You may well have seen the adverts telling us on TV that the laws have been changed so that photo IDs will be demanded as proof of identity before you can vote at elections. This is supposedly to prevent electoral fraud, and was introduced by the Tories on the back of similar legislation in America. That was criticised by the American Left, including The Young Turks, because the most likely sections of society not to have photographic IDs are the poor, Blacks, the young and students, precisely the sort of people that vote for the left. And one Republican politico even admitted that it was done to keep the Dems out.
The pro-democracy group, Open Britain, have issued this message to their supporters informing them that they are staring a campaign to make sure everyone is aware of the changes and has such identity documents so that they can vote.
‘Dear David,
Did you know that millions of eligible voters may be turned away from the ballot box at May’s local elections? The government rushed through new voter ID requirements ahead of this year’s May 4th local elections – and it’s going to impact you.
For the first time in England, voters will be required to present photo ID to vote—and not all photo IDs will be accepted. If you show up to the polls with an 18+ Oyster card or a student ID, for example, you may be denied your ballot, while IDs like 60+ Oyster cards will be accepted.
It doesn’t seem very fair does it?
While the Electoral Commission has launched a public awareness campaign, many fear that the new law will harm our democracy with voters unaware of the requirements. The [rushed] enactment of these restrictions is meant to target voter fraud (with very little evidence that this is an issue in the UK ) and will cost millions in taxpayer funds, while the public still faces an urgent cost-of-living crisis.
Similar laws have been enacted in the American South to suppress votes, particularly those of society’s most disadvantaged. We cannot go down this undemocratic path in the UK. Any eligible voter denied this May is unacceptable, so we must act to ensure that everyone is able to plan to vote ahead of time.
The Electoral Commission simply can’t do enough on its own, so we must take direct action to spread the word to our family, friends, and communities. The most effective thing we can do is to ask those around us if they know about the new rules, have proper ID, or if they need help applying for a Voter Authority Certificate.
Everyone deserves a fair shot at having their voices heard, and Open Britain remains committed to ensuring that this is the case. This May, you, your loved ones, or your communities could be unjustly disenfranchised, so we all need to set out a plan to vote. Open Britain has launched a Plan to Vote campaign, and the hard work begins now.
Here’s a really unpleasant development. I’ve blogged on here about a right-wing group and its YouTube channel, Correct, Not Political. They’re a bunch who go to various left-wing demonstrations and protests and attempt to argue the opposite case to the demonstrators. They turn up at gay pride parades, outside libraries presenting Drag Queen Story Hour, environmentalist demos by people like Extinction Rebellion, anti-racism and migrants’ rights protests, and they have a special part of their website devoted to ‘socialists and commies’. I thought first of all that might be just right-wing Tories with a few weird ideas. But no. This afternoon they’ve organised a livestream with a title quoting St. Paul about the ‘synagogue of Satan’ and ‘those who say they are Jews but are not’. St. Paul was a Jew himself, and proudly boasted that he was ‘a pharisee and the son of a pharisee’. As he believed that Christ came to save the Jew first, then the gentile, when he entered a town on his preaching mission he started by preaching in the local synagogue. The statement about false Jews and the ‘synagogue of Satan’, from what I understand, was about one particular Jewish community in what is now one of the Turkish cities, that strongly opposed early Christian preaching. I think they may have requested the local Roman authorities to clamp down on them. That’s the Biblical context of the quote, from a time when Christianity was a Messianic sect within Judaism. But passages like that from the New Testament tragically have an appeal to Fascists.
Intrigued by this title, I clicked on the channel. It was a few minutes before it started properly, but things definitely did not bode well. It showed an old B/W newsreel footage of people marching in a BUF rally, complete with the ‘Roman’ salute and the BUF banner. It also showed the cops forming up to police them. All this was set to the adagio for strings piece which gets played in films and TV programmes about the horrors of war. I think it comes from the end of Platoon or Full Metal Jacket when the film ends with its heroes being gunned down. After a few minutes of this, it began. It switched to some kind of studio with a quote from a rabbi to one side of the presenter, ‘Some call it Marxism. I call it Judaism.’ At that moment the presenter started speaking. I couldn’t hear him properly, so I have to admit I got bored and turned him off. Perhaps I’m being prejudiced, but I thought I’d seen enough.
I think the livestream was supposed to be about Israel, but it seemed to me to be a return to the old Fascist conspiracy theory that the problems of the western world, and particularly non-White immigration, all due to evil Marxist Jews. Well, to quote The Young Turks’ Ben Mankiewicz, if there is a Jewish conspiracy, nobody told him. Nor any of the other Jews I’ve met or had dealings with. As for the Biblical quote, it looks like an attempt to play down the anti-Semitism by doing what Oswald Mosley himself used to do: claim that they’re only talking about some Jews, but not all Jews. And those you’re attacking aren’t real Jews, of course.
It’s depressing and worrying that people are seemingly turning once again to the far right after the spectacular collapse of the BNP. I don’t know how many members Correct, Not Political has or how wide their audience. Probably very few. And to be fair, they also don’t seem to be violent. When they do speak to their opponents, the tone is quiet and reasonable and at a conversational level. When shouting and a bit of argy-bargy does occur, it’s more often by the left-wing protesters than them. They really don’t seem to be thugs and bruisers like the NF’s bovver boys.
But that doesn’t alter the fact that they have seemingly turned to real Fascism, which was based on hate and violence. And the really worrying aspect of this is the possibility that it might be part of a growing trend. To which there can only be one response:
This video from Novara Media aims to set the record straight about the far right in Ukraine, refuting Putin’s lie that he is liberating the country from Fascism. Hosts Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani talk about the Maidan, or Orange Revolution, that saw the pro-Russian Ukrainian president ousted in favour of a pro-western, pro-EU candidate. The pair state that the revolution was completely democratic. Umm, possibly. In fact the revolution was overseen by Victoria Nuland for Hillary Clinton’s state department and the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the quango to which the American state delegated the job of regime change when they took it away from the CIA. Not that this means that Zelensky is an American puppet or that Putin’s invasion is at all justified. They make the point that it was a popular revolution, but that far right groups were also involved and talk about the attack on a trade union building. This was set alight, several trade unionists were shot and killed, and Nazi graffiti was scrawled on the building. However, the identity of the attackers is unknown.
The Fascist groups active in Ukraine include the followers of Stepan Bandera, who fought for the Nazis as an SS auxiliary during World War II before turning against the Nazis. The Ukrainian authorities caused outrage a few years ago when they honoured him as a national hero. His followers today also wear SS auxiliary uniforms. Then there’s the infamous Azov Battalion, whose uniform includes the SS ‘wolfsangel’ badge and who have been active fighting the Russian separatists in the east. Walker and Bastani state that they try to recruit western Fascists, and the film includes a brief interview with a Swedish Nazi who joined them. They’ve also turned up in this country to try and gather the bigoted and stupid here. They rocked up at one of the neo-Nazi demonstrations a few years ago along with a group of Italian Fascisti. The Azov Battalion run a Fascist summer camp for children, shots of which show school age kids doing exercises and learning to shoot. They also have a very slick recruitment video. This shows them marching about, ready to defend the fatherland with a voiceover boasting about their patriotic values and ending with ‘Join us’. Also in this toxic stew is the Right Sector. There are interviews with various members of these horrendous groups, who say, among other things, how attractive the idea of ‘one nation’, but deny that everyone in these organisations is a Fascist. One high-ranking member successfully sued a journalist for calling him a Nazi, despite the fact that Nazi ideology is very much what their wretched rants sound like. The video includes a clip of one of their leaders at rally ranting from a stage about homosexuality. It’s unnatural, and being promoted by a certain racial group. Gosh! I wonder who he could mean? Yeah, it’s the old Fascist anti-Semitism. Years ago The Young Turks discussed these bonkers Nazi conspiracy theories. Ben Mankiewicz, one of their guests, responded to them by saying that if there is a Jewish conspiracy, nobody told him. I’ve seen other videos attacking various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which other Jews and people of Jewish descent have said the same thing. And if the Jews were so keen to promote it, why does Miriam Margolyes need to work with an organisation for gay Jews dedicated to challenging prejudice in the Jewish community? I’m not saying that Jews are any more prejudiced against gays than anyone else. I merely mention it to show how stupid and wrong the accusation that they’re pushing homosexuality is.
Bastani and Walker state that Zelensky himself is a political moderate and Jewish. As for these Nazis, the most they got at an election was 10 per cent of the vote. That’s a lot, but not the same as Jobbik in Hungary, which got 20 per cent. From this high point their share of the vote has declined to 2 per cent. This is roughly the normal proportion of votes gained by Fascist groups across Europe, including the BNP and NF in this country. Under normal circumstances, Fascists aren’t popular. The problem in Ukraine is that these scumbags have been taken up and formed links with members of the political elite, including a judge. The Azov Battalion has also been merged with the Ukrainian army, which has led its apologists to claim that it’s no longer a Fascist organisation. Fuelling support for the far right is the decline in living standards. Over the last 30 years the Ukrainian population has shrunk by 8 – 10 million, and the life expectancy is now what it was in the 1960s. I have a feeling that’s another consequence of the collapse of communism. My guess is that the dismantlement of the Communist economy and its replacement with capitalism has led to the same kind of poverty, unemployment and the closure of businesses and factories that has occurred elsewhere in the former Communist bloc. Just as Yeltsin’s wholesale privatisations in Russia resulted in the complete meltdown of the Russian economy. Putin’s popularity among ordinary Russians is partly based on his restoration of economic stability after the chaos the old drunk caused. And I understand that depopulation has also been a factor in the rise of the Nazi right in Germany. According to an online conversation with a German anti-fascist posted by left vlogger Kevin Logan, the former east Germany has been hit particularly hard with the transition to capitalism. Many of the former country’s industries and businesses have been unable to compete, and so have closed down. As a result, whole towns and villages have been abandoned as their people have moved away to seek employment elsewhere. When you have an economic crisis like that, people start looking around for a scapegoat, and Fascism provides it in the shape of immigrants and Jews.
I also think that whatever popularity Fascism has is also partly due to its claim to be a third political alternative against socialism and capitalism. Communism failed, capitalism isn’t living up to its promise and so some may turn to Fascism as an alternative.
Walker and Bastani also point out that there are other political groups fighting the Russians, including anarchists, so it isn’t true that the Fascists are the only people defending the country apart from the regular army. They also make it clear that they feel that the regular Ukrainian deserves its support from the West. It’s just that this should not be given to the Azov Battalion and the rest of the Fascists.
Yesterday Trump started flinging around accusations of voter fraud. He had already won, he declared, and so counting should stop. He also claimed that there was massive electoral fraud in states like Nevada and Georgia, where he’d lost to Biden, and stated that he was taking legal action against those states over the result and demanding recounts. These accusations seem to be utterly false, and his proposed lawsuit against Georgia has already been thrown out by the supreme court or whatever. There’s absolutely no basis to these accusations. They’re just an attempt by the megalomaniac man-baby to hang on to power any way he can. But it’s provoked demonstrations by his supporters up and down America, who are demanding that the authorities do exactly as he says.
This is all absolutely astonishing. It amazes me, because it’s less like the actions of an accomplished politician so much as a petulant child demanding that they’ve won a game and that everyone should therefore give in to them. Because. But it’s also a logical progression of Republican attitudes and policies towards voting. I put up a post a week or so ago reproducing and commenting on an article in the I, which reported that in some southern states like Mississippi Blacks and other sections of the population were being prevented from exercising their democratic rights by local legislation. Some of this dated from the era of Jim Crow, and was deliberately intended to limit the Black vote. A few years ago, The Young Turks put up a video attacking legislation the Republicans had put in place. This was ostensibly to combat voter fraud, but there was no real need for it. It’s real purpose was to exclude the poor, Blacks and students from voting. One southern Republican even gave the game away by saying that they passed these laws to stop the Democrats getting in.
It reminds me somewhat of the supposedly democratic election in Italy in the 1920s which saw Mussolini’s Fascists voted into power. At the time none of the parties in the Italian parliament had a clear majority. It had been hoped by Italy’s ruling liberal politicians that by inviting into government, they could form a coalition sufficiently strong to break this deadlock. But Mussolini didn’t want to be a junior partner. He wanted all of it. And so legislation was passed that defined Italy as a single constituency. Whichever party got the most votes nationally, would take something like three-quarters or so of the seats in parliament. The rest would be shared among the other parties. The Fascists won the election, though in many places they lost spectacularly. One of these, ironically, was Mussolini’s home town of Predappia, where he only got 2 per cent of the vote or less. Well, he had an obvious disadvantage there: they knew him.
But the result was that the Fascists became the overwhelmingly dominant party, and Italy began its journey towards dictatorship.
Mussolini had used constitutional methods, as well as brutal force, to gain power. Hitler did the same later in Germany, when the German president similarly hoped that he could break a similar political deadlock there by including the Nazis in a coalition government.
Trump’s wild, unsubstantiated accusations of electoral fraud and demands that voting should be stopped are an attack on democracy. They aren’t as flagrant or grotesque as the colossal gerrymandering that gave Mussolini control of Italy, but they’re definitely on the way there.
I don’t think Trump will get his way with his demands. But they do mark another stage in the gradual undermining of American democracy. And I’m afraid that if Trump does win, he will try to put in place legislation that will further further weaken it so that the Republicans can keep on winning unfairly. And the endpoint of all this, as in Germany and Italy, will be a right-wing dictatorship.
But it will be cloaked in the language of democracy, and protecting the will of the people.
As America gets ready to decide whether they want the Orange Generalissimo or Joe Biden in the White House for the next four years, it seems that many Black citizens in the American south are being put off voting by restrictive legislation. These laws, including one dating from the era of Jim Crow in Mississippi serve to disenfranchise the poor and minorities, and have prevented people of colour from being elected to government office in the state. The I published a report about this by Tim Sulllivan, ‘Laws continue to deter black voters in southern states’ in last Friday’s edition for 23rd October 2020. This ran
The weight of history and current laws are deterring the black vote in some southern states.
The opposition to black votes in Mississippi has changed since the 1960s, but it has not ended. There are no poll taxes any more, no tests on the state constitution. But on the eve for the most divisive presidential election in decades, voters face obstacles such as state-mandated ID laws that mostly affect poor and minority communities and the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of former prisoners.
And despite Mississippi having the largest percentage of black people of any state, a Jim Crow-era election law has ensured a black person has not been elected to statewide office in 130 years. Even today, the state has broad restrictions on absentee voting or online registration, absentee ballots that must be witnessed by notaries and voter ID laws that overwhelmingly affect the poor and minorities. Nearly a third of black people here live below the poverty line, and taking a day off work to vote can be too expensive. Then there are felony voting restrictions, which in Mississippi have disenfranchised almost 16 per cent of the black population, researchers say.
Distrust of the government runs deep. As a result, black politicians have long been fighting an apathy born of generations of frustration.
Anthony Boggan sometimes votes, but is sitting it out this year, disgusted at the choices. A 49-year-old black Jackson resident with a small moving company, Mr Boggan likes how the economy boomed during the Trump years, but cannot vote for a man known for his insults. As for Joe Biden, he and Donald Trump both “got dementia”, he says, and he hates how the former Vice President tries to curry favour in the black community. “They’re all going to tell you the same thing,” he said. “Anything to get elected.”
Some of these laws were put in place quite recently by the Republicans with the ostensible intention of reducing voter fraud. They chiefly affect the poor, Blacks and students, the section of the population most likely to vote Democrat. The Young Turks produced a report about them a few years ago, noting that one Republican politico let the cat out of the bag and actually admitted that they were intended to stop people voting for the Democrats.
Unfortunately, Mississippi isn’t the only southern state nor the Republicans the only party to rig regulations to stop Blacks voting. A few years ago the Democrats in Florida did something similar, manipulating the electoral rolls so that Blacks and Hispanics couldn’t vote.
And what the Republicans do, the Tory party copies. The Tories have also passed legislation supposedly designed to prevent voter fraud, but which also acts to prevent the poor, Blacks and other ethnic minorities from voting over here. Mike has published several articles on this, noting that the actual incidence of electoral fraud in this country is minuscule and covering reports that describe how they have operated to prevent people from voting. And it isn’t a coincidence that the sections of the population they prevent are those which also traditionally favour the Labour party.
It’s long past time these laws were repealed in both America and Britain. But this will require the election of genuinely reforming left-wing governments in each country. And I don’t see that happening any time soon with the corporatist right in control of the Democrats in America and Labour over here.
Another article Mike put up a few days ago, which reveals very clearly the Tory contempt for people of colour, is a piece about the massively disproportionate effect the Tories’ demand for Voter identification at polling stations has had on Black people. The Tories declared a year or so ago that they were seriously concerned about voter fraud, and so rolled out schemes demanding that voters should have proof of their identities when casting their votes. There was absolutely no need for it. This kind of voter fraud is absolutely negligible. I think Mike put up the stats for it in another of his articles, and hardly anyone has been caught doing it. I think there have literally only been one or two cases. But nevertheless, the Tories decided that it was a serious problem and a threat to democracy. Critics of the scheme also warned that their plans would actually be anti-democratic, as certain groups are far less likely to possess the necessary documentation to confirm their identities. Blacks would be particularly affected, and would be turned away and prevented from exercising their legal, democratic civil rights.
This was, of course, denied by the Tories. But it’s happened. Despite Cabinet Office Minister Chloe Smith telling us all in June that ““the evidence shows there is no impact on any particular demographic group … the evidence of our pilots shows that there is no impact on any particular demographic group from this policy”, the Electoral Commission has found evidence to the contrary. Findings from the 2018 and 2019 findings in Watford and Derby, two of the pilot areas, found that there was a strong correlation between Asians from each of the city’s wards not receiving a ballot paper. The Commission also reported that polling staff were not asked to collect demographic data about the people, who didn’t come back. This was due to the practical challenges of the data collection exercise. There wasn’t enough evidence yet to come to a conclusion about the scheme in any direction, and advised against doing so. But Mike accordingly reached the following :
If the Tories had wanted to know who would be deprived of the vote, and how badly it affected particular groups, they would have carried out the research. They didn’t.
They then went on to tell falsehoods that the research had been carried out when it hadn’t and that it showed no impact on any demographic group.
You don’t lie about something like this unless you are deliberately trying to harm people from ethnic minorities.
We can only conclude that the Tory voter ID plan is intended to stop black people and those from other ethnic minorities from voting:
And includes this tweet from Labour MP Cat Smith
The Government claim plans to require ID to vote doesn’t discriminate, but there’s no data to back this up.
Voter ID requirements come straight from the US-style voter suppression play book, and must be opposed by all who value inclusive democracy.
Smith’s absolutely right. The scheme was taken over from the Republicans in America, who have used to it to suppress the votes of certain groups – those that are most likely to vote Democrat. These are the poor, students and Blacks. There have been a number of videos about this produced by The Young Turks and other left-wing or liberal internet news sites. One particularly repulsive Republican politico actually let the cat out of the bag and admitted that it really was all about preventing Blacks from voting.
Which is just more evidence of how institutionally racist the Tories are, despite ostentatiously giving cabinet seats to BAME politicians like Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak. They’re really don’t want a less racist, more inclusive or simply more democratic society.
They are actively trying to increase discrimination all while keeping it carefully hidden through specious verbiage about protecting democracy. And that’s a threat to everyone’s right to vote.
There’s some areas of the American right still pining for the days of the McCarthy witch hunts. And unfortunately, it looks like they want to export them to these shores as well. Turning Point UK is one of them. If you don’t remember, Turning Point UK is the British spawn of the American Conservative outfit, Turning Point USA. Founded by the repulsive Charlie Kirk, who ‘LIVES AS A CAPITALIST EVERY DAY’, as he shouted at the Young Turks’ Cenk Uighur, this is supposed to be dedicated to inspiring young people with right-wing ideals, turning back the evil tides of liberalism, socialism and so forth. Its British branch got off to a notoriously bad start when Candace Owens, another prominent American rightist, told the assembled faithful at its inauguration that Adolf Hitler wasn’t really a nationalist. She declared that what he did would have been all right if he’d stuck to his own country, but he wanted to make everyone German. This was the opposite of nationalism. This was the opposite of history and morality, as was soon pointed out to her. TPUK have kept a quiet profile since. So much so that it has been suggested that the outfit is no more than a trick to part elderly American Conservatives from their money through encouraging them to donate to it, so little has it actually done. Unfortunately, it still seems to be around and making a nuisance of itself. Zelo Street has posted a couple of articles about the organisation posting attack ads libeling former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and leadership contender Rebecca Long-Bailey as anti-Semites, terrorist supporters and claiming they aid paedophiles.
And now Zelo Street has also reported that one of its scummy number has announced on Twitter that they want to import their parent organisation’s campaign of blacklisting left-wing academics. TPUSA has a ‘Professor Watchlist’ of academics they claim have a ‘left-wing agenda’. One critic, the Skeptical Seventh, has said of this that “They must know that what they are doing will lead to people being harassed, being shut down … It is undermining academic freedom, which is ironic for an organisation that claims to be in favour of free speech”. Yes, but for them it’s a case of free speech for me, but not for thee. However, the Beeb reported that it had been told by Dominique Samuels, one of the TPUK’s influencers, that they wouldn’t be introducing that policy over here.
This has been flat-out contradicted by the odious Darren Grimes. Grimes was upset when Priyamvada Gopal, a lecturer at Cambridge, tweeted a particularly apt quote from Lord Macauley to describe Priti Patel. She said: “We should acknowledge, as we look at Priti Patel, that there was one very successful cultural eugenics project: ‘We must at present do our best to form…a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’”. This was too much for Grimes, who didn’t recognise the quote, and ranted “This person is a lecturer at Cambridge. Is it any wonder our students are churned out of these university factories like hard-left, braindead sheep when this is what is teaching them?! What a truly bloody horrendous thing to think, never mind tweet”. Gopal herself was highly amused by Grimes’ reaction. She said “Before I withdraw again for a bit, I thought I should share my enjoyment of Mr Grimes’ condemnation of Lord Macaulay’s‘truly bloody horrendous thing to think’ … The great thing about British far-right is their complete ignorance of their own history &literature”. Macauley’s comment demanding the anglicisation of Indians is notorious. It frequently appears in textbooks as an illustration of the hostile attitude of the British colonisers to their subject peoples’ indigenous cultures.
The TPUK twitter feed then joined in with the ominous statement “Our uni campuses are overrun by leftist lecturers who teach their overt political bias as objective truth. This is not ok. The fight back begins now. Introducing ‘Education Watch’: Documenting University Lecturers’ Political Bias”.
This is, as Zelo Street has commented, the right using the false assumption that not only do they have the right to their own opinions, but also their facts, to start a witch hunt. And as Grimes was at the launch of Toby Young’s wretched Free Speech Union, it also shows that’s a sham as well.
Paul Bernal, an associate professor of Law at UEA, commented: “Can I just ask, what do the thought-police *want* us lefty academics to teach our students? Obviously facts are out. Analysis is against the law. Nothing foreign. Nothing expert”.
Tim concluded his article on this latest right-wing assault on free speech with the observation that TPUK were obviously trying to whip up hate and harassment because they were so desperate for the publicity. And so he was sure that they would be condemned by all good Conservatives.
Let’s be clear what Turning Point are demanding – the harassment and purging from academic of lecturers, whose politics they disapprove of. This is a feature of just about every totalitarian regime and movement. The Italian Fascists did it. The Nazis did it in the ‘coordination’ of the universities, which saw Jews and Marxists purged. The Communists did it. And it got really unpleasant in China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, when children were called upon to denounce their parents and teachers. The BNP or National Front also tried something like it in Britain in the 1980s. They urged nationalist schoolchildren to write to them informing on ‘Communist’ teachers. They would then send a couple of their thugs round to assault them. TPUK haven’t called for having them attacked, but this is what such a list would lead to.
As for this wave of left-wing lecturers churning out a generation of impressionable kids indoctrinated with cultural Marxism or whatever, this is, in my opinion, somewhat of an hysterical overreaction. Yes, there are outspoken left-wing academics, and always have been. But there are also Conservatives and all shades of political opinion in between. And, with a few obvious exceptions, such as those calling for sectarian or racist violence and hatred, for example, they should all have the right to teach what they believe to be objective fact. Because this is what democracy and freedom of speech means.
Freedom of speech and conscience means putting up with speech, ideas and opinions of which you don’t necessarily approve. It certainly does not mean tolerating only those opinions that you share. That, whether done by the left or the right, leads to intolerance and persecution.
And in the intellectual context, it also means the massive impoverishment of national culture. As a result of the Nazi purges of the universities and the arts, German culture suffered immensely. That of other countries, particularly America, benefited immensely, as talented scientists, mathematicians, writers, film-makers and artists took sanctuary on the other side of the Pond. It’s been said that if the Nazis hadn’t taken power, and pushed their greatest minds abroad, the 20th would have been hailed as the German century rather than the American.
This is what Turning Point would like to do to America, and which their equally idiotic counterparts on this side of the Pond would like to do over here – a stifling, stagnant, impoverished culture in order to enforce their own intellectual agenda.
Very interesting article in next week’s Radio Times for 16th-22nd November 2019. John Sweeney, a former journo with the Corporation’s Panorama, has written a piece attacking the parliamentary lobby system, ‘Time to name your sources’, on page 9. The subtitle states very clearly why he objects to it ‘Why are political reporters feeding us fake news?’
The article runs
As the country gears up for a general election, TV viewers and newspaper readers are being lied to from within a secretive system that reduces political journalists and Westminster correspondents to underbutlers, protects power and poisons our democracy. It’s called the lobby and its two most powerful players are a career psychopath (Conservative) and a neo-Stalinist (Labour).
The lobby was created after an Irish terrorist bomb in 1885 caused MPs to lock out the journalists who used to mingle freely inside Westminster. Reporters complained and a permitted few were allowed back, so long as they followed rule number one: when a source says a story is on lobby terms, you don’t identify that source.
The lobby’s most elegant defender, Andrew Marr, wrote in his book, My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, “Sophisticated social animals are necessarily hypocrites… who really wants to know less?”
But Marr wrote that before King Brexit turned everything it touched to Novichok. So where do those political stories based on anonymous oft-quoted “sources close to…” come from?
The PMS (the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman) is a many-headed beast, but one set of jaws is snapped by James Slack, who, as Nick Cohen pointed out in the The Spectator, in a previous life wrote the words underneath the infamous 2016 Daily Mail headline “Enemies of the People”, attacking three judges. Another set of jaws are those of Rob Oxley, Boris Johnson’s press secretary, but the sharpest teeth belong to “career psychopath” Dominic Cummings. David called him that five years ago. It was an understatement.
Cummings, Slack and Oxley jointly and separately use reporters in the lobby system to tell unattributable whoppers while the system as a whole is given coverage by BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and the papers. Veteran political reporter Peter Oborne nailed a series of lies about Brexit on “lobby terms” recently. Perhaps the most poisonous was the “lobby terms” claim, reported in the Mail on Sunday in October, that Remainers Dominic Grieve, Oliver Letwin and Hilary Benn were being investigated by the government because of their involvement with foreign powers. The story was a lie. The BBC, etc, didn’t tell that lie. But they prop up the system in which the lie could be told.
That system also encourages acquiescence among political hacks. If you don’t toe the line and ask awkward questions instead you are excluded from the regular drip-feed of anonymous briefings. It was reported that Boris Johnson when Foreign Secretary was considered a security risk by MI6 because of his dodgy private life. But has the lobby asked if Boris will launch an inquiry into himself? Nyet.
Another potential security risk is Jeremy Corbyn’s spin commissar, Seumas Milne. He oversees Labaour’s lobby operation but the system shields his shenanigans behind the arras. In 2014 Milne appeared on a panel at a summit in Sochi alongside Vladimir Putin. Milne, a former Guardian journalist, has in the past bigged up both Stalin and East Germany. Creepy.
Has the lobby asked Putin’s pal Milne if he is a security risk? Again, nyet.
In these toxic times, the lobby has become a lie factory. We need to scrappy “lobby terms”. If power speaks with a forked tongue, we need to know whose tongue it is that’s lying.
Okay, Sweeney’s correct to call out the lobby system. I’m irritated myself by stories that begin ‘sources close to the Prime Minister’ or ‘Ministers are considering’, as quite often this means that the source is sounding out a policy. And that policy is quite often something monstrous. I remember a story in the Sunday Express back in the early 1980s, when AIDS first appeared and everyone really was afraid it would decimate the global population like a new Black Death. It was so strongly associated with gays that a Beeb science documentary on it had the title ‘AIDS: The Gay Plague’. In this climate of fear, the Sunday Depress announced that ‘ministers’ – who were never named – were considering a radical solution to the problem. This was the construction of an ‘AIDS island’ following the Swedes’ example, where AIDS victims could be isolated and treated. It harkens back to the location of lazarettos – leper hospitals – on islands. But it was also frightening coming as it did from a government that had very far right tendencies and a reputation for aggressive homophobia. Maggie had just tried to introduce her law banning the positive teaching of homosexuality in schools. To many people, this seemed like the beginning of a campaign against homosexuals and the left which would end up with internment camps. The nightmare Fascist Britain of Alan Moore’s and Dave Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, running in the comic Warrior, seemed all too possible.
Others have also challenged the very close relationship between the press and the political class. When David Cameron was PM, it was pointed out that many leading journos, including editorial staff at the Guardian, I believe, also lived in Cameron’s village of Chipping Norton. Over on the other side of the Pond, some of the left-wing news shows on the Net, like The Young Turks, Sam Seder’s Majority Report and the David Pakman Show, have also commented on the way the press is content to parrot stories and claims by right-wing politicians, because they’re afraid that if they start challenging them, those politicians will simply stop talking to them and they’ll lose their stories. The result has been a decline in journalistic standards, as papers no longer attempt to hold politicos to account, but simply repeat their lines and lies. I’ve no doubt that this also partly accounts for the utter complicity of the press in repeating the claims and assumptions of the neoliberal right over here.
But this also doesn’t exonerate the Beeb. Despite the protestations of its political editor, the Beeb does platform right-wing figures over the left. Mike put up a graphic from Tory Fibs a few days ago, which showed very clearly how massively biased the Beeb was in its inclusion of figures and spokesmen for the right on its news shows and panels. Its newsroom is stacked full of Conservatives, like Nick Robinson, and Fiona Bruce and her producers on Question Time scarcely hide their right-wing bias. And the Beeb is still under investigation for the massive bias in its Panorama documentary on anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
The lobby system is a major part of the problem, but not the whole. The whole journalistic system and its cosy relationship with right-wing politicians is rotten, and needs to be overturned. And the Beeb is very much part of it.
The cover story on Saturday’s I for 20th July 2019 was a report that Britain’s landed gentry had doubled their wealth in a decade. Beneath the headline declaring that very fact were the lines
Dramatic surge in fortunes of British nobility since the 2008 financial crash, I learns
600 aristcratic families now as wealthy as they were at the height of the British Empire.
The story on page 12 of the paper by Cahal Milmo was based on the research of two academics, Dr Matthew Bond and Dr Julien Morton, lecturers, sociology lecturers at the London South Bank University, who had examined probates, or settled wills, of 1,706 members of the aristocracy going back to 1858. However, the article made the point that these wills only represented part of the aristocracy’s immense wealth, and their real fortunes is likely to be much higher because their lands, property, art collections and business investments are very frequently held in separate trusts which cannot be examined.
The article stated that
A hereditary title is now worth an average of more than £16m – nearly twice the value it stood at proior to the 2008 financial crisis, I can reveal. their fortunes contrast starkly with the decade experienced by the vast majority of Britons, whose inflation-adjusted wages remain stuck at 2005 levels.l Since the Thatcher era, the value of a hereditary title has also increased four-fold.
The academics’ research also
shows that the minimum value of one of these (aristocratic) titles now stands on average at £16.1m. The same figure, adjusted to reflect current purchasing power, stood at £4.2m between 1978 and 1987.
The four-fold increase suggests the aristocracy has prospered spectacularly under the era of financial deregulation and economic liberalisation ushered in by Margaret Thatcher when she came to power in 1979.
The I also stated
The figures represent a sharp recovery in the fortunes of the nobility, which went into a decline during the Second World War and the post-war consensus, which brought in more progressive taxation and the welfare state. From a pre-war high of £23m, average fortunes fell to £4.9m by the 1980s.
The data suggests that Britain’s wealthiest aristocrats have more than weathered the economic problems caused by the 2008 financial crisis, apparently using existing assets to take advantage of low interest rates to buy up stocks and shares and other investments which have rocketed in value. In the decade to 2007, the average wealth of the nobility stood at £8.9m – suggesting it has nearly doubled in the decade since. (pp. 12-13).
The article also looked at the educational background of the ten richest toffs. And what a surprise! They nearly all went to Eton and Harrow, before going on to Oxbridge.
Of the ten largest probates between 2008 and 2018, seven of the deceased attended Eton or Harrow, with the remaining three also attending major public schools. Six of the 10 went to either Oxford or Cambridge universities. (p. 13).
The newspaper also asked the Labour MP, Chris Bryant for his views about this. Bryant was the author of A Critical History of the British Aristocracy, published two years ago in 2017. He responded
“For more than a century the landed aristocracy have been moaning about their terrible impoverishment. Ostentatiously sitting in dilapidated drawing rooms with buckets and pails catching drips from the beautiful but bowed stucco ceiling, they have extended the begging bowl.
“Yet the last century has seen many do remarkably well. The end result is that eh great old landed, crested and hallmarked families of the UK are still in possession of most of the land and a large part of the wealth of the nation.” (p. 13).
The I was at pains to state that the study itself takes no view on the social role of the aristocracy, whose fans argue that it plays a valuable role supporting rural communities through fishing and farming. It quoted Morton as saying
“It may well be that having a rich and vital aristocracy is good for the country. We are interested in understanding this group as objectively as possible.”
Well, that might be the case, but they’ve also been severely bad for the rest of us. The I doesn’t mention it, but one of the ways the aristocracy has almost certainly increased their wealth is through the massive tax cuts the Tories have given high earners. They’ve been enriched through the Thatcherite doctrine that taxes and government spending have to be cut, the welfare state destroyed and everything, including the NHS privatised, in order to benefit the upper classes. Their wealth will then magically trickle down to the rest of us, as they open new businesses, pay higher wages and so forth. Except they don’t. They simply take the money and put it in their bank accounts, where it stays. And far from opening new businesses, business proprietors simply carry on as before, laying off staff in order to enrich themselves and their shareholders. The Young Turks and a number of other left-wing American internet news shows, like the Jimmy Dore Show, have put up videos about various companies that have made thousands unemployed after they were given tax cuts by Trump.
As for the British aristocracy, way back in 1988 Private Eye published a very critical review, ‘Nob Value’, of Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd’s The Field Book of Country Houses and their Owners: Family Seats of the British Isles, as well as the-then emerging ‘heritage’ sector. Massingberd, who wrote a ‘heritage’ column in the Torygraph, was a massive fan of the aristocracy to which he belonged, and, of course, Maggie Thatcher. In this book he loudly praised her policies, and looked forward to a ‘social restoration’ that would see the blue-bloods return to power. The Eye wrote
The ‘heritage’ mania has softened us up for a return to inherited wealth. Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd may be a richly Wodehousian figure, but his book, lauding the privately owned, is symptomatic. It is the correlative to Peregrine Worsthorne’s recent articles about the desirability of large inheritances and the return of a rentier class: the desirability in short of ‘a social restoration’. Come the day, of course, Massivesnob knows where he will be – in his seat again. But the fans of his snufflings seem curiously unaware of where that leaves them: which is sat upon.
In Francis Wheen, ed., Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion (London: Verso 1994), 320-2 (322).
Quite. It’s as true now as it was then, after Downton Abbey on the Beeb and now with the Tory party dominated by two toffs, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, coming after another Eton educated aristo, David Cameron, all of whom very much represent the interests of their class against the poor.
The only chance for the rest of us to shake them off, and go back to having a society where ordinary people have a decent standard of living, can enjoy good wages, proper welfare support and a truly national, and nationalised health service, is by voting for Corbyn.
I realise that this is a few days old, and that blogs like Zelo Street, Tom Clarke and Mike have already commented on it, but I really can’t let this one go without putting my ha’pence in. A few days ago, Laura Kuensberg tweeted that the members of the right-wing eurosceptic European Research Group had, according to her anonymous sources, been calling themselves ‘Grand Wizards’. This, as any fule kno, is one of the grade in the Ku Klux Klan. Outrage naturally erupted, at which point Kuensberg showed her true colours – deep Tory blue – by rowing back on her claim. She’d only heard it from two people, who were anonymous, and the ERG didn’t know about its Klan connotations when they started using it.
A likely story, as my grandmother would say when presented with tall tales of this magnitude. Firstly, as Tom Clarke and Zelo Street have pointed out, much news comes to journalists through anonymous sources. And with some stories the individuals providing the information may have their identities hidden by journalists, even when that person is known to them. Like in the various stories where information or comments are credited to unnamed ministers, civil servants or other anonymous ‘official sources’. And as the above blogs also point out, does anyone really believe that Rees Mogg, Boris Johnson, Steve Baker, David Davis and Iain Duncan Smith didn’t know that Grand Wizard was a Klan term? No, I don’t either.
I dare say that Boris or one of the others could probably huff and puff and try to make it all sound very innocent by referring back to one of Lloyd George’s nicknames: the Welsh Wizard. The Tories at the time had other words for him, such as ‘the little bounder’ and worse. Or they could try saying that it was just a bit of fun and meant in the spirit of the peeps who play Dungeons and Dragons and other Fantasy role-playing games. I think the Fantasy card game, Magic: The Gathering, is produced by a company called the Wizards of the Coast. But here’s the point. The ERG weren’t simply calling themselves wizards. No-one would be bother if they called themselves the ‘Wizards of Westminster’, in the same way that no-one is bothered when someone’s described as a wizard at maths, finances or whatever. It’s the fact that they called themselves ‘Grand Wizards’.
The Klan, their robes and their jargon are grotesque, and have generated a great deal of laughter after their expense. One anti-fascist described them as sounding like a Nazi party set up by D&D fans. But this hides a very grime, terrible reality: they’re White supremacists, who’ve killed thousands. They’re a secret society, who were set up to terrorise the Black liberated by the American Civil War. The full, pompous title is ‘The Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’. And the violence and terror they caused was and is horrific. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks described in one of their videos how his eyes were opened to right-wing racist violence in the US when he went into a Black Museum while passing through the South. This had a display on the lynchings, which revealed just how extreme the terror was. A wrong word or gesture could result in an angry mob surrounding a Black man, who would then be beaten, mutilated, or set on fire, and then hung from the trees. What is really disturbing is that the White mobs and onlookers would also see this as some kind of occasion for a party, holding picnics and breaking pieces off the bodies to take home as souvenirs. Not all the victims were Black. Tariq Ali on one of his shows pointed out that in Louisiana more Italians were lynched than Blacks. But it is truly horrific, and makes you wonder about how civilised the people and communities that committed, or simply acquiesced in these lynchings were. Uygur stated that if this was done by Muslims, then people here would automatically see it as more evidence of Muslim barbarism.
I am also honestly not surprised that the ERG decided to refer to themselves by such a loaded, disgusted monicker. There’s always been a section of the public school educated, Tory far right, that’s thought it absolute top hole and boffo to dress up as Nazis and goose-step around as Fascists, even when they’re not actually members. It was, after all, back in the 1980s when Paul Staines of the Guido Fawkes blog was hobnobbing with real south American Fascists and their supporters. It was the time when the denizens of the Tory students union were singing, ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks or Asians’ to the tune of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and demanding the death penalty for Nelson Mandela, ’cause he’s a terrorist. IDS was Cameron’s mate when Dodgy Dave decided that he was going to modernise the Tory party by severing its link with the Monday Club and clearing out members, who had connections to the Far Right. But this shows how superficial this was. And if IDS was one of those, who liked the ‘Grand Wizards’ nickname, then he’s nothing but a hypocrite. But this is pretty clear from his vile treatment of the poor, the unemployed, sick and disabled anyway.
And the fact that Kuenssberg was desperately trying to cover up this scandal after she revealed it also shows how biased the Beeb is. If this had been Labour, the scandal would have been played up and magnified, with various hacks and pundits, including probably the Zionist Jewish establishment, all bleating about how it shows the racism at the heart of the Labour party, and that Corbyn hasn’t done enough to stamp it out. But if it’s the Tories, the story’s quickly buried, and everything is done to try to reassure the public that they are the natural party of government where racism is minimal and swiftly dealt with.
This shows that the opposite is true. It extends to the highest levels, but they and their media puppets are desperate to cover it up.
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