Hi, and welcome to another of my cartoons, in which I attempt to lampoon the Tory party and our disgusting Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. This one is another mock poster/ record sleeve for my entirely fictional band, the Dead Thatchers. The name’s modeled on the American ’80s punk band, The Dead Kennedys. One of their satirical attacks on Reagan’s administration was ‘Bedtime for Democracy’, which I’ve used as the title and inspiration of this drawing. It shows Boris Johnson as Mussolini, surrounded by Maggie Thatcher and her bestie, General Pinochet, the Fascist dictator of Chile, as well as Ian McNichol and Emilie Oldknow.
Despite their loud claims to be the defenders of democracy, the Tories have so often been anything but. Churchill was an ardent opponent of Nazism, but it was because he saw them as a threat to British maritime domination of Europe and the North Sea. He was personally authoritarian, and actually like the Spanish dictator, Franco. He did, however, have the decency to describe Mussolini privately as a ‘swine’ when he visited Fascist Italy. In the 1980s sections of the Tory party had a very strong affinity for the Far Right, such as the Union of Conservative Students. Among their antics was calling for the National Front’s doctrine of ‘racial nationalism’ – the idea that only Whites should be considered true Britons – to become official policy. They bitterly hated Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, singing songs about hanging him in response to the pop single demanding freedom for the future leader of a democratic, multiracial South Africa. Other songs included a parody of ‘We Don’t Want No Education’ from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks or Asians’. There were also Tory demonstrations in support of apartheid South Africa.
The libertarian outfit to which Guido Fawkes belonged played host at its annual dinners to politicos from the South African Conservative Party, as well as the leader of one of Rios Montt’s death squads. Montt was the dictator of one of the Central American countries. Maggie Thatcher’s friendship with Pinochet was for the old monster’s support against Argentina during the Falklands War. But some of it no doubt came from Thatcher’s own very authoritarian personality. She wanted a strong state, which meant the police, armed forces and the intelligence agencies. The Tories also claimed that she was somehow working class. She wasn’t. She was lower middle class, strictly speaking, and despised the people the Victorians called ‘the labouring poor’. She despised the trade unions and regarded the working class as ungrateful and disloyal. Following Enoch Powell, she was a monetarist, as was Pinochet. His regime was supported by Milton Friedman, who went down to Chile to advise Pinochet on its implementation, because he and the rest of the Chicago school and American libertarians because they believed it could only be established by a dictator. The masses were too wedded, they believed, to state intervention and a welfare state for a monetarist government ever to be democratically elected.
And Boris is also extremely authoritarian. He shares the eugenics views of Cummings and Toby Young, as well as previous Tory governments, that the poor, the disabled, the elderly and the long-term unemployed are useless eaters on whom as little money and resources should spent as possible. He and his cronies seem to regard their deaths as simply the inevitable operation of the forces of Natural Selection. His and his advisers were in favour of letting the British people develop ‘herd immunity’ against the Coronavirus, which meant avoiding lockdown and letting the disease take the weakest in order to preserve the economy. When Johnson was finally forced to act, he did so by awarding himself dangerously wide, exceptional powers in order, so he claimed, to be able to deal with the emergency.
These powers could very easily be used to turn him into a dictator.
The Coronavirus bill debated by parliament on 19th March 2020 gave the government sweeping new powers to arrest, detain and surveil for the next two years. It was criticised by Observer journo Carole Cadwalladr, who asked why the bill was supposed to last for two years, when the government did not expect the emergency to last that long. She also asked the pertinent question of what the government would do with all the information it wanted to collect.
Labour’s Chris Bryant also attacked it, stating that current emergency legislation, from the Civil Contingencies Act to various health and disease legislation, also gave the government sufficient powers to deal with the emergency. The Civil Contingencies bill requires renewal every 28 days, and the other laws also contain important safeguards. Commons library clerk Graeme Cowie also stressed how important ‘Sunset Clauses’ are. He explained that they ‘
are an important safeguard against the use of unusually broad or general executive powers. They also take different forms: (a) time limiting provisions in an Act (b) time limiting the power to make regulations or (c) time limiting the effect of regulations”.
Zelo Street, the bill looked like a power grab by Boris, enabled by Tory tribal politics.
https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/03/coronavirus-bill-warning.html
This is all too credible, given the way BoJob also had the Queen grant him extended powers to try to force Brexit through parliament despite the opposition of many MPs, including those in his own party.
But Boris isn’t the only anti-democrat.
I’ve also included in the cartoon Ian McNichol and Emilie Oldknow, the chairman of the Labour party and the present COO of Unison respectively. Because these two charmers were part of the very real conspiracy within the Labour Party democracy to unseat Jeremy Corbyn by withholding information on the anti-Semitism scandal so as to make him appear incompetent. Other tactics included trying keep Wallasey Labour Party suspended for as long as possible so they wouldn’t deselect the sitting Blairite MP, Angela Eagle, running a parallel election campaign in London intended to ensure that only Blairites would be elected, debating whether they could get Momentum expelled. They also wanted to set up an interim government with Tom Watson as leader after the 2017 election, and intrigued against and vilified other Labour MPs and activists from the left-wing – the real Centre – of the party. All this is described in the Anti-Semitism report, which was suppressed on the advice of the party’s lawyers, and on which Starmer sat for a week before it was leaked. One of the plotters wanted to get an electoral college set up in the party to make sure that a left-wing could never be elected leader.
McNichol, Oldknow and the rest of them are as anti-democratic as Johnson.
They did not work for the good of the party as a whole, but merely their own, narrow factional advantage. And as the behaviour of the Blairites has repeatedly shown, they prefer Tory government to one by a left-wing Labour figure. The report describes how they debated who to vote for if it came to a contest between Corbyn and Tweezer. But their contempt for Labour party democracy has been amply shown over the past four years of Blairite intriguing against Corbyn. And Blair himself was very authoritarian, curtailing party democracy and centralising it around himself. The Blairites themselves are only small minority within the party, but they were able to present themselves as representing mainstream Labour through their monopolization of the party bureaucracy and the connivance of the lamestream media.
Now following the report’s leak, the Socialist Group of Labour MPs have written to Starmer asking very serious questions. Ordinary Labour members, activists and supporters like Mike are also demanding greater disclosure about their activities, as well as their censure and expulsion.
This is absolutely correct, as their contempt for their party’s leadership and members and fervent support of Tory policies shows that they are a threat to democracy like Boris and his mob in government.
Here’s the cartoon. I hope you enjoy it.
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