I also found this book on the English Defence League on Google Books.
The Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-Class Politics, Simon Winlow and Steve Hall (Policy Press: 2016).
‘The shock Brexit result highlighted a worrying trend: underemployed white men and women who have seen their standard of living fall, their communities disintegrate and their sense of value, function and inclusion diminish, desperately want a mainstream political party to defend their interests. However, no such party exists. These men and women cannot connect their declining fortunes and growing frustrations to their true cause. Instead, immigrants are scapegoated and groups like the English Defence League (EDL) emerge. This book is the first to offer an accessible and uncompromising look at the EDL. It aims to alter thinking about working-class politics and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the de-industrialised and decaying towns and cities of England. The rise of the right among the working class, the authors claim, is inextricably connected to the withdrawal of the political left from traditional working-class communities, and the left’s refusal to advance the economic interests of those who have suffered most from neoliberal economic restructuring. Incisive, contentious and boundary-breaking, it uses the voices of men and women who now support far-right political groups to address the total failure of mainstream parliamentary politics and the rising tide of frustration, resentment and anger.’
This is pretty much the same constituency that voted for UKIP – working class Whites who feel that they have been left behind and are no longer represented by the mainstream parties. And it has been demonstrated that the extreme right can be successfully combated with proper, socialist policies that bring the working class together. When Blairite Margaret Hodge was an MP, she did so little campaigning against them, that when the BNP got seven members elected to Tower Hamlets council their gruppenfuhrer, Derek Beacon, sent her a bouquet of flowers. But this was later reversed with a change of MP, I believe, who did campaign for improving working class conditions and Beacon and squadrists were all voted out.
There’s a warning there for Keir Starmer. If he continues Blair’s policies of concentrating on Tory swing voters at the expense of the working class, while pursuing the identity of politics of race, he will alienate members of the White working class. I don’t know if the EDL are still going. I haven’t heard anything about them in quite a while, but certainly Reclaim, Reform and David Kurten’s Heritage party are eager for recruits.
If we want to stop the far right, we need proper socialist, working class politics that unites Blacks, Whites and Asians together.
This deeply concerns me. A few days ago the mellifluous Irish left-wing vlogger, Maximilien Robespierre, posted a video asking if Keir Starmer was planning to push the privatisation of the NHS even further if or when he gets into 10 Downing Street. I didn’t see more than a few seconds of the video, but it seemed to be based on Starmer’s cagey response to how he would solve the country’s current crises. While Starmer has promised to repeal the anti-strike legislation, which would definitely be a great step if he actually does it, he answered that question by stating that Labour would not be spending its way out of these problems. This looks like an attempt to assure Tory voters that Labour is now fiscally responsible and no longer the high-spending party of traditional Tory caricature. But the current problems in the Health Service and other sectors are partly caused by decades of cuts and underinvestment. In the case of the NHS, the funding has also been gobbled up by increased administration expenses created by privatisation. So where is this extra investment, and improved services, supposed to come from? Blair tried to solve this by pushing the NHS’ privatisation further than Tories had dared. Not only were further NHS services outsourced to private healthcare providers, but he also created the Community Care Groups of doctors, who were responsible for commissioning medical services. These CCGs were granted the powers to buy in private medical services, and to raise additional income privately. Starmer is a Blairite, as shown by his vehement persecution of the Labour left and embrace of neoliberalism. One of the great commenters on this blog has suggested that he’s an admirer of the Swiss healthcare system. This is a mixture of state and private medical insurance, the degree depending on wealth. In the case of the very rich, it’s all, or nearly all, funded by private health insurance. In the case of the poor, it’s state-funded according to whether they can afford a level of private insurance. I have a feeling Nick Clegg of the Lib-Dems believed in the same kind of continental system. This obviously violates the fundamental principles on which Nye Bevin founded the NHS: that it should be universal and free at the point of delivery.
No-one wanted Blair to push through his NHS privatisations and there was electorally no need for it. By the time Blair was elected in 1997 the country was so thoroughly fed up of Tory misrule and their policies that Blair could have pursued a traditional Labour policy of renationalising it as well as funding it properly. But Blair was a Thatcherite and intensely concerned to get the Tory press and Tory voters onside, to the point that Rupert Murdoch has been described as an invisible presence at cabinet meetings. Blair’s pursuit of Tory policies left traditional Labour voters and members feeling betrayed and disenfranchised and the party lost both. They only continued winning elections because the Tories were worse.
I joined the Labour party a few years ago, inspired by Corbyn’s commitment to genuine Labour party policies and the protection and renationalisation of the NHS. I really don’t want to see it privatised by Starmer as Blair did.
If Starmer does push through further measures to privatise it, not only will he betray this country’s working people, making them poorer and with less available healthcare, then it will also have disastrous consequences for the direction of politics in this country. The recent surge of identity politics following the Black Lives Matter protests back in 2020 has also resulted in a backlash and the appearance of anti-woke parties further to the right, like Reform, led by Richard Tice, and Laurence Fox’s Reclaim. If working people become alienated from politics because whichever party you choose, economically they’re all the same, it leaves the way open for the far right. That was shown very clearly in Margaret Hodge’s neck of London, where Hodge did so little to tackle the rise of the BNP that the stormtroopers at one point had seven members on Tower Hamlets council. Their fuehrer, Derek Beacon, even sent her a garland after their squalid electoral victories. What has been shown to work against the fascist parties and unite working people of different ethnicities and religions is effective, traditional Labour welfare policies. These are desperately needed in themselves, but without them there’s the possibility that Britain may go the same way as the continent in the rise of extreme right-wing nationalist parties.
Renationalising the NHS and restoring the welfare state will not only massive improve the health, wellbeing and prosperity of the British working people, but will do much to stop the racial division and alienation fuelling the drift towards the parties of racial division, friction and resentment.
Mark Pattie, one of the great commenters on this channel, asked me if I’d seen the video in which Webb debates Mark Collett, the current fuehrer of Patriotic Alternative. I hadn’t, so he kindly provided the link. And now I have. It’s not a long video, just over five and a half minutes long, and isn’t actually a debate, despite its title. It’s Webb’s review of another debate between Collett and two Black YouTubers. And to be fair, Webb actually comes out of it quite well, almost appearing like a normal person of moderate, non-racist views.
The video is a response by him to continued calls by his commenters to debate Collett. They’ve also called on him several times to join the party. Webb begins by saying that he got one of their election leaflets through the post. Patriotic Alternative were planning to stand as a political party and put in candidates to fight seats at the last election. In the event, they neglected to register as a party with the electoral commission, and so couldn’t stand any candidates. But Londoners got their literature anyway. Webb states that it horrified the liberals and papers, but he read their pamphlet and couldn’t see anything outrageous in it. This is probably because Webb shares many of their views and prejudices, and so wouldn’t. I’m reminded of something Millennial Woes posted on his YouTube channel a few years ago. Millennial Woes is a Scots extreme rightist. His videos tend to consist of him sitting in a bathrobe in a darkened room, smoking, reflecting on the decline of the west due to non-White immigration. When the Alt-Right were in vogue a decade or so ago, Woes was one of the speakers at their conference. During it he told the assembled White supremacists that he realised how far he’d left the mainstream when talking to a young man on the train. The guy was intelligent and articulate, and it was a shock to Woes that he still believed the conventional narrative about the Holocaust! This comes from the man, who said his most extreme view was wanting to bring back slavery. It shows how people at the political extremes see their views as normal and inoffensive until suddenly shaken by talking to normal folks.
Webb said that there would be absolutely no chance of Patriotic Alternative winning seats in his area. The BNP tried a few years ago and got absolutely nowhere. And when they did win, they didn’t know anything about the practical business of politics in the council, and so were out at the next election. This is true, and it’s hilarious. According to Private Eye, Derek Beacon and his massive fascist legion elected to Tower Hamlets, all seven of them, didn’t realise that as well as proposing motions before the council, you also had to vote for them. Thus, when surprisingly the council accepted one of their motions for discussion, they didn’t vote for it, assuming it would automatically pass or something. The motion then failed. We are, fortunately, not dealing with men of the calibre of Oswald Mosley. Webb notes that in his area the BNP fielded several candidates, one of which was a Jewish woman. He found this surprising. Unfortunately, it isn’t, not if you read the articles on this by the excellent Tony Greenstein. Greenstein has blogged about how the Board of Deputies of British Jews got very upset with the very respected historian of the Jewish community, Geoffrey Alderman, for including in his study of the community’s history the fact that 2 per cent of the Jewish population had voted for the wretched NF. In London this was because they didn’t want their kids going to school with Blacks. He also notes that one Conservative politico, despite being Jewish himself, used to hobnob at elections with the BNP moaning that it was a pit that the nationalist vote was split between the two parties. There are fascist Jews around, and none of them were supporters of Corbyn, as Starmer and the Jewish Labour Movement would like us all to believe.
Webb goes on to comment that the Black YouTubers were perfectly reasonable, but they had weird, high voices so he found it difficult to listen to them. He doesn’t like Collett, and says that he refuses to debate or have anything to do with him because he blames the Jews for everything, and there are enough people on his site who already think he, Webb, is Jewish. This is because Webb has attacked the various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, lived in Israel at one point and supports the country, and occasionally wears a necklace with a Hebrew inscription. He states that Collett made quick, chopping motions that reminded him of a little Austrian dictator in the ’30s, and said he could imagine him on a podium screaming ‘Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Fuehrer!’ (One Race/People! One Reich! One Fuehrer), imitating Adolf himself as he did so.
And that’s about it. He describes the electoral incompetence of Patriotic Alternative and the fact that the BNP got absolutely nowhere in his neck of London, doesn’t say anything unpleasant about the Black YouTubers except for the personal comment about squeaky voices, and compares Collett to Hitler, as no doubt many others have done before him. He rejects Collett’s anti-Semitism, and so could even sound an anti-racist liberal. That’s if you weren’t aware of his views on race, and a video he posted today in which he asks if democracy has had its day, and that Britain, and Europe, need a strong leader who will rally them against the threat of militant Islam.
If you want to check the video to see what Webb says for yourself, here it is.
Simon Webb’s turn towards outright Fascism has puzzled me a little. Agreed, almost all the material on Video Debunked is deeply critical of Black and Asian immigration and the problems that have come with multiculturalism. So much so that his readers and commenters have implored him to join Patriotic Alternative. To his credit, he refused, and is deeply critical of its leader, His commenters contain people, who can only be described as real Nazis and anti-Semites. There are any number of them pushing the Great Replacement theory, which hold that the Jews are responsible for mass non-White immigration to the West. This is supposedly being done to destroy the White race. It’s American in origin but made its way into British Fascism where it mixed with certain native British strains of anti-Semitism from The Britons and Arnold Leese. Some of his commenters boast names like ‘Talmud ZOGberg’, after the Talmud, the second Jewish holy book, and ZOG, the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ of Nazis like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber. Webb isn’t an anti-Semite and is a staunch defender of Israel, which frustrates the Nazis on his channel no end, especially when he puts up videos debunking the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the arguments marshalled by the Holocaust deniers.
But these past few days he seems to have become overtly far right. Or at least, nostalgic for it. Yesterday he put up a video asking what was wrong with Fascism, citing Portugal’s former dictator Salazar as a benign Fascist regime in all but name. Salazar, he states, gave his country prosperity and didn’t bring it into the Second World War. In another video, celebrating the victory of Sweden Democrats as part of a right-wing coalition in Sweden and the increasingly right-ward turn of Italian politics, he looked back to the 1975 or so when the NF won 5 per cent in the British elections. He could have cited UKIP’s victory in the elections a few years ago, such as it was. That provoked various pundits in the media to speculate about Farage’s party becoming a major force in British politics. Channel 4 even made a mockumentary about what it would be like if the Drunken Financier took power, with immigrants confined in cages in the street. But Webb ignored the Kippers, and looked back to the boot-boys and hooligans of the NF instead. Why so?
I think the answer is that Webb is an authoritarian, who wants a specific political party for Whites. He’s a racial nationalist. He made a video a week or so ago discussing the rioting that has been going on in Leicester between Pakistani and Indian youths. This started after Pakistan won a cricket match against India. The rioting, which then had been going on for ten days, was obviously covered in the local papers but has received no national coverage. It has been covered in the Indian papers, as Harris Sultan and Nuriyah Khan have discussed on one of their videos. Webb suggested in his video that it wasn’t being covered nationally in Britain because it contradicted the narrative that people of Pakistani and Indian descent were as British as White, indigenous Brits. He also claimed that the cops trying to quell the violence weren’t British, citing one officer, who had an Asian surname. Actually, it seems to me to be eminently sensible to have Asian police officers trying to stop the unrest, if only to avoid the accusations of racism that would be directed at the White officers. From Webb’s description, you’d think that these Asian officers were men and women on loan from the Pakistani or Indian forces. But they’re not. They’re just British Asians. The fact that he calls them foreign, despite the fact that in many cases they may well have been here for generations shows his view of Britishness is based firmly on race, like the BNP. But unlike UKIP, who were national populist rather than racial nationalist. They were against immigration, but claimed they weren’t racist and had it written into their constitution that former members of Fascist parties were ineligible to join them. Of course, it turned out there were any number of former extreme rightists in it, but the image they wanted to project was of non-racism. Webb has also called for extremely authoritarian methods to be used against the Channel migrants. He’s pointed to the legislation defining entering the country illegally as an act of war, and asked why we couldn’t be like Poland and have armed soldiers guarding the frontier to makes sure no-one gets in illegally.
I believe that ethnically based parties are extremely dangerous. If nothing else, they fragment countries into competing ethnic groups, resulting in ethnic conflict and violence. This has been the case in many African countries. Robert Mugabe started his wretched reign of terror in Zimbabwe by terrorising and massacring the Ndebele, the traditional enemies of his tribe, the Shona, before moving on to other tribes and finally the White farmers. In Nigeria there was the Biafran War, when the Hausa and other Muslim tribes turned on the Igbo. In Uganda in the 1980s the dictator started massacring the largest tribe, the Buganda. And I’m afraid there’s a danger of ethnic specific parties arising in Britain. There’s the Aspire party in London, which resulted from a split in the Labour party after they deselected Lutfur Rahman. This party’s membership seems to be exclusively Bengladeshi Muslims, who were strongly favoured by Rahman in his administrations on the council. Sasha Johnson was setting up an ethnically specific party for Blacks, Taking the Initiative. This was supposedly because the major parties had done nothing about continuing Black poverty, and she denounced mainstream Black politicians like David Lammy in very strong terms. Whites could support Taking the Initiative, but its leadership could only be Black. From what I’ve heard, it had 40,000 members before Johnson met with a bullet in her back garden.
This is dangerous, because the BNP did well in the parts of London like Tower Hamlets where a section of the working-class White population felt marginalised and ignored by the major parties in favour of ethnic minorities. If Taking the Initiative had got off the ground and started winning elections, then there would have been a real danger of a backlash from some Whites seeking a party to represent them racially. And almost certainly if Johnson had had her way and founded a paramilitary Black militia.
As regards Salazar, he strikes me as having been a reactionary Roman Catholic, the Portuguese equivalent of a Spanish caudillo, or military dictator, rather than an outright fascist. There’s a chapter on his works in a book on dictator literature, and from this it seems that most of the books he wrote were Roman Catholic social doctrines, rather than the secular ideology of Italian Fascism. Webb has struck me as a right-wing Conservative, in favour of small government and private enterprise. I very much doubt he and his supporters would like Mussolini’s brand of fascism, which included state direction with private enterprise, and in which the trade unions were expected to sit in parliament with management to direct the economy. And this is quite apart from the overt militarism and warmongering of Italian Fascism.
What he seems to want, therefore, is a form of authoritarian, racial nationalist Conservatism, centred around the White British, rather than the overt, aggressive Fascism of Mussolini. This has to be opposed, along with other, ethnic parties that threaten to divide ordinary Brits and create more ethnic conflict while promising their people uplift and respect.
It’s a new year, and a new issue of the online magazine on parapolitics and genuine conspiracies, Lobster. In issue 83 they have a fascinating review by John Newsinger, professor emeritus of history at Bath University, of Graham Macklin’s Failed Fuhrers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right, published by Routledge at £24.99. The book’s actually a collection of biographies of six infamous British Fascists, Arnold Leese, Oswald Mosley, A.K. Chesterton, Colin Jordan, John Tyndall and Nick Griffin. Newsinger states that it is a book to read and keep for reference for the information it provides. He will never forget that Colin Jordan, of NF infamy, was arrested in the ’70s for stealing women’s underwear from Tesco’s. The Scum mocked him as a panty-thief, which must be one of the few times when the vile rag actually did something anti-racist. Jordan himself, as with all the grotty sawdust Caesars examined in the book, was a massive anti-Semite. He claimed he was innocent and it was all part of a Jewish conspiracy. Right. So he thought that the same people he believes have absolute secret control of media, politics and the economy, would feel the need to frame him for such a squalid petty crime. It shows both how paranoid the real Nazis are, and how ridiculous and absurd their stupid ideas about a secret Jewish global conspiracy get. Newsinger’s review summarises the careers of these real anti-Semites and Nazis.
Arnold Leese
was, the book claims, a pivotal figure in the development of British race nationalism. He was a poisonous anti-Semite who believed the Jews were the enemies of the White race secretly conspiring about Britain. They were to be first segregated and then exterminated. He founded the Imperial Fascist League. He was briefly interned during the War. After which he founded the racist magazine, Gothic Ripples, withits vile column, ‘Nigger Notes’. After a period of disillusionment with Hitler, he returned to praising him as one of the greatest statement produced by Europe. He blamed the war on the Jews. You hardly need to add that he was also a holocaust denier. His statement about it in Gothic Ripples sums up the whole mentality behind Holocaust denial: the people who do deny do so out of embarrassment, but would have absolutely no objection to it at all. Leese claimed that it didn’t happen, but if it had, his only objection would have been that too few Jews were murdered. Provided it was all done humanely. There is no way you can commit mass murder humanely. Leese also Lord Haw-Haw as a hero, and was jailed in 1947 for trying to help two Dutch SS officer escape to Argentina. Leese, unfortunately, wasn’t just influential in Britain, but also Europe and America.
Oswald Mosley
was the notorious leader of the BUF and the subject of an earlier biography by Macklin, which charted his career after the War. Mosley was an anti-Semite, although he constantly denied it despite all the plentiful evidence to the contrary. It’s therefore ironic, then, that Leese hated him because he thought that, as a member of aristocracy, Mosley’s own racial purity had also been compromised through intermixture with the Jews. ‘Cause Britain’s wannabe great dictator had a Jewish uncle on his mother’s side. In 1963 three members of his Union Movement, the post-war successor to the BUF, were jailed for bombing the offices of the Daily Worker. He managed to rehabilitate himself after the War, appearing on TV shows despite having condemned the Nuremberg trials and blaming the Jews for the Second World. War. I didn’t know about the bombing, and it explains why the authorities appear to be more afraid of White right-wing terrorism than Islamist.
A.K. Chesterton
was a relative of novelist and Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton. He was a member of Mosley’s BUF and editor of its magazine, The Blackshirt. He later broke away from the BUF, but continued as an extreme right-wing activist. Another grotty anti-Semite, he told the Nordic League that Jews should be hanged from lamp posts. He briefly served as a British officer in Kenya and Somaliland. But he’s also interesting for the way he and his followers also crossed over into the Tory party. He wrote for the Conservative magazine, Truth, which published his anti-Semitic screeds. He was even planning to run an article on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He also contributed articles to the magazine of the Royal United Services Institute, as well as the Daily and Sunday Express and the Evening Standard. He also ghost wrote Beaverbrook’s biography, before launching his own rag, Candour and founding the League of Empire Loyalists. He hated the Common Market and regarded those who supported it as traitors. Many grassroots Tories were also member of the LEL. When a Conservative MP accused League members of following a Fascist, it was pointed out to him that the chair of the meeting, the MP Jocelyn Lucas, was a former member of the BUF. The League firmly supported White rule in Africa. He also wrote the anti-Semitic book, The New Unhappy Lords, which claimed that the Jews were conspiring to enslave the west and incorporate it into a one-world superstate. Now we know the origin of that particular conspiracy theory and all those rantings about ‘globalists’. The National Front was former from a merger of the League with the Race Preservation Society, and served as the new organisation’s president until his death.
Colin Jordan
was another Nazi and member or founder of the National Socialist Movement. However, like Mosley he turned to anti-Black racism after the way, loudly supporting the ‘Keep Britain White’ movement. He also exploited the Notting Hill riots to promote racial hatred. He staged a series of tasteless racist stunt to stop the Labour candidate, Gordon Walker, getting elected. These involved his followers appearing in blackface and monkey costumes. After a Jewish cabby refused to accept his wife, Francoise Dior, the poor fellow was forced to flee to Israel after his home was firebombed. The NSM’s magazine hailed it as ‘the Second Expulsion of the Jews’. Two groups of NSM members firebombed ten synagogues and more in London. Jordan denied knowing about it beforehand, but had no qualms about posing with the accused outside the courthouse. He also hoped to get funding from the United Arab Republic and had schemes for a racist, offshore pirate radio station. I doubt it would have been a success. Not against Radio Caroline. He was also obsessed with Rudolf Hess, and wanted him awarded the Nobel Peace. It’s grotesque, but when you consider that they later awarded it to Henry Kissinger it starts to seem all too reasonable. However, the rest of the Far Right thought he was an embarrassment because he was too open about the Nazism they all held.
John Tyndall
was secretary of Jordan’s grotty NSM, praising the SS and the Holocaust in the pages of its magazine and calling for the creation of an SS state. He broke with Jordan to join the NF, taking over as leader. He was another anti-Semite who turned from attacking the Jews to racism against Blacks and immigrants. He also had connections to the American Far Right, helping them to resist the extradition James Earl Ray, suspected of the assassination Martin Luther King, from London. He was also a friend of William Pierce, author of the Turner Diaries, helping to sell his wretched Vanguard newspaper in London. The NF’s membership was boosted by Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Ugandan Asians, even though Amin was another anti-Semite and fan of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Well, Black and White, unite and fight – against racists and anti-Semites whatever their colour. After the NF’s electoral failure in 1979, Tyndall went back to Nazism before founding the fifth incarnation of the BNP. As leader of the NF, he was in some kind of power struggle with Martin Webster, who called it a gay organisation. I think that’s because Tyndall was gay, and had gay toleration written into its constitution.
Nick Griffin
claimed to have read Mein Kampf when he was just thirteen, and joined the NF when he was 15. The NF viewed some of the Middle Eastern countries as allies in the struggle against the Jews. He welcomed Iran’s reprinting of the Protocols and ardently supported Gaddafi’s Libya. After 9/11 he exploited Islamophobia,, but when debating Abu Hamza he found that his and the terrorist supporter’s views converged, with Abu Hamza telling the audience to support the BNP. And what a surprise, hem-hem, I do not think, as Nigel Molesworth would sa, he was yet another Holocaust denier. He then started playing down the anti-Semitism so that the BNP even had a Jewish councillor elected in Epping. Well, one of left-wing Jewish bloggers I follow – I can’t remember if it was David Rosenberg or Tony Greenstein, noted that the Jewish Conservative MP for somewhere around Islington or Tower Hamlets used to hobnob with the local Nazis at elections, complaining that the division between the BNP/NF and the Conservatives also meant the nationalist vote was divided. And the very respected Jewish historian Geoffrey Alderman got into a bit of hot water with the Board of Deputies of British Jews when his history of the British Jewish community stated that two per cent of British Jews voted for the NF because of anti-Black racism. The BNP’s peak came with the election of over 50 councillors and two MEP, of whom Griffin was one. He also liked Vladimir Putin, hailing him as an enemy of European liberalism and saviour of Christianity. He also supported Assad’s regime in Syria, even appearing on Russia Today to do so.
British Fascism’s Influence on Front National
Newsinger also notes that the book also claims that the NF also influenced the French Front National, now National Reveille. He wonders how this could be so, considering that British Fascism’s history is one of failure. My guess would be that Marine Le Pen looked at what they were doing, and then did the opposite. Her tactics are more like that of the founder of Italy’s post-Fascist party, Fini and his Alleanza Nazionale. Fini wound up the explicitly neo-Fascist MSI, and positioned the new party as centre-right. Le Pen has done something similar with the former Front National. Not that there isn’t a precedent in French Fascist history. The Croix de Feu were a ’30s French Fascist organisation, combing far right politics with their enthusiasm for cars. They also originally had a Fascist uniform, but their greatest electoral victories came when the dumped it and started trying to sound more like ordinary Conservatives.
This book’s important, because apart from the light it sheds on the history of British Fascism, it also shows where the vast majority of anti-Semitism really comes. And no, the real anti-Semites aren’t Corbyn and his supporters, let alone with sincere anti-racist peeps, especially Jewish, whom the British establishment has libelled and smeared. The real, poisonous anti-Semitism nearly always comes from the Far Right. And they are a real terrorist menace. I didn’t know British Nazis had bombed the Daily Worker and ten synagogues in the 60s, though I knew about the street fights between them and anti-Fascists. In the ’80s the NF were successfully prosecuted for holding paramilitary ‘self-defence’ training out on a farm somewhere. Part of the evidence they were planning to commit a terrorist outrage was that a can of weedkiller in a garden shed had the word ‘weed’ crossed out and replaced with Jew. Then there was the lone Nazi in the 90s who nail-bombed three pubs, including a gay bar. And this is quite apart from the assassination of Jo Cox and genuine Nazi outfits like the banned National Action. Simon Webb over at History Debunked has questioned the jailing of White Nazis as terrorists, when they have done nothing but look at Nazi material on YouTube, unlike the Islamists, who have committed real terrorist atrocities. I think the answer is that the authorities fear that they will start committing genuine acts of terrorism like those in the ’60s, as well as exploiting racism and the immigration crisis.
The six men profiled by the book are failures, but they continue to exert a malign influence and there is always a danger that their ideas will inspire real terrorism while persecuting and murdering innocents ’cause they’re the wrong religion or race.
Further evidence to condemn Starmer, Smeeth and Hodge as fanatically intolerant Blairites with absolutely no qualms about lying to the wider party to support their witch hunt against decent people, especially Jews, because their socialists and/or they criticise Israel. Mike has on his piece about this shameful incident a tweet from Labour Grassroots, in which a tearful delegate to conference describes how they were gaslighted by the odious Ruth Smeeth into support the grotty rule changes that have concentrated powers in the hands of the leadership and General Secretary. Smeefy got up on her hind legs to tell conference that they couldn’t consider themselves anti-racists or opponents of anti-Semitism without backing the changes. She was then followed by the equally repulsive Margaret Hodge, who said the same thing. The delegates states that this was all about concentrating power in the hands of an undemocratically elected official and continuing the witch hunt, but she was too frightened to speak up. She and her colleagues were hoping that someone else would, but nobody did. She describes it as the lowest point in her experience of the Labour party.
Mike states that, with these changes having been passed, her experience is going to get a lot lower.
Smeeth is the noxious MP, who got genuine anti-racist and opponent of real Nazism thrown out of the party as an anti-Semite. Why? Wadsworth caught her passing on a Labour brochure to a hack from the Torygraph at a party rally. Smeefy then accused him of using the old trope of the disloyal Jews. Except that Wadsworth didn’t know she was Jewish, and didn’t mention Jews at all. Wadsworth has a long and proud career as a real campaigner against racism, arranging for the parents of Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela, and working with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 80s to pass legislation against NF attacks on Jews in the Isle of Dogs. This didn’t prevent an angry squad of right-wing, White female Labour MPs descending on his trial to demand his expulsion. Commenters have said this squad was like a racist mob about to lynch a Black. As for Hodge, who looks to me like a cross between a Dr. Who monster and a ferocious female character, Mrs Slocombe, from Are You Being Served, she infamously screamed at Corbyn in parliament, calling him a ‘f***ing anti-Semite!’ This was against the rules, and she was suspended. She then whined that this was anti-Semitic, and made her feel like the Jews in Nazis Germany waiting for a knock on the door from the SS. This, not unreasonably, angered Jews and gentiles, whose relatives had been carted off to the concentration camps by the Nazis. And as an MP, she was so complacent about the threat from the BNP that seven of them got elected to Tower Hamlet’s local council and their leader sent her a bouquet as thanks. It’s partly thanks to these two lying clowns that Stalin has now managed to tighten his grip on the party.
I don’t blame the speaker for being too scared to stand up. I think that anyone who did, would have been smeared as an anti-Semite. But this shows that you can stand back and expect someone else to speak out against lies and authoritarianism, ever. Because if you stand by and allow it, it will be passed unopposed. Andsooner or later, they will come for you.
I went to an amazingly great pro-NHS zoom meeting last night organised, I think, by the anti-NHS privatisation organisations We Own It and/or Keep Our NHS Public. The speakers included Dr. Louise Irvine and Antonio Perez-Iranzo, a Spanish doctor working in the NHS, who described how Centene, the private health care company that’s being given positions on NHS boards and allowed to take over doctors’ surgeries, has managed to wreck healthcare in his home country. They were so terrible that eventually the Valencian government was forced to take the service back inhouse and kick them out. Rabina Khan, a Lib Dem councillor in Tower Hamlets, talked about her experience of the poor service they delivered when they took over the traditional GP’s surgery at which she was a patient. She was particularly concerned about the effect of privatisation on the elderly, and on Black and Bangladeshi women. Another speaker told of the vastly poorer service they gave when they were given NHS contracts and acquired GPs’ surgeries in Nottingham. The final speaker was Jeremy Corbyn, introduced as the ‘best Prime Minister this country never had’. Absolutely. He provided more details on the continuing NHS privatisation, showing his absolutely and unfailing commitment to the great institution created by Nye Bevan. He reminded everyone that one he waved the documents showing this was going to happen in parliament and asked Johnson about it, prime ministerial liar called him a liar. But he was right, and if, anything, understated the case. There was also time given for ordinary folks to ask their questions and give their experiences of the destruction of the NHS by these parasites.
In every case, the story was the same. Centene are given the contracts without warning, over the heads of local people, patients and even other doctors. Notification of the change comes from a bland, corporate letter and people are urged to get on Zoom for further information. This is a problem for older people, those not on the internet or who have problems using it, and people for whom English is not their primary language. Centene is a for-profit American health insurance company. Already big, it became massive in America with the introduction of Obamacare. It states in its corporate literature that it is only interested in making a profit, and that if this doesn’t happen, it will divest itself of those loss-making interests. Louise Irvine stated that, as a doctor, you don’t think of making a profit, even though since the inception of the NHS doctors are actually private businessmen, who contract in to the NHS. The only way to make a profit is to reduce costs. Which means sacking people and actually providing a worse service by reducing the amount of care given. In Nottingham, when Centene took over the service, they dispersed 3,000 of the 11,000 patients in their newly acquired GPs’ surgeries to others.
They are purely in it for the money, the profits of which go outside this country to their American shareholders.
Keep Our NHS Public is planning a demonstration against the privatisation of the NHS In London on Saturday, 3rd July 2021. This also includes issues like patient safety, and pay justice. They are going to assemble outside UCH on Euston Road, NWI at 12.00 before marching to parliament square. There are other protests also planned elsewhere in the country for the same day. Details of them can be found at their website https://keepournhspublic.com/ They also recommended people looking at an essay on this privatisation by a member of the Socialist Health Alliance, whose website is https://sochealth.co.uk.
They are naturally extremely keen for people to join their organisation or set up their own. Whatever we do, we have to organise to show the strength of opposition to this privatisation. They state it will be a long struggle, but people have succeeded in getting contracts taken away from the profiteers Serco, Circle Health and others.
The message is clear: Get rid of Centene and the other private companies profiting from the NHS. Get Boris out, and a proper government in, one committed to ending NHS privatisation.
And that does not include the Labour Blairites, who were as keen to privatise the NHS as their Tory heroes.
We Own It is an organisation campaigning for the renationalisation of public industries. It is particularly against the Tories’ ongoing privatisation of the NHS. I got this email from them yesterday about a public zoom meeting they’re organising on Monday against the Tories’ decision to hand over a number of doctor’s surgeries to Centene, a private healthcare company. This is going to be the thin end of the wedge, leading to further GP’s surgeries being privatised unless stopped. The email runs
“Our NHS turns 73 this year.
As part of this year’s NHS birthday, a coalition of NHS campaign groups – including We Own It – is organising a public meeting on stopping the private takeover of NHS GP surgeries.
Can you join the online (ZOOM) public meeting at 6pm on Monday, 28th June?
Our NHS was founded on the principle of equality: equal access to healthcare for everyone – from the rich to the poor. That is why the NHS was established as a public healthcare system, free at the point of use and funded through general taxation. Our local GP surgeries are the first point of contact with the NHS for over 80% of us. But with companies like Centene now getting their hands on our NHS GP surgeries, many of them risk being closed if they are not profitable. Centene has already closed surgeries in Harlow (Essex), Leicester and Camden for not being profitable. And by doing so, they are depriving the communities access to readily available care. It is so important that we continue to fight back and stop these takeovers.
As we celebrate the 73rd anniversary of our NHS, your involvement in events like this, David, is so valued. The truth is that without the fight that you have put on over the years, there may no longer be an NHS.
Thank you so much for the incredible work you’ve been doing to protect our NHS.
Cat, Alice, Pascale, Chris, Zana, Johnbosco – the We Own It team
PS: You still have an opportunity to fund action and campaigning against the government’s plan to allow private companies, like Virgin, to sit on ICS boards. Integrated Care Systems (ICS) boards will make decisions about how NHS budgets are spent in our local areas.Sign up to donate £5 a month or whatever you can afford. Every penny helps in the fight to stop this privatisation of our NHS.“
Of the speakers, Jeremy Corbyn needs no introduction as the former, and vilely maligned leader of the Labour party, but it will be interesting to hear from a medical doctor, Louise Irvine, and the Spanish speaker about how Centene is wrecking their country’s healthcare system, all in the name of profit.
I haven’t donated to the organisation, but I do intend to go to the Virtual meeting. I think the time is 6.00 – 7.30 pm on Monday, 28th June 2021. If you feel the same, you may also want to do the same to protect this most vital of British institutions.
Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension was lifted yesterday and he was readmitted to the Labour party. So there was, unsurprisingly, a mass outcry by the usual troublemakers, liars and smear merchants. Starmer responded by fudging the issue and refused Corbyn the Labour whip. This is, as Mike has pointed out, gross political interference of the type which the EHRC report into anti-Semitism in the Labour party condemned in the first place. He has also broken any number of Labour party internal regulations, as the Skwawkbox has clearly demonstrated. He’s done absolutely no good, except to annoy people with an unacceptable compromise. Unacceptable, because Corbyn’s supporters are still outraged by his unjust treatment of the Labour leader, while the smear merchants won’t be satisfied by anything less than his expulsion and the complete prostration of the Labour party to their own ultra-Zionist views.
Margaret Hodge
Among those crawling out from under the rocks to attack Corbyn were Margaret Hodge, Jessica Elgot, Rachel Riley, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Community Security Trust, none of whom are unbiased by any means. Hodge is the stupid, lazy and arrogant Labour MP who got herself suspended for calling Corbyn a ‘f**king anti-Semite’ in parliament. She then got herself readmitted after she started bleating about how terrifying her suspension was, and that it must have been like the terror experienced by German Jews under the Third Reich when they were waiting for a knock from Gestapo.
Her treatment was nothing like that horror, and she insulted the victims and families of those, who really had been imprisoned in the concentration camps. Her suspension was extremely lenient, no doubt helped by the fact that the media was very definitely on her side. Others would have received far harsher punishment. And her stupid, facile comments prompted an outrage response from Jews and gentiles, whose relatives had been victims of the Nazis.
But we shouldn’t be quite so surprised at her tactlessness. This is a woman who signally failed to do anything about real Nazism and anti-Semitism in her constituency. So much so that when the BNP had seven members elected to the local council in Tower Hamlets, their leader, Derek Beacon, sent her a bouquet of flowers in appreciation. She was also responsible for suppressing a report into child abuse in the council, then tried to blame its suppression on Corbyn. Apparently she was threatening to the leave the party if Corbyn was readmitted. If she did, it would be no loss to anyone, but unfortunately she hasn’t.
Jessica Elgot, Israel Lobbyist
Jessica Elgot is another Blairite, and if memory serves me right, she used to work for one of the Israel advocacy organisations. Which should immediately tell you that she isn’t concerned about genuine anti-Semitism, but simply protecting Israel.
Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Gaza and Islamophobia
The same applies to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and its odious boss, Gerald Falter. Falter founded it in 2014 or thereabouts because he was shocked at the way British public opinion had turned against Israel because of the bombing of Gaza. His wretched organisation is tinged with Islamophobia. On its website it declares that most anti-Semites are Muslims, and one of its patrons is a Hindu bigot who hates Islam, Christianity and those at the very bottom of the Hindu caste system. This character founded Operation Dharmic Vote to mobilise right-wing Hindu voters partly because he was outraged that high-caste Hindu doctors had to treat the people previously described as ‘the Untouchables’.
Community Security Trust and Violence Against Protesters
Then we come to the Community Security Trust, a volunteer police force set up to protect Jews and their property from attack. This would be all well and good, if that was all it did. But its members are supposedly trained in self-defence by the Israeli security forces and have been responsible for instances of violence themselves against protesters demonstrating against Israel. In one case Jewish and Muslim demonstrators were forcibly separated. Others were struck and beaten, including women, the elderly and a rabbi.
There’s also more than a little racial favouritism being shown in the establishment of the CST. I don’t know of any other ethnic group, which is allowed to have its own volunteer police trained by a foreign country. It can be argued that other ethnic groups deserve such a force more, as this is relatively little anti-Semitism compared with the prejudice against Blacks, Asians and Muslims. Can you imagine the reaction of our absolutely unbiased right-wing press if, say, Britain’s Black community had their own police force organised and trained by the Jamaicans or Nigerians? Or the Hindus trained by the Indian army? Or British Muslims with Saudi Arabia, Iran or Pakistan? They’d have a screaming fit and yell that we were being taken over by foreigners. But the CST is allowed to continue with the full cooperation of the British state and police.
Rachel Riley
As for Rachel Riley, this is a woman, who seems to have a visceral, personal hatred for the Labour leader and his supporters. She was on Talk Radio yesterday telling the world how terrible the Labour leader was, because he laid a wreath on the grave of the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the murder of the Israeli Olympic team in 1974 when he was attending some kind of gathering in Tunisia. This would have been extremely difficult, as Zelo Street has pointed out, because those monsters are buried in Libya.
Corbyn’s critics have been presented as representative of the British Jewish community as a whole. They aren’t. They are representative only of the right-wing, ultra-Zionist British Jewish establishment. Corbyn had many friends and supporters in the Jewish community, as have others, who have been smeared as anti-Semites, like Ken Livingstone. Corbyn was particularly respected by the Haredi community for his help in preserving their historic burial ground from redevelopment. He was also supported by Jewish Voice for Labour and Jewdas, with whom he spent a Passover Seder. Which enraged the Board of Deputies, who claimed it was a snub to the ‘Jewish community?’
Jonathan Sacks, Sectarianism and the March of the Flags
What Jewish community? As many Jewish left-wing bloggers have pointed out, there is no monolithic Jewish community, and the Board of Deputies only seems to represent the United Synagogue. And many of Corbyn’s other critics seem to be members, such as the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. Sacks died last week, and obituaries appeared praising him and his work. I’ve no doubt he was an excellent fellow in many respects, but he was also a sectarian bigot with a fanatical devotion to Israel. He caused outrage a few years ago when he, an Orthodox Jew, declared that Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’. This is the language of religious hatred, uttered by bigots before launching terrible attacks on their victims. Christian anti-Semites no doubt have said the same when persecuting Jews. Sacks was also an opponent of homosexuality, before opportunistically changing his mind and declaring that people had to be more open and accepting. He also led a group of British Jews on the annual March of the Flags in Jerusalem. This is the Israeli equivalent of the various Orange marches in Northern Ireland, when the Protestants of the Orange Order march through Roman Catholic areas. In the case of the March of the Flags, it’s when Israeli boot-boys march through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem to provoke and intimidate them. During these marches, Palestinians are insulted and abused, and their property vandalised. Liberal Jewish organisations asked Sacks not to go, but he refused. But what I also found interesting was that he seemed to be another member of the United Synagogue. The obituaries mentioned that he belonged to the Union of Hebrew Congregations, which looks to my inexpert eye as the United Synagogue by any other name.
The United Synagogue and the Corbyn Smears
Some of the Jewish journos, who took it upon themselves to write pieces smearing Corbyn as an anti-Semite are also members of the United Synagogue. The I published several of these pieces, noting at the bottom of the article the writer’s membership of the denomination. Which raises a few questions.
Are all, or the majority of those smearing Corbyn as an anti-Semites members of the United Synagogue? And if they are, who decided that the United Synagogue and its members spoke for all of Britain’s Jews? After all, it’s as if someone decided that only Tory Anglicans represent British Christianity. And when they produce stats claiming that Israel is important to the identity of 77 per cent of British Jews, is this really representative of all of the British Jewish Community? Or is it once again just confined to the United Synagogue?
All of Britain’s Jewish community deserve to be heard on the issue of Corbyn and Israel, not just Tory-voting ultra-Zionists and the United Synagogue.
I was at a Zoom meeting Friday evening of my local constituency Labour party, Bristol South. The evening was devoted to a discussion of how the party should respond and formulate proper policies following the Keir Starmer’s national policy review. The areas under discussion that evening were housing and local democracy, and health and social care after the Coronavirus. Many members that the way to restore proper health and social care would be to give power back to the trade unions, and proper wages and career prospects to the women and men working in our NHS and care sector.
Local democracy is rather more complicated, however. As has been shown by the news over the last couple of days, many local authorities are now in dire financial straits thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic. The Tories did promise that they’d give them all the funding they needed to cope, but it’s been a typical Tory promise: the funding hasn’t materialised. The result is that a number of local authorities are facing bankruptcy. Wiltshire in the West Country is one, and Bristol may well be another. Bristol has fared better than most, as the much-maligned elected mayor, Marvin, did manage to sort out the financial mess and serious budget deficits left by the previous elected mayor, George Ferguson. It seems under Red Trousers there was serious financial mismanagement. This really doesn’t surprise me, as Ferguson announced one year there would be tens of millions of cuts, but that we shouldn’t be afraid of them. Before he became an independent, Ferguson was a Lib Dem, but he may as well have been a Tory.
It’s unclear what the proper spheres of national and local government are. Andrew Marr has published a book on this very issue, but I stopped reading it and put it away due to the flagrant anti-Labour bias on his TV show. I guess I’ll have to dig it out and start reading it properly, as this could become a major issue in the next few years. It is a major problem how we can get the British public involved in both national and local government, so that they don’t feel ignored and marginalized by the authorities.
And there’s a serious problem for local authorities on the horizon. Apparently Dominic Cummings wants to take housing out of the hands of local authorities. This is extremely alarming, given the closeness between the Tories and developers, as shown by Jenrick’s scandalous conduct over at Tower Hamlets. As Mike and the others have revealed on their blogs, Jenrick allowed Tory donor Richard ‘Dirty’ Desmond to develop Westferry in London against existing planning regulations or the wishes of the local authority after Dirty Des gave the Conservatives a £12,000 bung. After twelve years of power, we’re back to John Major and New Labour levels of sleaze and corruption again. It’s feared that if the Tories do take it housing into national government, they’ll just let off a free-for-all of development.
The Labour party in Bristol is trying to encouraging the renovation of older properties as well as the construction of new housing. Not only does this also provide accommodation, but it also employs more people. There are also problems with the current planning legislation in that developers can convert old commercial properties into residential housing in areas around music venues. This has been done in the old office blocks surrounding the Bristol pub, the Fleece and Firkin, which has been a centre for live musical performances in Bristol since the 1980s. The problem is that at the moment the developers don’t have to do anything to protect the homes’ prospective residents from the noise, so that they complain instead about the music venue. The local authority in Bristol is trying to bring in some of the continental legislation that protects existing music venues by insisting that the developers must install double glazing and so on when they build flats and homes in such areas.
The party on Friday was expecting the Tories to make the announcement they were taking housing away from local authorities today, but wondered if they actually would after the scandal with Jenrick. I haven’t heard that they have. But it’s clearly something they would dearly love to do. If that happens it will lead to housing and building development that isn’t wanted by the existing residents of an area, and the further destruction of local democracy.
This is an area which needs to be very closely watched and guarded.
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