Private Eye Declares Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn Anti-Semites and Announces Labour Witch-Hunters After John McDonnell

I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Private Eye. Mostly I like it, but today I find myself wishing there was another satirical magazine around, one that wasn’t captured by the political-media complex. One that genuinely was subversive, crusading and really brought you the news that the papers and the lamestream media wouldn’t, and didn’t want you to know about. Because Private Eye is establishment. Its founders were all public schoolboys, as is its current editor, Ian Hislop. And yesterday it showed.

It ran an article on the imminent departure from politics of Diane Abbott for her letter to the Absurder stating that Jews don’t experience racism, and when they do, it’s like the prejudice against people with ginger hair. Unlike Blacks, who were enslaved and forced to the back of the bus under segregation. She ignored the Holocaust and the fact that across parts of Europe and America various institutions, like the universities, set limits on the number of Jews they would take in case they became dominated by Jews. I’ve also heard from people of Jewish heritage that California at one time wouldn’t allow Jews to own property. Abbott is completely wrong, as she’s been told by everyone.

I don’t believe, though, that Abbott is an anti-Semite. She just doesn’t believe anyone except people of colour, and that means primarily Blacks, suffer racism. And she doesn’t want racism by non-White ethnic groups discussed, because ‘they’ would use it to ‘divide and rule’. Aside from which, as Tony Greenstein has shown citing the stats, there isn’t a lot of anti-Semitism amongst severely normal Brits. 77 per cent of British people have positive views of the Jews. Five per cent hate them, and the reminder don’t care one way or another. Given those stats, it’s easy to see how she forgot about the real persecution Jews have historically suffered.

But this was not enough for the writer of the article on Abbott’s coming fall. The anonymous author, styling himself ‘Steeplejack’, said that her views were normal for Corbyn and his faction. He then quoted some Communist who said that Corbyn never really sympathised with the Jews because of their wealth. Okay, according to the stats 60 per cent of British Jews are upper-middle class. This section of the Jewish community doesn’t vote Labour. They’re Conservatives, as shown by Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, nipping round to No. 10 to congratulate Tweezer on her elevation to Prime Minister. The liberal parts of the community generally vote Lib Dem, according to the same stats, with only a few voting Labour. And some parts of the Jewish community are very right-wing, like the two per cent who voted for the National Front in the 1970s. ‘Steeplejack’s’ article believed that it was quite right that Abbott was going to be retired and that Corbyn had been effectively purged from the party, and ended with the announcement that they were coming after John McDonnell next.

You’ll note that at no time does the article mention that Corbyn had and continues to have the strong support of that part of the Jewish community that hasn’t become entranced by the Tories. They didn’t quote anyone from Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas or the Jewish Socialist Group. Because they are the wrong sort of Jews. They’re all evil self-haters and anti-Semites because they support him and criticise Israel. They didn’t go to Shraga Stern for comment, who welcomed Corbyn into his synagogue. Stern’s a Haredi Jew. Their theology holds that Israel will only be restored with the return of the messiah. Until then, Jews should stay patiently in exile, working for the good of the wider community. The Haredi community has a strong respect for Corbyn as he stood by them when they opposed the commercial development of their historic cemetery. But again, the wrong sort of Jews.

Now we come to the question of the identity of ‘Steeplejack’. The last of the Eye’s correspondents pushing this nonsense was outed as a Blairite Guardian hack. I don’t know who this guy is, but the pseudonym suggests he fancies himself in the mould of Fred Dibnah, the steeplejack and broadcaster. Dibnah was very good at explaining industrial history and Britain heritage of invention, but he had very reactionary views. He didn’t believe that women should go out to work, for example. ‘Steeplejack’s’ monicker suggests he is similarly right-wing, though probably not to that extent. And he’s almost certainly another establishment journalist.

Which is what is wrong with Private Eye. You get the views of the lamestream media. It’s critical, but only up to a certain extent. The magazine thus pushed the line that Starmer was an anti-Semite for all it could, because that was what the establishment was saying, and the magazine and its editor and contributors shared the same fears of a socialist revival. It also won’t tell you that the current Ukrainian president, Volodomyr Zelensky, is a quasi-dictator very much in the same mould as Putin. Because Zelensky’s on our side against Russia, and so the people must not know that the Orange Revolution was stage managed by Obama’s Victoria Nuland at the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. Private Eye aren’t anti-establishment, just a slightly critical section of it.

John McDonnell and the Socialist group of MPs are one of the very few things keeping me in the Labour party. And now it’s clear Starmer wants to purge them, with the support of the media and goblins like Private Eye.

Starmer Preparing to Abandon Pledge to Scrap Tuition Fees

He’s doing it again! Starmer is about to break another pledge. Are there any promises he won’t break, any principles he won’t betray? Sky News and the Independent have reported that during an interview on Radio 4 this morning, the Tory infiltrator in chief of the former Labour party announced that he was considering dropping his promise to end tuition fees. According to him, the economy is different now than when he made the pledge. Excuse me, but I’ve heard this one before. Whenever a politician goes back on a policy they’ve previous supported, one of the excuses trotted out is, ‘Now is not the time’. Tweezer did it when she went back on her election pledge to have workers in the boardroom. It also, I think, brings to mind a quote from Malcolm X. X warned his followers to be aware of betrayal by White liberals. I think he may have said that they were worse than Conservatives, because the racists were honest about what they were. But when it came to reforms to empower Blacks, White liberals would often give the excuse that they agreed with them, but the time was not right. This isn’t racial politics, but it does accurately describe Starmer and his mentality regarding radical reforms.

The Independent’s article describes how Blair brought in tuition fees, how they were initially capped and then raised and then raised again by the coalition government of Cameron and Clegg. The interviewer on Radio 4 brought up the fact that Starmer had made a series of pledges, like taking the utilities back into government ownership, and then dropped them. So Starmer replied by saying that it was quite wrong that Labour had dropped all of these pledges. Really? Mike over at Vox Political has a long list of all the promises Starmer’s broken. And he started, more or less, on day one when he was elected head of the party. He said he was going to retain Corbyn’s policies, which he then dropped, one by one, just as he persecuted the former leader’s supporters. As for Corbyn himself, one of the YouTube channels showed just how two-faced Starmer was about him by showing clips of Starmer giving glowing testimony about Corbyn before later going on to decry him. It’s all a bit Stalinist, like the way under Communism the latest member of the Politburo was hailed as men of great intelligence and integrity who would lead the workers’ to victory over capitalism before being denounced as an evil capitalist imperialist lackey and co-conspirator with Trotsky a few weeks or months later. Communist politicians and apparatchiks during Stalin’s reign used to read Pravda to see if they would be mentioned as the intended victims of yet another anti-Soviet plot that existed only in Stalin’s paranoid imagination. If they were, then they could tell that they were in favour with the old brute. If they weren’t, it meant that they’d fallen out of favour and could so be expecting a knock at the door from the NKVD/KGB. And the victims of the show trials were frequently smeared as collaborators with Trotsky. I supposed the contemporary Labour party equivalent is being accused of supporting Corbyn and being an anti-Semite.

But Starmer still wanted people to think he was sincere about reforming tuitions fees. He said that the present system was unfair and Labour was looking at alternative ways they could be paid. How? I don’t see any alternative. Either the government pays the tuition fees or the students have to. There may be some fudge, so that the government pays it as a loan, but you’d still be stuck with students having to pay them.

The paper went for comment to the head of Labour Students, who really wasn’t impressed. She rightly mentioned that students are now faced with mountains of debt and stated that this would be Starmer’s ‘Nick Clegg moment’. This referred to Clegg’s pledge to end tuition fees, which he immediately reneged on once he was in power with Cameron. And the decision to retain or raise tuition fees, I’ve forgotten which, was Clegg’s. Cameron was apparently ready to let him honour his policy announcement. I was doing a Ph.D. at uni when Clegg went back on his word, and naturally the former head of the Lib Dems was not popular amongst some students. Indeed, for some of them he became synonymous with treachery.

Starmer’s hesitancy about this decision, his determination to reject it while telling everyone that he still supports it, reminds me of his indecision over changing the Gender Recognition Act. Starmer was first in favour of it, then when the issue helped to bring down Sturgeon in Scotland he announced that it wouldn’t be a priority for Labour, before changing his position yet again and swinging back to support it. But in answer to that knotty question ‘Do women have penises?’ Starmer tried to have it both ways and declared that 99.99 per cent of women don’t have penises. All that did was provoke more ridicule and allowed Sunak to score points for the gender critical side by saying that no, women don’t have penises.

Apparently, it doesn’t matter what the issue is, Starmer will break any promise he makes about it while telling you that he still supports it. He really can’t be trusted.

Bristol Plastic Surgeon Wants to Shrink the NHS

And we all know what that means: more privatisation. This has got me really angry. The BBC local news for the Bristol area, Points West, has added a little local slant on the current NHS crisis. It has covered the views of a plastic surgeon, who was at one point appointed to an NHS committee of some description. Now the surgeon’s calling for a Royal Commission to examine the NHS and what changes should be made to it. The man’s concerned that 40 per cent of doctors graduating are planning to leave the health service, lured by higher salaries and better conditions in Australia and New Zealand. That is a problem that needs solving. However, his solution is to shrink the NHS. He opines that it’s too big, and is actually one of the world’s biggest employers. The NHS is indeed huge. I read somewhere that it employs more people than the Indian railway. But it’s always been big, and historically it always has given value for money. Until David Cameron, Tweezer, Johnson, Liz Truss and Sunak. But way back in 1979 the Royal College considered that improvements to the Health Service would be easily paid for by tax revenue. And to be fair to Tony Blair, it was properly funded during his tenure of 10 Downing Street, even though he really wanted to privatise whatever he could of it.

This is what we’re talking about here: Privatisation. Selling off some of the NHS’ services, so that it no longer provides a service to everyone, free at the point of delivery.

This is what the Tories have been aiming for, and what their media mouthpieces, like GB News’ Nana Akua, are demanding. The present Health Secretary denied that there were any plans for any such thing. Yeah, and Thatcher denied that she wanted to privatise the NHS, but she did. What probably alarmed the Health Secretary was that this surgeon spoke their plans out loud. The Tories are despicable, as is this surgeon’s views. I hope, I really hope, that more medical professions will come forward to challenge the government and their slow privatisation of this precious institution.

And that the government pays our junior doctors what they’re worth.

Simon Webb’s Speech to the Traditional Britain Group: A Critique

One of the great commenters on this blog asked me the other day if I’d watched Simon Webb’s speech to the Traditional Britain Group, which has been posted up on YouTube. Webb is the man behind History Debunked, in which he criticises, refutes and comments on various historical myths and distortions. Most of these are against Black history, as well as racial politics. Occasionally he also presents his opinions on gay and gender issues. Like other YouTubers and internet commenters, you need to use your own discretion when watching his material. Sometimes, when he cites his sources, he’s right. At other times he’s more probably wrong. As much of his material is against mass immigration, particularly Black and Asian, and he believes that there is a racial hierarchy when it comes to intelligence, there’s some discussion of the man’s political orientation. He’s definitely right-wing, reading the Torygraph and attacking Labour as ‘high spending’. But it’s a question of how right-wing. Some people have suggested he’s English Democrat or supports a similar extreme right fringe party.

The other day he gave a speech at the Traditional Britain Group, which is a particularly nasty set of rightists within the Conservative party. There was a scandal a few years ago, you’ll recall, when Jacob Rees-Mogg turned up at one of their dinners. Mogg claimed he didn’t know how far right they were, but was shown to be somewhat economical with the actualite when someone showed that he’d actually been warned against associating with them. They are fervently against non-White immigration and some of them have a dubious interest in the Nazis and the Third Reich. I’ve also been told that their members include real Nazis and eugenicists, which is all too credible. They also want to privatise the NHS. I found this out after finding myself looking at their message board a few years ago. They were talking about how they needed to privatise the health service, but it would have to be done gradually and covertly because at the moment the masses were too much in favour of it. Which has been Tory policy for decades.

Webb’s speech is about half and hour long, and takes in slavery, White English identity and how Blacks have taken ownership of the subject so that it’s now part of theirs, White guilt over it and the industrial revolution and how White Brits are being made to feel ashamed of imperialism. He also blamed Tony Blair for mass immigration and claimed that it was due to this that the health service was collapsing.

The British Empire

He started off by saying that when he was young, everyone believed that the British Empire was a good thing and that we had brought civilisation to Africa and other parts of the world. I don’t doubt this. He’s older than me, and so I can believe that the received view of the Empire in his time was largely positive. Even the Labour party broadly supported imperialism. Its official stance was that Britain held these countries in trust until they were mature enough for self-government. This has changed, and there is a general feeling, certainly on the left, that it’s something we should be ashamed of. But this has come from historians and activists discussing and revealing the negative aspects of colonialism, such as the genocide and displacement of indigenous peoples, enslavement, forced labour and massacres. The end of empires tend to be particularly bloody, as shown in the various nationalist wars that ended the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the French possession of Algeria. Britain fought similar bloody wars and committed atrocities to defend its empire, as shown in the massive overreaction in Kenya to the Mao Mao rebellion. Jeremy Black, in his history of the British Empire, also argues that support for the empire fell away from the 1970s onwards as British youth became far more interested in America. I think the automatic condemnation of British imperialism is wrong and one-sided. It’s also somewhat hypocritical, as the same people condemning the British Empire don’t condemn other brutal imperial regimes like the Ottomans. It’s also being used by various post-colonial regimes to shift attention and blame for their own failings. But all this doesn’t change the fact that some horrific things were done during the Empire, which politicians and historians have to deal with. Hence the shame, although in my view there should be a space for a middle position which condemns the atrocities and celebrates the positive.

Britain and Slavery

He then talks about how slavery is now identified solely with Black transatlantic servitude. But he argues that the White English can also claim slavery as part of their identity. He talks of the first mention of the English in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, when pope Gregory the Great saw some English children for sale in the slave market in Rome. Asking who such beautiful children were, he was told they were Angles. At which Gregory punned, ‘Non Anglii, sed angeli’ – ‘Not Angles but angels’. At the time of the Domesday Book 10 per cent of the English population were slaves. And the mob that tore down Colston’s statue in Bristol were unaware that the city had been exported English slaves over a millennium before. These were shipped to the Viking colonies in Ireland – Dublin, Wexford and other towns – from whence they were then trafficked internationally. Slavery existed long before Black transatlantic slavery. The first record we have of it is from 4000 years ago in the form of document from the Middle East recording the sale of slaves and pieces of land. While they weren’t aware of transatlantic slavery at school, they knew slavery existed through studying the Bible. The story of Joseph and his brothers, and the Israelites in Egypt. But slavery has now become identified exclusively with Black slavery and is part of the Black identity. It’s because we’re supposed to feel guilty about slavery and feel sorry for Blacks that Black people over overrepresented in adverts, on television dramas and even historical epics, such as the show about the Tudors where half the actors were Black.

Webb is right about slavery existing from ancient times. There are indeed documents from the ancient near eastern city of Mari in Mesopotamia recording the sale of slaves along with land and other property, as I’ve blogged about here. One of the problems the abolitionists faced was that slavery existed right across the world, and so their opponents argued that it was natural institution. They therefore also claimed that it was consequently unfair and disastrous for the government to abolish it in the British empire. He’s right about Pope Gregory and the English slaves, although the word ‘Angli’ refers to the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that settled and colonised England with the Saxons and Jutes after the fall of the Roman Empire. Angles in Anglo-Saxon were Englas, hence Engla-land – England, land of the Angles, and Englisc, English. Bristol did indeed export English slave to Ireland. Archbishop Wulfstan preached against it in the 11th century. We were still doing so in 1140, when visiting clergy from France were warned against going for dinner aboard the Irish ships in the harbour. These would lure people aboard with such promises, then slip anchor and take them to Ireland. The Irish Vikings also imported Black slaves. One chronicle reports the appearance of a consignment of blamenn, blue or black men in Old Norse, in Dublin. David Olasuga has also claimed that they imported 200 Blacks into Cumbria. Bristol’s export of White English slaves is mentioned in a display about it in the city’s M Shed Museum, which also contains the statue of Edward Colston. I do agree with Webb that there is a problem with popular attitudes towards slavery. Its presentation is one-sided, so that I don’t think many people are aware of it and its horrors outside the British Empire, nor how White Europeans were also enslaved by the Muslim Barbary pirates. I very strongly believe that this needs to be corrected.

Black Overrepresentation on TV

I don’t think it’s guilt over slavery alone that’s responsible for the large number of Black actors being cast on television, particularly the adverts. I think this is probably also due to commercial marketing, the need to appeal to international audiences and attempts to integrate Blacks by providing images of multiracial Britain. Many adverts are made for an international audience, and I think the use of Blacks has become a sort of visual shorthand for showing that the company commissioning the advert is a nice, anti-racist organisation, keen to sell to people of different colours across the world without prejudice. At home, it’s part of the promotion of diversity. Blacks are, or are perceived, as acutely alienated and persecuted, and so in order to combat racism the media has been keen to include them and present positive images of Black life and achievement. There are organisations dedicated to this task, such as the Creative Diversity Network, as well as systems that grade companies according to how they invest in multicultural enterprises, such as television and programmes with suitably racially diverse casts. Webb has himself talked about this. He’s also stated that Blacks are disproportionately represented on television, constituting only 6 per cent of the population but a very large proportion of actors in TV programmes and adverts. This might simply be because other, larger ethnic groups, such as Asians, aren’t so concerned with entering the entertainment industry and so aren’t represent to the same extent. Hence, Blacks sort of stand in for people of colour as a whole. As for adverts, I’ve also wondered if some of this might be purely commercial – a concern to sale to an emergent, affluent, Black market, perhaps. It also struck me that it might also be a make work programme. As I understand it, there are too many drama graduates for too few roles. This is particularly going to hit Blacks and other ethnic minorities because Britain at the moment is still a White majority country. There have consequently been demands for colour blind casting, as in Armando Iannucci’s recent film version of Oliver Twist. A year or so ago one Black actor announced that there should be more roles for Blacks or else they would go to America. As for the casting of a Black woman as Anne Boleyn, this seems to follow the theatre, where colour blind casting has existed for years. I think it also follows the tacit demand to create an image of the British past that conforms to modern multicultural society rather than how it really was. And some of it, I think, just comes from the feeling that as modern Blacks are as British as their White compatriots, so they should not be excluded from appearing as historical characters who were White. I think these considerations are just as likely, or more likely, to be the causes of the disproportionate number of Blacks appearing on camera than simply pity for them as the victims of slavery.

Blair Not Responsible for Mass Immigration

Now we come to his assertion that Blair was responsible for mass immigration. When he made this declaration, there were shouts, including one of ‘traitor’. I don’t believe that Blair was responsible for it, at least, not in the sense he means. The belief that he was, which is now widespread on the anti-immigrant right, comes from a single civil servant. This official claimed that Blair did so in order to change the ethnic composition of Britain and undermine the Tories. But did he really? This comes from a single individual, and without further corroboration, you can’t be sure. In fact Blair seems to have tried to cut down on immigration, particularly that of non-Whites. In order to dissuade people from coming here, he stopped immigrants from being able to apply for welfare benefits. The food banks now catering to native Brits were originally set up to feed those immigrants, who were no longer eligible for state aid. I also recall David Blunkett stating that they were going to cut down on immigration. The Guardian also accused Blair of racism over immigration. He had cut down on non-White immigration from outside Europe, while allowing White immigration from the EU and its new members in eastern Europe. The right had also been concerned about rising Black and Asian immigration for decades, and in the 1980s Tory papers like the Depress were publishing articles about unassimilable ethnic minorities. This started before Blair, and I don’t think he was deliberately responsible for it.

But I believe he was responsible for it in the sense that many of the migrants come from the countries Blair, Bush, Obama and Sarco destroyed or helped to destroy in the Middle East, such as Libya, Iraq and Syria. Blair had made some kind of deal with Colonel Gaddafy to keep migrants from further south in Libya, rather than crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. This was destroyed when Gaddafy’s regime was overthrown by Islamists. The result has been the enslavement of Black African migrants, and renewed waves of refugees from North Africa fleeing the country’s collapse.

He also stated that the industrial revolution, which was something else that was traditionally a source of pride, is now considered a cause for shame instead. Britain had been its birthplace and given its innovations to the rest of the world. However, we are now expected to be ashamed of it through its connection to slavery. The cotton woven in the Lancashire mills came from the American slave south, while sugar came from the slave colonies of the Caribbean. We’re also supposed to be ashamed of it because it’s the cause of climate change, for which we should pay reparations.

The Industrial Revolution and Climate Change

Okay, I’ve come across the claim that the industrial revolution was financed by profits from the slave trade and that it was based on the processing of slave produced goods. However, this is slightly different from condemning the industrial revolution as a whole. You can lament the fact that slavery was a part of this industrialisation, while celebrating the immense social, technological and industrial progress itself. After all, Marx states in the Communist Manifesto that it has rescued western society from rural idiocy. The demand that Britain should feel ashamed about the industrial revolution because of climate change comes from Greta Thunberg. It is, in my view, monumentally stupid and actually shows an ignorance of history. It’s based on an idealisation of pre-technological societies and an idealisation of rural communities. It’s a product of European romanticism, mixed with contemporary fears for the future of the planet. But the agrarian past was no rural idyll. People in the agricultural societies before the urbanisation of the 19th century had very utilitarian attitudes to the environment. It was a source of resources that could be used and exploited. The nostalgia for an idealised rural past came with the new generation of urban dwellers, who missed what they and their parents had enjoyed in the countryside. And rural life could be extremely hard. If you read economic histories of the Middle Ages and early modern period, famine is an ever present threat. It still was in the 19th century. The Irish potato famine is the probably the best known example in Ireland and Britain, but there were other instances of poverty, destitution and starvation across the UK and Europe. Industrialisation has allowed a far greater concentration of people to live than would have been possible under subsistence agriculture. Yes, I’m aware that overpopulation is a problem, that industrial pollution is harming the environment and contributing to the alarming declining in animal and plant species. But technological and science hopefully offer solutions to these problems as well. And I really don’t want to go back to a subsistence economy in which communities can be devastated by crop failure.

The call for climate reparations, I think, comes from Ed Miliband, and in my view it shows how out of touch and naive he is. I have no problem the Developed World giving aid to some of those countries threatened by climate change, such as the Pacific islands which are threatened with flooding due to the rise in sea levels. But some countries, I believe, are perfectly capable of doing so without western help. One of these is China, which also contributes massively to carbon emissions and which I believe has also called for the payment of climate reparations. China is an emerging economic superpower, and I see no reason why the west should pay for something that it’s doing and has the ability to tackle. I am also very sceptical whether such monies would be used for the purposes they’re donated. Corruption is a massive problem in the Developing World, and various nations have run scams to part First World donors and aid agencies from their money. When I was at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum one of these was a scheme for a hydroelectric dam in Pakistan. The Pakistani government was calling for western aid to finance the project. Britain refused, sensing a scam, for which we were criticised. Other countries happily gave millions, but the dam was never built. All a fraud. I suspect if climate reparations were paid, something similar would also happen with the aid money disappearing into kleptocrats’ pockets. There’s also the problem of where the tax burden for the payment of these reparations would fall. It probably wouldn’t be the rich, who have enjoyed generous tax cuts, but the British working class through indirect taxes. In short, it seems to me to be a colossally naive idea.

But these ideas don’t seem to be widespread. When he announced them, there were shouts from the audience to which Webb responded that it was coming, and they should wait a few years. Perhaps it will, but I’ve seen no enthusiasm or even much mention of them so far. They were mentioned during the COP 27 meeting, and that’s it. Thunberg’s still around, but after all these years I think she’s somewhat passe. At the moment I don’t think these ideas are issues.

Mass Immigration Not the Cause of NHS Crisis

Now let’s examine his statement that it’s due to immigration that the NHS is in the state it’s in. This is, quite simply, wrong. He correctly states that while Britain’s population has grown – London’s has nearly doubled and Leicester’s grown by 30 per cent – there has been no similar provision of medical services. No new hospitals have been built. As a result, where once you could simply walk into your doctor’s and expect to be seen, now you have to book an appointment. And when it comes to hospitals, it’s all the fault of immigrants. He talks about a specific hospital in London, and how the last time he was in that area, he was the only White Brit in the queue. This was because immigrants don’t have GPs, and so go to the hospital for every problem. We also have the problem of sick and disabled people from the developing world coming to the country for the better services we offer. A woman from the Sudan with a special needs child will therefore come here so that her child can have the treatment it wouldn’t get in the Sudan.

I dare say some of this analysis is correct. Britain’s population has grown largely due to immigration. One statistic released by a right-wing group said that immigration was responsible for 80 per cent of population growth. It’s probably correct, as Chambers Cyclopedia stated in its 1987 edition that British birthrates were falling and that it was immigration that was behind the rise in the UK population. I don’t know London at all, and I dare say that many of the immigrants there may well not have had doctors. I can also quite believe that some immigrants do come here for our medical care. There was a case a few weeks ago of a Nigerian woman, who got on a flight to London specifically so that she could have her children in a British hospital. I think this was a case of simple health tourism, which has gone on for years, rather than immigration.

But this overlooks the fact that the problems of the NHS has been down to successive Thatcherite regimes cutting state medical care in Britain all under the pretext of making savings and not raising taxes. Thatcher closed hospital wards. So did Tony Blair, when he wasn’t launching his PFI initiative. This was supposed to build more hospitals, but led to older hospitals being closed and any new hospitals built were smaller, fewer and more expensive. Cameron started off campaigning against hospital closures, and then, once he got his backside in No. 10, carried on with exactly the same policy. Boris Johnson claimed that he was going to build forty hospitals, which was, like nearly everything else the obese buffoon uttered, a flat lie. And Tweezer, Truss and Sunak are doing the same. Doctors surgeries have also suffered. Many of them have been sold off to private chains, which have maximised profits by closing down those surgeries that aren’t profitable. The result is that people have been and are being left without doctors. If you want an explanation why the NHS is in the state it is, blame Thatcher and her heirs, not immigrants.

Conclusion

While Webb has a point about the social and political manipulation of historical issues like the slave trade and the British Empire, these aren’t the reasons for the greater appearance of Black actors and presenters on television. Blair wasn’t responsible for mass immigration, and it’s underfunding and privatisation, not immigration, that’s responsible for the deplorable state of the health service. But he’s speaking to the wrong people there anyway, as the TBG would like to privatise it.

I am not saying it is wrong to discuss these issues, but it is wrong to support a bunch of Nazis like the TBG, who will exploit them to recreate all the social inequality, poverty and deprivation of pre-modern Britain.

Cassetteboy’s Foul and Funny Satirical Assault on the Tories and the Christmas Charts

Okay, I said that as it was the Christmas season, I wanted to leave politics and post different, lighter material. But this latest video on YouTube from the audio satirists of Cassetteboy and the Kunts is far too good to ignore. And so I feel myself reacting to it a bit like Dave Allen on his Christmas show in the ’80s. The great Irish comedian said, ‘The producer said to me, “Dave, it’s Christmas, so leave religion out of it.”‘ He then looked at the audience, letting than sink in for a moment, before ending, ‘Well, I would, if I could….’ A few years ago there was a campaign to embarrass the Beeb by everyone playing Rage Against the Machine with their expletive-filled lyrics in order to get it to No. 1 at Christmas. The track would be far too strong for the Beeb, who wouldn’t want to play it but would be faced with the problem of not wanting to ignore it either. Something similar was going on in the minds of Cassetteboy when they put together this festive assault on the Tories and their wretched legacy of incompetence, poverty, mendacity and greed.

The song begins in a suitably seasonal way by singing about the 12 years of Tory rule like the 12 days of Christmas, and how terrible it has been for the country. It began with Dave Cameron, who introduced austerity, but party before country with this Brexit vote and then ‘shat the bed and ran away’. This continued with Tweezer, who couldn’t sort Brexit out despite her thin red lines, then Boris Johnson who lied to get himself elected and partied while everyone else was in lockdown. Then we get to Liz Truss, who killed the Queen before being given the heave-ho and finally Rishi Sunak. Along the way there are clips of other Tory ministers, edited to make them say how terrible they are, including Jacob Rees-Mogg. The refrain is ‘F*ck the Tories’. It ends with the message that the individual Prime Ministers may differ, but they’re all the same really.

The video came out a week or so ago. I don’t think it’s got to No.1, but it’s crude, vulgar and entirely accurate. I hope it gives everyone a bit of fun during this ‘orrible Winter of Discontent.

Satirical Job Ad for Post of UK Prime Minister

I found this spoof advert for the job of Prime Minister on the Larry and Paul channel on YouTube. It purports to be from the UK ‘Govurnmunt’, complete with images of the Jobcentre and official UK government logos. It gives the details of how well the prime ministers are paid, their severance pay and pensions. It also reassures applicants that they don’t have to worry about having no previous experience or a high IQ. This is backed up with images of Suella Braverman and Liz Truss. Nor do you have to worry about having left before in disgrace, which is accompanied with images of BoJob, Dodgy Dave and Tweezer. On the other hand, you have to be good at maintaining important relationships. This has images of Rupert Murdoch, amongst others. And if you’re not ready for the change just yet, there’ll be another recruitment opportunity in about six weeks. Probably. It ends with the announcement that the job is open to any sociopath who went to Eton.

And so, the office of prime minister becomes a farcical joke. Though the mock ad’s funny and is the type of satire we should be getting from mainstream media. but probably won’t. ‘Cause if you laugh at the Tories on television, you’ll lose your license fee and end up with Nadine Dorries demanding your privatisation.

History Debunked Gets Nostalgic for the Polite Violence of British Football Hooligans

As against the really nasty, gun and knife violence of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. A few days ago, Simon Webb of History Debunked put up a video arguing that the reason Britain has become a much more violent society is because of non-White immigration. Yes, he conceded, riots and violence had occurred before mass Black and Asian immigration, but they were much less dangerous than currently. When fights broke out, as between different gangs of football hooligans, it largely involved fists. Knives and guns were rarely used. Now Webb does have a point here. The Lotus Eaters put up a video a few days ago of them speaking to Nick Buckley, a former police officer and anti-knife crime activist. Buckley stated that some of this violence did come from ethnic minorities importing their own cultural attitudes towards violence. An example of this was machetes, which came from Africa. But he did not have such a rosy view of indigenous British violence. Britain had in the past been an extremely violent society, but this had been successfully combated. And now we needed to start the process again with the new immigrants and their armed violence.

Absolutely. Here’s a couple of piccies I found of items issued to 19th century coppers for their own defence and protection. They come from Michele Byam’s Eyewitness Guides: Arms and Armour, published by Dorling Kindersley in 1988.

The above is a photo of a ‘stock’, a leather collar that was issued to the officers by some police forces to prevent them from being garrotted.

There was also this police sword. They weren’t carried by policemen on duty and were usually kept back at the police station. But they were issued for use in riots. One of the photos in one of the pubs around St. Nicholas’ Market in Bristol shows a group of 19th century cops drawn up in ranks practising their swordsmanship ready for just such a situation. I also remember hearing on a programme about 19th century crime that London was such a violent place that at any one time a certain high percentage of its officers would be off work recovering from injuries. 19th century Britain was far more violent than today, and if the criminals didn’t have knives, they had the ‘shiv’, which was often a cut-throat razor stuck into a cork. And Glasgow had a particularly nasty reputation for razor gangs.

This violence was successfully fought, in my opinion, through rising prosperity and the emergence of a culture of working-class respectability. My hope is that the same can be and will be done to crush the culture of violence in some parts of Britain’s ethnic communities.

Webb also stated that all the recent rioting could be correlated with immigrant communities and gave a list of them. This including the rioting across Britain in 1981/2, which was racial. But there have been other riots by Whites. Later in the 1980s or ’90s there was a riot in Hartcliffe in Bristol, which at the time was largely but not exclusively White. And I’m sure there have been other riots across the country that were the same, but have not been so notable because the rioters were Whites rather than Blacks or other ethnic minorities.

But there were other things Buckley said that probably didn’t go down too well with the true-blue Tories of the Lotus Eaters. Some of the rise of violence was blamed on the limits placed on stop and search, because more Blacks were stopped than Whites. But Buckley defended on it on the grounds that he’d been stopped and searched when he was a younger. And the reason why Blacks were stopped more than Whites was simply because Blacks were responsible for a higher proportion of crime. That was just statistics. The Lotus Eaters believed that the limits on stop and search had been put there by Blair. But he actually blamed David Cameron, who wanted to copy Blair in that regard, and Theresa May, who as home secretary took 20,000 coppers off the beat. As for the return of stop and search, Buckley stated that many communities were in favour of it because they wanted more police protection. Thus, in every council ward before an election, communities were asked if they wanted more policing, with the only answer either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. If they answered yes, they had stop and search. Complaints of racism were to be ignored and rebutted, because the community had asked for it.

The Lotus Eaters would clearly support the return of stop and search, but I got the impression that the last thing they wanted to hear about the rise in violent crime is that it was due to Dodgy Dave Cameron and Tweezer curbing stop and search and cutting police numbers. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

In the meantime, let’s also recognise that while violent crime may have increased in Britain, there have also been horrifically high rates of it during the 19th century when it was driven by Whites.

It’s Predictable: Farage Blames Blair for Muslim/ Hindu Riots

He also blamed Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May as well, but it’s mainly Blair’s fault. Because he encouraged diversity. GB News interviewed Nigel Farage over the continuing riots between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester. They disturbances have now spread to Smethwick, where Muslim protesters are standing outside a Hindu durgan. The protest has supposedly been caused by the temple inviting a right-wing preacher to speak there. A news report about this from one of the Indian news networks showed a Muslim lad in a black balaclava talking about how they had come down from Birmingham and elsewhere to protest. It was peaceful, but, he added, if things did happen, they’d be there.

Farage inevitably had to blame Tony Blair. He said that immigration could be a great asset and Britain had benefited from it, but when it was uncontrolled and let in unassimilated groups, it resulted in scenes like this. And Blair was primarily to blame because he promoted diversity. This accusation comes from a single senior civil servant, who claimed that Blair had promoted mass immigration in order to rub the Tories’ noses in diversity and multiculturalism. This is just one person saying this, and it’s possible that his memory is mistaken, or he’s lying. But the accusation has spread around the racist right like a rash, so they all hate Labour as the party of mass immigration.

The Fuhrage, however, did have a point when he agreed with one woman, who had responded to the statement by Claudia Webbe that the rioting was due to extreme right-wing ideologies imported from the subcontinent. Yes, that woman, had said, racist, colonialist, sexist patriarchal ideologies were imported from elsewhere. This turns the tables on the attitude of the anti-racist left that Britain is a terrible, racist, colonialist, patriarchal society and it’s reflected in our culture, which has to be reformed if not torn down. Farage also blamed our leaders for not acting against ethnic racism because they were afraid of being accused of racism in turn, as shown by the grooming gang and a number of other scandals. But that’s only part of it. Certain politicians on the left stated that they didn’t want to tackle ethnic racism because this was a threat or distraction from campaigning against White racism. Diane Abbott was one of these. She was asked by an Asian gent at some kind of Labour meeting what she intended to do about racism in ethnic communities. She replied that she was against doing anything, because it would allow ‘them’ to divide and rule.

Sadly, the Asian guy was right. Ethnic tensions and racism in Britain were ignored, and as a result these communities have been influenced by fascist propaganda from outside.

Now is the time to reform anti-racist campaign so that it includes all forms of racism and far right, populist ideologies and not just White.

Grotty Daily Mail Shills for People to Abandon NHS and Go Private

I’ve just been to the barbers for a haircut, and while waiting I leafed through some of the papers left out. One was the Heil, so I looked through that. Okay, I’m not proud of it, but it was something to read while waiting. Needless to say, it was as it usually is. There’s a story about the cost of housing asylum seekers and the channel migrants. But what really disgusted me was an opinion piece. This was by a supposed NHS consultant urging patients to ‘beg, borrow or steal’ to go private.

This is essentially the Tory strategy for running down the NHS, ever since Maggie Thatcher. She wanted the health service privatised and replaced by an American-style healthcare system funded by private health insurance. She was only stopped by a cabinet revolt and the finding of her personal secretary, Patrick Jenkin. Jenkin had been to America and knew exactly how poor in comparison the American system was. So Thatcher had to content herself with aiming to get 10 per cent of the population to take out private health insurance.

She also began process of piecemeal privatisation, selling off or opening up the ancillary services to private competition. This process was carried on by John Major’s administration and then by Tony Blair, who was ostensibly Labour. And Cameron, Tweezer and Bozo have in turn continued the wretched process. Private healthcare firms are allowed to compete with the NHS itself for contracts for medical services. Thanks to this privatisation, administration costs in the NHS have sky-rocketed where they approaching the levels -25 per cent or so – which the American private health system spends on administration. Privatisation does not bring savings. Quite the opposite. At the same time, the Tories have cut spending on the NHS, and grotty Tories like Truss and Mogg are saying they’ll cut more NHS ‘waste’. Meaning, presumably, more expensive privatisation and cuts.

The only way to cut waste is to renationalise the NHS.

But the article shows the direction of travel British healthcare is taking under the Tories: a two-tier system, with poor NHS services for the people at the bottom, and expensive private healthcare for those who can afford it. And the Tories stand to profit from it personally. Under Cameron, 100 MPs had personally connections to private healthcare firms.

If you really want to ensure that you and the rest of this great nation has the healthcare it needs and deserve, then kick the Tories and the other privatisers out, and demand the renationalisation of the NHS!

Toby Young on the Free Speech Union and Legislation Needed to Protect Free Speech

I am very definitely not a fan of Toby Young. He’s a very right-wing Tory with nasty eugenicist views. I think he’s part of the Spectator crew and something of a sleazeball, as Hill Street Blues’ officer Mick Belcher would describe him. If memory serves me right, he was one of the people behind a proposed free university, which collapsed a few years ago. Tweezer appointed him to the body that’s supposed to represent Britain’s students, despite the fact that it’s been at least a couple of decades since he was one. He got into Private Eye a few years ago for attending a eugenics conference at one of the London universities. Along with him were members of various American far right groups, who believed that race really did define intelligence and Blacks were biologically less bright than the rest of us. They also weren’t in favour of the welfare state, for the old, old reason that it’s a waste a money supporting people who can’t fend for themselves. In other words, some of the people there could be reasonably described as Nazis.

And his attitude to women leaves much to be desired. A few years ago he managed to cause mass disgust on Twitter or one of the social media platforms by describing how he watched female MPs on TV, commenting on their busts. Back in the 90s he wrote a piece for GQ about how he had been a ‘lesbian for a day’. He then revealed in the article that he’d dressed up in drag and then decided to go trolling through New York’s lesbian bars looking for a snog. He had successfully passed himself off as gay woman in two of them, before he was discovered in a third and had to beat a hasty retreat. Or been thrown out. Whatever. This is the kind of antics many lesbians are complaining about from trans-identified men, or possibly straight men claiming to be trans. They object to clearly biological men demanding romance or sex from them because they claim to be trans. There have been transwomen giving presentations on ‘Breaking the cotton ceiling’, which means getting into lesbians’ cotton underwear. Graham Linehan, formerly the writer behind Father Ted and now an anti-Trans activist, has remarked that one of the lesbian dating sites is actually full of bearded men, who are about as feminine as he is, all claiming to be trans. Well, Tobes tried this trick decades ago. But I wouldn’t like to see him as any kind of trans pioneer.

But his Free Speech Union does have a point.

Young and the others set this up to protect people from persecution because of their views. These are mostly individuals, whose views or comments are deemed offensive because of racism, sexism, homophobia or anti-trans. He appeared on a video on GB News talking about the work the Free Speech Union had done defending two such individuals. One was a railway worker, who’d been sacked because of a comment he’d posted on social media. He lived in one of the towns up north with a large Muslim community. After the lockdown was lifted, he posted that it was a relief no longer having to live in an alcohol-free Muslim caliphate. Someone complained to the company, and he was sacked. The Free Speech Union, however, took up his case, and an industrial tribunal declared in his favour that he was a victim of unfair dismissal and awarded him damages. The second case was a Christian woman, who offended woke sensibilities by stating that the Christian ideal of marriage should be the heterosexual one of a man and woman. Now I’d say that this was perfectly correct and normal, and that holding such a view doesn’t mean that you automatically hate gays or people in same-sex marriages. I’m absolutely sure you can hold such a traditional view of marriage, while recognising that gays also have the right to marry and for their marriages to be respected. But this traditional view was too much for someone, and she suffered because of it.

Now I realise that many people do disagree with these views, and particularly with the railway worker’s comments. It is islamophobic. But that’s the point. For free speech to mean anything, it has to include offensive or unpleasant speech. Free speech that only permits approved speech whether by the authorities or the populace, is no such thing. I’m not a free speech absolutist. There have to be limits, which in my opinion includes holocaust denial, the promotion of paedophilia or which urges people to commit other crimes, like incitement to riot. I’d also include real incitement to racial hatred, though my fear is that such reasonable legislation has been broadened too far to include comments which someone simply finds offensive, rather than which genuinely threatens the safety of Blacks and other people of colour. The guy’s remark is offensive and tasteless but not, I think, really worth his job.

Young explained that the Union would like to pass legislation protecting people from being sacked for their views, if they expressed them as private individuals and not as work or representatives of a company or organisation. He also talked about getting the trade unions to back such legislation, considering that the trade unions were founded to protect workers talking about their companies’ pay and conditions. Well, it was a bit more than that. They were founded to fight for workers’ pay and conditions, but yes, opposing victimisation for one’s views is part of that.

He also proposed having a two-year limit on what could be used to attack someone from their web history. Here I definitely agree with him. There have been a number of cases where politicos, celebrities and ordinary mortals have been embroiled in scandals because of something they said online a few years ago, sometimes when they were much younger. Quite often it’s people, who’ve said something unpleasant or bigoted about people from ethnic minorities and gays, sometimes when they were very young. Private Eye has done this several times. Quite often they’ve printed pieces showing that whatever such a politician, industrialist or media figure thinks now, back in the day he or she had very different views. Sometimes very far back, like in the ’80s or ’90s. People change, and don’t necessarily hold the same views they had when they were in their teens or twenties.

But another reason I’m prepared to give such legislation my approval is because it might stop some of the persecution by the witch hunters. The stock in trade of persecutory groups like the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and David Collier and the GnasherJew troll farm is going through their targets’ internet history looking for anything they can misrepresent as anti-Semitism. They’ve done it to a lot of people, many of them Jews and firm opponents of anti-Semitism. They did it to the great Jackie Walker, a self-respecting Jew by faith and blood and a very committed anti-racist activist. Jackie had been discussing the involvement of Jewish financiers – who she explicitly stated were members of her own people – in the slave trade. This is historic fact, and Jackie, as a proper historian and academic, has produced an enormous amount of mainstream scholarship by respected and respectable historians to support it. She has also made the obvious point that these financiers were working for Christian, European kings and states, with whom the ultimate responsibility lies. Again, perfectly correct. But she left out a word, which allowed the CAAS to misrepresent her grotesquely as an anti-Semite. That, and the Jewish Labour Movement secretly recording some of her perfectly reasonable comments about commemorating other groups’ holocausts, like the slave trade, during a workshop on commemorating the Holocaust, has led to her being expelled from the Labour party and receiving the most horrific abuse.

Another victim of the witch hunters was a perfectly innocent Jewish lady in Devon. She was mentioned in an online film Mike and other Corbyn-supporting peeps appeared on promoting a documentary refuting the accusation that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. That film opened with a group of venerable rabbis in long beards, dark coats and broad-brimmed hats stating very clearly that Corbyn was no such thing. Many of the speakers, including Mike himself, were victims of the witch hunt and what looks to yours truly as gross libel. One of these wretched witch hunting groups had posted a map of the locations of anti-Semites, and this lady and her address were on it. As a result, she not only received abuse but her car was firebombed.

This is what is called ‘stochastic terrorism’.

This is the name given to the type of online activism when someone deliberately posts comments that will rile people up against a particular group or individual to the point where they may physically attack them. But the remarks that provoke and encourage the assault are carefully phrased so that the person making them can always disavow responsibility: ‘T’wasn’t anything I said, your honour. It’s nothing to do with me and I didn’t intend anything like it should happen.’ Except, of course, they did. As in my view was the case with this lady.

Toby Young is a Tory with deeply unpleasant views. But I do think the Free Speech Union has a point and deserves support.

Especially if it prevents malign witch hunters doxing innocent people, leading to attacks on them and their property.