No, HIGNFY, That’s Not What We Object to in Your Treatment of Corbyn

Last night’s edition of the Beeb’s satirical panel game, Have I Got Not For You, decided to reply to certain criticism regarding their treatment of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. This week’s guest host, Jo Brand, stated that the programme had been widely attacked by supporters of the Labour leader because the programme continued referring to him by his surname, while the Prime Minister was more informally called by his first name, Boris. This, it was claimed, showed a bias towards the Tory leader, which the programme disputed.

Ummm, no. This is not why many of us object to the programme’s bias against Labour. We object to it because it pushes, like the rest of the media, the flagrant lie that he and his supporters are anti-Semites. Last Friday I put up on this blog immediately after the programme an article expressing my dismay at seeing this pushed once against by Victoria Coren-Mitchell, a broadcaster for whom I have otherwise immense respect. She made a joke about Corbyn believing in the anti-Semitic Jewish bankers conspiracy. He doesn’t. Never has done, and never will. He has a proud record of supporting Jews and Jewish issues in the UK as part of a general commitment to combating racism. But he frightens the British, American and Israeli political establishments by supporting Palestinian rights. And more alarming, horror of horrors!, he has the support of self-respecting Torah-observant and secular Jews. The meeting he attended, which so sent the British Jewish establishment into panicked hysteria because it compared the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to that of the Jews under the Nazis, was addressed by Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor. It certainly was not a Nazi meeting by any stretch of the imagination. And Mr Meyer wasn’t alone in his support for Palestinian rights. They were also championed by Marek Edelman, another Holocaust survivor, who had fought in the heroic Warsaw Uprising. Edelman even compared the Palestinians fighting for their land, freedom and dignity with the Uprising against Nazi genocide. But this is very much how it is not presented by the British press and media.

I wasn’t alone in my disgust at the programme pushing the idea that Corbyn was an anti-Semite and a conspiracy theorist in the worst sense of the term. Many others were too. Mike put up a piece reporting their criticisms and concerns. To be fair to Victoria Coren, she tried to reply to them, and seemed to leave thinking the issue over.

And it seems that the outrage on social media with the programme and its treatment of Corbyn has got to the point that its producers realise they have to do something to tackle it. But they can’t defend their linking of Corbyn with anti-Semitism and bogus, murderous conspiracy theories, it seems. Nor can they acknowledge, it appears, that there is a serious issue here. Because all decent people know that Corbyn is an anti-Semite, and they cannot damage this myth by showing that there are decent people, who don’t.

And so they tried to head off criticism by rebutting a different issue entirely.

This is not good enough, not by a long way. Some people might object to the programme for the above reason, but that’s not why an increasing number do. But it does seem to show that the programme’s producers are worried about criticism they are getting about their contemptuous and contemptible treatment of the Labour leader.

Perhaps if we continue to voice our real objections, the Beeb might just have to come clean on the real issue. I hope so, but I’m not holding my breath.

Is the Latest Anti-Labour Smear Motivated by Tory Fears of General Election?

Mike suggested in his first article on the Sunset Times’ latest anti-Semitism smear against the Labour party that it was motivated by the fear that a general election was in the offing. Mike wrote

This is a critical time for the people of the United Kingdom.

Hysteria over Brexit is at fever pitch, with Theresa May in negotiations with a Labour team on a way to save the process from the disaster she has made of it.

If the talks fall apart, it is possible that Mrs May will trigger a general election in the hope that a new Parliament may be able to support one of the options available.

And in this context, The Sunday Times publishes a piece smearing the leader of the Opposition.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/04/07/a-general-election-is-in-the-offing-time-for-another-anti-semitism-smear-against-jeremy-corbyn/

I don’t think there can be much doubt about it. The Skwawkbox has also pup up a very interesting little piece reporting that the Mail on Sunday has an eight-page feature telling its readers ‘How to protect your cash from Corbyn’. Which, as the Skwawkbox points out, is a frank admission that they think he’s going to win the next election, and that they think that one’s coming soon. The Skwawkbox also points out that it shows that the Tories are also all about the wealthy, drily commenting ‘Who knew, eh?’

https://skwawkbox.org/2019/04/07/mail-spends-eight-pages-telling-readers-corbyns-going-to-win-next-ge/

Who indeed? The Tories have always seen themselves as the party of business and industry. Or rather, they have since they stopped presenting themselves as just the party of the Anglican Church and aristocracy, and decided to broaden their constituency by taking the business vote from the right-wing of the Liberal party. As a result, they are very much the party of the Establishment, although it has to be said that the religious right have also become very worried that a large section of the Anglican church, along with many other British churches and religions, doesn’t support them. And it seems from the latest smears against the Labour party and this piece in the Heil on Sunday that the Establishment is very, very worried. And so they should. Polls last week showed Labour five points ahead of the Tories, and the Newport by-election even suggested that the lead could be as much as nine points. Or at least it was in Newport.

Hence the Sunset Times’ attack, which, as well as being a malign attempt to misrepresent and libel Corbyn and his party, is also an act of utter desperation. The Tories are desperately afraid they’ll lose the next election, and so they’re reverting to the anti-Semitism lies and smears. But they’ve used them so often before, it’s very likely that the British public, or at least a sizable part of them, realises that they’re lying and simply don’t believe them. I’ve blogged before about a piece I found elsewhere on the Net, which reported that a senior member of the Israel lobby, responsible for spreading the anti-Semitism smears against opponents of Israeli ethnic cleansing, lamented that it was no longer working as effectively as they’d like.

I hope this continues and the whole, wretched sham campaign of smears and lies is utterly discredited along with the soulless hacks and politicos that retail it. And that Labour wins the next election by a landslide.

Ken Livingstone: The Establishment Is Terrified of A Socialist Getting in 10 Downing Street

This is a short clip from RT’s Sputnik programme of Red Ken in conversation with his old Labour comrade, George Galloway, and his main woman Gayatri. They’re discussing the prospects of Jeremy Corbyn and whether he can defeat the Tories in the next election.

The clip begins with Red Ken saying that Corbyn will fight on to the end, as they both know, because they’re like him and rebelled against the Labour leadership on the same issues. Livingstone says that he wishes a documentary-maker would come and make a film about all those rebellions, and see how many of them were right. Jeremy voted against war after war, and against the imposition of taxes on the poor. He then says that the establishment is terrified of a Socialist getting into 10 Downing Street.

Galloway then asks LIvingstone if he thinks this could really happen. He says that the Tories are ‘all at sea’, that Brexit is a mess, as is the economy, but the Tories are now4 points ahead in the polls. And Galloway’s afraid that if the Tories get in again, not only will Britain be broke, it’ll be broken. The Scots will almost certainly vote for independence, and even he – Galloway – couldn’t vote against it in those circumstances.

Livingstone replies by saying that the economy is indeed in a terrible state. Growth is negligible, there are jobs being created, but they’re low paid, insecure with no pension rights, and this is the worst economic situation they’ve seen in their lifetime. But there is a chance for Labour to get in. Before the last general election, they were predicting a Labour wipeout of more than 100 seats lost. But instead Corbyn led them to the biggest electoral gains since 1945, and they came within two per cent of beating the Tories. This was despite 81 of his MPs trying to unseat him. He says that Corbyn was able to make these gains despite the establishment running the smear stories about him supporting terrorism, or giving information to Czech spies, because once their in the election period, the TV has to give equal space to them. And Corbyn talked about issues, like low pay, and unemployment, which really connected with people. The same issues that fuelled the rise of Trump.

The clip ends with Leninspart predicting that the campaign against Corbyn will now become even nastier. There’ll be even more lies and smears, just as earlier Galloway remarked on how they’re now trying to get rid of Corbyn using salami tactics. But once the country gets into the election period, it’ll be different.

‘No Confidence’ Vote Needed Against Racist May’s Betrayal of the Windrush Generation

This is another issue that’s so glaringly unjust, I can’t let it go. This week it’s been revealed that Tweezer, when she was Dave Cameron’s Home Secretary, had all the landing permits awarded to the generation of immigrants that came with the Empire Windrush. And not only that, the piece of legislation that specifically protected them from being deported as illegal immigrants, was removed in secret.

How utterly disgraceful!

As a result, the people of that generation, who have every right to live here in the UK, have been denied the proof they need to show it. About 7,600 people have already been deported in ‘secret flights’, many of them shackled in various ways, including leg restraints.

These are men and women, who came to this country to work. They were given the worst, dirtiest and lowest paid jobs that we didn’t want. But we benefited enormously from their hard work and their skills. You think of the various Pakistani doctors and Jamaican nurses, who entered and expanded our health service. Quite apart from all the others, who worked as cleaners, street sweepers, domestic staff, or on the buses. They had to put up with horrific racist abuse. In Bristol there was a colour bar on the buses against employing Blacks. Bristol’s Black citizens launched a campaign against it, which was backed by the great socialist legend himself, Tony Benn. And the Whites, who befriended them could also get abuse and vilification from the racists. One of my aunts had it done to her in the 50s or 60s, because she had a Black friend. It’s commonplace now, and almost completely unremarkable. But at the time people were attacked for having Black friends. Never mind interracial romances and marriages.

It should be very obvious to everyone that these deportations are monstrously unjust, and that the person responsible for them should be sacked. Which would be Theresa May.

May, however, did what Tories always do, and started lying to protected her sorry rear end. First of all she claimed the decision to destroy the documents had been taken in 2009 by Labour. A lie. It was taken by her, a year after in 2010. Then she blamed that convenient scapegoats, civil servants. I’ve absolutely no respect for the upper ranks of the civil servants, many of whom have been promoted way beyond their ability, and seem to be as snobbish and class-ridden as the rest of the establishment. You think of the name of their ‘staff association’ the ‘First Division’. That’s so smug and self-congratulatory, that it just about says it all about the mentality of the people who named it. But civil servants don’t take action except on the authority of ministers. Someone must have told them to do so. And that person was Tweezer.

She’s now got herself into the papers, saying that the decision was wrong, and no-one will be deported. Too late. People have been. And the British public aren’t happy. Mike put up a stream of comments from his Twitter feed from people condemning May’s decision, and the racism that underpinned it.

Yes, racism. The Tories have always been against immigration. I can remember the Mail and Depress railing in the 1980s against the hordes of ‘unassimilable’ immigrants. There was one article I remember in particular, which complained how disgusting it was that Black folks from the Caribbean had a greater right to enter this country than Whites from Canada under the-then immigration rules. And a few days ago I blogged about how I found in Bristol Central Library a book of articles, arguing that the British regarded race as the defining feature of ethnicity, not culture. With contributions from the extreme right-wing Salisbury Review, and journos from the Torygraph, Mail and Express.

One of the best comments I’ve seen from the peeps on Twitter was from Michael Rosen, the children’s poet laureate. He said that May’s demands for documentation, which she had deliberately arranged so that the Windrush people couldn’t provide it, wasn’t Fascist, but was certainly Fascistic. Mr Rosen’s Jewish, and so I’m confident that his family know about this from personal experience of Nazi persecution. As do so many other British Jews.

Mike was so outraged, that he urged people to get on Twitter and demand a ‘no confidence’ vote on May. Absolutely. I totally agree. It’s too early to call a general election, but May should go, because of the immense harm her government is doing to the poor, the disabled, the unemployed, the way they’re destroying the welfare state and privatising the Health Service. And, of course, because of their carefully camouflaged racism. Despite all their smooth assurances, nothing has been done for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. And in fact the Tories have repealed even more fire safety legislation, so that horrific accidents like that are now even more likely.

And then there’s the issue of the vans May sent round, trying to encourage illegal immigrants to hand themselves in. Some Tory called Nick Timothy got on Twitter to claim that May was against them, and that the decision for them was taken when she was absent on holiday.

Well, as the host says on the Beeb panel game, Would I Lie to You, ‘it was a lie’. May wasn’t happy with the message on the vans, but only because they weren’t nasty enough. She thought people might think the Tories were being too soft on illegal immigrants.

Which tells you all you need to know about the Tories, the people who vote for them, and the supporters in the press. Since Thatcher, governments have been desperate to curry favour with them and particularly with Murdoch. Enough’s enough. May’s the racist leader of a racist party, although I know individual Tories, who are very definitely anti-racist. Tories, who will be as shocked at this as people on the Left. The time’s long past that May and the rest of her vile crew were gone.

I back Mike’s call for a ‘no confidence’ vote. She’s a disgrace, and this attack on people, who came here seeking a better life and to make our great country their home, is particularly deplorable. And her wretched decision then also has implications for the children of people, who came here from the EU, after Brexit.

Get her out, before she and her storm troopers humiliate and deport even more decent, law-abiding people.

Owen Jones Talks to Rebecca Long-Bailey: Neoliberalism Has Fallen Apart

In this video, Owen Jones, the author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class and The Establishment, talks to Rebecca Long-Bailey, one of the people responsible for the Labour manifesto and close ally of Jeremy Corbyn. He states that she has been pretty central to the whole Corbyn project. And he particularly likes her because she’s a ‘scamp’ from Manchester like him.

He begins by stating that Clement Attlee established the post-War consensus of a strong welfare state, state intervention in industry and labour and trade union rights. This fell apart under Margaret Thatcher. He asks her if Thatcher’s neoliberalism is now falling apart in its turn.

She replies very positively that it definitely is, and that more orthodox economists are stating that we need a Keynsian approach to the economy. She says that when they began promoting Keynsianism, they were attacked as very much out of touch. Now the Financial Times and another major economic journal has come out and supported state interventionism. The FT even said that we need to renationalise water. This left her absolutely speechless with surprise when she read it, as it was a Labour idea.

She was the Shadow Minister in charge of business and industrial strategy. Jones notes that the hostile press would immediately attack Labour’s policies as destructive and compare them to Venezuela. He asks how she responds to that. She replies with a very clear answer: ‘Rubbish’. She points out that, under neoliberalism, Britain has become one of the least productive nations in the developed world. Indeed, productivity is at its lowest for 20 years. And thanks to wage restraint, wages are also lower than they were before the Crash of 2008.

She states we need an investment bank for England to encourage investment, as private industry won’t invest unless government does so. She also states that we need to reform industry so that it represents everyone involved in a firm, including workers and stakeholders. When Jones asks her what she considers socialism to be, she simply responds ‘Fairness’, and talks about giving employees rights at work, protecting their jobs. She also makes it clear that she believes it is very important to show people that voting Labour will make a difference to their lives. She wants to show people in the north that Labour will tackle homelessness, not just by building more homes, but by building more social housing, so that people, who can’t afford a house will get one. It will be a radical transformation of society, just like it was in the 1940s.

She also talks about how difficult it is being an MP. As a Member of Parliament, you just want to talk about your policies and the issues, but you have to be aware that every time you give an interview, the media are trying to lead you into a trap by getting you to say the wrong thing, or criticise a Labour colleague.

Long-Bailey clearly has a deep grasp not only of the abstract economic issues involved, but also of the personal dimension as people are driven in debt, misery and despair through neoliberalism’s destruction of the British economy for the enrichment of the small number of extremely rich and privileged. And she is inspired by the same ideas as those of Clement Attlee and the great labour politicians, who forged the post-War consensus and gave Britain it’s longest period of economic growth, as well as expanding opportunities for ordinary working women and men.

And it can only be brilliant that the FT, that great pillar of financial capitalism, has come on board to support a return to Keynsianism.

As for the pet Thatcherite policies of Monetarism and neoliberalism, Robin Ramsay has spoken of Monetarism that when he studied economics in the late 60s and ’70s, it was considered such as a nutty idea that his professors didn’t bother to argue against it. He has suggested that it’s possible the Tories, who embraced it also knew it to be a load of rubbish. But they adopted it because it provided an ideological justification for what they wanted to do anyway: privatise industry and smash the organised working class.

Now Thatcherite neoliberalism is falling apart very obviously, and the elite are panicking. Hence the non-story about Clive Lewis and his supposed ‘misogyny’, which is a complete non-story. It’s being used by the Tories to try to distract people from their continuing failures over Brexit, the privatisation of the health and education services. And, of course, the sheer mass of seething misogyny and racism in their own party.

RT’s Establishment Club Road Trip Bus Comes to Bristol

Russia Today are sending their Establishment Club bus on a road trip around the country. The name, if I’m not mistaken, is a homage to the satirical club run in the 1960s by the late, great Peter Cook, and which also displayed the talents of John Bird and John Fortune, who continued making satire with Rory Bremner on his show in the early 2000s. The bus, which is appropriately red, was looking for the best satirical talent around the country. Further auditions are planned for Brighton, Edinburgh and Newcastle.

Compered by Keith Allen, a stand-up comedian and the Sheriff of Nottingham on the Beeb’s recent remake of Robin Hood, as well as the father of pop star Lily, this short, five minute video shows some of the talent they had come aboard when they stopped in my home city of Bristol.

There are four or five performers. One chap does two pieces, including a skit at the end about how the Beeb selectively edits interviews with the general public to create the impression it wants, in this case with a drunk, who needs to be coached before associating Brexit with immigrants, before this is edited to show how Britain is alive with racism. Another fellow sings a song on his ukulele about the Fuhrage’s plane crash. May favourite is the man, who recites a poem about the dismantlement of the welfare state. This piece calls it as it is and identifies the social Darwinism underpinning the policy – he sings about ‘Mr. Darwin’s little theory’. Which might be a little unfair to Darwin, as it was formulated by Herbert Spencer.

Allen did raise a few eyebrows, and appear in the press last week, when he attacked the current state of British stand-up. Using his characteristic earthy language, he said it ‘needed a cattle prod to the bollocks’ because of the careerism amongst too many contemporary comics. All they wanted to do, according to him, was tell jokes about the colour of Trump’s hair, and then get on a panel show.

Buddy Hell over Guy Debord’s Cat has, as another comedian, also lamented the decline in the quality of prospective comics. He has said that all too often they simply recite their life history, without actually being funny or making a joke.

I’m sure there are more genuinely funny people out there, and wish Allen and the RT team every success in finding and nurturing the next crop of comedic talent. Talent that will tear great, bloody chunks off the establishment and its monstrous edifice of bureaucratic indifference, corporate greed, and institutional class hate.

Vox Political: New Tory Attempt to Smear Owen Jones with Twitter

Mike over at Vox Political has put up another post documenting what looks like an attempt by the Tories to make it appear that the left-wing author, Owen Jones has been buying Twitter followers. It’s entitled, Tory smear tactics are too obvious by far and begins:

Whose idea was it to buy thousands of Twitter followers for Owen Jones, in imitation of the tactic for which David Cameron was recently shown up?

Under the headline David Cameron has tens of thousands of Twitter followers who DON’T EXIST, yesterday’s (February 12) Daily Mirror told us: “David Cameron, who famously claimed “too many tweets make a t***”, faces Twitter shame as tens of thousands of his followers don’t exist.

“The Tory leader has 915,000 followers on the social network, which he joined five years ago.

“But media experts say 15% were ghost accounts – meaning about 137,000 of his Twitter friends are imaginary, while another 393,000 of his followers are deemed “inactive”.

Owen Jones, the author of Chavs and The Establishment, realised the other night that somebody had set up 4,000 spam accounts to follow him. The Tory blogger, Guido Fawkes, and a right-wing blog that supports him, then accused Jones of buy Twitter followers.

Mike makes the point that this looks exactly like someone from the Tories trying to smear the Left after their leader was caught doing so.

He also challenges Fawkes to start blogging under his name.

The articles at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/02/13/tory-smear-tactics-are-too-obvious-by-far/. Go and read it.

It does indeed look like someone from Tory Central Office has set this up to smear Jones. As for Staines, aka ‘Guido Fawkes’, one of his fellow Tories made some very uncomplimentary ‘colourful metaphors’ about him after he stabbed him in the back a few years ago. Staines has a very sordid past, coming from the extreme Libertarian wing of the Tory party that used to cosy up to the BNP and invite the leaders of Latin American death squads round to dinner. ‘Cause obviously the leaders of gangs of thugs, who raped, killed, mutilated and tortured anyone to the left of General Franco stand for individual liberty and freedom.

This shows you how desperate the Tories really are. They are very definitely on the back foot. And they know it.

Peter Cook versus Ian Duncan Smith: Now That Would Be A Speech Worth Watching

The late awesome Peter Cook, Comedy Titan and Tormentor of the Establishment

I’ve just now reblogged Mike’s article from Vox Political, ‘DWP Debate Highlights Duncan Smith’s Failure to Perform’, describing at length the near total and absolute failure of Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms. They have gone well over budget, and over time. Unfortunately, time and money are not the only things that they have cost. Tens of thousands of people had died in hunger and poverty thanks to RTU’s and his Coalition collaborators calculated destruction of the welfare state. Mike’s piece is worth reading for the video of Glenda Jackson laying into Smith in a devastating critique, which includes comments on the man’s personal sanctimonious demeanour. To which he responds by giving his usual unctuous, contemptuous and contemptible smirk that serves him instead of a reasoned rebuttal.

It reminded me of Peter Cook’s routine laying into Harold MacMillan when performing in cabaret at his club, The Establishment. Cook regularly used to perform spoofing MacMillan personally. In one of these acts, he plays MacMillan replying publicly to a letter he has received from a senior citizen, worried that his pension is no longer big enough to support him. After reading out the letter, Cook as MacMillan, says, ‘To which I reply,’ there is then heard a ripping noise as he tears the letter up, ‘Be of good cheer’. He then makes a very funny, satirical speech exactly in the manner adopted by politicians like the Conservatives when trying to tell you that despite the abundant evidence to the contrary, you are somehow better off.

This was at a time when satire was generally new, shocking and subversive. There was legislation expressly preventing comedians from performing impressions on television without the consent of the people they lampooned. When Private Eye first came out, it was seen as very suspect and only a few newsagents initially stocked it. The culture of deference to those in authority was so strong that when Robin Day wrote his autobiography in the 1980s, Grand Inquisitor, he was still shocked and enraged at That Was The Week That Was to describe it as ‘deplorable’.

Cook challenged that automatic deference to authority. And he wasn’t afraid to do it to their faces.

Supermac once turned up in the front row to watch one of Cook’s performances. The great man noticed, and homed in on him. He moved right in front of MacMillan, and said in his voice something along the lines of ‘And so I turn up, smiling stupidly when someone is sending me up’.

Watching RTU smirking inanely in front of Glenda Jackson, I wished Cook was still with us and was ready and willing to do the same to him. He’d have had a field day metaphorically disembowelling a pompous, incompetent nonentity like RTU.