Michael Brooks on Ellen Degeneres’ Hypocrisy and Friendship with George Dubya

Michael Brooks is a co-presenter and has his own show with Sam Seder on Sam Seder’s Majority Report. In this video, he adds his comments to the criticism Ellen Degeneres has earned about her friendship with George ‘Dubya’ Bush and her hypocritical treatment of her writing team. Degeneres, who considers herself politically liberal, and who came out as a lesbian on her own show a few years ago, provoked outrage when she was filmed sitting next George Dubya and his wife at a football game, chatting affably.

Left-wing Americans and others, who simply believe that America’s invasion of Iraq was morally wrong and support gay rights, were understandably upset that Degeneres was sitting with the man responsible for the illegal invasion and for trying to have it written into the Constitution that people of the same sex could not marry.

In response, Degeneres tried to explain herself on her own show. She said that her friendship with the wretched former president was no different than the other friendships she had we people, whose political views she didn’t share. She then said that we all should be kinder to each other.

Sam Seder made a video himself about her attempts to excuse herself. He made the point that Bush was responsible for the deaths, multilation and displacement of millions of people in Iraq and the Middle East. He also rebutted her call for people to be kind to each other on the grounds that you can believe in it, but does it mean you should be kind to a serial killer, who hasn’t stopped killing, believes there’s nothing he’s done wrong and will take that kindness as an indication that you’re fine with him killing.

In this video, Brooks also weighs in against Degeneres. He points out that she’s also a union-buster. Despite claiming that her writing team were all family to her, when they took part in the Writers’ Guild strike she sacked them all and replaced them with blacklegs.

But the main piece of his video is another, posted on Twitter by Rafael Shimunov. This shows the terrible reality behind Degeneres self-justification by placing behind her images of Iraq and its war-torn people. He also points out we shouldn’t be surprised by Degeneres’s friendship with Bush. They’re both part of the rich 1 per cent, supporting each other against the majority.

I realise that this is an American matter, and that Degeneres is hardly known over here, although I have seen her show broadcast on one of the cable/satellite channels. But there are issues of integrity here, which also affect journalists and broadcasters generally. Alistair Campbell and Tony Blair are still putting their oar in about current events, with Blair commenting on Corbyn’s leadership of the party and Campbell interviewing McDonnell in GQ. Both Blair and Campbell share the responsibility of the Iraq invasion with Bush, and could fairly be described as war criminals. They have no moral right whatsoever to give political judgments or recommendations to anyone on the left. At the same time, there is a new film ready to be released about the civil servant, who leaked the papers about the Iraq invasion in order to prevent it. This woman has far more integrity, and the film about her, is in my view, of far more moral worth, than Degeneres’ pleadings for kindness towards a man, who destroyed an entire country simply as a display of imperial dominance and corporate profit.

One of the female Labour politicos – I’ve forgotten who – has sparked controversy because she refuses to be friends with Conservatives. As these videos show, she has a point.

Blissex on the Bombing of Libya and British War Crimes in Iraq

On Friday I put up a piece questioning whether we were also involved in running death squads in Iraq, like the Americans had under General McChrystal. Blissex, one of the many great commenters on this blog, added the following information. He writes

Things are more complicated yet simpler than that, for example an UK military commander objected:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/chilcot-inquiry-black-ops-in-iraq-caused-split-between-us-and-uk-7130996.htmlhttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/chilcot-inquiry-black-ops-in-iraq-caused-split-between-us-and-uk-7130996.html
“Some senior British officers were unhappy at what was going on and the involvement of the UK’s SAS and the SBS. “Why are we helping to run Latin American-style death squads?” One British commander, himself ex-SAS, demanded to know. The SAS were, on at least two occasions, barred from carrying out such missions in the British-run south of the country.
Questions were asked about how information was being obtained from suspects in Balad. There was an unofficial inquiry into the treatment of prisoners at the base, although no evidence was found to implicate Maj Gen McChrystal. …
But the reverberations from special forces operations in Iraq continued. Six years later Maj Gen McChrystal, by now a four star general and commander of international forces in Afghanistan, had received a complaint from the UK’s director of special forces (DSF) for speaking about operations carried out with the SAS and SBS in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile an SAS lieutenant colonel, who had served with distinction under Maj Gen McChrystal in Iraq, was told to stay away from the Regiment’s headquarters in Hereford.”

Also on the wider picture:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/brexits-irish-question/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/brexits-irish-question/
“Now, the empire is gone and the UK is slipping out of England’s control. Britain’s pretensions to be a global military power petered out in the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan: the British army was effectively defeated in both Basra and Helmand and had to be rescued by its American allies.”

Andrew Marr, “History of modern Britain”:

“Britain’s dilemma from 1945 until today has been easy to state, impossible to resolve. How do you maintain independence and dignity when you are a junior partner, locked into defence systems, intelligence gathering and treaties with the world’s great military giant? … At other times her dependence has been embarrassing, in big ways such as the Suez fiasco; and small ways, such as the American refusal to share intelligence assessments in Iraq, even when the raw intelligence was gathered originally by British agents and passed on.”

He also stated that while Obama and Killary were behind the bombing of Libya, the real people pushing for war were Sarkozy in France and David Cameron in Britain.

«Killary was Obama’s Secretary of State when he sent the bombers in to level Libya and aid the Islamist rebels in overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi.»

Oh she and Obama were/are warmongers, but the insanity is that the libyan stupidity was strongly initiated by N Sarkozy, with D Cameron’s support, and B Obama tried to talk him out of it, even if eventually went along.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/#8https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/#8
“When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong,” Obama said, “there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/barack-obama-says-libya-was-worst-mistake-of-his-presidencyhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/barack-obama-says-libya-was-worst-mistake-of-his-presidency
In March, Obama made a searing critique of the British prime minister, David Cameron, and the former French leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, for their roles in the bombing campaign they led in Libya.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/03/17/david-cameron-did-make-a-mess-of-libya–thats-why-obamas-comment/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/03/17/david-cameron-did-make-a-mess-of-libya–thats-why-obamas-comment/
I remember quite clearly the deep reservations senior American officers and officials had at the time about the enthusiasm displayed by Mr Cameron and French President Sarkozy for overthrowing Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
While the Americans had no great affection for Gaddafi, they just could not see why, after all the controversy surrounding the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the European leaders wanted to start another conflict. “We just don’t get it,” a senior US general told me at the time. “Gaddafi just does not pose a threat to us.”

So elements of the SAS and British special forces were involved in assassinations in Iraq for the Americans, but they were not popular and important sections of the British administration were against their use. As for Cameron and Sarkozy, I wonder if hankering after British and French imperial greatness was also a factor in them demanding Gaddafi’s overthrow. The French are supposed to be recolonizing all over Africa, and it’s also possible that Sarkozy may still harbour resentment towards African and Arab independence movements because of the horrors of the Algerian independence movement. As for David Cameron, the British aristocracy and upper classes, as George Orwell pointed out, are bred for war and get a real thrill out of it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Cameron, and Boris as well, want to be seen as great war leaders, like Winston Churchill. Both Britain and France have been savagely hit by Islamist terrorism, and so I think that a desire to launch a fresh attack on the Middle East to teach Muslims a lesson was also a major factor. Gaddafi’s regime was accused of the Lockerbie bombing, although Private Eye has maintained that the real culprit was probably Syria, but we needed their support for the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein under George Bush snr. Gaddafi did sponsor terrorism, but they were used against other Arab and African leaders, and he kept them on a very short leash domestically.

As for the quotes Blissex provides about Britain trying to reclaim its imperial role by riding on America’s coat-tails after the Second World War – I completely agree. And the Special Relationship has always worked to America’s advantage, and very much against ours.

The Coalition’s Secret Courts and Communist Yugoslavia’s Gulags

Inmates at a Soviet Gulag

Many bloggers, including myself, have raised the issue of the Coalition’s increasing intolerance, its attempts to close down freedom of speech and the press through legislation such as the anti-lobbying bill. Vox Political yesterday reblogged a piece showing that Britain had fallen from 29th to 33rd place in the world for press freedom following the government’s campaign against the Guardian for publishing the revelations of comprehensive British and American secret surveillance.

One of the most alarming developments in the Coalition’s creation of an increasingly authoritarian and dictatorial state are the secret courts, which have been set up with the full backing of those champions of freedom and democracy, the Lib Dems. Another Angry Voice has particularly blogged and commented on them. He gives this brief description of them:

For those of you that don’t know about what the Tory “Secret Courts” bill entails, here’s a brief description: As it now stands, defendants (or claimants in civil cases) can be excluded from the hearings where their fates are decided; they will not be allowed to know what the case against them is; they will not be allowed to enter the courtroom; they will not be allowed to know or challenge the details of the case; and they will not be allowed representation from their own lawyer, but will instead be represented (in their absence) by a security-cleared “special advocate”.

See his post ‘Secret Courts: The Very Illiberal Democrats’ at http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/secret-courts-very-illiberal-democrats.html

This legislation places Britain alongside the nightmarish perversions of justice described in fiction by Franz Kafka in his novels The Castle and The Trial, in which the hero has been arrested and repeatedly interrogated for an unknown crime. He does not know himself what he is supposed to have done, and the authorities never tell him. This grotesque injustice was the reality in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Under the Ba’ath legal code, there were a set of laws, knowledge of whose existence was also prohibited and for which individuals could be arrested and tried. I can remembering hearing about this through the BBC’s radio coverage of the arrest and eventual execution of Bazoft, a British journalist of Iranian origin, who was arrested for spying by Hussein’s regime. The passage last March of the Secret Courts bill, and the government’s attempt to prosecute the Guardian for Snowden and clamp down on other forms of dissent, raises the real possibility that such a grotesque miscarriage of justice will also occur in Britain.

Apart from Hussein’s Iraq, it is also very, very much like the totalitarian regimes of the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, where anyone considered to be a threat to the regime was subject to summary arrest and deportation into the concentration camps and gulags. Further communication with them was difficult, if not impossible. In both regimes those arrested simply disappeared. For the Nazis, such unexplained disappearances were a deliberate part of the system of arrest and imprisonment. It was called ‘Nacht und Nebel’, or ‘Night and Fog’, and was intended to cause even further terror of the Nazi dictatorship.

Milovan Djilas, Yugoslav Communist leader and dissident

The Yugoslavian Communist regime of Marshal Tito also established a gulag after it’s split with Stalin in the late 1940s. The Yugoslavs were resisting Stalin’s attempt to turn their country into a satellite of the Soviet Union. Undercover of diplomatic missions, joint Yugoslav-Soviet companies and even a Soviet film of Tito’s victory in the Second World War and the rise of the Communist government in Yugoslavia, Stalin’s regime attempted to recruit spies against Tito’s government. The international Communist organisation, the Cominform, was also used to recruit agents and spread discontent in order to undermine Yugoslavia’s independence.

The regime responded with the summary arrest of anyone suspected of pro-Soviet sympathies and the establishment of a gulag for them on Goli Otok, or Bare Island. Milovan Djilas, a former Vice-President of Yugoslavia, President of the National Assembly and later leading dissident, describes the system of arrests and the brutal conditions under which the inmates were held in his autobiographical account of the regime and his part in it, Rise and Fall.

He notes the camp’s extra-legal basis, and the way it was established at the highest authority.

The camp for Cominformists on Goli Otok (“Bare Island”) in the northern Adriatic was organized without a legal basis. At first, Cominformists were simply taken into custody and shipped there. A law was passed later covering obligatory “socially useful labor,” as the camp activities were innocently designated for official purposes. Moreover, not even the Politburo, or its inner circle, the Secretariat, ever made any decision about the camp. It was made by Tito himself and implemented through Rankovic’s State Security apparatus. (p. 235).

After examining the motives behind those who joined the Cominform against the Yugoslavian regime, including personal rivalry and frustration at their lack of personal advancement, Djilas describes the harsh conditions in the camp.

Sentences to Goli Otok were imposed by the security organ. By law, no term could exceed two years, but there was no limit on its renewal. Inmates who languished there for ten years were not uncommon.

On his passage to the island the prisoner was shoved-in fact, hurled- to the bottom of the boat. Then, when he emerged on Goli Otok, he had to run the gauntlet. This was a double line of inmates, who vied with one another in hitting him. If gouged eyes were a rarity, broken teeth and ribs were not. There were also incorrigibles, who were subjected to lynching, sometimes spontaneous, sometimes not.

The inmates had no visitation rights. They received neither letters nor packages-at least not in the early period. Until word leaked out unofficially, their families had no idea where they were; letters were addressed to a number, as to soldiers in wartime. Their labor was not only hard and compulsory, but often meaningless as well. One of the punishments was carrying heavy stones back and forth. Work went on in all kinds of weather. What stuck in their tormented memories, as I can well understand, was labouring on rocky ground in scorching heat. State Security got carried away with making a productive enterprise out of Goli Otok, for this was the period when the Security bosses were tinkering with our economy and founding export firms; yet nothing came of this “production” but suffering and madness. Then, when finally released, inmates were sworn to silence about the camp and its methods. This could have been taken for granted, yet little by little the truth came out anyway, especially after the fall of Rankovic in 1966. (pp. 241-2).

Tito was intent on suppressing the Cominform in Yugoslavia with as little bloodshed as possible. The camp was intended on ‘re-educating’ the political prisoners, rather than murdering them, a process that was nevertheless carried out with extreme brutality.

This nuance of his-on the head but not off with it-explains why so few Cominformists were killed. But it also became the basis for unimagined, unheard-of coercion, pressure, and torture on the island. There, re-education, or “head-knocking”, was made the responsibility of certain inmates- the “reconstructed” ones-who in effect collaborated with Security. The latter involved itself as little as possible, leaving the re-education to “self-managing units” made up of reconstructed inmates, who went to inhuman extreme to ingratiate themselves and win their own release. They were inventive in driving their fellow victims similarly to “reconstruct” themselves. There is no limit to the hatred and meanness of the new convert toward yesterday’s coreligionists. (p. 241).

Djilas makes it clear that many of those interned in the camp would not have been imprisoned if they had instead been tried in an open court.

But regardless of any such factor, there is no question that the vast majority of Cominformists would never have been sent to Goli Otok had the proceedings been the least bit legal, reasonable and undogmatic. People were arrested and committed to the camp for failure to report intimate “cominformist” conversations or for reading leaflets and listening to the short-wave radio. Subsequent victims included those who at the time of the resolution said that we ought to have attended the Bucharest meeting at which our party was condemned.

Djilas recognised that Communist ideology played a part in the construction of the camp and the terror they inflicted in order to destroy Stalin’s influence in Yugoslavia. He also cautions, however, against viewing such human rights abuses as a purely Communist phenomenon.

But the way we dealt with those arrested and their families-that was something else again. There was no need to behave as we did. That conduct sprang from our ideological dogmatism, from our Leninist and Stalinist methods, and, of course, in part from our Balkan traditions of reprisal.

But analyses can be left to historians and philosophers. My business is to get on with the tale, a tale of defeat and disgrace, not only for Yugoslav Communism but also for our times and humankind. If the Yugoslav gulag, like the Soviet, is explained purely in terms of the “inhuman” or “antihuman” nature of Communism, that is an oversimplified judgment that in its way is just as ideological. Ideology, I think, was only a motivational expression, the appeal to an ideal, justifying the insane human yearning to be lord and master. Sending people off to camps is neither the invention nor the distinction of Communists. People like those of us at the top of the heap, with our ideals and absolute power,, are bound to throw our opponents into a camp. yet if the treatment of the inmates had come up for discussion-if discussion had not been precluded by Tito’s omnipotent will-different views would have emerged among us and more common-sense and human procedures would have been instituted. Some of us were aware of this paradox: a camp must be established, yet to do so was terrible. (pp. 236-7).

The Western press was also content not to report the existence of the forced labour camp.

Characteristic both of the time and of the relationships then unfolding was the attitude towards the press, Eastern as well as Western, toward the camp. The Western press by an large showed no interest in it, certainly no critical interest. The same could be said of the Western diplomatic corps. Whenever the persecution of Cominformists came up, as if by agreement these diplomats displayed a tacit understand: our independence and the state were threatened by a combination of external and internal pressure. But there was also a note of ambiguity, of malicious joy behind the Westerners’ façade of understanding: let the Communists exterminate each other and so reveal the very nature of Communism. (pp. 242-3).

All these elements are present in the policies the Coalition has adopted towards press freedom and the unemployed. The secret courts set up by the Coalition would allow those deemed to be a threat to be tried without the normal conventions to ensure justice and protect the accused until they are found guilty. This is important: in British law, you are innocent until the court is convinced of your guilt, and the onus is on the prosecution to prove their case.

The Coalition have also shown themselves more than willing to use psychological techniques to indoctrinate their policies’ victims. The unemployment courses and forms drawn up with the advice of the Nudge Unit are designed so that the unemployed will blame themselves for their joblessness, rather than the economy.

Elements within the Conservative party have also at times called for the establishment of camps for individuals they judged to be a threat to the British state. One of the reasons behind the assassination of Airey Neave, Margaret Thatcher’s political mentor, in the 1970s by the INLA was because Neave had called for the establishment of internment camps in northern Ireland. And as workfare shows, there is a strong impulse towards using compulsory ‘voluntary’ labour to support big business in Britain, just as it was used in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, and, for that matter, Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Nor can the British press be depended on to guard traditional British freedoms of speech and justice. AS Mike over at Vox Political has shown, part of the reason for the marked decline in press freedom in this country is due to the Right-wing press’ collusion with the authorities in attacking the Guardian and Edward Snowden. It’s has been alleged by Lobster that in the 1980s the Sunday Times under Andrew ‘Brillo Pad’ Neil was a conduit for disinformation from the British security services. Certainly Neil has shown no qualms about making unsupported claims about Allende’s democratically elected Marxist government in Chile in order to support the coup led by Thatcher’s friend, General Pinochet.

These secret courts, the gagging laws and workfare have to be stopped now, before they develop into something exactly like the forced labour camps of the Nazis and Communists. And that has to start by voting out the Coalition.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Together their reforms are laying the foundations for a police state and forced labour camps.

Protest at its Last Extreme: The Bodies of the Dead accuse their Political Murderers

Cartoon Showing Stalin responsible for the deaths of millions through his famines

I’ve been reading the descriptions of the suffering of the Russian people during the artificial famine caused by Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930s In Alex de Jonge’s biography of Stalin. It’s truly horrifying stuff. Whole villages were found dead of starvation, while those pitiful souls, who made it into the town suffering from scurvy, boils and sores were rounded up by the authorities and thrown into cattle trucks, to be taken to the edge of the town. They were then dumped and left to die.

De Jonge also states that the peasants had a ‘fashion’ ‘that will appeal to those for whom only the blackest humour will do.’ He then describes how starving Soviet citizens took the bodies of dead friends or even strangers and arrange them at the feet of the statues of Lenin erected in many Soviet cities’.

You can either see this as a ghastly, morbid joke by a brutalised and dying people. Or you can also see it as a last, desperate protest by people, for whom all other forms of protest were closed and denied. Stalin had absolute control of the media and the Communist party itself. He had forced out of office any and all Communist politicians, who had any sympathy whatsoever with the peasants, such as Bukharin. Bukharin was particular unpopular with the rest of the Communist party as he was a vocal supporter of the Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which established a mixed economy, and had made a speech to the peasants telling them to ‘enrich themselves’. Needless to say, after he was forced from office he later died in one of Stalin’s purges.

The pyramidal structure of Soviet politics meant that ordinary Soviet citizens did not have any political power. There had been armed resistance to the collectivisation programme. De Jonge states that in one area there were 150 peasant uprisings, as the smallholders rose up against the regime and its officials, who wished to take away their land, crops and livestock. These were described as ‘women’s rebellions’, and put down ruthlessly.

And so ultimately the only form of protest the peasants and other citizens of the USSR had against a regime that was killing them in their millions was to lay the bodies of the dead at Lenin’s feet as the last, most powerful, mute accusation.

There’s also another similarity between the Coalition’s attack on the disabled and poor, and the Communist apparatchiks who robbed and killed the starving of the USSR under Stalin. Both regimes blame the victims. The Soviet officials in charge of collectivisation blamed the peasants themselves for the famine, claiming that they were deliberately withholding food in order to bring down the Communist system. This accusation reached its most paranoid, ludicrous extreme in the January 1930 edition of the Ukrainian Communist magazine, Collective Farm Activist. This rag hysterically accused the peasants of deliberately starving themselves to death to undermine the Soviet state: ‘they have grain [but] deliberately starve themselves and their families to death in order to sow discontent among other collective farm workers’.

A Ukrainian woman reads the names of the victims of Stalin’s famine in her country during a special ceremony to commemorate them in November 2011.

The Coalition and many of their apparatchiks at Jobcentre Plus and the Department of Work and Pensions similarly blames the disabled and unemployed themselves for their condition. They are able to work, they’re just feckless layabouts. At the last interview I had at the Jobcentre Plus here in Bristol, at Eagle House, I was more or less told by a young woman, ‘Arti’, that I should stop coming in as I was ‘not allowing us to help you’. She also asked me rhetorically if I was continuing to come in to make a point. She would have been brilliant in the purges.

‘Are you guilty?’
‘Very guilty, O Stalin!’
‘Then let the mad lice be shot!’

David Cameron, whose cuts to benefits have resulted in the deaths of as perhaps as many as 38,000 per year. Not as much as Stalin, but getting there.

I wondered if a far milder form of this protest could be used to protest the ruthless policies of Cameron and Clegg and their lackeys Ian Duncan ‘Matilda’ Smith and Esther ‘McLie’ McVie. People are dying in their tens of thousands now, in 21st Century Britain, due to despair and starvation as the Coalition throws them off benefit. The true figures are not released, and the extent of the deaths little reported by a largely Right-wing media. I’ve reblogged a piece by Sue Marsh from Diary of a Benefits Scrounger on her experiences of being bounced back into the audience, mendacious editing, and simply being cancelled on various television shows purporting to investigate the condition of the disabled. Benefits Street on Channel 5 was merely the latest of these. Her piece is very well worth reading, as she presents a ream of statistics about the cuts to benefits for the disabled that is very definitely not reported. Mike over at Vox Political has also repeatedly blogged on the right-wing bias of the BBC’s reporting on the cuts under Jonty whatever-his-name-is, the current gauleiter in charge of the gleichschaltung of BBC News for the Tories. There’s a real problem in that the protests against the cuts aren’t reported by the Beeb or the rest of the media.

Anti-Maggie Cartoon. The caption reads ‘Never have so many been robbed of so much for the benefit of so few’.

I wondered if one way of making the point that this Coalition is murdering people in the tens of thousands is use similar imagery to that of the starving in Stalin’s Russia. Stilloaks on his blog has a list and potted biographies of 45 or so people, who have so far died through having their benefit removed by ATOS. It seems to me that one way of waking people up to the way the Coalition’s policies are killing people would be to organise a demonstration, where model coffins or candles, with the names of some of the deceased, were carried by the protesters and laid at an image or statue of David Cameron, or, for real shock value, Margaret Thatcher. After all, she was the ultimate architect of the free-market attacks on the welfare state that Cameron has merely continued and extended. And as we’ve seen from demands by some of the madder Tory politicos, there’s a real cult of Maggie just as great on the Right as Lenin was for the Communist faithful. After all, one of them wanted the May Day Bank Holiday to be renamed in Thatcher’s honour. Previously they just wanted to be restored to St. George’s Day, so that the English can have a national holiday like the Welsh, Scots and Irish. So the cult of Maggie even trumps patriotism. The names and photographs of some of the deceased should be carried, read out and laid at Cameron’s feet.

I’ve no doubt that protests like this have probably been done already, but I think it really needs to be repeated again and again to make the point inescapable. If nothing else, it should show how closely the Coalition of Cameron and Clegg resembles another doctrinaire and murderous regime, which they despise so much and whose despicable utilitarian attitudes to its workers they fully share.

British Shell Companies and the Attacks on Liberal Journalism in the Ukraine

Private Eye has long been extremely critical of the shell companies and the British tax legislation and accountancy firms that support them. These are companies that largely exist in name only, which are used as an accountancy trick to allow corporations to avoid paying tax in Britain by falsely claiming that they are resident, or owned by companies in foreign tax havens. It dates back to Blair and New Labour, but as with everything corrupt that benefits big business, it’s been taken over by the Coalition. Now, according to the Eye’s Christmas edition, these companies have been used for something even more pernicious and sinister: the attack on liberal journalism itself on the Ukraine. The Eye’s article ‘Tricking Kiev’ reports how a network of shell companies was used by the American-Ukrainian businessman, Alexander Altman, to wrest control of Ukrainian news agency, TVi, from its rightful owner, Konstantin Kagalovsky, a Russian businessman based in Britain.

The Eye says:

‘The battle in the Ukraine between pro-European reformers and the friends of Russia’s Vladimir Putin is partly a fight for control of the media.

Luckily for the oligarchs, they can rely on the acquiescence of TVi. Once a source of investigative journalism, it is now a feeble wreck thanks to a massive fraud perpetrated with the help of Britain’s lax corporate regulations.

As Eye 1344 reported, American-Ukrainian “businessman” Alexander Altman walked into TVi in April, and astonished its journalists by saying that he was now their boss. He locked out its owner, the British-based-based Russian businessman Konstantin Kagalovsky, and ordered reporters to stop causing trouble on pain of dismissal.

In a withering judgment at the High Court in London last week, Mr Justice Turner said there had been a “coup” at TVi, accomplished by “using forged documents comprising fake powers of attorney, board resolutions and board minutes”.

TVi’s baffled owner found that control had passed to a British firm called Balmore he had never heard of. No one could blame him for his ignorance. Balmore was an off-the-shelf firm, which Mr Justice Turner said “was in the precarious position of having beern served with a notice that it was to be struck off the company register for failing to submit an annual return”.

On the day Altman moved against liberal journalists in Kiev, Balmore’s annual return was prepared and filed electronically to Companies House in Britain.

The rightful owners’ lawyers secured an injunction in the summer saying that Altman must disclose information on how TVi had gone from Balmore into a maze of British shell companies. Robert Dougans, Kagolovsky’s solicitor, said Altman had refused to comply and was thus guilty of contempt of court. Even Altman’s London lawyers, Kerman & Co appeared to suspect that something unprofessional and unethical may have been going down. Internal emails, revealed to the court, show Sebastian Devlin, an associate lawyer at the firm, warning partner Carl Robinson that he saw a “real risk” in complying with Altman’s wishes. As the judge drily noted, Robinson was “unable to proffer any clear Explanation” on what Altman had asked Turner that had so worried his colleague.

Throughout the contempt case, Altman said he was the victim of a “set up”. He got out of bed one morning and found that he was associated with mysterious British companies. The judge was having none of it. If Altman were an innocent victim, “he would have made far more strenuous efforts to find out what had happened”. He “knew full well “why the companies had been formed. He was their “controlling mind”, who had retained Kerman & Co and handed them boxes of corporate documents.

The judge found Altman guilty of contempt, and will sentence him next year.

Robert Dougan, the victorious solicitor, told the Eye that despite the judgement there was still no guarantee that the Ukrainian courts would hand TVi back. “One of the reasons why people are on the streets in Kiev is because shady operators in and out of government can commit frauds and no one does anything about it.” As in so many other frauds, the fraudsters turn to “light touch” Britain for help. Dougans explained how he had found out for himself how light that touch was. “I decided to test our controls by registering my cat as a company director,” he said. “No one tried to stop me.”

(Private Eye, 21 December – 9 January 2014, p. 33).

This is a serious attack on the nascent free press in the new, post-Soviet state. The Ukraine is one of the oldest of the Russian states. As the kingdom of Kiev, tt was founded in the early Middle Ages by Varangian Vikings, who intermarried with and adopted the culture of the indigenous Slav population. Under its king, Oleg, in the 9th century it established relations with the Byzantine Empire. Oleg marched to Constantinople at the head of an army and after sacking its suburbs and nailed his shield to the city’s wall. As well as extracting tribute, he also demanded a number of agreements establishing trade between the Empire and Kievan Russia. The Byzantine Emperor acceded to his demands, and Oleg married a Byzantine princess. Later in the century, sometime after 988, the Kievan king, Vladimir the Great, converted to Christianity. This marked the beginning of the Orthodox Church in Russia, as well as the beginning of the Russian view that they are the ‘Third Rome’, after the Eternal City itself, and Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine or eastern Roman Empire.

The country takes its name from the Ukrainian word ‘Krai’, which means a border area. During the Middle Ages it was part of the Republic of Poland, before being conquered and incorporated into Russia. The Ukraine has produced some of the greatest Russian authors, including Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of the White Guard and the Master and Margarita.

One of my father’s workmates was Ukrainian, who finally moved back his native country to be with his family after the fall of Communism. One of my friends has also lived and worked in the former Eastern Bloc. A few years ago he holidayed in Kiev, and really loved the place. When he came back he proudly showed me the various sights he’d seen. Back in the 1990s there was some pessimism about the new, post-Soviet nation’s future. There has been considerable friction between the western Ukraine, which is largely rural and Roman Catholic, and the industrialised, Orthodox east, which has a large Russian population. Some observers and commenters feared that the country would degenerate into ethnic conflict and possible civil war, along with the emergence of anti-Semitism. While the country is clearly divided over the question of its ties to either the EU or Putin’s Russia, large scale conflict has been avoided. Indeed, the Financial Times was so impressed with the new state that in an article about it, the newspaper described it as almost a magical place, straight from a fairy-tale. The question of whether the country has closer ties to Russia or the EU is, of course, an issue for the Ukrainians themselves to decide. To do so, and to strengthen their democracy, they need a genuinely liberal, free press able investigate corruption and dodgy political dealing. Unfortunately, the extremely lax corporate legislation over here has meant that this is being stifled to serve very powerful, corporate interests.

The use of this legislation to attack Ukrainian free journalism also poses a threat to the free press in the rest of the world, including this country. Globalisation has meant that the world is now interconnected, and once international big business feels it can get away with something in one country, it will try and use the same tactic elsewhere. We cannot afford to see this as merely a problem for a far away country, tucked away in the former USSR. If it is allowed to succeed in the Ukraine, then it will eventually come here.

Bernard Ingham, the Press Office under Thatcher and Mussolini and the Fascist Spin City

All regimes to a greater or lesser extent have attempted to manipulate public opinion to their own ends. A curiously modern example from the Middle Ages is the use of political ballads against Henry VI’s wife, by his opponent, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the father of the infamous Richard III. Richard had been England’s Lord Protector, governing the country. reacting to the king’s incompetence and weak-mindedness, Richard launched a political campaign against him. Political ballads attacked the queen as a ruthless, foreign princess, intent on conquering and oppressing her husband’s lands while misleading him as to her intentions. He and the king’s supporters also launched campaigns against each other in parliament, culminating in a general election, as well as fighting each other on the battlefield. Although a medieval conflict, the Wars of the Roses also appears strikingly modern, almost like the founding archetype of the coups that have been staged since. Richard III at one point even made speeches from the balcony, like great 20th century dictators like Mussolini.

Informal Influence over the Press in Democracies

During the 20th century much of the control of the press in the democracies was informal. Presidents and prime ministers arranged press conferences and dinners with sympathetic press barons. There were censorship rules, that could be invoked in times of national crisis, such as laws against the dissemination of enemy propaganda during First and Second World Wars. Some of the restrictions on what was printed in the press was simply through the personal relationship between the editor and the family of leading politicians. At the Cheltenham Festival of Literature one year, the British caricaturist Gerald Scarfe told the story of how one of his early cartoons was spiked by the editor of the Times. It was of Winston Churchill in his final period as an MP in parliament during his declining years when the powers that had inspired the country to keep on fighting during the War were fading. Scarfe said that at the time Churchill was senile, and the cartoon showed him at the end of the green benches, asleep and drooling. The Time’s editor rejected it on the grounds that it would upset the great man’s wife, Clemmie, when she opened it at breakfast in the morning.

Bernard Ingham and Thatcher’s Press Office

This relationship with the press changed slightly when Mrs. Thatcher established a press office under Bernard Ingham. Now Ingham strongly rejects the description of himself as a spin doctor. Nevertheless, as Maggie’s press officer he institutionalised the government’s manipulation of the news and public opinion in a way previous administrations had not. This in turn prepared the way for its expansion under Peter Mandelson during Blair’s government, and the consequent use of spin and propaganda by the governments following them.

Rigid Control of Press in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy

Totalitarian regimes are notorious for their absolute control of the press and media to garner mass support. In Hitler’s Germany, they were placed under the control of Josef Goebbels, the ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment’. This prompted the satirical joke, said with one eye looking over the shoulder for the Gestapo, that the Goeb was the minimum amount of power required to turn off 100,000 radio sets. Despite the Nazis’ claim that they were enthusiastically supported by the great German public, you can gather from this what that public really thought of their leaders’ rantings.

Control of the press in Mussolini’s Italy was similarly strict. Under a law of 1924, an area’s prefect could warn any editor who ‘damaged the credit of the nation at home or abroad’, ‘aroused unjustified alarm in the public’, and published ‘false or tendentious news’. Editors were also at risk if they published material inciting class hatred or urged disobedience to the law. An editor that was warned twice could be dismissed from his post by the prefect. Another decree gave the prefects the right to sequestrate the issue of a particular paper that had broken the above rules. Originally this legislation was used only against the Socialist and Communist press and papers that had very small circulations. In 1925 it was expanded against the last remaining liberal newspapers. Mussolini tried to encourage the newspapers to adopt a friendly attitude towards to his regime. When this failed, official censorship increased, while the newspapers’ proprietors were threatened with forcible closure and the destruction of their equipment. Under Alfredo Rocco, the former leader of the Nationalists and Mussolini’s Minister for Justice, a corporative Order of Journalists was set up. This was under the control of the Commissione Superiore alla Stampa, composed of other journalists, rather than magistrates. Despite Rocco’s claim that the Commissione ‘realizes both the autonomy of the class and its link with the State’, he himself appointed its members and the Order as a whole was an instrument for controlling the journalists. No journalist, who was not on its rolls was allowed to practise his profession. Stalin used a similar organisation to control writers in the Soviet Union. This was the Writers’ Union, which had actually been founded to protect literature and the press from control by the old tyrant. From 1927 to 1928 there was a sustained campaign in Italy to purge the press of non-Fascist journalists and editors. By the end of the 1920s two-thirds of the newspapers outside the major cities were owned by the Fascist Party. At the same time, the magazines and newspapers published by the individual local Fascist groups, the federations or the Fasci, were reduced by Mussolini’s brother, Arnaldo, for greater economy and to make their control by the central Fascist organisations easier.

Censored Subjects in Fascist Press

In September 1928 the regime issued new guidelines detailing what newspapers were and weren’t allowed to print. All news was intended to be optimistic and present the regime in a positive light. Newspapers were ordered to give minimal coverage to rail disasters, bank failures and air crashes. Journalists were to treat natural disasters ‘with great sobriety’. Mussolini himself decreed that the crime column should be ‘demobilized’, especially stories of suicides, tragedies of passion, violence and child molestation. Editors were also banned from publishing photographs of nude or scantily clad women. I wonder how the Right-wing tabloids like the Sun, Star, Daily Mail and so on would cope under a Fascist dictatorship, considering that much of their content consists of photographs of nude or scantily clad women, and in the Sun, a hysterical campaign against paedophiles in which innocents were targeted and persecuted.

Informal Control of Press by Mussolini; Purchase of Newspapers by Industrialists for Fascist Regime

In other ways, however, the Fascists’ control and manipulation of the press was much more subtle. From 1922 to 1924 this was done informally. Il Duce’s Press Officer, Cesare Rossi, arranged deals in which private financiers sympathetic to the regime bought up opposition newspapers. The radical Milan newspaper, Il Secolo, was purchased for the regime by a group of industrialists headed by Borletti and Cesare Goldmann. Another newspaper, the Corriere Italiano, founded by the regime, was financed by consortium consisting of Fiat, Ilva, Terni, and the shipping magnate, Odero. This approach was discredited in the crisis following the regime’s assassination of the dissident philosopher, Matteotti, in exile Marseille. This revealed the sordid intrigue surrounding the Corriere Italiano and its companion Fascist paper, Nuovo Paese. In the unrest that followed, the headquarters of opposition newspapers were occupied by Fascist squads, and were only allowed to resume publication after submitting to the orders of the local Fascist ras.

In fact simple economic reasons meant that the party and the government could not afford to own and control all the Italian newspapers and magazines. The most important Italian papers thus remained in the hands of the private owners and industrialists, who held them long before the Fascist seizure of power. These proprietors continued to use them to influence the government’s economic policy and secure favours from the regime.

Pre-Fascist Staff Retained under Fascism

There was also some continuity with the pre-Fascist press, in that the regime permitted newspapers and magazines to retain their previous, non-Fascist staff, provided they did not produce material criticising the regime or its policies. Indeed, Mussolini appears to have intended to present some degree of political pluralism. He allowed the trade union newspaper, Il Lavoro, to resume publication in Genoa after it had been closed down. Il Lavoro was the paper of a group of CGL leaders that had capitulated to the regime, and continued to employ a number of well-known opponents of the regime. Mussolini appears to have kept it going in order to appeal, unsuccessfully, to the working class.

Press Office as Institution Common to Thatcher’s Britain and Fascist Italy

While the control of the press by the Italian Fascists was extreme, there is some comparison to the situation in today’s early 21st century Britain. Following Mrs. Thatcher and Bernard Ingham, subsequent British administrations have employed a Press Office like Mussolini and Cesare Rossi. Favourable coverage by the press has been seen as vitally important. From Blair onwards, the government has been sensitive to projecting a positive image through press barons such as Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre of the Mail. These industrialists have similarly been active, like the right-wing press baron Alfred Hugenberg in Weimar Germany, to build up massive media empires presenting their view of current events with an eye to influencing government policy. One former member of Blair’s cabinet said that Murdoch was a quiet presence at all the premier’s cabinet meetings, meaning that Blair was constantly concerned what Murdoch’s reaction to his policies would be.

Grant of Newspapers and Broadcasters by British Governments to their Supporters

Like Mussolini, Mrs Thatcher and subsequent prime ministers also have been active to ensure that particularly important newspapers were owned and acquired only by their supporters. Mrs. Thatcher made sure that the Times and other newspapers were bought by Rupert Murdoch, rather than the left-wing, and corrupt, Robert Maxwell. Blair and his cronies also waved through the acquisition and merger of various satellite firms by Murdoch despite concerns that this set up a dangerous monopoly, concerns that were also raised when Richard Desmond, the owner of the Express, purchased Channel 5. Mrs. Thatcher also acted to support the press barons in their destruction of the print unions, when the press finally moved out of Fleet Street after centuries of occupation.

‘Death on the Rock’ and Thatcher’s Closure of London Weekend Television

Equally significantly, Thatcher acted to close down a TV company that did not follow her line on the killing of a group of IRA terrorists in Gibraltar. According to Private Eye, the Prime Minister was angered by the World in Action documentary, Death on the Rock. The IRA squad in question had travelled to Gibraltar in preparation for an attack on the British army there. The documentary presented evidence that the security services had had the squad under surveillance the whole time they were preparing for their attack. It stated that there had been numerous occasions where the terrorists could have been stopped and arrested without, or with minimal bloodshed. This was not done, and the entire squad was shot dead in what appeared to be an extra-judicial killing. In short, rather than straightforwardly protecting the servicemen and women stationed on the Rock, the SAS had acted as a Death Squad. Lady Olga Maitland said as much a few years later in her biography of Thatcher, when she declared that the purpose of the exercise was to send a sharp message to the IRA.

This is a strong and highly contentious claim. Now the IRA and the other terrorist groups in Ulster were responsible for acts of horrific violence against innocent civilians and members of the security services that left hundreds killed or mutilated, and showed little remorse or compassion for their victims. Most Brits supported the armed services in their campaign against them. There is, however, a line in such military campaigns that cannot be crossed by a democratic regime governed by human rights. This is what prevents nations with a proud democratic tradition, like Britain, from descending into arbitrary government and gun law like the South American Right-wing dictatorships. World in Action argued that this line had been crossed. World in Action was produced by London Weekend Television, which as a result lost its broadcasting license. This was granted instead to their competitors, Carlton, whom Thatcher obviously felt could be relied on to produce more positive coverage.

Conclusion: Increased Government Control of Media and Decreasing Political and Social Freedom in Post-Thatcher Britain

The result is that the freedom of the press in contemporary Britain is far more fragile than it appears. Mussolini was unsuccessful in gaining absolute control of the press, but was also concerned to present the semblance of pluralism. Press diversity in contemporary Britain is also coming under increasing pressure. Newspapers and magazines are increasingly owned by a very few proprietors, who see to it that their monopolies are protected and expanded by the governments of the day. In return, they support a Right-wing agenda that demands further privatisation, the suppression of working class political organisations and the curtailment of welfare benefits and the eventual dismantlement of the welfare state. Finally, broadcasters that present evidence of flagrant government violations of human rights will be penalised and closed down. Perhaps the difference is that in Mussolini’s Italy, it was a case of private industrialists aiding an extreme Right-wing state. In post-Thatcher Britain, it’s an extreme Right-wing state aiding its industrialists. The gap between freedom and tyranny is increasingly a fine one.

Sources

‘Press’, in Philip V. Cannistraro, ed., Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy (Westport Connecticut, Greenwood Press 1o9i82) 437-40.

Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919-1929, 2nd Edition (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1987) 394-400.

Colin Richmond, ‘Propaganda in the Wars of the Rose’, History Today, July 1992, 42:12-18.

‘Toadying the Line’, reviews of Margaret Thatcher: The First Ten Years, Lady Olga Maitland (Sidgwick & Jackson); Margaret Thatcher: The Woman Within, Andrew Thomson (W.H. Allen), in Francis Wheen, ed., Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion (London: Verso 1994) 224-5.

New Labour and the Abandonment of Socialism and the Working Class

Yesterday Ed Milliband announced that he was ending the automatic contribution to the Labour party from the subscriptions of individual members of the trade unions. It marks a continuation of the New Labour policy of distancing the party from its origins in the unions. Way back in the 1990s, Tony Blair threatened to end the party’s ties to the unions altogether if they did not toe his line. It’s also part of the New Labour campaign of presenting itself as more middle class party. This process began under Neil Kinnock. The satirical British magazine, Private Eye, satirised Kinnock’s new middle class direction for the party by showing him shouting ‘Ich bin ein shareholder!’ Other spoof photographs on the same theme showed Kinnock shouting declaring, ‘I am an estate agent, and the son of estate agents’. Later Tony Blair was shown next to John Prescott saying, ‘We’re all middle class now’, to which Prescott replied ”appen I am, you middle class ponce’. Or words to that effect. We’ve come a long way since the Fabian Society published the pamphlet Natural Allies: Labour and the Unions, by Martin Upham and Tom Wilson in the 1980s.

New Labour and its Pursuit of the Middle Class and Increasing Alienation of the Working Class

The British conspiracy magazine, Lobster, has published a series of pieces charting and strongly criticising the rise of New labour and its abandonment of socialism and the working class. Simon Matthews in his review of Anthony Selden’s biography, Blair notes that the core of New Labour was a group of ‘modernising’ Labour MPs, the Project, consisting of Blair himself, Peter Mandelson, Margaret Hodge, John Carr, Jack Dromney and Sally Morgan, amongst others. It was essentially a response, shared by many other demoralised Leftists in Britain, the US and Australia, to Reagan and Thatcher’s electoral triumphs and the apparent victory of Neo-Liberal economics. Matthews considers that at the heart of New Labour’s political philosophy are the following ideas:

1. Middle class support is absolutely critical at every level. They must not be alienated through raising direct personal taxation.

2. The immense power of the media means that it is impossible to challenge them. They are therefore to be flattered and given good stories. The press are to be allowed to work in a deregulated market place.

3. If extra money is needed to pay for domestic projects, this may only be raised through the importation of cheap foreign labour. This increases the working population and lowers labour costs, so allowing an increase in tax revenue. This last policy has led to the increasing alienation of the White working class, that feels that Labour and the other mainstream political parties has abandoned them. The result is a resurgence in right-wing parties with anti-immigration policies, such as UKIP, or the English Defence League, which campaigns against radical Islam. This alienation has been noted by the BBC. A few years ago the BBC ran a series of programmes devoted to the issue of race in contemporary Britain. The trailer for this showed a White, working class man standing in front of a black background, slowly having his face covered in black ink until he became invisible. A gravelly voice then asked if the White working-class were being written out of Britain today. American critics of Neo-Conservatism have noted much the same attitudes in both the Democrat and Republican parties. The middle-class White members of these parties support affirmative action programmes, so long as they do not affect their children. See the volume, Confronting the New Conservatism.

American Commercial and Political Interests

Critical to the New Labour project has been collaboration with the Democrats in America, and the Australian Labour Party, but not with the Centre-Left European socialist parties. In the summer of 1993 Blair and Brown visited America, a trip arranged by the British embassy. There they met Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserved, who recommended that the Bank of England should set the interest rates in the UK. This was put into practice four years later when they gained power. Blair, and many of the other leading figures of New Labour – Gordon Brown, Ed Balls, David Miliband, Mo Mowlam, Patricia Hewitt and Tessa Blackstone, amongst others, had extensive transatlantic connections. They studied at American Universities, and/or worked for American companies.
Robin Ramsay, Lobster’s editor, has noted that New Labour represent American interests, and those of the British Foreign Office, determined to preserve both the ‘special relationship’ with the US and British commercial interests overseas. Blair himself stated as much in a speech he gave to Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

‘The Americans have made it clear they want a special relationship with Europe, not with Britain alone. If we are to be listened to seriously in Washington or Tokyo, or the Pacific, we will often be acting with the rest of Europe … The real patriotic case, therefore, for those who want Britain to maintain its traditional global role, is for leadership in Europe … the Labour government I hope to lead will be outward-looking, internationalist and committed to free and open trade, not an outdate and misguided narrow nationalism’.

The Primacy of the Financial Sector over Manufacturing

The privatisation and deregulation of the economy under Mrs Thatcher resulted in British companies having the largest overseas investments after the United States. The Blairites supported continued American power and international hegemony because it offered the best global protection to British commercial interests. Manufacturing industry and the public sector became merely special interest groups, which were simply taken for granted and ignored. Gavyn Davies in his comments supporting an independent Bank of England stated that the ‘one quarter of the economy that is affected by the exchange rate’ – in other words, manufacturing, could not be allowed to ‘take precedence over the inflation target’. In others, it should not prevent interest rates being kept high to attract capital to London.

A major part of the New Labour programme was the promotion of the interests of the City of London. The first draft of the Labour Party policy document, Meet the Challenge Make the Change: A New Agenda for Britain by a committee chaired by Bryan Gould stated in its section on finance:

‘The concentration of power and wealth in the City of London is the major cause of Britain’s economic problems’. It further argued that Britain’s economic policies had been for too long ‘dominated by City values and run in the interests of those who hold assets rather than those who produce’.

Seven years later, however, when New Labour had become dominant, the power of the City was seen as a source of economic strength. Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle, in their book The Blair Revolution, published in 1996, claimed that

‘Britain can boast of some notable economic strengths – for example, the resilience and high internationalisation of our top companies, our strong industries like pharmaceuticals, aerospace, retaining and media; the pre-eminence of the City of London.’

The Blind Trusts, Labour Finance and Industry Group and Commercial Donors as Alternative Funding Sources to Traditional Membership Fees and Union Contributions

Tim Pendry, another contributor to Lobster, has described his experience with the Labour Finance and Industry Group and its use by Labour to construct an alternative source of funding from the trade unions and constituency activists. He considers that the party deliberately constructed an opaque and highly centralised funding system. The idea was that this would remove the party’s reliance on its traditional supporters, who as a demographic were considered to be aging and declining. The constituency system was believed to be costly and impossible to police. Moreover, it was vulnerable to being captured by the activists, who would make the party once more unelectable. The funds raised could be used by the Party to fund the kind of mass marketing that the Tories had achieved with Saatch and Saatchi. This policy was to result in the scandalous creation of a series of blind trusts. Pendry notes that the scandals surrounding New Labour and business came from their complete ignorance of the Puritanical ethics of the business community. He considered that many business leaders were horrified by the type of conduct that was considered acceptable in politics. Pendry wrote this in 2006. After the near collapse of western Capitalism under Goldman Sachs, Lehmann Brothers and the other major banks, these comments now seem somewhat ironic. Pendry himself has strong affection for the members of the Labour Finance and Industry Group. He describes them as decent, clubbable people, and notes that they themselves tended to be very much Old Labour – Gordon Brown, rather than Tony Blair. The result of the current parties’ reliance on funding from rich donors has resulted in the membership of both Labour and Tories plummeting. He estimated that Labour had about 200,000 members, while the Conservatives are around 300,000. The Conservative parliamentary leadership has also had problems recently with the apparent contempt with which it holds its members. Yesterday Cameron delivered a speech stating that grassroots Conservatives were highly valued by the party. This followed previous comments by senior party figures describing them as ‘swivel-eyed loons’.

Conclusion: Labour as Centre-Right Pary; Alienation of Working Class

The result of all this is that the Labour party has been transformed from a Centre-Left to Centre-Right party, keen to promote Neo-Liberal economic policies and distance itself from its roots in the 19th and early 20th century trade union movement. The result has been the gradual erosion under Labour of worker’s rights and the encroachment of the market through the Private Finance Initiative. Apart from the continued legacy of Mrs. Thatcher’s destruction of Britain’s manufacturing economy, the British working class has felt disenfranchised and alienated. A minority of its White members have been turning to more extreme nationalist organisations, such as UKIP, which are perceived as far more receptive to their interests.

Sources

Simon Matthews, ‘Our Leader’, in Lobster 48, Winter 2004, 34-5.

Tim Pendry, ‘The Labour Finance and Industry Group: A Memoir’, Lobster 51, Summer 2006, 3-9.

Robin Ramsey, ‘Contamination, the Labour Party, Nationalism and the Blairites’, Lobster 33, Summer 1997, 2-9.

A Note on Lobster

I’ve described Lobster as a conspiracy magazine, which makes it sound like one of those magazines devoted to insane, and frequently dangerous theories about secret governing elites like the Freemasons, Jews and now Reptoid aliens from the Pleiades. It’s not. It’s devoted to what its founder and editor, Robin Ramsey, describes as ‘parapolitics’. This is the study of politics as affected and influenced by genuine covert groups, such as funding lobbies, think tanks and the intelligence and security services. It bases its material on published studies and memoirs from the various groups involved, newspaper articles, and the personal experience of its contributors. It’s also on the web, and has an archives of some articles on-line.