There was news yesterday that Bristol University had put up a statue of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman outside its medical buildings. This was accompanied with rather grandiose statements hailing her as the mother of modern medicine. This surprises me, as you would expect from such a description that Lacks herself was a doctor, surgeon or biologist of some kind. As Webb’s video shows, she was actually none of these. She was an ordinary Black American woman, who died of cervical cancer. What makes her different is that cells were taken from her body, cultured so that the line has carried on, and were studied by doctors and biologists. This has led to a number of cures and treatments for diseases like the Polio vaccine. Some of this research was done at the university. Hence the statue. I think the decision to put one up to her may well have been influenced by a book that was published about her a few years ago, The Case of Henrietta Lacks.
Webb considers that the statue is part of a general campaign to pull down monuments to White men and put up statues instead to Black women, even if their contribution to British history and culture is actually quite minor. He talks about a monument put up in Wales to honour a Black headmistress. He feels that while the woman would hardly warrant a statue if she were White, at least she did something more worthwhile than Smiley Culture. He was a pop star in the 1980s who was promoted yesterday as a hero of Black British history in an article in the Metro by Alicia Adjoa. But Culture’s end was rather less than heroic. He committed suicide after being caught importing a massive amount of cocaine. Bristol, in his view, is trying to put up a statue to a Black person to replace the one of Edward Colston, pulled down by Black Lives Matter protesters.
There is indeed pressure to put up statues of great Black British figures. The argument is that there are too few monuments to Black people and that this doesn’t represent to the diversity of contemporary British society. The problem is that while Blacks have been present in Bristol since the 16th century, they’ve only been here in large numbers since the Empire Windrush. And the majority of Black Britons led largely humble, unspectacular lives. Hence the fact that many of these statues honour people, whose achievements, while worthy, are relatively small.
I also think the statue has been erected for reasons quite specific to Bristol University. The University has considerably benefited from donations from the Colston charities. This, not surprisingly, is resented by Black activists, and so the University responded a few years ago by appointing a Black woman to be its first professor of the history of slavery. As far as I can make out, her job is really to work out what to do with the money from the Colston charities in the way of anti-racism and pro-Black policies.
The University was also in the local news this week for having set up a bursary solely for Black students. BBC Points West announced that the current Black population on campus is only less than 3 per cent of the total. This seems to me to be a response to another accusation. Bristol has a large Black population. I don’t know what the situation is now, but London, Birmingham and Bristol were the cities with largest Black populations in the UK. But the number of Black students at the university was small. The problem with this criticism is that Bristol, as one of the country’s leading universities, has, or used to have, very high entrance standards. Blacks perform less well academically than the other races, and so consequently have less opportunity to enter further education without the benefit of such affirmative action programmes. Also, when I was at school back in the 1980s you were actively discouraged from applying to the university in your home town. Thus it wouldn’t have mattered how large Bristol’s Black population were, they would have been advised by their teachers at that time to apply to universities and colleges elsewhere. Of course, this has changed somewhat with the ending of the student grant and the introduction of tuition fees. More students are applying to local universities through the sheer necessity of keeping costs down by staying in their home town.
Now the statue of Lacks is all very well, but I feel that if statues are going to be put up, it should be to people with some connection to the city. If we’re talking medicine, perhaps the first Black nurse to serve in one of the city’s hospitals. Or the person or people who started St. Paul’s carnival, if there isn’t one already. My mother also remembers there being a Black Bristolian boxer of her parents’ generation. A statue could have been put up of him as a local sporting hero. You could even go back to the depictions of Black Bristolians published in the 19th century.
While these people wouldn’t have been great scientists, they would at least have had a genuine connection to the city.
The police were present at the Black Lives Matter demo on Sunday at which the statue of the slaver, Edward Colston, was pulled down, hauled to the harbour and thrown in. They did not try stop it, and are now being questioned and taken to task about their refusal to interfere. ITN interviewed their chief on the 6 O’clock news last night. I can’t remember what he said exactly, but it was that the demonstration was peaceful and non-violent. Zelo Street has reported that ITN weren’t the only people, who wanted a word with the rozzers about that. According to the Times, Home Secretary Priti Patel has called in the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset Police, Andy Marsh, to demand and explanation. She has also said that she wants those responsible to face prosecution.
There are several aspects to this. Zelo Street quotes the Secret Barrister, who makes the point that Patel has no business telling anyone whom the state should prosecute. That’s the role of the Crown Prosecution Service. She is interfering with the independent prosecutorial process. Which is yet more proof that she doesn’t understand and respect the independent of the judicial system and is unfit to be Home Secretary.
Zelo Street also argues that the story is another piece of misdirection on the part of the Tory media. Patel has imposed a fortnight’s quarantine period for those entering the country. But the Metro today claimed that this wouldn’t do anything to stop the spread of Covid-19 but would just harm business. So the Times tries getting people to look the other way at what she’s doing about all those dreadful protesters.
I actually think Marsh was quite right for the police not to try to stop the demonstrators attacking the statue. The statue is extremely controversial and people have been campaigning for its removal for years. Unlike some of the protests elsewhere, there doesn’t appear to have been any attacks on the police themselves. No-one appears to have been hurt, and no shops or businesses were attacked and looted. As for the statue, it is only a statue. Obviously it’s going to cost the council taxpayer for the authorities to haul it out of the harbour, but it isn’t a person or someone’s home or business.
That could so easily have changed if the police had got involved. The crowd would have resisted or tried to fight back. What was a peaceful demonstration would have become a riot. People could have been killed or injured, and the businesses around the Centre attacked and trashed. And also it wouldn’t look good for the police themselves. The cops everywhere have got a reputation for racism. Having them defend the statue of a slaver would have added to it. I can image it causing more angry denunciations of the police and more protests about police brutality and Bristolian racism.
Any attempt to interfere on the cops’ part would have led to violence and further unrest. The police were right to try to preserve order and the safety of people and their livelihoods by stopping the attack on the statue. Patel is wrong to tell them that they should.
Despite the Beeb’s massive pro-Tory bias – all those stories it ran pushing the anti-Semitism smears, the packed, right-wing panels and audiences of Question Time and Fiona Bruce favouring the Tories, gaslighting Diane Abbott, and Laura Kuenssberg’s breach of electoral law about the postal vote, BoJo still isn’t satisfied with the Corporation. He announced yesterday that he was boycotting Radio 4’s Today programme, claiming it was biased. An article about this in yesterday’s Metro, ‘Johnson boycott of BBC Today ‘Bubble”, ran
Boris Johnson has turned up his attack on the BBC and ‘withdrawn engagement’ from its Radio 4 Today programme.
A No. 10 source accused the corporation of speaking to a ‘pro-Remain metropolitan bubble in Islington yesterday’.
No minister were put up for interview on the programme in the 48 hours after the election, following a campaign in which the PM was criticised for refusing interviews to the Today programme and Andrew Neil.
Dominic Cummings – the PM’s chief adviser – told colleagues he ‘never listens’ to the programme, which has lost 1 million listeners since 2017.
It also emerged the PM has asked aides to explore whether non-payment of the TV licence fee should be decriminalised.
He threw doubt over the future of the £154.50 annual charge during the campaign.
A BBC spokesman defended its election coverage and said it was ‘fair and proportional’.
Zelo Street comments on the twitter debate about this, beginning with former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s tweet
A clever moment for Dominic Cummings {if it’s him} to pick off the BBC [and thereby delight Murdoch and many others]. If my timeline is representative, many of the Beeb’s natural defenders are shrugging and/or too cross to protest.
Even if they think the BBC had a poor election, that’s like abandoning the NHS because it struggled over one winter. By all means call for improvement/reform. Privatisation will lead to a form of UK Fox News. And then how we’ll miss it.
The Tories have been steadily running down the BBC for years. They resent it because it’s a state industry. Hence the legislation passed under Major’s government demanding that more programmes should be made outside the Beeb by private production companies. Boris’ attack will also please Murdoch and the Americans. Murdoch has been attacking the Beeb for years in order to promote his wretched Sky channel, and the Americans are buying up British broadcasters. Nothing would please Murdoch and the Americans more than to have the Beeb abolished or privatised.
As for Fox News, it’s dire. Its slogan, ‘Fair and balanced news’ is an outright lie. It has a colossal right-wing bias to the point that one media investigation found that people would be far better informed if they didn’t watch it because of the massive falsehoods and lies peddled by the channel. It also has a very restricted audience. Its demographics show that most of its viewers are over 70, so much so that it has been described as a television retirement home. Yet I can remember an article by one of the hacks in the Radio Times pondering if the BBC shouldn’t emulate it.
Zelo Street also shows a number of other tweets by people, who do feel betrayed by the corporation. While they don’t support its privatisation, they feel that their criticisms aren’t taken seriously. This feeling is summed up in a tweet from Matt Prescott:
I used to love the BBC and would have died on the barricades to defend it. Now I feel utterly betrayed by the daily failures to ask hard questions and call out lies.
Tim concludes
‘The Tories have played the BBC like an obedient fool. And in pandering to them, the Corporation has left itself fatally vulnerable.’
Yes, they have. If the Corporation thought that a pro-Tory bias would stave off further attacks, they have been gravely mistaken. The Tories won’t be satisfied until they are privatised, just as they want the media in general to capitulate to them and their wishes utterly. As history has shown, those broadcasters that anger them in power have their stories spiked or their broadcasting licences withdrawn.
The Beeb does make good programmes, which is partly why the Tories hate it. As an institution, it’s genuinely popular and so prevents private broadcasters completely taking over British television and radio. But through its pro-Tory bias it has alienated many on the left, who would otherwise be its most staunch defenders.
But Johnson’s attack on the Beeb is only going to be the beginning. He wants the other broadcasters to submit. The attack on the Beeb is also a veiled threat to them.
The Tories are directly attacking freedom of speech and opinion on the airwaves. This looks very much like the beginning of massive state control of public broadcasting, in which the only voices permitted will be pro-Tory.
Remember Sargon of Akkad? He was the internet personality who helped to wreck UKIP. This suffered a crisis when former leader Nigel Farage left to start his own rival bunch of squadristi, the Brexit Party. Which as any fule kno was actually a private company, so that only Fuhrer Farage could make any decisions. Farage took a large chunk of UKIP’s membership with him, and so Supreme Leader Gerard Batten tried to revitalise the party by recruiting a group of far right internet personalities. This were Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars, Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan of Nazi pug infamy, and Sargon. The result was that much of the remaining membership, who considered themselves moderates and non-racist, left. The party was then taken over by Dick Braine, and collapsed shortly afterwards in acrimonious abuse and litigation threats.
Sargon, however, like Hatey Katie Hopkins, seems to have gone back to the Tory party. He’s published a series of videos on YouTube celebrating the Tory election victory. But one of these was also his comment on an article in the Metro reporting that Muslims are frightened by a rise in racism after the Tory victory. So frightened, in fact, that many of them are considering leaving Britain.
Sargon, who somehow believes he’s ‘moderate left’ despite being a libertarian ‘classical liberal’, and opponent of feminism and anti-racism, seemed to find all this highly amusing. He guffawed merrily and sneered at left-wingers correctly observing that these fears were caused by Johnson’s racism. British Muslims’ fears, he seemed to think, weren’t due to a real increase in racism, but because they’re still somehow outsiders and not really British. Johnson stated that the burqa isn’t a British custom and that in British society people showed their face. Muslims should adapt to the mores of host of the host society. Other groups, Blacks, Jews, and Hindus, and so on, were behind Britishness and the Conservative Party – Sargon has posted at least one video claiming the Tory election victory is a victory for ‘Team Britain’. Why weren’t the Muslims? And they were free to go. No-one was stopping them, like some minorities are prevented from emigrating in Islamic society.
Now I actually share Sargon’s views on the burqa and its complete coverage of a woman’s face and body. So, he would no doubt be surprised to know, does George Galloway, the former leader of the Respect Party, who has been attacked for being pro-Muslim, pro-Palestinian and far Left. Galloway pointed out when Johnson first made his comments about the burqa that only a small percentage of Muslim women actually wore it. But Johnson’s comments were seen as an attack on the Muslim community generally, and did provoke an increase in anti-Muslim violence. These fears aren’t idle, but deadly serious. One woman was stabbed to death in a racist attack because she was wearing a burqa.
I realise perfectly that there are problems with integration in some sections of the Muslim community. I am also fully aware how repressive and undemocratic many Islamic countries are. But that doesn’t mean that innocent Muslims in this country should feel that they are somehow regarded as less than full citizens and vulnerable to abuse and worse.
And let’s point out the racial double standards here. When the ultra-Zionists were claiming that Jews were considering leaving the UK because Jeremy Corbyn was an ‘existential threat’ to Britain’s Jewish community, this was trumpeted not just by the right-wing Jewish press, but also by Britain’s right-wing media. It was something that Labour should be thoroughly ashamed about, and marked the party and Corbyn as unfit for government.
But when Muslims start saying that they’re under threat and considering leaving, Sargon and people like him seem to regard this as amusing and view it with an attitude of ‘good riddance’. Or else, as Zelo Street has pointed out in their piece today on the fears of the Muslim community, the media actively ignores it and hacks like the Spectator’s Douglas Murray write articles attacking figures from ‘the intolerant left’ like Grace Blakely and Jo Swinson in order to distract attention from it.
It’s disgraceful that any of Britain’s ethnic minorities should feel unsafe in this country, whether they are Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians or whoever. That the press in general is ignoring this issue, or in the case of Douglas Murray, actively trying to divert attention away from it, shows how deep-seated Tory islamophobia is. As well as exposing how cynical their professed concern over anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
Johnson’s victory is emboldening the racists and Islamophobes. And that’s a problem for everyone.
Alexei Sayle, one of the pillars of the ’80s Alternative Comedy wave which spawned The Young Ones, French and Saunders, the Comic Strip and Ben Elton was interviewed in yesterday’s Metro (27th September 2019). The man’s 67, but still angry – although the interview also says he’s mellowing – and stars in a series on Radio 4 set in a sandwich bar and due to have a headline gig at the Southport Comedy Festival. Speaking to the paper’s Jade Wright, Sayle talked about his career, the state of modern comedy and attacked austerity, the Tories and supposedly ‘moderate’ politicians, who support them. It’s interesting in that Sayle also champions Jeremy Corbyn, without the paper trying to attack the Labour leader in response or a snide aside. The interview on page 51 and continued on page 54 is entitled ‘Sayle Now On’. It’s too long for me to type it up as a whole, but here’s the bits where he mostly talks about politics, along with his family background and the lack of left-wing comedians today.
Alexei Sayle might have been in the comedy business for 40 years, but he’s not lost any of his flair for contemporary analysis. His take that ‘austerity is the idea that the 2008 financial crash was caused by Wolverhampton having too many libraries’ has been spreading like wildfire on social media. May that’s because, as he claims, there’s a surprising shortage of anti-establishment comedians.
‘There’s a gap in the market. Even if they didn’t believe in it, you’d expect someone to do it, just for the money,’ he says. ‘there were loads of left-wing comedians in the 1980s. Where are the new Ben Eltons now?’
His new Radio 4 show, Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar, in which the Wolverhampton library gag first appeared, is the Liverpool comedian on his usual erudite, and angry, form. As is evident from the show, he’s become a passionate advocate for Jeremy Corbyn and the grassroots movement he has created. ‘When people sneer at Jeremy Corbyn, it drives me nuts,’ Alexei says. ‘To hear him being called a racist by racists, it’s beyond belief. And yet I have friends who are taken in by this s**t.’
‘I hear him talk, and it makes sense, then it gets deliberately misrepresented by people who have something to gain from that, people who are very much part of the establishment.
Alexei grew up in Liverpool. His mum, Molly, was a pools clerk from a Lithuanian Jewish family and his father, Joseph, was a railway guard. Both were members of the Communist Party. But, while always political, he was keen from a young age to find his own voice. ‘I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think things are changing’, he says. ‘Voters are seeing through the politicians who claim to have moderate views, but actually what they’re saying is really quite extreme.
‘For a long time the politicians from all parties were all fighting over the votes in the middle. Politics went from strongly right-wing to mildly left-wing and there were lots of voices that didn’t get heard at all, loads of people who didn’t vote.
‘You had all these modern, careerist MPs who were almost indistinguishable from each other. But austerity has disproportionately affected young people and other groups who felt there was no one to speak for them. There are new people registering to vote all the time. Maybe they have more hope now.’
So is Alexei more hopeful, too? ‘Yes,’ he says, before pausing. ‘Maybe. More so lately. Suddenly, from nowhere, they have a genuinely left-wing leader and new voices who are vocally opposing austerity as the political ideal it is.’
‘It was never a necessity for force terminally ill people to look for jobs or to close libraries. That was a series of political decisions that didn’t really save any money any way. Now we have a leader who will speak up.’
I was never a fan of Sayle’s comedy myself, as I simply didn’t find it funny. Much of it just struck me as just abuse, without anything really deep being said. But here he’s pretty much right. The only thing I differ from him here is when he says that things have gone from extreme right to mildly left-wing. Blair was always a member of the Thatcherite extreme right. He and the rest of New Labour really did want to sell off the NHS, although I think he definitely believed in making sure that medical care was free. And he also introduced the work capability tests that have caused so many desperately ill people to be thrown off benefits, to live and die in starvation and misery. What differed about Blair is that he was genuinely anti-racist, pro-gay and anti-sexist – so long as they supported him – and was careful to sound slightly left-wing. Even when he was aiming at the same voting constituency as the Tories, using the same ministers, who had crossed the floor from the Tory party, like Chris Patten, and was taking money from the same corporate donors.
But people are waking up to how they were fooled and the country run down by the ‘moderates’ as well as the Tories and the Lib Dems. People do feel they have hope for a better future under Corbyn. As for comedy, the complaint on the right is that there are few right-wing comedians and that it’s all biased against the Tories. Which is rubbish. Buddy Hell over at Guy Debord’s Cat also wrote a blog piece complaining that the contemporary aspiring comedians he’d seen really don’t have anything funny to say. Their act simply consists of them telling the story of their life. I’m not in show business, so I have no idea why this should be so. It might simply be that the people who aspire to be comedians have been inspired by the autobiographical, observational comedy of people like Sayle, but don’t really have anything to say. It may also simply be that as the left-wing comedians of the 1980s matured and were overtaken by other comics, there was a reaction against the older generation’s political comedy. Even so, shows like The Last Leg are still managing to put a well aimed kick to the Tories. But perhaps, if more people are being inspired politically by Corbyn, this will also spur a new generation of angry left-wingers to subject the establishment to bitter scorn and derision. While showing that there can be a better world without people like Johnson, May, Cameron, Swinson and the rest of them, of course.
Yesterday, BoJob’s old mucker Michael Gove appeared on the Andrew Marr Show to be interviewed about Johnson’s coup. And his answer to one question, and outright refusal to answer others shows that he shares his masters outright contempt for parliamentary sovereignty. Marr asked him if the government would obey new legislation from MPs forcing Brexit to be delayed. Gove replied that it may not. This, as the twitter account dedicated to the late Labour activist, Harry Leslie Smith, ‘is what dictatorships look and sound like’. The Parliament UK website states that in the UK, parliament is the supreme legal power, not the government, and parliamentary sovereignty is the most important part of the British constitution. In stating that Johnson’s government may not abide by parliamentary legislation, Gove has confirmed that this is indeed an administration that is out of control and a threat to British democracy. And the folks on twitter were very quick to point this out.
Mike has a selection of them in his article about this. Apart from ‘Harry Leslie Smith’, there was the quantum physicist and science broadcaster, Professor Brian Cox, who tweeted:
“This statement – that the government may decide not to obey the law – confirms that the current minority government is dangerous. Every MP with integrity from any party must stop them this coming week. This is no longer about Brexit – that can be dealt with afterwards.”
Quite so. Mike himself, after discussing some of the issues that will be raised this week, such as parliament’s ability to pass a ‘Section 24’ law and whether parliament will pass legislation delaying Brexit, and Johnson’s government comply with it, concludes
But the most fundamental question of all must surely be: What will we do if Boris Johnson refuses to accept the sovereign will of Parliament and tries to dictate what the UK does? If he actually does assume the role of dictator, how do we stop him?
It’s a good question, and a group of 20 Tory MPs, who are threatening to defy Johnson’s demand to support his Brexit at the end of October, have been told that if they do so, he will withdraw the whip from them in parliament and prevent them standing as Tory candidates in the next election. Johnson will, in other words, purge them from the party. As Mike has pointed out, it’s an empty threat. If Johnson’s government falls, he won’t be leader of the Tories and so will be in no position to make sure they’re deselected. And if they did vote against him, then his government would fall.
They rebel Tories may also call Johnson’s bluff, as there have been reports that say that the 20 may stand as Independent Tories at the next General Election. Which would be a massive, historic split in the Tory party.
The response of Tory chairman James Cleverly was a panicked tweet denying that the Tory party has deselection mechanisms. And the folks on twitter have already compared Johnson’s threats of deselection to Stalin’s purges. Jack D and Henry Zeffman both pointed out that the Tory press has tried to smear Jeremy Corbyn as a power-mad authoritarian threatening mass deselections. Corbyn hasn’t done so, and if he did, he would certainly be denounced as a Stalinist by the Tories. But now the irony is that Johnson, a Tory MP, is set to do this very thing.
Tim Fenton, the Sage of Crewe, has also pointed out that not only would the Tories accuse Corbynism of Stalinism if he threatened mass deselections, but that by supporting Johnson’s threats to expel the rebel Tories the right-wing press has decided that Stalinism is quite acceptable when they do it. He quotes a few headlines to show it. He writes
‘Metro has told readers “ID cards may be withdrawn from rebel MPs … Tory no-deal ‘traitors’ could be deselected”, while the Express has shrieked “BORIS VOWS TO BOOT OUT BREXIT REBELS”. The Telegraph prefers “PM warns rebel MPs: back me or be sacked”, and the Mail agrees: “BACK ME OR I’LL SACK YOU”, as does the Times, with “I’ll kick you out of party, Johnson tells Tory rebels”.’
This isn’t an accident. The Tory press has been entirely supportive of the coup. The Times published an editorial denying that Johnson’s prorogation of parliament was any such thing. As for the mass demonstrations that occurred up and down the country on Saturday, the following day’s papers had very little to say about them. Of course, it may be that the press was taken entirely off guard, and didn’t have enough staff to give them proper coverage. Or they really did believe that other stories were more important, which is the excuse the media always gives for refusing to cover left-wing demonstrations or other events properly, where the Left embarrasses and exposes the incompetence and callousness of the right. But it looks far more like culpable silence. They didn’t want the British people to defy Johnson’s coup, and so were very definitely not going to call attention to their doing so. It hardly happened, as far as they were concerned.
But it was left to Sun to show how really contemptuous of democracy and its institutions the Tory press were. The Scum thundered
“WHY should the Government promise to enact some as-yet-unwritten and arguably illegitimate law being cooked up by Remainers with their rogue Speaker? … The Government runs the country, not a cross-party rabble”.
To which Zelo Street commented ‘Democratically elected MPs? Democratically taken decisions? The sovereignty of Parliament? Pah! Away with them!’
Exactly. This is one of the fundamental, defining features of Fascism, aside from the militant racism: an absolute contempt for parliamentary democracy. Both the Italian Fascists and the Nazis claimed to have saved their countries from ‘corrupt parliamentarianism’ as the Italian Fascists called it. Democracy had, in their eyes, done nothing but weaken their countries. Only strong government through a dictator could restore them to greatness. The Scum’s denunciation of the ‘Remainers with their rogue Speaker’ and ‘a cross-party rabble’ comes very close to real Fascist rhetoric.
Which shows very clearly how hollow the right-wing media’s claim to hold government to democratic account and prevent the rise of Fascist dictatorship really is.
After the departure of the nine Labour splitters, Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour party, is up to his old tricks again trying to undermine Corbyn. Watson to my mind looks like the American comedian Greg Proops, but without any of Proops’ wit, personality or charisma. He’s a Blairite, who is now trying to use the splitters’ departure to try to get his old chums back onto the front bench, develop a separate back bench power base, and then purge Corbyn’s supporters on the pretext that they’re anti-Semites.
Watson was on the Andrew Marr show to peddle his malign views on Sunday. He claimed that he had received 50 complaints of anti-Semitic abuse from MPs, and that he had passed them on to Corbyn. Now today I read in the Metro that he was demanding to be allowed to deal with allegations of anti-Semitism as well as the party secretary, Jenny Formby, because Formby allegedly wasn’t dealing with them quickly enough.
Yesterdays I, for Monday, 25th February 2019, quoted Watson as saying
‘I think he [Corbyn] needs to take a personal lead on examining those cases and, if necessary, recommend to our [ruling body]NEC what has to be done.
‘The test for him as a leader is to eradicate anti-Semitism. It is not Labour party members, who will be the judge of that, it is the British Jewish community.’
He also demanded a reshuffle of the front bench to represent a greater range of views, saying
‘If there isn’t one, I think I’d need to give a platform for my colleagues who want their ideas to be listened to by the current Shadow Cabinet’.
The I’s report about his intention to set up a back-bench group of MPs, ‘Splintering: Deputy leader to set up backbench group’, runs as follows
A new grouping of Labour MPs who are disillusioned with the party’s direction under Jeremy Corbyn is being set up by his deputy Tom Watson.
Its launch, which is expected within a fortnight, is aimed at preventing the trickle of defections of MPs to The Independent Group from becoming a flood.
But the faction will also inevitably be seen as a rival power based to Mr Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. I understands that organisers hope to attract more than 100 backbenchers into the group, which will appoint spokespeople and work on policy initiatives.
Meetings will be held within days to gauge the level of support for the group.
‘We need to assert ourselves more than we have done in the last two years,’ said one MP.
Mr Watson said he wanted to ‘give a platform’ to Labour MPs who felt excluded by the leadership.
‘My central point is that the social democratic voice has to be heard, because that is the only way you keep the Labour party unified and prohibit other colleagues from potentially leaving the PLP_ [Parliamentary Labour Party]. The situation is serious,’ he told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show.
Of course, Watson denies he is rebelling. The previous article in the I quoted him as saying that he was ‘standing up for pluralism in the party’.
This is just lies and doubletalk. Watson and the 100 MPs he wants to recruit are obviously Blairites, indignant at being forced out of power. They’ve been intriguing against the Labour leader ever since he came to power. They’ve threatened to leave several times before, just as they’ve tried to oust him as leader. But Corbyn is genuinely popular with the Labour grassroots activists, and his policies are immensely popular with the public. Which puts Watson and his fellow plotters in an awkward position: no-one wants their shoddy, mouldy neoliberal economics any longer. People are sick and tired of Labour trying to copy to the Tories as Blair and his coterie did. And the Blairites themselves were a small minority within the party. They dominated it because they seized control of party bureaucracy, just as Stalin and his supporters were able to seize control of the Communist apparat in the former Soviet Union. These backbench MPs may claim to be defending a plurality of views, but they only views they’re interested in defending and promoting are their own. Not Corbyn’s, and not anyone else’s in the party.
As for claiming to be Social Democrats, this is a sick joke. The Social Democratic tendency in the Labour party was the creation of Anthony Crosland. Crosland didn’t want further nationalisation, because he felt it was unnecessary. Its benefits, he felt, could be obtained instead through progressive taxation, strong trade unions and social mobility. Well, thanks to Thatcherism, social mobility stopped under Blair. In fact, I think under the Tories it’s even been reversed, so that for the first time since the late 19th century Marx’s statement that the middle class are being forced down into the working class is true, at least as far as middle class poverty goes. Similarly, Blair, as a Thatcherite, hated the trade unions and passed legislation aimed at destroying their power. With their acquiescence, it should be said. As for progressive taxation, they’re against that as well. Aaron Bastani quoted an interview in last week’s New Scientist with Chris Leslie in his article on the corrupt, compromised policies of the Independent Group. Leslie had said that he was not in favour of a 50 per cent tax rate. This was the tax rate set by Gordon Brown. And I don’t doubt Leslie was alone. My guess is that a number of the Blairites, who still remain in the Labour party, have the same noxious views.
Watson and the other Blarites aren’t Social Democrats: they’re Red Tories, Thatcherites. Any other description of them is a lie.
As for the anti-Semitism allegations, my guess is that it’s just more smears of people supporting Corbyn and standing up for the Palestinians. And when Watson says that Labour will be judged by the Jewish community, he’s not talking about the Jewish community as a whole. He’s talking about the Tory, Zionist Jewish establishment. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is monstrously right-wing and which is an explicitly Zionist organisation. An organisation which is morally corrupt and deeply compromised. How else can you describe an organisation which issued nauseating, spurious justifications for the IDF shooting unarmed Gazans last year? Which excludes Orthodox and secular Jews? And which howled with rage when Corbyn spent a Pesach (Passover) seder with the socialists of Jewdas, and claimed this was an insult to the Jewish community?
And the same is to be said about the Chief Rabbinate. The former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, caused shock and outrage when he called Reform Jews ‘enemies of the faith’, like a medieval inquisitor about to launch an auto-da-fe against heretics and Jews. He also considered homosexuality to be a terrible sin and warned his congregation not to join a gay rights march, until he later changed his mind, that is. And he led a contingent of Jewish British thugs to Israel to join the March of the Flags. That’s the day when Israeli ultra-nationalists march through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem vandalising their homes and businesses and threatening and intimidating them. I see no difference between it, and Tommy Robinson and his odious crew marching into British Muslim communities, or Mosley and the British Union of Fascists goose-stepping into the Jewish community in the East End in the 1930s. And when the Jewish community held their rallies last summer against Corbyn, organised by the Board and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, those attending including members and supporters of the Fascist organisations Kach, the Jewish Defence League, and the English Defence League Jewish Division.
Similarly, Watson’s declaration that he wants to assist in dealing with cases of anti-Semitism cases means that he’s unhappy with Formby’s handling of it for other reasons. He wants more Cobynites thrown out through the same spurious reasons that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism and that describing Israeli plotting to determine who should be in the cabinet as a ‘conspiracy’ is the same as reviving the smears on Jews as a whole of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Oh yes, and that showing a photoshopped image of a Jobcentre with the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ on it is another terrible anti-Semitic smear, rather than a justifiable description of the murderous policies of the DWP.
And his demand to decide these cases personally is the precise same tactic Stalin used when he gained power. Before Stalin became leader of the Soviet Communist party, the post of General Secretary was a relatively unimportant position. His comrades thought he was thick, and so gave him the job thinking that he would satisfied purging it of all the drunks and seducers. But as well as getting rid of them, he was also using it to purge his enemies’ supporters and fill it with his own. He’s supposed to have said of the power of elections, ‘It’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes’.
Watson is a typical Blairite. He follows Blair and the others as a destructive neoliberal, who wants absolute obedience to a highly centralised, dictatorial party elite. It is not Corbyn and his supporters who should be thrown out, but him and his.
This is another excellent piece of reporting from RT, and shows why we need the Russian-owned station to provide us with the news that the mainstream channels won’t give us.
In this short segment, RT’s Laura Smith covers a protest by the People’s Assembly against the planned roll-out of Universal Credit to even more areas. The organisation has stacked some of the food donated to it outside Downing Street to call attention to the way Universal Credit is forcing more people into poverty. UC is supposed to make the benefit system simpler by rolling six benefits into one, but delays can mean that it is up to six weeks before claimants receive any money.
Smith also interviews the spokesman for the People’s Assembly, Sam Fairbairn, who states that the extension of UC across even more parts of the UK will throw an extra 30,000 people into poverty, while the clip also shows headlines predicting that as many as half a million people more could be forced to use food banks. The organisation has chosen today to make the protest as Philip Hammond will announce his new budget tomorrow. Fairbairn states that the existence of such poverty is not acceptable in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world. He states that the government should either get rid of Universal Credit, or get out.
Mike over at Vox Political has also covered this, and included RT’s video. He remarks that he hasn’t found anything about the protest in the mainstream press, with the exception of the Metro. He also jokes that he’s not sure that the Tories will understand the message. Theresa May will probably take it as meaning that the food can be used for the next time she goes for a banquet with Murdoch or Dacre.
Universal Credit was, of course, the big idea of Ian Duncan Smith, who boasted that it would be the greatest strategy to raise people out of poverty since William Wilberforce ended the slave trade in the British Empire. Which shows the sheer, colossal vanity of the man.
And I don’t believe for a single minute that the problems with Universal Credit and the various snags and delays in paying it to those claiming it are remotely accidental. The Tories have said time and again that they believe in making the process of claiming benefits as painful and humiliating as possible in order to force people off welfare and into work. Or rather, just off welfare. The neoliberal and Monetarist economics they follow demand a ‘reserve army’ of the unemployed to keep wages down by making sure that jobs are actually in short supply. Thus we have something like 4 million jobless, but for the sake of his political career the Tories have to lie about the figures being much less. This explains why Philip Hammond appeared on TV on Sunday to claim that Britain ‘had no jobless’.
I am also not remotely surprised that none of the mainstream media, with the exception of the Metro, are covering this. The right-wing media really wouldn’t want to, as they’re probably acutely aware how weak and fragile May’s position actually is. For all the Tories’ criticism of her leadership, they have no desire to see her fall just yet, and take the rest of the current Tory government with her.
As for the BBC, the Corporation has consistently tried to avoid reporting on protests against the Conservative governments. It even managed to ignore one, that occurred right outside its front door when David Cameron was in power a couple of years ago. This was a protest by a crowd of several tens of thousands. But it didn’t appear on the broadcast news. It was, however, mentioned on the Beeb’s news website, so they could claim that they had covered it.
As I’ve mentioned many times previously, the Beeb’s management is very solidly composed of White, public-school, Oxbridge educated men, and there is a very strong Conservative bias at the Corporation. You only have to consider the very anti-Labour bias of ‘Goebbels’ Nick Robinson and ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg. Years ago Private Eye reviewed Robin Day’s autobiography, Grand Inquisitor. Day was, or had been, the corporation’s main political interviewer. The Eye remarked that while Day was keen to present himself as a fearless journalist holding the government and civil servants to account, in reality his instincts were to side with the government and authority against criticism and protest. The BBC is the state broadcaster, and it sees itself very much as one of the country’s great, central institutions. While it’s supposed to be impartial, it does have an institutional bias towards established authority. And it’s refusal to cover anti-government protests properly seems to indicate that this bias is such that it seems to look upon such protests as something close to subversion. Any act of mutiny against established authority, which should not be indulged, but ignored or suppressed as quickly as possible.
RT is under concerted attack in America, where the current ruling elites are bitterly hostile because of the way it covers domestic discontent, and poverty and injustice within America itself. It’s also being used by Killary’s team as a convenient scapegoat for her failure to gain the American presidency against Trump. And so Republicans and corporatist Democrats are claiming that the protests and demonstrations that have taken place across America, including movements like Black Lives Matter and the Take The Knee protest by NFL players, aren’t genuine, authentic demonstrations of popular anger, but all stirred up by RT, which just disseminates propaganda for Putin.
It’s absolute nonsense, but the Tories and Theresa May have tried to copy the Americans and have made the same accusations over here.
This shows why we need RT to cover the demonstrations and issues that the mainstream media and the state broadcaster would prefer to ignore.
The Tories are busy trying to build up Theresa May as ‘strong and stable’ in her negotiations with the EU. But the Europeans themselves have quite a different perspective. The I today has a story about May attacking the EU for leaking news in order to undermine her position. And yesterday, one of the papers – it was either the I or the Metro – reported that the German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, was publishing ‘alternative news’ leaked from the EU, which contradicted the claims May herself was making.
‘Alternative news’ sounds to me very much like ‘alternative facts’, which was the phrase Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s spokespeople, gave to the clearly bogus rubbish she was spouting on behalf of her master.
In the case of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, this is really rubbish. I used to buy it occasionally when I was at school doing German in order to improve my grasp of the language. I don’t think it helped, as much of it was waaay beyond my schoolboy abilities. It’s one of the German papers of record. It is, or it was, a broadsheet at the level of the Times and Telegraph, and like them it has a centre-right bias. This should be somewhat qualified, as I gather that, like the majority of other continental newspapers, it is not as barkingly right-wing as our press. I have a feeling it was a former reporter for the Allgemeine, who turned up a little while ago on one of the alternative news channels to talk about the nefarious antics of the American intelligence services in making the international situation much worse.
It is as far away from ‘fake news’ or ‘alternative facts’ as you can get.
It also has a very good grasp of events over this side of the Nord See. I can remember being impressed by its coverage of the Tory party’s coup against Thatcher way back in the 1990s.
So if there’s an alternative between the facts as reported by the Frankfurter Allegemeine, and May’s ‘facts’, in my opinion you’re better off believing the German newspaper. It’s far more reliable.
As opposed to May and the Tories, who have a very long history of lying going back decades.
Mike over at Vox Political has posted up a piece giving credit for the Metro laying out today’s cover, so it looked like that of the notorious issue of the Scum which lied about the Hillsborough disaster and the behaviour of the Liverpool fans. He also states that the revelations have been greeted with silence by the Scum and Bernard Ingham, Maggie’s press secretary, who made some of the appalling smears.
I think the Scum has made an apology about the disaster, but only after it changed its editor. The editor of the paper at the time was Kelvin MacKenzie, who has never apologised. Unfortunately, his mendacity hasn’t harmed his career one bit. The last time I saw him on TV, he was a regular, along with Nick Ferrari, another right-wing hack, on the Alan Titchmarsh show on daytime TV.
As for Bernard Ingham, he was nicknamed ‘Thatcher’s Rotweiler’, and had the same hatreds and political instincts as his mistress. He resents being described as a ‘spin doctor’, but as he was her press secretary, that was more or less what he was, and that’s where the rot started, although I’ve no doubt that No. 10 was managing the content of news stories long before then.
Ingham was, along with another of other celebs, caught out on ’90s TV by the edgy funster Chris Morris in his spoof news programme, Brass Eye. This had a section where various celebrities and personalities read out fake messages warning people of some imaginary threat, or campaigning for a very spurious good cause. Like Paul Daniels telling the world about ‘elephant tipping’ in Libya, and the elephant that had got its trunk caught up its bottom. In Ingham’s case, he was made to look very stupid along with his parliamentary colleague, David Amess, the MP for Basildon, and a whole host of TV personalities including Jimmy Greaves, Noel Edmonds, Bernard Manning and Rolf Harris, by reading out a warning about a fake synthetic drug, Cake. Cake was ‘a made-up drug’. One pill was the size of a dinner plate, and it had to be swallowed all in one gulp. It worked by affecting part of the brain called ‘Shatner’s Bassoon’, and was responsible for terrible physical side effects. It was made in Czechoslovakia, and so the goitres it produced on the necks of its addicts were known as ‘Czech neck’. And one girl was so sick with it, she threw up her own hip bone. This is, as you doctor should tell you, physically impossible. And the statement ‘Cake is a made-up drug’ should have alerted Ingham, as it alerted the viewers, that what was coming was a load of rubbish. But Morris and his crew were so persuasive, and Ingham so blinded with his own ego, that he failed to get the joke.
Well, twenty years or so ago, Ingham and MacKenzie lied about the deaths of 96 innocent people, and smeared them and a great British city. And that’s no joke. Their silence about the matter suggests that they are completely unrepentant. Their only remorse is over the fact that they got caught.
Here’s that section from Brass Eye, so you can share some of Morris’ ‘disgusting bliss’.
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