I’m afraid I haven’t posted much over the past few days as most of its been about conflict in Gaza, and there’s just so much coming out about it that I really can’t keep up. I have, however, noticed the anti-left, anti-Palestinian bias of certain news outlets and organisations, such as the New Culture Forum and the Lotus Eaters and the appearance of the current head of the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simon, to tell everyone that the protests against Israel and its barbarity towards the Palestinians is just ‘Israelophobia’. I think he’s written a book of that title, telling everyone that hostility to Israel is simply a matter of anti-Semitic prejudice.
Er, no. No, it isn’t. Israel’s critics, like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker et al, as Jews are naturally extremely well-informed about Jewish history and the history and vile politics of the Israeli state. Greenstein and Walker both took the side of the Palestinians through their own research, not out of some pre-existing self-hatred or hostility towards the Jewish people. In the case of Tony, I think it started when, as a schoolboy, he took the side of the Palestinians in a school debate about Israel and the Palestinians. And what he found and read convinced him that the Palestinians were right, and had been unjustly persecuted. Jackie came to supporting the Palestinians through protesting against apartheid in South Africa. She was asked by a friend why she protested against it in South Africa, but not in Israel. Like Tony, Jackie’s very definitely Jewish, the daughter of a Russian Jewish father and a Black America Civil Rights worker mother. Her partner’s Jewish, and her daughter goes to a Jewish school. Many of the books against the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians are written by Jews or by gentiles, who support them. One of the books I’ve got on it has the title Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. This discusses not only the brutality of Israeli colonisation, but also the contempt the founders of Israel had for diasphora Jewry, which Tony also discusses in several of his articles. There are also Israeli human rights organisation campaigning against the oppression of the Israeli state. These include B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence. The latter is an organisation of ex-Israeli soldiers, which exists to talk about the atrocities they have seen and committed. As for Muslims, the impression I had is that they are very well informed about the Israeli state’s persecution of their coreligionists. The closure of mosques, for example, by the authorities is covered in their equivalent of parish magazines in a way that isn’t done elsewhere.
Hamas are a bunch of terrorist murderers, but the Israeli response has been massively disproportionate and constitutes war crimes in its turn. Also, support for the Palestinians does not equal support for Hamas and support for terrorism, despite the impression given by some of the marchers on the pro-Palestinian protests. There is a question of bias and spin in all this. The Muslim marchers on one protest were supposed to have carried Hamas flags and the black flag of jihad. But Mike didn’t see any evidence of this in the pictures the right produced of this march, and I can’t say I’ve seen any either. Some prats do seem to have been waving the jihad flag around, and there are accusations that some of the participants in another protest were chanting ‘jihad’. It’s certainly possible, but doesn’t mean that everyone there marching wants another genocidal war in the Middle East.
But the right is definitely spinning this as the evil anti-Semitic socialist left allying with the anti-Semitic Palestinians and Muslims to attack the completely innocent and virtuous state of Israel. Muslims and anti-racist activists have already commented on how British Muslims are seen as ‘the enemy within’, and it’s being spread to include the socialist left. One of the right-wing news channels – I’ve forgotten which one – had some pundit on who claimed that if Israel went, the West would be next. And a few days ago GB News had on an academic from a Jewish university in Vienna, who lived in the last Jewish area in the Austrian capital. This gentleman declared the present wave of Muslim unrest over Israel to be ‘the end of Jewish life in the West’.
He gave as his reasons the security threats to European Jewish institutions, such as synagogues and schools, incidents of anti-Semitic abuse and violence and the statistic that 70 per cent of French Jews would like to leave France. I find that hard to believe. No details were given of who carried out the poll, how reliable it was and the bias or otherwise in the questions asked. Back in the 90s and Noughties there were concerns about the way the French state seemed keener to clamp down on cases of Islamophobia than against anti-Semitism. The Financial Times explained it was because there was far more prejudice against Muslims then against Jews. Far more French people considered Jews fellow countrymen than Muslims. The lack of action didn’t come from indifference or hostility to Jews, but from the opposite: the French people, as a whole, were not anti-Semitic and regarded the Jews as part of themselves. Muslims, on the other hand, were far more vulnerable.
The academic was also worried about the loss of Jewish influence. There were only 400,000 Jews in Britain compared to 4 million Muslims. As the Muslim population increased, so would their influence amongst politicos. This is a fair point, but the size of the Islamic population didn’t stop the right-wing British establishment and that part of the Jewish community that considers itself the official leaders and spokespeople for British Jews, the Chief Rabbinate, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Chronicle and associated grotty journalists running a very successful smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn. And whatever some fanatics scream, the severely normal British public aren’t anti-Semitic. Tony demolished this claim with some stats a few years ago showing that the overwhelming majority of Brits either had a positive view of their Jewish comrades, or didn’t think they were either particularly good or evil. The real anti-Semites were very much in a minority at 7 per cent. I dare say it’s gone up since, but almost certainly not as much as the right would like us all to believe.
And it looks very, very much like shabby fearmongering. Round about the time of the invasion of Iraq, the Spectator published a glowing review of a nasty little novel set later this century. In fact, I think it may have been set about now, in the ’20s. This imagined a future France, where the remains of the socialist left had united with militant Islam to seize power. France was now a Muslim state, and there was a new Jewish Holocaust underway.
And then when Corbyn was leader of the Labour party we had rather excitable individuals making the same exaggerated claims. Various celebs on the internet were tweeting to each other that it was like 1930s Germany all over again. Which it definitely wasn’t. If it had been, they’d have been in absolutely no position to complain about it on the net, nor would they be free to pursue careers or run businesses. And the only public performances they’d be allowed to do would be those designed to humiliate them. There were also various TV executives declaring that British Jews weren’t safe before departing for Israel. I have a feeling that one those saying that actually returned to Britain a few years ago, but I might be wrong.
I don’t see any of that. We had a protest in Bristol against the situation in Gaza. This was just for peace, with no racial denunciations. I haven’t come across any reports of Jewish Bristolians being abused or molested. There was Palestinian embassy in Bristol’s Old City, but I haven’t heard anything about that for years and there hasn’t, as far as I know, been any Muslim demonstrations here calling for the Jewish community’s death. What I do see is a temporary crisis, which certainly has the possibility to get much worse, the racial aspects of which are being grossly exaggerated in order to scare Jews and ordinary Brits into supporting Israel and against the socialist left.
Okay, this story came up in my internet news feed about half an hour ago but has since vanished, so I can only tell you what little I saw of it. Yeah, I know, I could google it, but I’m afraid I’ve come down with a bad case of skivalitis, as we called it at school. If anyone’s really interested, I will chase it up, though.
Last week I noticed that the Daily Mail was proudly boasting that it had recruited a brilliant new columnist, whom everyone was talking about. This was the blonde buffoon, Boris Johnson. Well, Johnson used to be editor of the Spectator, and before that a Times columnist before he got the heave-ho for making things up. Which pretty much describes the content of all of his speeches. Everything he’s ever said as Prime Minister was a fib. Now in disgrace, he’s returned to journalism and the Heil was delighted to have him. His first article for the wretched rag was ‘Leftists May Sneer – But the Titan Sub Crew Were Heroes Pushing Back the Frontiers of Science’. With all due respect to the victims of that terrible accident and their families, no, they weren’t scientists pushing at the frontiers of human knowledge. They were tourists going down to see the wreck of one of the most notorious maritime disasters in history. They weren’t oceanographers or marine biologists, going down to study the ocean depths and its creatures, if any are down that deep. That doesn’t make their deaths any less sad and deplorable, and I strongly take issue with some of the left wing commenters on the net, who seemed to see their deaths as a cause for celebration because they were millionaires. As for the jibe at ‘leftists’, well, not everybody on the left shared that attitude, and Bozo’s comment just looks like another cheap dig. Which is what you basically expect from him.
But now, it seems, Bozo has got himself into trouble because a watchdog committee has ruled that he broke parliamentary rules by taking the job. Quite why this should affect Boris, when so many MPs also have very well remunerated second jobs, I don’t know. But it has. But I’m not complaining – the more Johnson digs himself into trouble, the better.
Unfortunately, despite Johnson’s greed, idleness, incompetence and unrestrained braggadocio, Richard Tice seems impressed with him. Look at some of the videos on YouTube, it seems that he wants to invite him to join Reform. There have been mutterings about some kind of alliance between Mogg, Johnson and Farage, which is enough to put most people off.
Earlier this afternoon I posted a piece about an article by Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, about how there were too many people off sick when they were tens of thousands of jobs going vacant. Some other politico, I don’t know if it was one of the Tories or Starmer’s crew, has also announced that they intend to retrain those currently off sick to fill those vacancies. I’m certain they were talking about the ill, rather than the unemployed, though the article revealed the same persecutory attitude the Tories have towards them. I’m afraid I really don’t know much about the current official processes governing the long term sick and disabled. I’m therefore grateful to Trev, one of the great commenters on this blog for the information he’s posted about the treatment of the sick and disabled wishing to claim benefits And one of the things that is very clear is that they are expected to look for suitable work. Which shows that, if Nelson really was talking about the sick rather than the unemployed, he’s talking massive nonsense. Even if Nelson was talking about the unemployed, some of my arguments against the policy still stands. And Trev’s comments still show the persecutory and vindictive nature of Tory policy towards the sick and disabled.
Trev writes
‘I didn’t know there still was any Sickness Benefits. There are no Sick Notes anymore because the Tories scrapped them. You have to get a Fit Note that says what you can do not what you can’t do, then apply for ESA (Employment Support Allowance) which replaced Income Support, then once in receipt of ESA you are still required to look for work if placed in the ESA Work Related Activity Group. People are routinely informed that their ESA has been stopped and the DWP have decided they are now fit for work. I have health problems but I think it better to stay on legacy JSA instead of bothering to apply for a Fit Note and ESA because once lost I can never get my JSA back again and the conditions on legacy JSA are more favourable than UC.
Many of the sick or disabled who are claiming Benefits are forced to look for work and apply for jobs, as well as attending Government schemes such as the Health and Work Programme run by Reed in Partnership aka “Better Working Futures”. I’m currently on that scheme and they are always texting you with “Hot Jobs”, which could be virtually anything, a part-time Cleaner 2 hours a week or a full-time factory/warehouse job involving shift work and heavy lifting. Everyone who is sent there is out of work but has some ailment, illness, health condition, physical or mental. One week they sat us down in a classroom and showed us a video of a man born without limbs, then we had to write a list of things in our lives that we feel grateful for. Last week I was in a class being taught how to write a cover letter for a job application. It lasts for 15 months and is compulsory if referred by the Jobcentre.
P. S. If you have a health condition or disability that prevents you from leading a normal daily life such as needing help to get dressed, cook a meal or move around, for example, you can apply for PIP (Personal Independence Payments) of varying levels and amounts, and which replaced DLA (Disability Living Allowance). I don’t know about how that relates to work requirements or jobsearch, might depend on whether you’re also getting ESA and are in the WRAG or not. And the Tories said their Welfare Reforms were intended to simplify the Benefits system! They lied.
Oh and I almost forgot, there’s also the much dreaded WCA (Work Capability Assessments) whereby a private company gets public money to find sick & disabled people capable of working. I’m not sure which particular group it applies to, ESA or PIP. WCA was introduced by New Labour.’
My best wishes to Trev and to everyone else struggling with this vile system designed to humiliate and degrade some of the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Race (New York: Basic Books 2013)
Thomas Sowell is himself a Black American intellectual. A former Marxist, he wrote an excellent book on Marxism which I’ve used on this blog, before crossing the floor to become a conservative. According to the blurb on the back flap, he is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow for Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. That’s the same Milton Friedman, I presume, who backed General Pinochet’s Fascist regime in Chile because only a Fascist regime could introduce the free market reforms and abolition of the welfare state Friedman wanted against the wishes of the workers. The same Milton Friedman whose monetarism was considered so daft by economics lecturers in the 1970s that they simply didn’t bother discussing or refuting them. The same Friedman who caused consternation in Tory ranks in the late 1980s when he announced that his policies were a failure.
Race and IQ in the views of the Progressives
The book is a survey of official attitudes to race, intelligence and social, economic and intellectual achievement from the Progressive era around the close of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th up to the late 20th century and today. These two periods had markedly different attitudes towards race, and especially its supposed links to intelligence. During the Progressive era, senior academics, intellectuals, politicians and policy makers followed the social Darwinist dogmas of their day and believed that race defined intelligence. They believe in a racial hierarchy of peoples, with Nordic Whites at the top, southern Europeans below them, Black Africans below them and right at the bottom aboriginal Australians. This led to brutal, callous and genocidal attitudes towards race. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, declared that ‘we should not be sentimental about the gradual extinction of inferior races’. They were particularly worried about the decline in superior Nordic immigrants from Europe and mass immigration from the supposedly inferior peoples from southern Europe. Hence they were keen to impose legislation limiting the arrival of the latter. They were also afraid that intellectual inferior Whites from the lower orders would also outbreed their more intelligent social superiors, and so imposed legislation providing for their sterilisation and isolation. These men weren’t cranks. They included leading academics from America’s best universities, and politicians like American presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Most of the examples Sowell gives were on the political left. They believed in conservation, state intervention, publicly owned utilities and strong trade unions. He does, however, mention that over here in Britain eugenics’ supporters included Ernest Beveridge, H.G. Wells and Conservatives like Winston Churchill.
The American authorities thus initiated a programme of IQ testing, the results of which do appear to show that they were right about the average IQ of certain racial groups at the time. But many of the groups whose IQ scores were low have gone on to achieve considerable social and economic success. Blacks had an average IQ of 85, but other immigrant groups like Greeks, various Slavic peoples also had IQs in the low 80s, while Spanish immigrants had an average IQ, on these tests, of 77. These low-scoring peoples also included eastern European Jews, which is astonishing given the massive uplift of the Jewish community and their prominence in academia. As for the Chinese, who believers in the Bell Curve consider are superior to Whites in intelligence, they were found to have an IQ of 98. Interestingly, Blacks from the northern US scored higher on IQ tests than southern Whites. This racist ideology had a direct effect on Black employability. Under Wilson, various state departments, such as the post office, began to sack their Black workers. But not all of those who believed in the link between race and IQ were monsters. One psychologist stated that he took 3 sessions with a child before administering the test. He believed the children he saw were more intelligent than the tests showed. he therefore spent time getting them used to him. In the first three sessions he let them play, drawing on the blackboard, making things with clay. It was at the fourth session he administered the test. Using this technique, the children’s test scores went up by 8 points. This psychiatrist still believed that this was a small amount, but it is roughly half of the 15 per cent average difference between Black and White IQs. The link between IQ and race was later discredited when another psychiatrist issued damning criticisms against it, one of which was that the tests were not often not administered in a language the subjects, often immigrants, understood. The same psychiatrist also did not believe that Blacks were incapable of being educated, but thought that they could achieve much more given better teaching methods.
General Rise in IQ
He also notes that IQs generally are rising, and that no-one really knows the true range of the Black IQ, or even that of the human race as a whole. The reason why average IQs have always remained at 100 is that they’ve been periodically renormed to keep 100 as the average level. If they weren’t, and psychiatrists continued using the same standards, then the average Black IQ would 104. As for the range of Black intelligence, he cites the example of a nine year old girl, who by one set of tests had an IQ of 140, and 200 by another set. Unfortunately, his scepticism towards racial differences in IQ does not extend to the Bell Curve, whose authors and work he defends. He notes that they state in the book that there isn’t enough evidence to decide one way or another if IQ is affected by race.
But IQ alone does not explain why some groups outperform others, even when their intelligence is exactly the same. For example, Chinese with an IQ of 100 perform at the same level in jobs, education and so on, as Whites with IQs of 120 or so.
Culture and Historic Environment as the Determining Factors in Ethnic Skills and Performance
Sowell believes that the performance of ethnic groups depends on the environment in which these groups historically lived and their traditional culture. These create skills which have allowed minority groups the world over to achieve prominence in business and academia, such as the Germans in Latvia and Bohemia, the Jews in eastern Europe, and the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia. These groups have often prospered despite immense persecution, like the Jews. For example, Italian immigrants to the US and Australia were dirt poor. But they always repaid their debts, hence a separate bank was set up in California, the Bank of Italy, was set up to cater to them. This bank eventually became the Bank of Italy. At the same time there was a marked disparity between the achievements of Jewish and Italian kids at school. The two groups lived in the same areas and attended the same schools. But Jews did much better than Italians. Why? Sowell puts this down to different cultural attitudes towards education. Even the poorest Jews had a respect for learning, while there was a hostility to it in the Italian south, from which many of the latter migrants came. When there Italian government introduced compulsory schooling, there were riots, and attacks on teachers and schools. He takes issue with some of these groups now being described as ‘privileged’. A survey of different races in Toronto declared that the Japanese were the most privileged people in the city. But the Japanese owe their success to their own efforts, not privilege. They were also subjected to restrictive legislation and were interned during the Second World War for far longer in Canada than in the US. He is also highly sceptical that racism accounts for the poor performance of American Blacks. While they’re often the last to be hired, and the first to be fired, the next in line for sacking are Whites. Asians are the last to go, and perform better generally than Whites, even in White owned companies. But this is not mentioned in discussions about race, as it would cast doubt about the poor performance of Blacks being solely due to White racial prejudice.
White Racism as the Cause for Black Marginalisation
And it’s White racial prejudice which is the dominant explanation for Blacks lagging behind Whites and the rest of society today. This began with Gunnar Murdal’s 1944 book, An American Dilemma, which claimed that this was due to ‘confused and contradictory’ attitudes among Whites. But Sowell considers this an insufficient explanation, as American Blacks made their greatest progress, both professionally, economically and educationally, during the period before the Civil Rights Act, when racism and overt discrimination was far more acute. He also describes how White racial attitudes changed over time. For example, from 1840 to 1890 some areas were remarkably racially tolerant. In these cities, Whites and Blacks lived in the same areas. As time went on, Blacks not only exercised their right to vote, but also were elected themselves in areas where the majority of voters were White. There were no zoning regulations and the communities weren’t segregated. Sowell believes this was because the Black communities that had moved north in this period had become acculturated and had the same values and standards of behaviour as their White neighbours. This changed with mass Black migration from the south. Sowell draws on observers to the south, like Alexis de Toqueville, Frederick Olmsted and others, to argue that there is a common southern culture, shared by Blacks and Whites, and ultimately coming from the British immigrants that settled those areas. This culture rejects education in favour of aggressive masculinity., The new Black migrants had none of cultural values of the previous Black arrivals,. Crime rates shot up, dismaying the traditional Black citizens as well as Whites. As a result, these communities introduced zoning laws segregating the two colours.
As time went on, the Progressives called themselves liberals, and the explanation for Black underachievement and poverty changed from intelligence to White racism. The solution for these ills, as proposed by the intellectuals, is multiculturalism. Blacks are to be given greater access to academic places through preferential treatment that allows them to get into universities with lower grades than White applicants. At the same time, the features of Black culture that are holding the Black community back are either excused or simply denied as well as the racist attacks by Black gangs on Whites and Asians. Multiculturalism, according to Sowell, is not only not working, it is actually positively harmful.
Affirmative Action Holding Blacks Back Educationally
The book argues that, contrary to the claims made by some educationalists, there doesn’t need to be a ‘critical mass’ of Blacks in a class to get the bright Black students to do better. What works instead is when bright blacks are put in with Whites at the same intellectual level. As for university admissions, much harm is being done through mismatching Black applicants with the wrong colleges. Elite American universities are giving places to Black students, who without such preferential placements would have gone instead to second tier universities. These students find it difficult to keep up, and drop out. The second tier universities, denied a pool of applicants from these aspiring Blacks, offer places instead to Blacks, who would have gone to third tier institutions. And these two drop out, all the way down the line. This is a controversial assertion, and has been argued against, though the professors doing so have not made their research available to scrutiny by others. The book instead to the academic results achieved by the University of California when they dropped giving such preferential placements. There were drops in admissions at the some campuses, but of the Blacks who attended, more passed with better grades. He also argues from the example of Amhurst College that teaching Black history and insisting on Black culture also isn’t necessary for Blacks to get ahead. Amhurst was a Black only college that sent a small but significant number of students on to Stanford. Alumni from the college have said that they were taught Black history as it affect America, like slavery and abolition. But beyond that, it wasn’t taught and there was no interest in it. They said they knew about as much about Africa as they knew about Finland.
He also criticises such academic preferential programmes on the grounds that they don’t work for the poor who really need them. Instead the places offered go to members of the upper classes of the groups targeted. In America, that means the children of lawyers and businessmen. And it’s the same with the Indian version of affirmative action.
The Decline of Black Communities Following the ‘White Racism’ Explanation
Sowell also gets angry about how multiculturalism has led to the decline of life in Black communities. Anything done by Whites for Blacks is immediately suspected of being for some sinister, racist purpose. When a subsidized housing project was built in Harlem in the 1960s, writer James Baldwin declared that it showed how much Whites hated Blacks. That was why people were urinating in the lifts, smashing anything they could, and fornicating in the playground. Sowell argues that there was never a time when this would have been acceptable, and it didn’t occur before the ’60s and White racism became the explanation for everything. He cites the memoirs of other former residents of Harlem, who say that when they lived there, none of this vandalism and loutish behaviour occurred. He cites Theodore Dalrymple, one of the columnists in the Spectator, who declared that the same destructiveness is found among lower class Whites in Britain. They can’t blame racism, so it must come from a common attitude of resentment fostered by the post-60s intelligentsia.
He also argues that most Blacks were against the race riots of the 60s, citing polling data. One of the polls showed that 58 per cent of Blacks thought the riots were harmful for them. But the rioting was excused by the media, which claimed that the anger that fuelled it was quite rightly felt by all Blacks. Sowell is concerned and angry at the way Black culture is being dragged down to the lowest common denominator of rioters, criminals and vandals. He suggests that Black underperformance in schools comes from a resentment of intelligent, academically able Blacks by other students, who will attempt to stop them from achieving. And the same attitude, according to Dalrymple, exists among White Brits. From my own experiences at school forty years ago, I think Sowell has a point. There is a resentment among some Blacks and some Whites, not all, against anybody, who seems to be doing better than them, and they will bully them. For Sowell, this clearly harms the Black community when middle class Blacks feel compelled to emulate the poor behaviour of their less-achieving classmates.
Multiculturalism Preventing Blacks from Acquiring Social Skills Leading to Achievement
This attitude prevents Black Americans from acquiring the same civic qualities and skills that other groups have in their progress upward through society. For example, German Jews were highly acculturated, compared to more recent immigrants from eastern Europe. They took it upon themselves to educate and uplift them. As a result, eastern European Jews from Romania and elsewhere were told to learn English, speak without vulgarity ‘and learn the uses of soap’. Two Black newspapers in one of America’s northern cities advised Black arrivals not to dump their rubbish in the yard or the passage by their houses, watch their language, and not to talk too loudly on the tramcars. In other words, to act couth. Sowell doesn’t mention it, but similar attitudes were impressed on the British working class during the 19th and early 20th century as part of the culture of working class respectability.
Again, there’s a similar example from Britain. In the 1980s or 1990s, according to the Independent, the head of education in one of the northern towns had lost her job following accusations of racism by the Pakistani community. She’d been concerned at the way they took their children out of schools to send to Pakistan for three months at a time. This was damaging their educations. But the Pakistani community denounced her as racist, and had her sacked. It was over a decade before the council realised she was right and had the courage to reverse the policy.
Multiculturalism Creating Anti-White Racism and Violence
And then there’s the racial animosity produced by multiculturalism and its attitude that all Black America’s problems are due to White racism. This has led to racist mob attacks by Blacks against Whites and Asians, but they aren’t reported. In one, where a gang of Blacks attacked a White girl and 10 others, the cops when they arrived weren’t interested in taking down their statements or particulars, but told them simply to go home. As for a girl left bleeding from a punch, they laughed at her and joked ‘White girl bleed a lot’, which became the title of a book arguing that there was more violence by Blacks against Whites than the reverse. When these attacks occur, the race of the attackers is never identified. They are just unspecified ‘youths’. And if the details are given, then racism as a motive is both denied and justified. After a White woman was gangraped in Central Park by Blacks, a New York Times hack declared that racism wasn’t a cause, but it was part of their motivation as resentment against their treatment by White society. At the same time, a White academic has redefined racism so that it depends on power and privilege, as a way of denying Blacks can be racist.
Something very much like this has happened in Britain. Back at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one, Whites were briefly the ethnic group suffering most racist assaults. And it was noted that the number of racist murders of Whites was nearly at the same level as the White racist murder of Blacks. And then there were the Asian grooming gangs, were allowed to get away with their predations for 20 years because the police and authorities were afraid of being accused of racism. And there have been the same accusations of the media cover-up of racist assaults and murders of Whites.
Another White academic felt that it was only right that young Whites should be denied places under academic preference schemes, considering how he had benefited from White privilege. Sowell states that he was therefore punishing someone younger, who had nothing to do with it, for something he himself had done. He makes the point that these decision are not about abstract people, but affect real individuals.
Slavery
He also discusses slavery, which is now held to be simply a case of Whites enslaving Blacks. But it has existed all over the world, from the days of the Roman Empire onwards. Before the arrival of Europeans, Africans enslaved other Africans, and there were more slaves in India than in the whole of the USA, and slavery was also extensive in China and southeast Asia. White Europeans were also enslaved by the Barbary pirates. Before the technology existed to transport slaves en masse, most civilisations enslaved people of their own race. As for racist lynchings, fewer Blacks were lynched in American history than Armenians were killed by Turks, or Ibo tribesmen by Nigerians in one year.
The Racism Industry and Its Assault on Business
He is also critical of what he terms the race industry and particularly the American equivalent of the Equal Opportunities Commission/ Equalities and Human Rights Commission. This prosecutes companies for not employing the correct number of ethnic employees according to demographic statistics, leading to long, expensive cases costing millions of dollars which drag out over the years from court to court. And this is despite no individual actually claiming they were subjected to racism by that corporation. Few companies can afford this process, and so they settle out of court. While this technically means that no offence has been made, it is taken by the department as an admission of guilt and a victory for them.
And what also infuriates Sowell is that none of the intellectuals, who ever pushed these policies, whether it is the racism and genetic determinism of the Progressive era or contemporary multiculturalism, ever has to take the consequences of their views. But academics, news people, politicians and educators will pay the price if they speak out against these orthodoxies. But intellectuals, meanwhile, promote these views with impunity, seeing themselves as the anointed on the side of the angels.
Sowell’s Right-Wing Bias
The book has a clear conservative bias. It’s no accident that Sowell marks out the Progressives as the promoters of social Darwinism, despite the same views being held by the right. Big businessmen during the Silver Age of the 19th century used social Darwinist arguments to oppose welfare and safety at work legislation. It was no use passing these laws, they argued, because the poor would never really benefit and would instead become a burden on society while outbreeding their brighter, more successful social superiors. But American conservatives are now using past racism to discredit anything left-wing. Previous generations of left-wingers were supposedly racist, so you shouldn’t back their policies today. It’s pure guilt by association. He likewise blames the expansion of the welfare state for the decline of the Black family, and argues that Black employment fell as a result of minimum wage laws passed in the 1930s. The motive of some of those arguing for them was that they were needed to prevent Chinese workers undercutting Whites. But this did happen, and resulted in race riots against the Chinese in 1909 in Britain. Then a number of companies sacked their White workers and replaced them with Chinese, causing the riots and racist attacks on Chinese people. After this, the firms sacked the Chinese workers and rehired the Whites. As for minimum wage laws today, these are desperately needed whether the workers are White, Black, Brown, Yellow or whatever. Without them the mass poverty we’re already seeing thanks to neoliberalism and the war in Ukraine will become particularly acute.
Decline of Marriage Not Due to Welfare State
I also disagree with his statement that the decline of marriage and the two-parent family among Black Americans is due to the welfare state or its expansion. I’m sure he’s right that this occurred in America about the same time as LBJ passed the welfare legislation of the late 60s, but as Sowell himself says, correlation is not causation. In Britain the marriage rate declined as a result of the sexual revolution of the 60s, but only really got going in the 1970s,, several decades after the introduction of the welfare state by Clement Attlee’s Labour government in 1948. The decline of marriage as an institution might have been aided by the socially liberal legislation passed by Roy Jenkins in the 1960s, which made divorce much easier, but I think it has far more to do with a changing attitude towards sexual morality than greater welfare provision. At least over here in Britain.
Racial Tensions Increasing
But I do think he has a point about multiculturalism and the way it is leading to greater racial tensions. At one point in the book he states that in the 30s, 40s and 50s Whites would go into Harlem for entertainment and parties. This rings true, if only because this was the heyday of some of the great Jazz musicians and their orchestras – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Howlin’ Wolf, Duke Ellington. Yeah, I know, some of these were really in New Orleans, while Howling Wolf was in Chicago. At the end of a good evening’s fun, people were even able to sleep in Central Park unmolested. I believe that as well, as I’ve read interviews with various writers – I think one of them was veteran journalist of UFOs and the weird John Keel – who have done so.
And I do believe that attributing all of Black America’s problems to racism is making the situation worse. Note here that Sowell doesn’t deny racism existed or exists now. He just doesn’t believe that it’s the ultimate cause of Black America’s dire situation, not when other groups have suffered the same persecution, started out with the same low IQ scores, but have managed to rise and prosper like Jews, Asians and the Chinese. And here the book becomes a warning. Throughout history the resentment of the success of one ethnic group by the others, from the Czechs’ resentment of the Sudetenland Germans, to the Chinese in southeast Asia and Malaya, the Indians and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and the Jews in eastern Europe, has resulted in terrible official persecution and ethnic cleansing. Here he could have added the White farmers in Zimbabwe, attacked, beaten and murdered by Robert Mugabe’s thugs. These tensions have been exacerbated by versions of affirmative action. This suggestion also contains another veiled criticism of socialism, as the resentments he criticise also apply to those at the bottom of society against those at the top, and he is very much against redistributive economics. But redistributive economics through a strong welfare state in Britain has meant that there hasn’t been the level of grinding poverty that there is in the US, where the living standards of some parts are worse than some developing countries. This may be one of the reasons why the crime rate here in Britain and Europe has traditionally been lower than the US. People traditionally haven’t been as desperate. Quite apart from the fact that if social tensions in America and Britain have got worse, it’s because of an increasing gap between the rich and everyone else, so that ordinary Americans and Brits don’t feel that the system is rewarding them as it should for their hard work.
Critical Race Theory as an Explanation for the Failure of Affirmative Action Programmes
Sowell states that these affirmative actions programmes were, in many cases, only supposed to be temporary. But they have always been renewed. We’ve had positive discrimination in Britain for forty years now, ever since riots of 1981/2. These were also supposed to be only temporary. I think the intention was that after Blacks gained proper demographic representation proportional to the White majority, the situation would become self-sustaining. The programmes could be discontinued because Blacks would no longer need such official help. But this hasn’t happened. Blacks still lag behind, and have been particularly hard hit by austerity and the banking crisis.
I think this is one reason why the radical left is pushing Critical Race Theory and White privilege, even though some of this is obvious nonsense. CRT holds that the level of racism is the same today as 100 years ago. It’s just better hidden. But I doubt that very, very much. At the same time, all Whites are racist and benefit from the privilege of having White skin. But this is also not true, as shown by the White vagrants you can see on the streets and the very fact that many of the BLM protesters were White. There is institutional racism, but I don’t think it can be held to be the source of all the Black community’s problems. And I do fear that the belief that White racism is responsible for Black poverty and marginalisation is just increasing racial tensions. CRT and White privilege seem to me to be a desperate attempt to explain why previous anti-racism policies haven’t worked, and making even more dubious claims. Sowell states that the supporters of multiculturalism never give any supporting evidence for their views, and are never asked for any. It’s just assumed they’re right. The Black Tory MP, Kemi Badenoch, has today been reported as stating that the concentration on race is resulting in greater segregation. She may well have a point.
Perhaps now’s the time that multiculturalism and its accusations of racism as the cause of Black poverty and marginalisation should be questioned.
According to today Torygraph, far-right Labour MP Neil Coyle has had the party whip withdrawn because of racist comments about the Chinese he made to a journalist at Stranger’s Bar in parliament. This left the press gentleman, who presumably is of Chinese descent, feeling unsafe. Well it’s all coming out now. Coyle, as Mike has reported, made disgusting remarks about Jewish Voice for Labour, tweeting that their members were communists with their own party they could ruin. This resulted in a complaint to Starmer from three very distinguished Jewish gents – Geoffrey Bindman, a Queen’s Counsel, Avi Shlaim, professor of Middle Eastern history at Oxford and a Mr Harold Immanuel. I’ve said in a previous post that Coyle’s disgusting comment was almost straight out of Hitler’s vile rantings. The Nazis attacked the SPD, the German socialist party, as Marxist, and with a disproportionately high Jewish members. The Jews in it were all conspiring to throw gentiles out and place it under Jewish dominance as part of their subversion of parliamentary democracy and their plot to take over Germany. I’ve been trying to find the exact quote to show how similar this accusation is Coyle’s. I haven’t been able to find it, unfortunately, but I have found others that are broadly similar. For example, in one of his speeches Hitler ranted
‘that wherever one looks one sees Jews. The whole of Germany is governed by Jews. It is a sandal that the German workers, whether with head or hand, let themselves be so harassed by the Jews. Of course, because the Jew has the money in his hands. The Jew sits in government and swindles and smuggles. When he has his pockets full again he drives the workers into confusion, so that again and again he finds himself at the helm, and we poor Germans put up with all that. He also spoke about Russia and who did all that? Only the Jews. Therefore, Germans, be united and fight against the Jews. Because they will gobble up our last crumbs. The lecturer’s concluding words: We shall carry on the struggle until the Jew has been removed from the Reich even if it seems like an insurrection or even to revolution.’
Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich (London: Penguin 1970) 41.
Mike has also pointed out how the Nazis identified the Jews with Marxism. This is absolutely correct, as another quote from the wretched man shows
‘Fate answered the question for me inasmuch as it led me to make a detached and exhaustive inquiry into Marxist teaching and the activities of the Jewish people in connection with it. The Jewish doctrine of Marxism repudiates the aristocratic principles of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of vigour and strength by numerical mass and its dead weight.’
Fest, Face of the Third Reich, 55.
And then there’s this quote from a 1933 speech by General Reichenau to a council of commanding officers baldly stating the party’s role in stamping out ‘Marxism’:
‘We must understand that we are in the midst of a revolution. What is rotten in the state must fall and it can only be brought down by terror. The party will proceed ruthlessly against Marxism. The army’s task is to order arms. No succour if any of the persecuted seek refuge with the troops.’
Fest, op. cit., 360.
Okay, let’s not exaggerate – Starmer and Coyle aren’t shooting Jews and Marxists or putting them in concentration camps. But he is smearing decent people, who are Jews and leftists, as anti-Semites and ‘Communists’ in order to purge them from the party and make it safe for nice, Zionist neoliberals. Who are the only people, including the only Jews, that are welcome in the party as they wish to mould it. And the rhetoric they are using is exactly that of Hitler and the Nazis. They are real anti-Semitic tropes.
But left-wing Jews don’t count. Certainly not, it appears, to comedian, writer and broadcaster David Baddiel, who has written a book, Jews Don’t Count, about the revival of anti-Semitism. This presumably includes Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as members and adherents of left-wing anti-Semitism. Because criticism of Israel for its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic, and not merely anti-Zionist. Looking through YouTube yesterday, I found that Baddiel had turned up on Spectator TV to talk about his book. Yeah, the Speccie, whose columnist ‘Taki’ has been described as an anti-Semite, and who wrote a piece in his column in the wretched magazine praising the Greek Chryse Aurea, ‘Golden Dawn’, bunch of Nazis. The group that beats up immigrants and asylum seekers, whose leader has, I believe, been banged up for the murder of a left-wing journo.
In fact the Spectator has been running stories about Socialist and Muslim anti-Semitism for some years now. Way back in 2004 there was a review by Frederick Raphael of a book, set in France in this decade, in which the remains of the French socialists has joined force with the Muslims to seize power. Together the two have launched a new Holocaust against the Jews. Yes, I know the left isn’t free of anti-Semitism, and it’s present in the Islamic community, but this is just anti-socialist, Islamophobic smears and propaganda. But one of the complaints by Jewish right-winger around that time was that the left was more concerned about racism towards Muslims than anti-Semitism. It seems Baddiel may also share this attitude. Well, as the Independent pointed out in its analysis of French racism at the same time, the French were more concerned about Islamophobia because it was far more prevalent than anti-Semitism. Something like 30 per cent of French people polled believed that Muslims weren’t really French, as compared with only five per cent who thought the same about Jews. And I dare say much the same is true over here as well.
David Baddiel is highly intelligent and a genuinely witty, funny bloke. He has a double first and a doctorate from Oxford. I can remember laughing fit to burst along with the rest of his audience when I heard him read from his book, Time For Bed, nearly two decades ago at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. But now it seems he’s another one who’s checked his brains at the door when it comes to anti-Semitism in Labour.
He made some excellent observations about Whoopi Goldberg’s ignorant remark that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. Unfortunately, his views about Corbyn and his supporters are also ignorant and prejudiced. Don’t bother with them.
As I’ve said before, I’ve mixed feelings about the imminent demise of GB News. It is a right-wing news network, deliberately founded to provide an ‘objective’ alternative to the ‘wet, woke’, BBC with Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunset Times, Economist and head of the board that runs the increasingly far-right Spectator, as its main man. Well, the channel has failed to attract viewers, advertisers have been put off by what they see as its racist bias, and its main broadcaster now is former chief of the Brexit party, Nigel Farage. Neil has jumped ship like the proverbial rats and it’s highly debatable how long the channel’s investors will put up with it before they finally pull the plug. Plus Rupert Murdoch is planning his own rival in the shape of TVTalk. This won’t have the financial problems of GB News, because it’s going to be financed through subsidies from the other parts of Murdoch’s empire of filth. Which means that Britain could be getting a version of Fox News, a channel so untrustworthy and which tells so many lies that researchers found that people who took no news at all were better informed that viewers of Fox. Salvador Dali once said that he was intent on cretinizing the public. Dali was immensely talented, but greedy, treacherous, perverted and a supporter of General Franco. He died some time in the late ’70s or ’80s. But his mission to turn the west into a region of dribbling morons is being carried on by Dirty Rupe.
On the other hand, GB News does provide a valuable service by inviting guests to speak, who have been blogged or silenced by the other channels and media for their controversial views. These include critics of postmodernism, including Critical Race Theory and the transgender ideology like Helen Pluckrose. Another critic of the transgender ideology is Graham Linehan, the writer of such comedy greats as Father Ted, the IT Crowd, Big Train and co-creator of Black Books. In this interview with Andrew Doyle on GB News’ Free Speech Nation, Linehan talks about his activism challenging the transgender movement. He’s motivated by fear and outrage at the way he feels vulnerable people, especially girls and young women, are being misled into believing themselves to be transgender and the immense harm that such needless transitioning is doing to their bodies and minds. The puberty blockers not only halt the transition to physical adolescence but there is also evidence that it stops the crucial brain development that comes with it. The people given these drugs therefore stay locked in an emotional childhood. The double mastectomies performed on transitioning women leave the patient with no sensation in their chests. The use of male sex hormones causes the womb to atrophy and adhere to other organs, so that the transmen given these hormones often have to have hysterectomies in their 20s. He argues that there is no respectable science backing up the claims of the transgender movement, and that what science there that supports some of their claims comes from very small studies, and so is scientifically highly debatable.
Linehan is also concerned about the way sexually predatory men may claim to be transwomen in order to get into a position to abuse women. One example of this is the recent Wi spa incident, where a Black woman complained about a naked man in the women’s area. Although this was dismissed by pro-transgender activists as a hoax, further witnesses have come forward. And the perpetrator himself had multiple convictions for indecent exposure as well as burglary. He also talks about the way the Girl Guides have extensive, rigorous rules protecting girls and women if men go away with them, but these rules are somehow relaxed with transwomen, as if all such people were equally safe and nice. He draws a comparison between the paedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. For nearly a century, the priesthood were a protected caste. As a result, paedophiles could join the Roman Catholic clergy confident that they would be protect from prosecution. Transwomen in his view now form a similarly protected class who are somehow held to be immune from any wrongdoing.
Linehan has, unsurprisingly, been accused of transphobia, which he denies. He states that there are transpeople who support him, and says he has met more transpeople through his activism than possibly his critics. He certainly does have his supporters in the trans community, several of whom have appeared on his YouTube channel, The Mess We’re In. As for the position that transwomen aren’t women, he points out that there are transwomen like Debbie Hayden and Blair White who don’t describe themselves as women. He believes that in the coming years we will see a growth in the number of detransitioners, former transpeople who have found that transitioning has not cured their problems with gender identity and expression.
Linehan also views the trans movement as acting against gay people, particularly lesbians. He has spoken about Pride rallies, where much has been said about trans people, but lesbian women aren’t mentioned. He views the trans ideology as a new kind of conversion therapy designed to stop children from being gay. In his view, homophobic parents are putting gender non-conforming children – kids who play or adopt the dress of the opposite sex – forward as transgender out of the fear that they may be gay. They can’t handle that, and it’s easier for them to accept that they are really people of the opposite sex stuck in the wrong body. He’s particularly convinced of this since he heard a joke going round the Tavistock clinic, one of the main transgender clinic, that if they continue transitioning people, soon there won’t be any lesbians left. He also talks about how many gay people are worried about the way the main gay organisations, such as Stonewall, have thrown all their weight behind the trans ideology. They are afraid that when the transgender craze finally breaks and the bankruptcy of the ideology is finally revealed, then ordinary gay people will suffer because of the strong support organisations like Stonewall gave it.
He also talks about the attempts trans rights activists make to silence their opponents. He describes the abuse gender critical feminists receive and the refusal of TRAs to engage in any kind of dialogue with them. He states that a group of gender critical peeps wrote a letter to one of the papers requesting their opponents to tone the abuse down a bit. Not only was this polite request refused, but one of the signatories, a gay man, suffered attempts to wreck his career simply for signing the letter. James Dreyfus, a gay actor, who has appeared in the comedy programmes The Thin Blue Line and Gimme, Gimme, has also suffered from this. Dreyfus has played the Master in one of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays. Yet his gender critical stance has resulted him being airbrushed out of a list of actors who have played the Doctor’s arch-enemy. Trans Rights Activists refuse to appear on programmes or platforms with people like Linehan, stating that they will only debate the issue with trans people. But there’s silence from them when transpeople come forward, who oppose the ideology. They don’t want to debate them either. Linehan has said that the reason one very prominent feminist academic has refused to debate the issue on television is because this woman would be unable to credibly explain how Eddie Izzard is a woman in the same way as people’s mothers.
And Linehan has also suffered for his gender critical feminist views. His own career is comparatively safe, though he mentions that there is one episode of the IT Crowd that the broadcasters tried to censor. This was about one of the characters falling in love with a transwoman. It’s held to be transphobic, but he points out that the joke is actually that the transwoman, although identifying as female, still behaves like a man. Which makes her the ideal partner for the other character, who is quite blokey. His wife, however, suffered far more from attempts to wreck her career, simply because she was married to him.
I realise that this is a very, very, emotive and controversial position, but I strongly believe critics of the transgender movement like Linehan, Kellie-Jay Minshull and others, absolutely deserve to be heard. What should matter in a debate like this is reasoned debate, backed by scientific fact. But I don’t see this coming from the Trans Rights Activists, many of whom, Linehan alleges, really aren’t transgender. Instead I just see abuse, including horrific death threats and violence. For examples of this, go to the Women Are Human site.
I am aware that there are supporters of the new transgender ideology who read this site. I appreciate their fears and their views, and really don’t want them to feel excluded or vulnerable. I repeat: I don’t want to see anyone persecuted, discriminated against or victimised because of their sexuality or sexual orientation. I appreciate that there are people for whom transitioning to the opposite sex may be the best treatment for their condition. The statistics for the number of transpeople murdered in Britain is actually very low – perhaps about three in the last decade or so. It’s far lower than the murders of other demographic groups. But I do understand transpeople’s fears of violence against them. Way back in the 1990s there was a small press magazine for transpeople, Aeon: The Magazine of Transkind. This covered issues such as anti-trans violence. I definitely do not, in any way, support such violence against anyone because of their gender presentationor identification. I am also acutely aware that transgender people are definitely not all paedophiles, rapists or sexual predators, and don’t want to see them tarred as such because of those that are.
But there are real issues surrounding women’s safety, their ability to participate in women’s sports against transwomen, who may have a physical advantage from their former male physique and development. I think there is a problem with psychologically vulnerable young people, particularly girls, being misdiagnosed and put on the track for transition when it is medically inappropriate. One of the other issues Linehan and the gender critical feminists raise is that there are all kinds of medical complications with gender reassignment. It is difficult, painful and expensive, and can lead to poor health for the rest of the life of the transman or -woman. They feel that people with gender dysphoria – the medical term for dissatisfaction with one’s gender identity – are being miss-sold gender reassignment surgery as a cure for this problem when it may not. There are problems with the TRA claim that without surgery, trans-identified people will commit surgery. However, some transpeople have committed surgery, possibly because they have found out that it is not a cure for their problems.
This has certainly happened. Years ago there was a report in the papers about the discovery of the body, police had initially believed, of a young woman. Forensic investigation, however, revealed that this individual was a transwoman. From what I remember of the case, she had drowned herself, leaving a suicide note that read that she now regretted transitioning and wished she could turn back. It’s a tragic case, and I hope whatever side of the debate you’re on, we all agree that everything should be done to stop transpeople, or anyone else, taking their lifefor whatever reason.
These are vital issues, but any criticism of the trans ideology is being blocked and silenced. North of the border the Maria Miller, a gender critical feminist, is being prosecuted for hate speech because she put up stickers saying ‘Scottish women won’t wheesht’ – a Scots term meaning ‘shut up’ or ‘be silent’ – and a looped ribbon which her opponents claim is a noose. The SNP have also gone further and banned demonstrations outside the Scots parliament after the mass demonstration by Scots women and their male supporters a week or so ago. Every attempt is being made to silence gender critical people through the accusations that they are hateful and transphobic. The LGB Alliance, which believes trans is a separate issue and the gay organisations should return to fighting for gay rights, has been accused of being a hate group.
Horrendous as GB News is, I believe it is performing a vital service by allowing people like Helen Pluckrose and Graham Linehan to speak. This is a service that should be done by the BBC as the country’s public service broadcaster. But it isn’t. Linehan has pointed out that the Corporation backs the trans ideology to the extent that one of its children’s programmes presented a White, heterosexual couple as a pair of lesbians on the grounds that the male partner was trans-identified. He has become so disgusted with the Beeb that he has joined the right-wingers demanding the cancellation of the license fee. As for himself, he and Doyle have crossed swords in the past, though the discussion on here is entirely amicable. Linehan states that the debate is tribal, and that before he got involved in it he believed that everyone on the right really was evil. But after coming into contact with them, he finds that they are not. It’s just a different view of the world. Well, in the case of some Tories, that’s definitely the case. But I still believe that Therese Coffey, Esther McVey, Iain Duncan Smith and their ilk, who have been persecuting the disabled, the unemployed and the poor are genuinely evil, and don’t simply have a different opinion. Not with the number of people their policies have killed.
Controversial as they are, programmes and videos like this are an argument in favour of GB News. I’ve no time for the standard media rhetoric about how neoliberalism is absolutely correct and anyone challenging it, like Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, are evil Trotskyites and communists. That’s all over the media, including supposedly left-wing papers like the Groan and the Mirror. But the culture war issues cut across political boundaries and are the best argument for the channel’s continuation. But it’s these issues that are alienating the younger staff and causing them to leave.
I’m no fan of GB News nor the horrendous Farage and Brillo. I don’t think it’s remotely a loss to British broadcasting that the man who has no problems with Taki writing horrendous anti-Semitic screeds and praises the neo-Nazi Greek Golden Dawn in the pages of the Spectator. But I am afraid that dissenting voices that genuinely need to be heard will be left without a platform when it goes.
And I am very much afraid of Dirty Rupe’s planned replacement.
The Independent dug up a few of Michael Gove’s old speeches in which he expressed opinions that really should cause him considerable embarrassment. Should, but probably won’t, as this government seems to be impervious to any kind of shame or guilt. One came from a speech he made as president-elect of Oxford University’s debating society in 1987. Speaking for the motion ‘This house believes the British Empire was lost on the playing fields of Eton’, Gove used the term ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ for Black people. This caused a member of the audience to shout ‘Shame!’ I know it was a different time then, and racist jokes and material were more acceptable then than they are now, but times were changing. Racist language like that wasn’t acceptable.
He also had similarly grotty views on the north, celebrating Thatcher’s humiliation of the region and its people:
“We are at last experiencing a new empire, an empire where the happy south stamps over the cruel, dirty, toothless face of the northerner. At last Mrs Thatcher is saying I don’t give a fig for what half the population is saying, because the richer half will keep me in power. This may be amoral. This may be immoral. But it’s politics and it’s pragmatism”.
The happy south? I live in Bristol, and I don’t recall this bit of the south being at all happy under Maggie Thatcher. Not when there was rising unemployment, St Paul’s exploded into riots along with Brixton in London and Toxteth in Liverpool, cuts to unemployment benefit, the ending of student grants, the introduction of privatisation into the NHS, cuts to education budgets so that many schools didn’t have the funding to repair decaying premises and so on. Presumably by ‘happy south’ Gove is talking about those rich areas inhabited by himself and his extremely wealthy and complacently happy chums.
He also made a number of, er, forthright comments about homosexuality. He said that gays thrive on short-term relationships and praised Thatcher’s policies as “rigorously, vigorously, virulently, virilely heterosexual”. To be fair, the Observer, writing about the rise of AIDS amongst American gays, stated that most relationships between gay men were short-term and rarely lasted a year, in contrast with the much longer-lasting connections between lesbians. I’m not sure whether this is still true. As for Thatcher’s policies being ‘heterosexual’, there’s nothing heterosexual or otherwise about privatising everything that wasn’t nailed down and looking forward to selling off the NHS and ending the welfare state, because the poor should look after themselves. On the other hand, Thatcher did try to stop the promotion of homosexuality in schools with the notorious Clause 28. This resulted in massive protests by gays and straight people, who feared it would be the start of real persecution, including incarceration. He also claimed that John Maynard Keynes was also a ‘homosexualist’. I’ve heard those rumours too, and to be fair, I think some of them come from gay rights campaigners. Keynes did have close relationships with men, but he was also happily married for 20 years to the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Of course, it could have been a ‘lavender marriage’ designed to hide his real sexuality, but it’s doubtful. And in any case, what Keynes did in private with consenting adults was his own business. What matters is his ground-breaking economic theory, which has lasted a dam’ sight better than Thatcher’s wretched Monetarism. Gove’s allegations of homosexuality looks a bit like an attempt to discredit the theory by making insinuations about the man.
But it seems Gove’s own sexuality may also be open to question. According to Zelo Street, there was a recent piece in the Spectacularly Boring in which Mary Wakefield, Dominic Cumming’s wife, says that David Cameron was worried that Gove and Cummings were having an affair. Now there would be a ‘gruesome twosome’. She dismisses the idea, stating that it’s all rubbish but the rumour mill goes on. The Street, however, is not so sure, and convinced that at least one of the newspaper groups knows the truth. He urges them to come forward with it, as we’re now in the 21st century. Except for the Tories, of course.
Ah yes, the Tories and homosexuality. I remember how, under Thatcher and Major, it seemed that every week a Tory MP or cabinet minister would have to resign due to extra-marital shenanigans. Gay rights activists took particular delight in outing vociferously anti-gay Tories, who were then caught with their male lovers or rent boys. This reached the point under Major that Private Eye joked that when he talked about going ‘back to basics’, what he really meant was ‘back to gay sex’. And if it wasn’t homosexuality, it was old-fashioned heterosexual adultery with mistresses and prostitutes.
The remark about ‘fuzzy-wuzzies’ is the kind of racist comment that has caused Tories to resign in the past. I doubt it will do that to Gove because of how long ago it was made. Gove’s comments about homosexuality also seem to be par for the course in a certain section of the Tory party. Despite David Cameron promoting openly gay Tory MPs, Boris Johnson himself managed to upset the gay community by calling them ‘tank-top wearing bum-boys’. Well, I remember back in the 1970s it seemed everyone was wearing tank-tops, so it wasn’t only gays who were fashion victims.
I suspect if any of his comments does any damage, it should be that about the north. Because that shows the real hatred and contempt metropolitan Tories had for Britain’s former industrial heartland.
And that hatred and contempt is still there, despite the Tories having somehow convinced the northern working class to vote for them.
Zelo Street put up a piece yesterday reporting and commenting on the Spectator raving about a French anti-immigration author, Eric Zemmour, whose views could fairly be said to be far right. Zemmour has been prosecuted three times for racial hatred. He has described young male migrants from Africa and the Middle East as ‘killers and rapists’ and written a book, The Suicide of France, lamenting the abandonment of traditional French values to Islamism. He also laments the great replacement of the indigenous White French by Muslim immigrants, rails against the foreign powers he sees dominating France, from the EU to Germany, and defends the collaborationist leader of Vichy France, Marshal Petain. The ‘great replacement’ is the vile conspiracy theory that holds that the Jews are deliberately importing non-White immigrants to destroy the White race. If Zemmour was anyone else, he’d probably be denounced as an anti-Semite. But he’s of Algerian Jewish descent, and according to the Speccy a hatred of Muslims is ‘hardly unique’ among Algerian Jews, who were forced out of the country when it gained independence. This still doesn’t mean that a respectable magazine should be publishing him then.
Zelo Street concludes
“What Jonathan Miller means by comparing Zemmour to Tucker Carlson is the amplification of mere bigotry – in both cases, explicitly or implicitly against Muslims – into the Great Replacement theory. The only novel element of Zemmour’s take is that he is Jewish, and the child of immigrants – but still riding a trademark white supremacist bandwagon.
On being called out for promoting such bigotry, Andrew Neil will tell his critics that they should consult Nelson, as he’s the editor, and decides what goes in the magazine. Nelson, in turn, will snootily brush off any criticism as “just something on Twitter”.
Once more, the Spectator has been caught promoting bigotry. And that’s not good enough.”
All the French peeps with whom I’ve talked about Petain cordially and absolutely hate him and his vile regime. This was a regime that collaborated with the Nazis and their persecution of the Jews. There do seem to be problems with some immigrants and rape. Earlier this week Alex Belfield reported that the course immigrants are given on integrating into British culture includes training them against sexually assaulting and raping British women. But obviously that does not mean that all Muslim and African immigrants are such a threat.
Zelo Street describes the Spectator as ‘increasingly Alt Right’. I don’t think you can doubt it when it promotes someone like Zemmour, who is planning a ‘piratical’ challenge next year in the French presidency campaigns, and who would also like to be on GB News.
But we should also be asking where the Board of Deputies and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are about this issue. They’re nowhere to be seen. With his views on the Great Replacement, Zemmour could be regarded as genuinely self-hating. But they’re silent. Yet when someone on the left criticises Israel, they fall over themselves screaming that they’re an anti-Semite, especially if they’re Jewish.
The Spectator is promoting people with extreme right-wing views, views which the Board of Deputies seems to feel is acceptable because he’s not attacking Israel. Which shows that the Board is not only biased, but completely unfit for purpose for defending Jews against real anti-Semitism.
Simon Jenkins, one of the columnists at the Groan, has written a very interesting piece about the end of the west’s occupation of Afghanistan and the government it has protected. Jenkins begins his piece by stating that the invasion itself was absolutely unnecessary.
“The US had no need to invade Afghanistan. The country was never a “terrorist state” like Libya or Iran. It was not at war with the US; indeed the US had aided its rise to power against the Russians in 1996. The Taliban had hosted Osama bin Laden in his mountain lair through his friendship with the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. At an immediate post-9/11 “loya jirga” in the southern city of Kandahar, younger leaders pressed the mullah to expel Bin Laden. Pakistan would probably have forced his surrender sooner or later. After the 2001 invasion the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanded that George Bush “punish and get out”.
Yet neither Bush nor Tony Blair listened. Instead they experienced a rush of blood to the head. They commandeered Nato, which had no dog in the fight, and began “nation building”, as if nations were made of Lego. It would be an age, said the political scientist Joseph Nye, of the “velvet hegemon”. For reasons never fully explained, Blair declared a “doctrine of international community” and pleaded for Britain to be in the first bombing run over Kabul. He then sent Clare Short as the minister for international development to stop the Afghans growing poppies. Afghan poppy production soared to an all-time high, spreading from six to 28 provinces, probably Britain’s most successful farm product of all time. Opium floated the Taliban back to power.”
He goes on to describe the totally misguided optimism among the western forces when he visited the country in 2006, when he was told that the Taliban were all but defeated. Seven years later the Taliban had defeated us, and have now gone on to defeat the Americans. As a result, the soldiers, interpreters, academics, journalists and aid workers are seeing friends threatened and killed. The occupation has been colossally expensive. The Americans have supposedly spent a trillion dollars. It has cost Britain £37 billion.
He concludes that this demonstrates the complete failure of imperialism, and that the proper thing to do now is to establish good relations with the new regime in Afghanistan and its neighbours Pakistan and Iran. Even though Boris still wants to play at Britain being a great imperial power.
“How many times must it be drummed into British heads that the British empire is over? It is dead, finished, outdated, not to be repeated. Yet Boris Johnson has just sent an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea. Britain has no need, let alone right, to rule other countries, to “make the world a better place”. No soldier need die for it, let alone 454 British soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan. The best Britain can now do is establish good relations with a new regime in Afghanistan – in liaison with Kabul’s neighbours Pakistan and Iran – to protect at least some of the good it has attempted to do this past 20 years. The world is not threatening Britain. Terrorism does not need state sponsors, nor will it be ended by state conquest.”
It’s a good article, but I’d dispute Jenkin’s assumption on the continuing popularity of imperialism amongst the British public. When Blair invaded Iraq a few years later, two million people in Britain marched in protest. I think it was the biggest public protest ever at the time in Britain. I even recall that the Spectator and various Tory politicos were against the invasion, even though Niall Ferguson had previously raved about the new western imperialism in Afghanistan in the pages of the Heil. The British public weren’t given a choice about either invasion. The invasion of Afghanistan was sold to Britain and America as the justified reprisal for 9/11. The west wasn’t there to occupy the country, but to transform it into a modern, democratic state governed by western notions of human rights. Ditto with Iraq. It seems to me to have been mainly the opponents of these ventures, who recognised what this was really about and described it as such. There was an article in the conspiracy magazine, Lobster, calling Blair a ‘Gladstonian imperialist’ for example. I think some Guardian or Independent journos also described it as a kind of imperialism, but were also in favour of it because of New Labour support for the neo-con agenda. But there was supposed to be a difference between this new kind of imperialism and the old sort. Britain and America were to act as the world’s policemen, preventing tyrannical governments from engaging in genocide and other human rights atrocities, just as the US had intervened in the war in Yugoslavia and there had been calls for western intervention during the genocide in Rwanda. This was supposed to be very different from the conquests, occupations and annexations that had occurred in previous centuries. This means that many Brits probably didn’t see the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as imperialist.
But both were. And the real reasons were deliberately kept hidden from the British and American public. I’ve said before that the real reason for the Afghanistan invasion was the construction of a strategically important oil pipeline that the Taliban government had refused to build in collaboration with the US. William Blum, the late veteran critic of US imperialism, discusses this in some of his books, as does Michael Moore, the ‘capped crusader’, in his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. The Iraq invasion was intended to acquire the country’s oil industry and reserves for the American and Saudi oil companies, and the country’s state enterprises for American multinationals. The neo-Cons also had the dream of turning Iraq into the kind of low tax, free trade economy they wanted for America. They lowered import tariffs, so that immediately the rest of the world dumped their excess products in Iraq. Iraqi business couldn’t compete, there was a wave of bankruptcies and unemployment shot up to 60 per cent. All this is described by Greg Palast in his book, Armed Madhouse.
I also wonder if the Guardian really wants the British public to know how Blair lied to them. As their demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters showed, the Groan is thoroughly Blairite. One of the sources Private Eye used for its hit pieces on Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, according to the redoubtable Tony Greenstein, was a named Groaniad hack. The newspaper also wants to reassure the public that conspiracy theories are just fantasies and that governments, big business and other political actors don’t really engage in plots and secret plans. Hence David Aaronovitch has appeared several times in its pages to tell its readers that they don’t exist. I might, however, be wrong about this, and that Aaronovitch has published his views dismissing conspiracy theories in the Independent. Either way, what passes for the British left wing press has been extremely reluctant to admit that there was any kind of ulterior motive behind the invasions of these two countries.
But there was. The primary goal was to conquer them for the oil industry and big business. The result has been 20 years of war and chaos, and in the case of Iraq, the destruction of a whole country. The new imperialism of the neo-Conservatives has been a costly, bloody failure. It’s high time it was abandoned.
But I’m afraid that the same people who pushed these wars are still around and regrouping, as the speakers at an online left-wing Labour party rally against imperialism and colonialism described several months ago. I’m afraid they’ll come back, and push for another middle eastern war, most likely against Iran. All to protect Israel and liberate its people from the Islamic theocracy, of course.
And absolutely nothing to do with revenge for the Islamic revolution and the country’s nationalisation of its oil industry.
The recriminations from last week’s elections continue. Unindicted war criminal Tony Blair crawled out from whichever stone he’s been hiding under since leaving office to give his tuppence worth on the reasons Labour did so badly. The headline from one of the papers says that he blames ‘wokeness’ and warns that Labour could ‘cease to exist’. Well, many people are saying the latter. And one of the reasons for its poor performance and disengagement with the working class isn’t ‘wokeness’, the new term that’s overtaken ‘political correctness’ to describe anti-racism, feminism, and an attitude against forms of prejudice, but Blair himself.
Let’s start with an obvious issue that united people across the political spectrum. Blair launched an illegal war against Iraq as part of George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’. Saddam Hussein was supposed to have aided Osama bin Laden. He hadn’t, but Blair put pressure on the intelligence services and falsified evidence – he ‘sexed up’ the ‘dodgy dossier’ – to show that Hussein had. Hussein was a monster who butchered his own people, but he hadn’t moved out of Iraq since his failed invasion of Kuwait. Experts on the Middle East said that there he was regarded as a joke. The real reason for Bush and Blair’s invasion was partly to defend Israel, because Hussein occasionally funnelled aid to the Palestinians whenever he felt like it, but mostly to grab the Iraqi oil reserves. They’re the biggest in the Middle East outside Saudi Arabia. They also wanted to steal Iraqi state enterprises, while the Neocons were keen on turning the country into the low-tax, free trade state they wanted to create in America. The result has been chaos, sectarian bloodshed, war crimes, and the destruction of the Iraqi economy and secular society.
Despite the loud backing of hacks from the Groaniad, millions of ordinary Brits knew better. Two million people, including one of the priests at my local church, marched in protest. Blair shrugged it off and the invasion went ahead. It was contrary to international law, and there have been abortive efforts to have Blair and Bush arrested for their crimes and tried in the Hague. The Tory party opposed the war, as did the Spectator. I think in many cases this was just simple opportunism and opposition for the sake of being seen to oppose, as when they’re actually in power, there doesn’t seem to be a war the Tories don’t like. But some Tories, to be fair, were serious. The right-wing journalist Peter Hitchens honestly despises the ‘Blair creature’ for the way he sent our courageous young men and women to their deaths for no reason. People chanted ‘Blair lied, people died’. Absolutely. But somehow he’s being treated as some kind of respectable statesman.
And it was Blair who started the British working class’ disillusionment with Labour. He was far more interested in capturing Tory votes and those of swing voters. Under him, the party became pro-private enterprise, including the privatisation of the NHS, and continued Thatcher’s dismantlement of the welfare state. It was Blair who introduced the ‘work capability tests’ for the disabled and continued Thatcher’s programme of making the process of claiming unemployment benefit as humiliating and degrading as possible in order to deter people from signing on. But he retained the party’s commitment to anti-racism and feminism as some kind of vestige of the party’s liberalism. The result has been that large sections of the White working class felt that they were being deliberately ignored and abandoned in favour of Blacks and ethnic minorities. This is the constituency that then voted for UKIP, and which I dare say has now gone over to supporting Boris Johnson’s Tories.
As far as ‘wokeness’ goes, yes, the shrill, intolerant anti-racism and feminism is off-putting. I am definitely no fan of Black Lives Matter, but it has immense support amongst British Blacks and Asians because of the deprivation of certain parts of those communities. Labour BAME supporters also felt abandoned because of Starmer’s tepid, offhand support for it, and his protection of those credibly accused of racist bullying. They started leaving the party as well.
The Labour party did badly at the elections not because of the lingering influence of Jeremy Corbyn, but because of Blair’s abandonment of the White working class, and Starmer’s contemptuous attitude towards the party’s non-White supporters.
Labour may well be on the verge of ceasing to exist, but it won’t start winning in England again unless to rejects Blairism and returns to proper, traditional Labour values and policies.
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