBC journalists wrote to the broadcaster’s director-general to oppose the decision to shorten its News At Ten programme after it emerged it would be cut by 10 minutes to make way for youth programming and Question Time.
Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen and other foreign correspondents have asked Lord Tony Hall to reconsider.
Last year, Sunday Politics, hosted by Sarah Smith, was axed and replaced by Politics Live, which airs Monday to Friday.
Other people, who are sick to death of the Beeb’s right-wing Tory bias, including Andrew Neil, are actually quite delighted and amused. The good fellow at Crewe, who does the Zelo Street blog, posted a piece on it on Friday, whose title said it all ‘Andrew Neil Nearly Out the Door’. He noted that despite Hall defending Neil over his ‘crazy cat woman’ remark to the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, the cancellation of one of Neil’s vehicles shows that the comment and the outrage it sparked has had an effect.
The deputy political editor of the Heil on Sunday, Harry Cole, was furious, tweeting
“A bloody outrage. Will only give succour to Corbynistas and sad sacks like Jukes and Carole who are modern equivalent of green ink dickheads who pester management. Since when did boss class start listening to loons before the viewers? Bring back #ThisWeek and make @afneil DG”. Which brought forth the reply from Peter Jukes
Harry Cole defending Andrew Neil, and desperately trying not to look like a member of the boss class.
Rather more damaging to Brillo and his supposed impartiality was another photo Carold Cadwalladr unearthed, showing Neil in the company of the former Ulster Unionist MP, David Burnside, who was formerly the PR man to Cambridge Analytica shareholder, Tchenguiz, who was in his turn the publicity man for Dmitryo Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch wanted by the FBI. And Nigel Farage, now desperately trying to claw his way back into British politics with his wretched Brexit Party.
Zelo Street also noted that this was in addition to the discomfort Neil was bringing the Beeb with his continued association with the Spectator, now increasingly Alt Right, which specializes in climate change denial, pro-Brexit propaganda, and vicious islamophobia from pundits like Douglas Murray. As well as the snobbery and elitism of James Delingpole and anti-Semitism and Fascist propaganda from their other long-running contributor, Taki. Who a few weeks ago embarrassed the magazine by praising the Greek neo-Nazi group, Golden Dawn, as just ‘patriotic Greeks’, who were just a bit rough around the edges. Like when one of them murdered left-wing journalist, perhaps, or when the attack and demolish market stalls belonging to illegal immigrants and attack and beat asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East.
The Zelo Street article concluded
In any case, Andrew Neil should be grateful that he’s been allowed more or less free rein to reinvent himself as a broadcast journalist after falling out with Rupert Murdoch. Now he’s got more dosh than he knows what to do with, it’s time to yield to youth.
He’s at the top of his game? Good. Then he may be remembered well. Time to go.
Unsworth’s cancellation of his show, rather than handing it over to someone else to present, also says something about the show’s audience. It’s viewers are clearly people, who want it to be helmed by an older White man, whose backgrounds is very much in establishment, centre-right journalism: Neil was editor of the Sunday Times and The Economist. And Zelo Street has quoted other journos at the Spectator that he is another Thatcher cultist, who wishes Maggie was still around running the country. Presumably it’s the same kind of audience that avidly supports John Humphries on Radio 4’s Today programme, another massively overpaid, right-wing White man of mature years. Which would indicate that the audience for these two is also largely made up of right-wing, very establishment White men who are middle-aged to elderly.
It seems to me that Neil’s show needn’t be axed, but could easily be handed over to someone else, someone younger, who was rather more impartial, or at least less publicly biased. It struck me that the team on the Beeb’s breakfast news could probably do it, Charlie Stayt, Naga Manchetti and Louis Minchin. And the rise of the new left-wing media on the internet has show what very incisive minds there are well outside of the establishment media. Like Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar, and The Canary’s Kerry-Ann Mendoza and Steve Topple. They’re all young, Sarkar and Mendoza are both BAME, while Topple definitely had a countercultural appearance with his Mohican coiffure. But they’re all very shrewd reports, who keenly analysed and dissected the news. And their example shows that out there is a vast pool of talent, which is currently being ignored by the current media political establishment.
Of course the Beeb’s refusal to appoint someone else to present the show may also be partly based from their experience of what happened to Newsnight after Paxo left: its audience collapsed. But rather than cut back on current news reportage and analysis altogether, the Beeb could actually launch a replacement instead, presented by younger people and aimed at younger people. You know, all the millennials and younger, who are trying to make their voices heard in a political climate dominated by the old and middle-aged. The people a genuinely functioning democracy needs to get involved and interested in political debate.
But I’m sure this would be a step too far for the Beeb. You’d have the establishment media whining that the Corporation was dumbing down, that it was ‘Yoof TV’ after the various tasteless disasters in youth programming spawned in the 1990s by Janet Street-Porter and others of her ilk. As well as the more serious fact that the establishment is absolutely terrified of millennials and what the Victorians used to refer to as ‘the rising generation’ because they’re generally more left-wing than their elders in the political establishment. You know, all those pesky kids in America and Britain, who are backing Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn against the corporatists in the Democrat Party, Trump and the Republicans, and Tweezer, the Tories and the Blairites over here. Young people, who want socialism rather than the tired, destructive Neoliberalism of the past forty years.
But the political, media and industrial establishment is absolutely petrified of them and their views. They don’t want them to be heard. And so they’d rather axe one of Neil’s shows than hand it over to them. Which shows how paralyzed the Beeb is in trying to hang on to its aging, establishment audience at the expense of trying to bring on board young, and potentially radical talent.
Last week Mike also put up a series of articles discussing the Beeb’s proposal to host the debate over Brexit between Corbyn and Tweezer, and showed why Corbyn should choose ITV instead. It seems the Corporation had been in negotiations with May to host the debate through Robbie, one of Tweezer’s spin doctors, who used to work at the Corporation. This had been done weeks before May issued her challenge to Corbyn, which suggested that Tweezer was hoping for some help from the ever biased BBC.
The Beeb didn’t just want a straightforward, head-to-head debate between the two party leaders. They also wanted this to be
followed by a discussion between eight panellists, including politicians, with a wide range of views on Brexit, and ending with further head-to-head debate and closing statements.
This was in contrast to ITV’s offer, which was just for a straight head-to-head debate between May and Corbyn. As Mike points out on his blog, the Beeb had no right to change the format of the debate, and suggested that their doing so may have been part of their negotiations with Tweezer. The inclusion of a panel, with members that included other politicians, also gave the Corporation too much freedom to pack the show with pro-Tory viewpoints. Like the Corporation has been doing every Thursday evening on Question Time, and on just about every news programme. If they can get in an attack against Corbyn, they will.
On Tuesday Mike put up a piece reporting that the Beeb had withdrawn their offer, and published their official reply. Which he also critiqued. Apart from the above comments about possible bias in the format, and its origins with Tweezer, Mike also commented that the Beeb’s disappointment at being unable to bring the British people this programme and its wide variety of views, shows why the Corporation still deserves its nickname of ‘Auntie’. It’s still trying to tell the British public what to think.
The Corporation did, however, say that it would have a Brexit edition of the One Show, which was apparently broadcast yesterday, and would show a programme completely devoted to Brexit on Monday, 10th December.
Mike concluded his article on this by saying that the Beeb’s withdrawal puts May into a quandary. He writes
It seems clear she has been trying to manoeuvre Mr Corbyn into a position where she can accuse him – of not understanding her Brexit plan; of trying to sabotage Brexit; or even of running away from a TV debate.
But now, with her BBC set-up scotched and all the smart money saying she won’t agree to the ITV plan, it seems that – once again – Mrs May will be the one accused of “running away”.
In fact many people said on Twitter that Corbyn would be far better off going to ITV, Channel 4 or Sky for the debate, rather than the Beeb. Because the Beeb simply can’t be trusted. Lord Adonis, one of Blair’s former cabinet ministers said it. And Tom Pride gave four good reasons in one of his tweets. These were about Andrew Neil, the host of the Daily Politics, Nick ‘Macclesfield Goebbels’ Robinson, Sarah Sands, a Beeb politics editor, and Lynn Hayter, the fake vicar.
Neil before he joined the Beeb was a former chair of the Confederation of Conservative Students, Robinson was also a chair of the Young Tories, Sands was a former editor at the Mail and Torygraph, while Hayter is an actor the Beeb dragged on claiming she was a proper, accredited member of the clergy. Instead of a self-appointed pastor of an internet church flogging the Prosperity Gospel heresy.
He also commented on how May threw a strop at the Philip Schofield for asking her an awkward question over on ITV’s This Morning. Schofield’s a good professional interviewer, but This Morning is very definitely not the Spanish Inquisition. Which May definitely didn’t expect, and couldn’t handle the torment of the comfy chair (gratuitous Monty Python reference). So Mike went on to argue that, from past evidence of May running away from a debate with Corbyn at the last election, if anyone’s going to do a runner, it’s her.
As for the Neil and Robinson, they’re only two of a newsroom packed with Tories. Mike and the other left-wing bloggers have discussed many other Tory spin doctors, who used to work at the Corporation before deciding that even trying to put up a pretence of being impartial was too much for them, and went off to join Cameron and Tweezer. Neil was also the editor of the Neoliberal The Economist, and then the Sunday Times, where, according to Lobster, he ran fake stories and disinformation for MI5. And Robinson showed how massively biased he was in his editing of an exchange between him and former SNP leader Alex Salmond during the Scots Referendum debate the other year. Goebbels Nick asked Salmond whether he was afraid that the big financial houses in Edinburgh would flee south if the Scots gained independence. Salmond gave him a full answer, denying that this would happen. Confronted by awkward facts, Robinson and his team went off and edited the exchange. First of all they made it appear as if Salmond hadn’t really answered the question, then they removed his response completely and claimed that he ignored the question.
It was one of the most blatant falsification of news that I’ve seen.
And the Beeb has a long history of this, which they’re desperately trying to deny. They’ve launched a campaign against ‘fake news’, which is risible, considering they and the lamestream media are responsible for a fair number of fake and spurious news stories. And in next week’s Radio Times, there’s a feature praising Question Time to the roof, complete with a piccie of Dimblebore with a quizzical smile on his mug.
But older readers remember how the Beeb faked footage of the police attacking the miners at the Orgreave colliery during the 1980s miners’ strike, to make it look like the miners were attacking the rozzers. And too many people have now woken up to how Question Time is consistently biased against the Left. Quite apart from the systemic bias against Corbyn on nearly every Beeb news show.
The Beeb’s withdrawal of their offer to host the Brexit debate seems to confirm just how deeply the British public are suspicious about the Beeb and its Tory bias. They don’t trust it, and will continue turning away from it until it does something to correct its bias. But this may be far too much for a state broadcaster, that automatically follows the Tory, establishment line.
Here’s another great piece from Chunky Mark the Artist Taxi Driver, which he posted yesterday. He comments on the remarks in the Torygraph from the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove. Dearlove was speaking about Jeremy Corbyn’s meeting with a Czech spy, and declared that the Labour leader ‘has questions to answer’. This is part of the continuing attempt to create a ‘Red Scare’ about the Labour party and its leader, comparable to the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ that lost Labour an election in the 1920. The Zinoviev letter was an MI5 forgery, and this is a complete non-story and Tory libel.
Mike’s pointed out that the spy in question was a diplomat. Corbyn met him, just as he met other diplomats and no secrets were passed on. The Czechs, and the academic in charge of their Secret Services library has said they have categorically no evidence that Corbyn ever worked for them, or passed on any secrets at all. And in the week Andrew Neill, who is the former editor of the Sunday Times and the Economist, told his viewers precisely what a load of rubbish it this story is on the Daily Politics.
Corbyn is threatening to sue for libel. Gavin Williamson, the Tory apparatchik who repeated in a Tweet, is trying to backtrack without giving Corbyn the apology or money to charity that he demanded.
But the bug-eyed slander-merchants of the Torygraph are still carrying on with it.
Chunky Mark makes the point that Dearlove himself is hardly reliable, because he was involved in the concoction of the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ that served to bring us into Blair’s illegal and murderous war in Iraq. And he’s repeating the libel that Corbyn handed secrets over to a Commie spy, simply because he hates and fears him.
He also comments on the resignation of Ian McNicol, the Labour Party chief, who presided over the massively unjust suspension and expulsion of tens of thousands of Labour members, because they had the audacity to vote for Corbyn rather than endorse the preferred Blairite Thatcherite entryists. Chunky Mark says that we shouldn’t celebrate his departure, because this is a man who poured his life and blood into the Labour party. Before going on to say precisely why we should. One of those he expelled was a trade unionist. She committed the terrible offence of saying that she ‘f***ing loved Dave Grohl’ in a post she put up about the Foo Fighters. This apparently brought her union and the Labour party into disrespect. Actually, considering the fruity language on the internet, I’m surprised anyone even noticed, let along took offence.
So McNicol’s walked, and hopefully we’ll get a better, fairer person in to do his job. Hopefully.
The redoubtable Tony Greenstein, anti-racist, anti-Fascist and very definitely not an anti-Semite, put up a post yesterday commenting on McNicol’s departure, with the restrained title ‘Rejoice – The Witch is Dead – Crooked McNicol Rides No More’. He gives further information on McNicol’s resignation. Apparently he was given his marching orders on Tuesday. Greenstein also points out that this is just the beginning of making the Labour party’s bureaucracy more just.
But this does give up to everyone libelled, smeared and unfairly expelled, simply for their opposition to the Blairites and their wretched neoliberalism.
Mike today put up a piece blowing away another lie that the Tories and their servants in the media have hawking: that the Left is full of misogynists, who harass and abuse women MPs. In fact Amnesty International have published a report showing that the opposite is true: most abuse comes from the right. And the female politico, who most often suffers it is Diane Abbott.
Who in the Left is honestly surprised by this? There are Conservative varieties of feminism, as you’d expect, but feminism, or women’s lib as it was known in the 1970s, is most often associated with the Left. And as the Austrian democratic socialist Marxist, Karl Kautsky argued, socialism is all about equality. This is why they champion the working class, and why left-wing governments, particularly Communist, have encouraged women to enter politics and the workplace, even if their countries’ traditional culture is very sexist, as it is in Russia and some of the countries of the former eastern bloc.
Conservatives, on the other hand, stress the importance of tradition, and despite having given Britain two female prime ministers, Maggie Thatcher and now Theresa May, this usually also means stressing and promoting traditional gender roles. Thus, while the right-wing broadsheets may earnestly discuss the issue of getting more women into the boardroom, and equal pay, the Daily Heil has been telling its female readers that stable families, and indeed western civilization as a whole, needs women to concentrate on staying at home to raise children, rather than both pursuing independent careers. The image the right projects of feminism is of angry misandrists, which has been a factor in why so many young women a few years ago rejected the term ‘feminism’, even when they had strong feelings about winning equality and rejecting sexism.
There’s also more than a little racism on the Tories’ side as well. The Tory right has always had links to Fascist right, including inviting members of central American death squads over to their annual dinners. A few days ago I put up a piece about Owen Jones’ video on YouTube, in which he commented on an odious conversation by the Tory youth movement, Activate, about gassing chavs and shooting peasants. This wasn’t the first time they had made Nazi comments and bullied the poor and underprivileged by a very long chalk. Jones discussed some prize examples of their foul behavior. This included the members of Oxford University Conservative society goose-stepping around like the real Nazis, singing songs about ‘Dashing through the Reich … killing lots of ****’, the last a very unpleasant terms for Jews. Their comrades north of the border ain’t no better either. This crew thought it would be jolly fun for one of them to dress up as a slave master, while another cringed before him as a slave. It wasn’t that long ago that the Tories in Scotland were known as the Unionist party, and their antics and Thatcher’s complete dismissal of the country was a large factor in the decision of so many Scots to vote for the SNP.
As for the Tory press, they’ve been consistently against coloured immigration since Windrush. And long before then, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they were busy campaigning against allowing ‘aliens’ – that is, eastern European Jews, to enter this country as asylum seekers fleeing the pogroms in eastern Europe. This anti-immigration stance has frequently been blatantly racist. Private Eye, when covering the prosecution of the Scum yet again for racism by the Press Complaints Commission, as it then was, noted that the wretched paper had had 19 judgements against it previously for its racist content. I can remember how the Torygraph, Mail and Express back in the 1980s railed against ‘unassimilable’ immigrants and the way they were forming little ghettoes.
Racism became a major issue in that decade following the 1981/2 riots, and the publication of government reports that revealed a massive culture of institutional racism and Black deprivation in Britain. To the Tory press, however, the riots were all the fault of racist Blacks. While there have been Black and Asian politicians before, Diane Abbott was one of the group of very visible Black politicians and activists to achieve public office during the decade, along with Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant, the leader of Brent Council. They were all very vocal in their opposition to racism. Grant died the other year, and I think Boateng more or less vanished into the depths of Whitehall. There are a number of other Black politicos, like David Lammy, Chuka Umunna and Oona King, but Abbott is one of the longest-serving and most reviled. The Scum tried running a Communism scare against the Labour party in the 1987 election, by putting up a two-page spread with the photographs of Labour MPs and candidates, below which was a few brief quotes or comments showing how they were a threat to British society. Red Ken is supposed to have said that he wasn’t in favour of the British army, but wanted the workers to be armed so they could guard the factories. Under Abbott’s was a quote, ‘All Whites are racist.’
That was very much the image she had at the time. She’s supposed to be very keen on tackling racism, because she felt that her mother’s career was blocked because of her colour. This is actually quite likely. But it’s highly questionable that she’s anti-White. Many of the stories the press published about the supposed hard-left extremists in the Labour party at the time were either exaggerations or completely made up. Ken Livingstone, whom the Eye has frequently mocked under the nickname, Ken Leninspart, really did believe in worker’s control. But he was never a Marxist, and in fact worker’s control used to form only a small part of the subjects he discussed with the, um, ‘gentlemen’ of the press. Most of the time it was rather more mundane. But they played up the worker’s control, and attacked it, because it frightened their proprietors and editors, quite apart from the rest of the middle class. The veteran gay rights activist, Peter Tatchell, who was also beginning his career as a Labour politico, was another who was made to appear much more extreme than he was. At one point the papers published a story about him going on holiday to one of the great gay centres on the American west coast. Except that he hadn’t, and didn’t even know the place existed. They also did the same thing to Marc Almond. In his case, they didn’t think he looked sufficiently effeminate, and so retouched his photograph.
Given this long record of telling porky pies about radical politicians, you can’t be sure that Abbot made the above comment, or that it represents her views now. But as Sid James remarked to Tony Hancock in ‘The Scandal Magazine’, mud always sticks, boy. They’ve carried on portraying her as a threat to White history and culture. A few years ago, the Daily Mail ran a story about how the London borough she represents in parliament decided to replace the paintings in their civic offices. Down came the traditional portraits of the White guys, who had previously served on the council, and up came paintings of Black children.
The story was part of a larger article about her, and didn’t offer any details about this, nor the reasons for the decision. Without putting it in so many words, it was presented merely as Abbott’s coterie of angry Blacks removing Whites from the history of the borough. How this supposed racist anger compares with her appearing regularly alongside Michael Portillo on Andrew Neil’s The Daily Politics, where she appears perfectly calm and genial with her White presenters, as befits a grande dame of British politics, I really don’t know.
Nevertheless, she remains a Tory bete noir, and given the fact that there have always been members of the party, who can’t understand why a Black person could ever object to golliwogs, the Black and White Minstrels or why you can make derogatory comments about Black people’s supposed character defects as a race, or use the unpleasant terms previous generations used to insult them, and it becomes quite easy to see why she should be the target for so much abuse.
As for the supposed sexism in the Labour ranks, there was never much substance to that anyway. It was never more than an attempt by wealthy, entitled right-wing Labour female politicians to smear their male rivals. These women had nothing to offer ordinary working Brits, including women. While ordinary women are finding it difficult to pay the bills and feed their families, thanks to the ravages of neoliberalism, these female politicians simply offered more of the same. More cuts, more privatization, more precarity. But like Hillary Clinton, from whom they got the tactic, they wanted to present themselves as representing women in general, even if in fact they only represented rich, entitled women like themselves. And so just Clinton was outraged by the popularity of Bernie Sanders, these women were infuriated by Jeremy Corbyn. Clinton claimed that she had been vilified by the ‘Bernie Bros’, who didn’t actually exist. And so her counterparts in the Labour party over here decided to follow her, and lie about how they were the victims of savage misogyny from Corbyn and the Old Left.
The reality is the opposite. I don’t doubt that there is racism and sexism on the Left. But there’s far less of it than on the right. But the press are still liars for claiming otherwise.
More sheer, howling madness from Alex Jones of Infowars, the man for whom the term ‘fake news’ could have been coined. As I’ve mentioned before, Jones is a notorious conspiracy theorist, who hosts his own internet TV show where he claims that the people of America and the world are under attack from their own governments, determined to impoverish and enslave them. Those responsible for this nefarious project are the ‘globalists’, by which he means the elite 1 per cent, the major industrialists, politicians and world leaders. According to him, they are determined to create something very much like the one-world Satanic superstate of Christian Fundamentalist end-times demonology. The leaders of this conspiracy are involved in every kind of depravity imaginable, including child sacrifice and paedophilia. He appeared on Jon Ronson’s Channel 4 documentary Them: Adventures with Extremists, where he and Ronson sneaked into the annual meeting of America’s political and business elites at Bohemian Grove in California. Witnessing a bizarre playlet in which the participants burn an effigy of ‘Dull Care’, Jones and his followers immediately decided that the figure was a child being ritually sacrificed to Satan.
Jone’s has said a number of times that he doesn’t know if the ultimate forces behind the conspiracy to enslave humanity are demons or malign, extradimensional aliens. But he believes they really exist, whatever they are. Thus he accused Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton of being demonically possessed, and that Clinton was a participant in Satanic rituals involving eating human blood and other body fluids. He also had to make an apology and a very public retraction on air after he claimed that there was a paedophile ring supplying children to Democratic party politicos operating out of a pizza parlour in Boston. Of course there wasn’t. But that didn’t stop someone with a gun going into the place looking for the underground basement where they kept the kids prisoner. Fortunately, the owners were able to show him that no such dungeon existed, and no-one was shot. But it could very easily have gone the other way.
He also had to retract similar allegations made against the Turkish owner of a yoghurt factory. This company had a policy of hiring immigrants, including those from the Middle East. So Jones alleged that the firm’s boss was another paedophile, and that workers from his company were responsible for a spate of rapes in the area. No, the boss wasn’t, and his workers weren’t either. And after the factory boss consulted m’learned friends, as Private Eye calls them, Jones had to appear on air to state that, once again, he’d made a mistake.
As a member of the American Right, he’s firmly against gun control. He’s also against fluoride in the water, and seems to believe that there is some kind of UN plan to have their doctors castrate the male population. Quite apart from putting chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay.
As well as enslaving us in refugee camps for the victims of natural disasters, Jones also believes, or claims to believe, that the globalists are trying to deprive us of our basic humanity. He denounced the gay rights movement as a ‘transhumanist space cult’ intending to create a genderless human being. Which really isn’t how the vast majority of gays and their supporters in their movement for equality see it at all. Away from sexual politics, Jones has frequently ranted about how the globalists plan to turn everyone into some kind of genetically engineered cyborg.
In this short clip, under a minute, Jones cries about how, when he was in Britain, he saw tanks full of babies and small children, who’ve been genetically engineered into fish people. They all had gills, and were swimming around, breathing under water.
I’ve put this up partly because it involves my home country, obviously. Jones has been to England. He appeared briefly on the Daily Politics with Andrew Neil, where he started yelling about the evils of gun control and how we would never crush good Americans and take their guns away. Or something like that. It ended with the camera pulling away from Jones to focus instead on Neil making the circular ‘nutter’ gesture by the side of his head.
I don’t know whether Jones has been to Blighty again or not. I’m absolutely sure, however, that he has not seen gilled, gene-engineered sprogs in tanks. I think there was a project to develop artificial gills in the 1907s – Duncan Lunan mentions it in his book, Man and the Planets – but that seems to have died the death of all scientific dead-ends. And a few years ago the BBC science documentary programme, Horizon, did cover experiments where animals were shown breathing in liquid. It wasn’t water, however. It was a special, oxygenated liquid, and the creatures didn’t have gills.
It also seems to me that he’s watched too much X-Files on DVD. The show’s central story arc was that there was a secret project to create human-alien hybrids in preparation for a final, alien invasion in which the normal human majority would be completely exterminated. The aliens and the hybrids were, of course, green blooded. As well as being extremely difficult to kill, the human-alien hybrids could also breathe under water. There’s a scene in one episode where Mulder and Scully look around a secret lab in an old warehouse, full of humans sleeping underwater in their tanks.
It’s a good question whether Jones actually believes any of the stuff he spouts. A few months ago his ex-wife sued for custody of their children. They were then living with Jones, who also his studio in his home. His former wife claimed that Jones was insane, and that watching their father rant about these bizarre and terrifying conspiracies, which existed only in his head, was damaging to their children’s mental health. Jones’ lawyer responded that he didn’t believe any of this nonsense, and that it was an act, or performance art. Which is sort of a confession that he’s a fraud.
My guess is that a fair number of Jones’ viewers don’t believe any of the stuff he comes out with, and watch Infowars in the same way people used to read the Weekly World News and its daft stories. Such as, ”Dad Was Bigfoot’, Says Beastie Man’, and a headline news story about a Grey alien giving his vote to Bill Clinton. Jones also probably realizes this, and doesn’t care. If you look on YouTube, there are number of videos explicitly labelled ‘Alex Jones Rants’, which seem to come from Jones or Infowars themselves.
And at least one British tabloid has run bogus stories on the same theme of secret genetic experimentation. Two decades ago, a couple of British newspapers also tried to go for the same market as the Weekly World News in the states. There was the Sunday Sport, now The Sport, and its story about a B-52 bomber being found on the Moon. The Daily Star also tried to plumb those depths. At the time, the Science Fiction chiller, Chimaera, was running on British television. This was a series about a journalist and female genetics engineer, who had uncovered a terrible secret plot to breed a human-chimpanzee hybrid to act as a new slave class. Although SF, the series is not as incredible as it seems. At one point Stalin was interested in creating such a ‘Humanzee’ hybrid to serve as soldiers in the Soviet Union.
While the series was running, the Star, if I remember correctly, carried a story, which claimed that similar genetic experiments were being carried out by the British government, and that their journalists had found laboratories containing elephants the size of rabbits. Well, they clearly hadn’t, although there certainly had been genetic experiments of a sort. This was the time of Dolly, the cloned sheep, and attempts to create a sheep-goat hybrid, experiments which made Chimaera and its plot all too plausible. However, the Star’s attempts to become even more stupid and bonkers than the Sport failed, according to Private Eye, and the wretched rag lost rapidly lost readers. They then had to make a complete volte-face, and go back to something resembling normal journalism. Jones’ tale of secret human experiments in British labs also hark back, consciously or not, to Chimaera and the daft story in the Star which it inspired.
While some people do see Jones as a joke, there is a very serious aspect to him and Infowars. Many people do take it seriously, as was shown by the incident at the Boston pizza parlour. And Jones was one of those backing Trump’s campaign for the presidency. He had the orange buffoon on his show several times, lauding him as the man, who would finally lead the revolt against the globalists. Which is quite ironic, if we’re talking about human-animal hybrids. Trump got very annoyed last year when the American comedian, Bill Maher, declared on his show that Trump was so orange, he must be half orangutan. Trump took the joke so seriously, he began waving his birth certificate around to show that both his parents were human, and threatened to sue for libel. Of course, in practice Trump has shown himself every bit as globalist as all the other politicians and businessmen, moving factories and parts of his business empire abroad to where he can exploit the cheap labour of workers in the Developing World.
As with the Star’s bogus stories about genetically engineered dwarf animals, I doubt anyone has been taken in by Jones’ nonsense about genetically engineered fish babies. But that doesn’t mean people don’t believe some of his nonsense, and he is having a destabilizing effect on American democracy through his promotion of the extreme right. However risible his stories are, Jones and his power to influence part of the American electorate have gone far beyond a joke.
My drawing of Boris Johnson, who seems to have been in some pain. Make up your own jokes.
Earlier today, Mike put up an audio clip of Boris Johnson, Tory MP for Henley on Thames, former editor of the Spectator, mayor of London, and frequent guest on Have I Got News For You being interviewed on the Queen’s Speech by Eddie Mair on Radio 4. Boris has got a reputation as an incompetent buffoon, based on the fact that things have gone spectacularly wrong with him in charge in public for years. Like, for example, when he tried coming down a zipline for some event, and got stuck halfway along and had to be rescued. Or when he shut himself out of his own house in front of reporters. Or when he held a press meeting for some campaign he was involved in, only to have the video go wrong, as reported in Private Eye.
This interview will most certainly not have dispelled that reputation.
Mair begins by asking Johnson about Theresa May’s comments last year about tackling various injustices. What was there in the Queen’s Speech today, about correcting the harsher treatment Blacks receive in court?
Johnson’s reply was a series a mumbled ‘ers’, followed by ‘I’ve got it here somewhere’ and rustling sounds.
So Mair moved on to his next question, which was about what plans the government may have to tackle mental health issues.
More mumbling and sounds of ignorance from Johnson, who then tried to change the subject and go back to the previous question.
At which point Mair brought him up sharp with the words, ‘No, Boris, this isn’t the Two Ronnies, where you can answer the question before last’, referring to that sketch which gently sent up Mastermind.
He then asked Boris about the contents of the Queen’s Speech in general. BoJo didn’t know, and so Mair told him. Or rather, he listed all the subjects and policies May had said she would tackle in her manifesto, which she has now discarded. 13.7 million people voted for that manifesto, said Mair. Was it right that this should now be thrown away?
More mumbling and muttering from Boris, who blustered something about ‘changed circumstances’.
Along with the clip, Mike has also put up some of the responses to it on social media, including those of the Labour politicos John Prescott and Chuka Umunna, and the left-wing writer and journo, Owen Jones. All of them make the point that this was a dreadful interview, comparable to that of Diane Abbott a few weeks ago. This resulted in Abbott being ridiculed across the media. Now Boris has given a similarly bad one, so will he get the same treatment?
No surprise there. The French Philosophical Feline, Guy Debord’s Cat, made this point over a fortnight ago when Abbott was forced to pull out of the campaign due to ill health. People started muttering about how this showed she was incompetent, while May asked the rhetorical question if people wanted this woman as Home Secretary? La Chat Philosophique Francaise compared this to the 1970s racist campaign against the Labour party, in which voters were explicitly told that if you wanted a ‘coloured’ living next to you, you should vote for the Labour party. Or to put it crudely, ‘If you want a n***er for a neighbour, vote Labour’. He writes
In the last week or so, we’ve heard May and her Tories say “Would you want Diane Abbott as Home Secretary”? Such a question is predicated on the knowledge of the Other. The idea that the Home Office will be run not only by a woman, but a black woman is too much to bear for our crypto-racists. Better to have a white woman or a white man in charge, eh? Where are the black faces in May’s cabinet? There are none. There are a couple of Asian millionaires but no black people.
Diane Abbott has been attacked precisely because she is black and because she’s a woman. Boris Johnson is allowed to make as many gaffes as he likes and get away with it. He’s given plenty of latitude when he indulges in racism and his thuggish behaviour is regularly overlooked, even laughed off. He’s a clown, so we’re told.
He concludes
When you base your competency argument on a handful of gaffes rather than a person’s record, then you play the bully’s game. If you can’t see the obvious racism that underpins the bullying of Abbott and prefer to focus on her presumed incompetency, then you need to have a word with yourself.
Part of the issue in Abbott’s case, I suspect, is the fact that challenging racism has been a very important part of Abbott’s political career. Her parents were both working class. The Daily Mail a little while ago in an article on her claimed that she was personally embittered because she believed that her mother had been passed over for promotion because of her colour. Which is very possible, given the racism of the times.
As a result, Abbott got a reputation as someone, who was prejudiced against Whites. In the 1987 one of the Tory papers – I think it was the Scum – ran a double spread of photographs of various Labour politicians, underneath which was a quote designed to frighten all right-thinking British Thatcherites. Underneath Red Ken’s fizzog was the quotation ‘I am not in favour of the army. I am in favour of arming the working classes to guard the factories.’
And below Abbot’s was the statement ‘All White people are racist’.
This was designed to show how far left and unfit for government the Labour party was. As it stands, Ken Livingstone was in favour of workers’ control, though this was only one aspect of his views on industry and government. And as some of his Tory opponents and colleagues in London admitted, Livingstone was far from a lunatic.
I’m sure the same can be said for Abbott. The quotations from the Scum sound plausible, but that’s what effective propaganda has to be. If it sounds like lies, then people won’t believe it. And it isn’t as though the Scum doesn’t have a reputation for lying. As one of the premier organs of Thatcherite propaganda, it shares all the mendacity of the party is loudly supports.
And this is quite apart from its blatant racism. Way back at the end of the 1990s or the first years of this century, Private Eye ran an article on yet another case in which the Scum had been hauled up before the Press Complaints Commission, as was, for racism. The Eye pointed out that the wretched paper had had 19 decisions against it by the Commission for racism over the years. And that was then. Who knows what the count is now!
As for Abbott, she seems perfectly at home with Michael Portillo and Andrew Neil on The Daily Politics. I did hear a little while ago that Portillo was her baby’s godfather, though I’m not sure if this is right. If it is, it confirms that she’s fitted right in as a politician of long and distinguished standing.
Will Boris get pilloried for his dreadful performance? Of course he won’t! He’s White, pukka old Etonian establishment – the type of people, who believe that they have an unquestionable right to govern the rest of us, and who the right-wing media, including the Beeb, will support against challengers like Abbott. Or Jeremy Corbyn, for that matter, who was also ridiculed after failing to know the answer to a question posed by Woman’s Hour.
Which will just show just how biased in terms of class and race the Beeb and media are.
And for fans of classic comedy, here’s the Two Ronnies Sketch in question.
On Tuesday Mike put up a post commenting on May’s claim that she was going to end the austerity foisted on the country by Cameron, Osborne and Nick Clegg. The trio had claimed that cutting services, privatising the NHS, and dismantling the welfare state even more ruthlessly, were what was needed to pay off the debt Labour had incurred trying to prevent the global economy collapsing due to the bankster’s recklessness. The result has been wages cuts and a massive increase in poverty as the poor, the unemployed, the sick and the disabled were thrown off benefits for the flimsiest of reasons.
Instead of blaming the bankers for the economic crisis, the Tories and their Lib Dem enablers went back to the using refrain of blaming ‘high spending’ Labour for ‘living beyond our means’.
As Mike points out in his post, cutting government investment is the one thing you don’t do during a recession. State investment stimulates the economy, which means that businesses start making money again, which generates more tax revenue.
This one of the arguments in support of welfare provision against unemployment. If unemployed workers have some kind of income during a recession, they can afford to spend some of it, thus generating more income for businesses and the state. It’s basic Keynsianism, and it works. Unlike the grotty free market economics embraced by the Tories. That has only succeeded in increasing the debt.
Now Theresa May has decided that austerity should be ended. Not because she has woken up at last to the fact that it isn’t working, and in fact is damaging the British economy. Or because she’s suddenly grown a conscience, and has realised the immense human cost of the Tories’ austerity policies in terms of tens of thousands of people, who have died in misery. Or the 7 million plus British people now living in ‘food-insecure’ households, who don’t know if they’re next meal is going to be their last.
No, it’s because the Tories lost their overall majority, thanks to a revived Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn. Mike comments
And now, further cuts are being abandoned – not because austerity’s ends have been achieved, but because the Tories have realised they will forfeit votes if they continue.
Everybody in the UK, who isn’t filthy rich, should be furious. We should be marching on Tory MPs’ homes and offices with blazing torches and pitchforks, shouting “Burn the monsters!”
The last thing we should do is tolerate this latest cynical reaction to prevailing trends. Tories represent greed and power. The only reason they abandon their pursuit of greed is when it may harm their hold on power.
Mike isn’t the only one who’s furious at this cynical U-turn and the cavalier fashion in which the Tories have shrugged off their responsibility for destroying so many lives with a brutal, callous and entirely wrong economic and social policy. He concludes
Even now, on the BBC’s Daily Politics, Tories Michael Howard and Dominic Grieve are talking about the need to live within our means. The fact is that it is entirely possible, if Tories are stopped from siphoning off our money into their bank accounts.
The end of austerity is to be welcomed.
The end of the UK’s problems will only come when the Conservatives are banished from Parliament forever.
In fact, the I newspaper also reported on the same day that the Tories were revising their manifesto, and dropping the more unpopular policies, such as the ‘Dementia Tax’. This was accompanied with noises about how we lived in a democratic society, and the Tories were a democratic party, so they were responding to the demands of the electorate.
There were also statements designed to reassure Tory supporters that this time, May herself would be performing better in public. They claimed that she was now a more naturalistic speaker, and that ‘the Maybot is gone.’
I find all of this very difficult to believe. The Tories are inveterate liars, who lie constantly without compunction. You only have to look through Mike’s blog for the past week or so to find very long lists of May’s promises, which she has subsequently broken. Such as her promises to put workers on the boards of companies. The campaign of her predecessor, David Cameron, was one long series of lies. He and IDS, the minister for culling the disabled, claimed that they were going to ringfence spending on the NHS, campaigned against hospital closures by Blair’s New Labour, and tried to present the Tories as now being more left-wing and friendly to the poor. He also stuck a windmill on the roof of his house, and claimed that his would be ‘the greenest government ever’.
Once in power, the NHS was being cut and privatised, hospitals closed and given over to private management companies, conditionality for welfare benefits massively increased, and any semblance of environmentalism thrown out completely. The windmill went from his roof, and in came the privatisation of Britain’s forests, the repeal of various pieces of legislation protecting the environment, and the go-ahead given to fracking.
The fact that Howard and Grieve were talking about ‘living within our means’ – which is Tory-speak for not spending anything on the poor and state services, like the NHS and education, means that the Tories really don’t believe it.
And yesterday Mike put up a piece reporting that Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, and Sajid Javid are calling for May’s proposed cap on energy bills to be scrapped and the party should return to its ‘free market roots’.
Mike quoted Labour’s shadow energy minister, Rebecca Long-Bailey, and concluded:
“If correct, this is potentially another stunning U-turn from a weak and wobbly Prime Minister,” said Rebecca Long-Bailey, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
“One in ten households are living in fuel poverty and customers are being overcharged a whopping £2 billion every year. Theresa May unequivocally guaranteed a price cap before the general election but now it appears she is preparing to row back on that promise. It now looks like this price cap was simply an election gimmick and that the Conservatives were never serious about taking action to keep energy bills down.
“Britain needs a serious and long term approach in order to bring energy costs down, not cheap gimmicks that may simply be thrown into the bin just a week after the General Election.”
She’s right; Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid are wrong. What do YOU think the Tories will do?
I think it’s blatantly obvious what the Tories will do. They’re lying now about ending austerity, but perfectly serious about abandoning the energy bill cap. If they get in again, May will reintroduce all the policies she claimed she abandoned, and the Tories will once again chant the old Thatcherite chorus of TINA – There Is No Alternative.
There is. It’s Jeremy Corbyn. He’s this country’s hope to stop further NHS privatisation, welfare cuts, starvation and deaths.
Mike this week put up a piece reporting and commenting on the admission by Maximus that they do indeed ask depressed people questions about suicide as part of the Work Capability Assessment. See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/03/11/dwp-contractor-admits-routinely-asking-sickness-benefit-claimants-dangerous-questions-about-suicide/There are several questions. The first questions simply ask them if they have had thoughts about suicide, and the frequency and severity of these thoughts. These are, in my view, reasonable questions. Or rather, it would be if it were part of a genuine medical examination as part of a real programme to make that person well again. Depression isn’t a case of being ‘a bit down’. It is, as the British medical scientist, writer and Humanist, Lewis Wolpert described it in the title of his book, ‘A Malignant Sadness’. Clearly, if someone does have thoughts about suicide, they are extremely unwell and desperately need help.
The other questions, however, is unwarranted and frankly dangerous. The depressed person is then asked
“And what is it that stops you from acting on the thoughts that you have?
“Can you think of any reason that you’re not doing that? Is it friends or family support?”
Now it should be clear to anyone with the most meagre level of intelligence that asking people, who are already mentally fragile and have admitted they think of doing themselves injury or actually killing themselves, why they haven’t done so is extremely dangerous. My guess is that the way it is phrased in particular makes the question seriously unethical, as it seems to assume that the depressed person is not seriously troubled by these thoughts unless he or she has tried to act them out.
I don’t know, but I can imagine that if a social scientist or medical professional doing research amongst the clinically depressed asked the question, they could be hauled up before their relevant bodies overseeing professional standards for ethics violations or misconduct. As part of their training, social scientists are told not to phrase questions in the form of ‘You’re not…are you?’ And the Hippocratic Oath, a form of which doctors were required to take until recently, contained the provision ‘And I shall do no harm.’ These questions seem close enough to the first question, at least in spirit, to make them also unethical, while violating that provision of the ancient doctor’s Oath in that they could seem to some to be suggesting that they should.
The Work Capability Test itself is a scientific travesty. It is based on spurious and scientifically invalid research supposedly linking recovery to illness to mental attitude. The whole wretched test was introduced by Blair and his coteries on the recommendation of the American insurance fraudster, Unum, in a conference in the first years of this century. It is based on the attitude, shared by the Blairites and the Tories, that nearly everyone claiming invalidity or sickness benefit is a malingerer, despite the fact that such fraud only counts for 0.7 per cent of such claims.
The question also shows the immense double standards about health that persists between us and our rulers. It’s assumed that asking a severely ill person why they haven’t harmed themselves or committed suicide is acceptable. But heaven help anyone, who asked the same question of a captain of industry or leading politician why they haven’t tried to commit suicide, and you can imagine the feeding frenzy from an outraged press.
For example, the Blairite contender for the Labour leadership and flagrant liar, Angela Eagle, was asked by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics about Tony Blair and whether the vile warmonger should face trial for leading Britain into an illegal war. Tellingly, she said no, as ‘Tony’s been through the wringer’. Thus showing that she cared more for the Dear Leader’s anguish than for the real horror he has inflicted on hundreds of thousands, of not millions of innocent people, who have been killed, tortured and forced out of their homes through the carnage he and that other malignant creature, George Dubya Bush, have created through their war. I don’t know what Neil’s response was, but can you imagine the outrage that would have resulted if Neil had said, ‘Well, he can’t be going through too much trouble, ’cause he’s still walking’.
Or if one of the other interviewers asked the same question of one of the Tories, like Theresa May, David Cameron, or the people directly responsible for the question: Ian Duncan Smith and Damian Green. There would have been fury directed at the ‘left-wing’ BBC. How dare they suggest that a minister of the realm isn’t doing his job if he hasn’t committed suicide for his failures! Or even the suggestion that they have failed in their job, which the Tories have, spectacularly.
But if it is acceptable to ask a gravely disturbed person why they haven’t acted out their desires to harm themselves, then by the same standard it should be acceptable to ask the same questions of anyone, including and particularly the ministers that have formulated that question.
Now I am not suggesting that Blair, May, Cameron, aIDS or Damian Green should be asked these questions, or otherwise be told to kill themselves, for precisely the same reason I don’t think anyone should be asked these questions. I am merely trying to point out the double standards involved here.
Now I imagine that if they were asked about this question, Damian Green or his predecessor, the Gentleman Ranker (and a right ranker he truly was) would say, in their inimitably patronising manner, that they are only trying to gauge the severity of the illness. This is rubbish. The whole test is structured so that the government can find some pretext to deny paying the ill person disability benefit on the grounds that they’re still somehow fit for work.
And Mike and many other bloggers and disability activists also see something much more sinister here. Many tens of thousands of people have committed suicide, or died in poverty and misery after being thrown off benefit, although the DWP continues to deny it. See Stilloaks website and the blog, ATOS Miracles, for further coverage of this and the biographies and individual cases of some of the victims. For Mike and people like Jeff Davies, one of the long term commenters on my blog this is evidence of a covert, secret genocide of the disabled. The government wants them dead, because that way they don’t have to pay out to support them. They can continue lowering the taxes of their rich donors.
This is how it’s beginning to look to very many of us, whether we’re disabled or fit. The presenters of the Channel 4 comedy review show, The Last Leg, even said so themselves. There should be mass outrage about these questions and the test itself. That there isn’t is a major disgrace in itself.
For years, Private Eye used to run, off and on, a photograph of a picture of newspaper editor Andrew Neil wearing a baseball cap and vest in the company of a glamorous young lady. They haven’t done this quite so much of late. Neil is, of course, the presenter of the Daily Politics, and Mike and other bloggers and commenters have pointed out that there is definitely a right-wing bias to his show.
Well, I found a copy of the offending photograph from an issue from Private Eye way back in 2005. I thought I’d post it to show the deep concern Neil has in youth fashion and supporting young ladies in the media.
Mike over at Vox Political on Friday posted this piece about Andrew Neil’s treatment of one of the witnesses in the Tory bullying scandal: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/05/tory-bullying-inquiry-witness-bbc-complicit-in-bid-to-defame-me/. Ben Harris-Quinney, the chairman of the Tory thinktank, the Bow Group, was invited on to Neil’s programme, the Daily Politics. Ostensibly this was to discuss vote-swapping between the Conservatives and UKIP. When he got there, however, he found himself being questioned about his own character, and accused by Neil of being a ‘Walter Mitty character’. Mr Harris-Quinney has taken the step of writing a letter of complaint to the Beeb about his treatment. He believes his treatment was part of a campaign of intimidation against him arranged by one of Grant Shapps’ aides.
Mike in his article makes the point that the bullying scandal has proven very damaging to the Tories, and that this incident disproves the claims that the BBC is left-wing, or biases against the Tories, particularly as Andrew Neil is a fervent Tory supporter.
This episode would seem to bear out Mike’s observations, and show just how far the Tory factionalism within the BBC goes. It’s not just rabid support of the Tories, but a determination to do the Whip’s and the government’s dirty work of keeping dissident elements that might harm the party in line.
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