David Lammy was on LBC Radio yesterday, and gave an answer to an interview question that left many listeners stunned. Kernow Damo has put up a piece about it on his vlog, as has Maximilien Robespierre, the smooth-voiced Irish vlogger. The Met’s heavy-handed policing of the Coronation and its arrest of 62 anti-monarchy protesters, simply for protesting, has raised questions about both the Met’s conduct and the Tory legislation allowing them to clamp down so hard on peaceful protesters. People are concerned about the draconian laws curbing protests and strikes. Lammy was asked if Labour intended to repeal this legislation. ‘No,’ he said, ‘because otherwise we’d spend all our time just repealing Tory legislation.’ This left Robespierre thoroughly gobsmacked. Because people are voting Labour in the hope that they’ll revrerse the Tory legislation allowing the water companies to dump raw sewage into our waterways and seas, stop the running down of the NHS, the impoverishment our great, hard–pressed and underappreciated working people. Now Lammy says that Labour doesn’t intend to do any of that. Robespierre raises the obvious point that this is a strange attitude for a party whose electoral line is that people should vote for them because they aren’t the Conservatives.
But I think this attitude is part and parcel of Starmer’s return to Blairism. Blair was a Thatcherite, who went further in the privatisation of the NHS and reforming – read: cutting back even further – the welfare state than the Tories themselves. One of the criticisms of Blair’s and Brown’s governments was that New Labour really didn’t differ at all from the Conservatives. They just promoted themselves on being able to implement the same wretched policies better and more efficiently. And in the case of the ‘welfare to work’ legislation, in which benefit claimants only got their welfare cheque if they did mandatory voluntary work for grasping, exploitative charities like Tomorrow’s People or the big supermarkets, Blair spun a profoundly reactionary policy introduced by Reagan’s Republicans in America and mooted by Thatcher over here as somehow left-wing and radical. It was all part of Blair’s New Deal, a modern version of Roosevelt’s make-work schemes during the Depression. The result of New Labour’s shameless emulation of the Tories was that an increasingly large part of the electorate stopped voting. They felt that it didn’t matter who you voted for, because they were all the same. Corbyn offered some escape from this electoral trap by promoting socialist policies. Hence the screams from the establishment both inside and outside the party that he was a Commie, Trotskyite anti-Semite. Because you can’t have someone offering the proles something that will actually benefit them.
And now it seems it’s back to business as usual under Starmer.
And the return to Blairism is already having the effect it previously had on the electorate. The Tories took a hammering at the local elections, and has naturally been held as an historic win by Stalin. Except that it was more a comment on how the electorate was fed up with the Tories than an overwhelming victory for Labour. According to some experts, by this measure Labour will be 28 seats short of a majority at the next general election. I seem also to recall polls that indicated that while people liked Labour, they didn’t like Starmer and didn’t think he was anywhere near as good a leader as whoever was the Tory prime minister at the time. And it’s obvious to see why. Starmer is deeply treacherous and untrustworthy, ditching nearly every pledge and promise he declared he believed in. He has done everything he could to purge the left with the usual smears of anti-Semitism. But his personal performance against the Tories has been dismal. For a long time he offered no alternative policies. His tactics seemed to be to wait for the Tories’ own failures and duplicity to catch up with them and then hope that the proles would vote Labour as the only alternative. This seems to have worked to a certain extent, but it also shows that the same tactics is failing to energise any enthusiasm for a Labour government. In fact, it’s put many people off.
Not that this necessarily bothers Starmer. As we’ve seen from the various coups and plots against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour right would prefer to destroy Labour than accept any return to socialism.
Or does he mean the Wrong Kind of Jews and others accused of anti-Semitism ’cause their evil socialists and critics of Israel?
I got this round-robin message from the leader of the Labour party this afternoon.
‘Dear David,
In October 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published a damning report into antisemitism in the Labour Party.
At that time, I was clear the Party accepted the EHRC’s report in full and would implement all of its recommendations. We agreed an Action Plan with the EHRC in December 2020, and since then, we have worked tirelessly to right the wrongs of the past and to tear out antisemitism from our Party by its roots.
Today, it was announced that the EHRC have been satisfied with our progress and the significant changes we have made. Accordingly, the Action Plan has formally concluded.
While this is an important moment, it is not one for celebration. Rather, it is one for reflection. As to how a Party that has always prided itself on its anti-racism and its commitment to equality could have fallen so far.
This announcement demonstrates we have turned the corner. However, the job of restoring Labour is not complete. It shows we are heading in the right direction, and I assure you that there is not a hint of complacency in that confidence. I know there is still much to do.
We will not rest for a moment until not only have we changed the Labour Party for the better, but our country, too.
Thank you,
Keir Starmer Leader of the Labour Party’
The storm of allegations of anti-Semitism against the Labour party and individual members, often men and women of deep integrity and humanity, and which cost Corbyn the election and the party’s leadership, were whipped up by a corrupt political and media establishment appalled at the prospect of a return to power of a man committed to genuinely empowering working people. They baulked at the renationalisation of the utilities, despite the fact that every day shows this is urgently needed. They hated the idea of reversing the privatisation of the NHS and most of all they feared and loathed the return of strong trade unions, workers’ rights and proper welfare state that actually supports its citizens. There was also a foreign policy element too. They also hated Corbyn because he was an idealist who shared Robin Cook’s dream of an ethical foreign policy and specifically his support for the Palestinians.
This fear and loathing was shared by the right-wing, Zionist section of the Jewish community that considers itself that communities official ‘establishment’. This included the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which in reality speaks for the United Synagogue and no-one else, two Chief Rabbis, who both led contingents of Jewish Brits on the ‘March of the Flags’ in which Israeli bovver boys terrorise the Arabs of East Jerusalem, the Jewish Leadership Council, which split with the board because they weren’t right-wing and pro-business enough for them, and various other organisations that were set up in the wake of the bombardment of Gaza to promote Israel and drive away support for the Palestinians. These included the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the woefully misnamed Jewish Labour Movement, whose members don’t have to be Jewish or even members of the Labour party. Their accusations were taken up by the British mainstream, who’d found that smearing Corbyn as a Commie and Trotskyite hadn’t worked. But the charge of anti-Semitism stuck. Corbyn backed down when he should have fought, and sacrificed his allies in the belief that this would placate his enemies. It didn’t, and people like the mighty Tony Greenstein knew it wouldn’t and tried to tell him so. But he didn’t listen.
And then there were the vipers within the Labour party, who collaborated with all this. The right-wing faction that conspired against Corbyn at every opportunity, whose members were on Conservative websites and forums, who misdirected election funding from where they were needed, organised coups and bullied Black and Muslim members. They also did their best to conceal instances of real anti-Semitism from the leadership in order to keep the smear going.
When are these malign enablers of real anti-Semitism going to be thrown out of the party?
Well, I reckon they won’t, because they supported Starmer. And Starmer was also personally keen to keep the smears going as a tool for his purges of the left. Hence, even though he was told by his lawyers that he would win a court case against one set of allegations, he folded and gave them the money they demanded.
Israel’s Far Right government this week has declared they’re going to recognise a slew of illegal Jewish settlements in Palestine as punishment for the disturbances at Christmas. This is in contravention of international law. Where’s a statement condemning this from Starmer? Oh, wait, he’s ‘100 per cent Zionist’, so there won’t be one. This is despite the fact that numerous Zionist human rights organisations like B’Tselem have condemned the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And suffered for it from militantly nationalist regimes that have declared them, like the Jews in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, to be the enemy within.
And what does this statement mean?
It looks like, although the EHRC is satisfied, Starmer still intends to continue his witch hunt because there is still much work to do and we have to reflect on how an anti-racist party became steeped in anti-Semitism. Well, when you realise that the majority of those accused of anti-Semitism were Jews, who had often experienced real abuse and assault because of their religion or ethnicity, and that one of the gentiles smeared and purged was a Black anti-racist activist who had worked with the Board of Deputies to combat real anti-Semitic violence by the BNP in the 1980s, it’s clear that this is all bogus.
The anti-Semitism smears and witch hunt were a tissue of lies from beginning to end. And Starmer knows it, and supported it. And it looks like he means to keep the pressure up even after it is all supposed to have ended.
This appeared for me on YouTube on Sunday. From Bristol With Love appears to be, or have been, a radical blog based in Bristol. It declared itself to be a place for local music, local news and new way of local thinking. So, a local website for local people, to paraphrase the terrifying couple running the local shop in The League of Gentlemen. They display the anarchist/syndicalist flag, suggesting that their political sympathies lay with those brands of radical left-wing politics. And in this snippet of audio, posted on Durston Fletcher’s channel on YouTube, the tear into Julie Burchill.
And it’s entirely deserved.
Burchill’s a journalist and novelist, who comes from Brislington, one of the suburbs in south Bristol. It’s a mixture of residential housing and light industry, mostly now the big stores like Wicke’s. Burchill started out as a rock journalist on the NME when she answered their advert for a ‘hip young gunslinger’ to join them. She was also briefly married to another journalist and novelist, Nick Parsons, who was one of the panel discussing the week’s cultural highlights with Mark Lawson on Newsnight Review and then The Late Review. After that, she moved on to the lamestream press, writing demented pieces for the Heil on Sunday and the Spectator. For some reasons she considers herself some kind of communist. Private Eye put her remark, about how she and her then-lover, Charlotte Raven, spent their evenings crying over the fate of the workers, in ‘Pseud’s Corner’. It might be right, but nothing she has said suggests she has any real sympathy with radical left politics. Quite the opposite, in fact. She used to rave about Margaret Thatcher, privatisation and GM foods. At one time the Heil was trying to promote itself with adverts showing her and another noxious right-wing waster, the late John Junor. This showed two pencils being sharpened, one Burchill’s, one Junor’s, and was supposed to show two hacks with opposing views coming together. Politically there was nothing to choose between them. They both worshipped Thatcher. The only difference was their hatred and scorn for those of the opposite sex. Burchill’s column dripped venom about men, while Junor, from what I remember, sneered at women.
One of Burchill’s screeds from this time was particularly bonkers. She wrote a long piece in Hitler’s fave British paper declaring that the idealistic young men and women who joined the International Brigades to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War were, get this! the equivalent of the bloodthirsty British tourists who went to Spain to enjoy the bullfighting. It’s nonsense, and grossly offensive nonsense. People like the Gloucestershire poet Laurie Lee and the mighty George Orwell, along with countless others, joined up because they saw the spectre of the Fascist jackboot stamping on Europe’s face and wanted to stop it. They risked, and lost, life and limb fighting a brutal, merciless dictator. Many of those fighting Franco came from the radical left – anarchists, communists and more moderate socialists, like POUM, whom Orwell joined. But the regime for which they were fighting was liberal and democratic. Spain still has not recovered from the tortures and mass executions even now, and the excavation of the mass graves of those butchered by the monster is hotly contested by the Spanish Far Right. It makes you wonder just who Burchill would have supported back then.
Back in the ’90s Burchill also wrote a few bonkbuster novels, which were duly reviewed and criticised by Private Eye. She also joined the Groucho Club and its denizens among the media club, and became something of a massive drug hog if reports can be believed. According to Private Eye, once again, she once boasted of having stuck so much of the marching powder up her nose to stun the Colombian army. Since then she seems to have married again, to a man, and now lives with her family in Brighton. But she still pops her head up now and then.
In this bit of audio, the two hosts talk about how their mother’s can’t stand her, how she left Bristol when she was thirty, and used to come down to the city for the Punk gigs. Where she claimed about the place being full of liberals and middle class Trotskyites. Well, yes, they were about in Bristol. You used to see the adverts for Socialist Worker posted up on one of the bridges coming into Temple Meads, and there was a bloke selling it outside the railway station. They might still be around now, although in recent decades Class War and Bristol Anarchist Federation seem to have become more high profile. But it would be a bit of stretch to say that Bristol was full of them. She also, apparently, sneered at how unsophisticated we plebs down here in the West Country were when it came to drugs. According to them, she was amazed that if you asked a girl in Bristol if you could borrow her mirror, she thought it was because you wanted to touch up your make up. As opposed to snort coke off it. Oh, the naivete. Depending on where you go, that may not be quite the case now, unfortunately. But clean living and avoiding an addictive drug that rots your nose are hardly things to sneer at.
One of them also tells a story he heard from a woman in a pub about Burchill frightening a rat to death. The woman was at some kind of party Burchill was holding. Burchill retreated into her kitchenette to snort coke off her mirror, only to find a rat dangerously near it. She chased the rat into a corner, the rat adopted an aggressive, fighting posture, Burchill did the same, and the rat dropped dead of a heart attack, scared to death by her.
If that story can be believed, Burchill’s too toxic even for vermin. And she’s still a disgrace to Bristol.
The conspiracy and parapolitics magazine :Lobster has a new website with a different format. But fortunately it’s still publishing very informed news and comments about the covert political machinations that are rarely reported in the mainstream press, and which the mainstream media and the political establishment would quite often very much like to hush up. And one of these pieces of news, as discussed in the ‘News from the Bridge’ column in the magazine’s current issue, is that Lord Levy is once again abroad in the Labour party obtaining Israeli money for the Labour party. This was the situation about a quarter of a century ago after Blair bumped into Levy at a social gathering at the Israeli embassy. Levy arranged for Blair to get funding from the Israelis and Zionist Jewish businessmen in Britain. This allowed the future war criminal to stay independent of the union’s funding and pursue his programme of turning Labour into a centre-right party based on Thatcherism.
Rather more interesting, however, is the article’s remarks about the current state of the Labour party’s finances. These have declined drastically from the heady days when Corbyn was its leader. Then the party had a membership so large it dwarfed the Tories, making it the largest socialist party in Europe. Its finances were correspondingly extremely healthy too, as these members supported the party through their subscriptions. The Blairites’ campaign to purge the party of socialists and critics of Israel has resulted in a catastrophic fall in membership through decent people being smeared and thrown out of the party as anti-Semites, and other, left-wing members simply walking away due to the Blairites and Starmer taking the party sharply to the right. And they’ve made it very clear that they don’t want traditional Labour people as supporters and activists, as they regard them as Commies, Trotskyites and worse. No, they want to make the party safe for nice Thatcherite neoliberals, who will make the right noises about combating racism, prejudice and so on without necessarily doing anything about them.
But it seems that the loss of the party’s members isn’t the only the reason Labour’s finances are in trouble. Apparently, much of its finances is going to pay the lawyers for their role in defending the party from legal action brought about by the purges. This is no doubt one of the reasons that I, and doubtless other remaining Labour party members, get emails and letters from the party every so often begging for donations. I haven’t responded to them for a number of reasons, one of which is that the party wouldn’t be in its dire financial situation if it hadn’t treated its mass membership and supporters with such absolute contempt that they were either driven out or simply resigned because its leadership no longer represented them.
And there’s an additional racial factor in all this. Very many of the people smeared as anti-Semites and purged were Jews. There are statistics arguing that Jews formed the majority. These were decent, self-respecting folk, who were targeted simply because they didn’t toe the line on supporting Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. This is sectarian anti-Semitism. It came from that section of the Jewish community which fancies itself as British Jewry’s ‘establishment’ – the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Chief Rabbinate and such rags as the Jewish Chronicle. In fact, as Jewish bloggers and commenters have made very clear, these organisations represent only a declining fraction of the Jewish community. The Board of Deputies really only represents the United Synagogue, whose members also included some of the journos attacking Corbyn in the lamestream media. The I‘s writer, Simon Kellner, was one such, and there were other writers, who appeared in the papers after whom was the note so-and-so ‘is a member of the United Synagogue’. In the fact the Jewish community is as diverse in its members religious and political views as just about everyone else in British society generally. From what I understand, Judaism never has and isn’t a monolithic community and the only people who’ve ever claimed it is are genuine anti-Semites, like the Nazis.
The definition of anti-Semitism the witch-hunters use conflates anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. But the best definition of anti-Semitism is simply hatred of Jews simply for being Jews, regardless of politics or race. And I’m dam’ sure that the Jews purged as anti-Semites by David Evans and Starmer are very aware and have more knowledge of real anti-Semitism than they’d like. Many of them are the victims of real anti-Semitic abuse and violence, or they lost family members in the Holocaust. I read somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, that half of British Jews had relatives murdered by the Nazis. This makes a mockery of the party’s policy of demanding those suspended for anti-Semitism to attend retraining on it by groups like the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion.
One of the latest victims of the purges is Jonathan Rosenhead, emeritus professor operations at the London School of Economics. Prof. Rosenhead is Jewish, but that hasn’t stopped the apparatchiks of suspending him for anti-Semitism. They’ve also told him that, despite his lifetime of political activism and his ethnicity/ religion, he has to go for compulsory retraining so he can be told how to think about anti-Semitism. I suspect that Prof Rosenhead could probably give the fanatics running the retraining course lessons on anti-Semitism, what it is, how it arises and how it must be fought, rather than have to listen to their nonsense.
The Lobster article, in fact, gives decent people two reasons not to donate to the Labour party. One is that the money from those donations are going the party’s official, sectarian anti-Semitism in smearing and purging Jewish members, as well as decent gentiles. The other is that the donations are going to the lawyers who fought the party’s victims when they tried to seek justice through the courts. People like Mike, for example, who tried to sue them for breach of contract.
As far as I’m concerned, these are reasons enough to want to tell Starmer or whoever where to stick it the next time they send a message appealing for donations.
They are in this financial mess because of their hostility and persecution of decent people, and I object to being asked to collude in this persecution by funding their legal team. If they need to pay their legal expenses, then they should do what their victims have been forced to do. They should pay it out of their own personal finances, rather than expect the very members they despise to do it for them.
I’ve been meaning to put up something about this ever since I got the wretched message from the Labour’s party’s wretched Disputes Team in the Governance and Legal Unit, but didn’t get round to doing so. As some of you may remember, I got a series of emails from the Disputes Team or whoever a little while ago telling me that I was being investigated for anti-Semitism because of a particular blog post. Naturally I argued very strongly against the accusation, and demanded to know the identity of my accusers as per natural justice in a British court of law. I was told they wouldn’t divulge that information, and Labour party investigations aren’t part of the British justice system. This is very true, as the principles of justice that are supposed to animate our legal system are completely foreign to it, as numerous people falsely accused of anti-Semitism can attest.
Several months later, on the 22nd March of this year, 2022, I got the following email from the Labour party. They decided that I had contravened the provisions on anti-Semitism and racism in the party, and that this was hampering the party’s fight against racism! But they haven’t expelled me. No, I’ve been issued with a formal warning, which will stay on my record for 18 months. Here’s the text of their message
‘
Notice of Outcome of Investigation: Formal Warning
We are writing to inform you that the Labour Party (the Party) has concluded its investigation into the allegation that you had breached Chapter 2, Clause I.11 of the Party’s Rule Book (the Rules).
A panel of the National Executive Committee (the NEC Panel) met on 18 March 2022 and considered all of the evidence that the Party put to you and any evidence submitted by you in response.
Summary of the Findings of the NEC Panel
The NEC Panel found on the balance of probabilities, that you posted an article on your blog on 05 December 2020.
The NEC Panel concluded that your conduct was in breach of Chapter 2 Clause I.11 of the Rules. In particular, your conduct undermined the Labour Party’s ability to campaign against racism. In coming to this conclusion, the NEC Panel considered that your conduct contravened the provisions of the Code of Conduct: Antisemitism and other forms of racism.
Taking into account all relevant evidence the NEC Panel concluded that the appropriate outcome is to issue you with this Formal Warning pursuant to Chapter 2, Clause I.1.D.iii of the Rules.
The NEC Panel wishes to make clear that your conduct has fallen short of the high standards expected of Party members and to remind you of the importance of behaving consistently with the Rules and Codes of Conduct at all times.
This Formal Warning will remain on your Labour Party membership record for a period of 18 months. If you commit any further breach of the Rules during that period, an NEC Panel may take this Reminder of Conduct and the behaviour that led to it into account in dealing with that breach.
Consequently, any restrictions that the Party may have imposed on your membership rights pending the outcome of this investigation have now ended. This includes any administrative suspension of your membership that may have been in place.
Conduct Expected of Labour Party Members
The Party expects you, in common with all members, to engage in civil, measured discourse, online and offline.
It also expect members to conduct themselves in a manner that avoids any discrimination or harassment on grounds of race, religion or any other protected characteristic inside the party and in wider society and support, and not to undermine, the Labour Party’s ability to campaign against all forms of racism and prejudice.
Members of the Party agree not to engage in any conduct that is prejudicial or grossly detrimental to the Labour Party. This includes any conduct that demonstrates hostility or prejudice based on a protected characteristic; sexual harassment; bullying or intimidation; and unauthorised disclosure of confidential information.
Members must also comply with the provisions of the NEC’s Codes of Conduct, which are publicly available online here:
The Party urges you to read the NEC’s Codes of Conduct carefully and bear them in mind whenever you are involved in Labour Party activities and in discussion and debate, online and offline, about political issues and ideas.
Yours sincerely,
Disputes Team
Governance and Legal Unit
The Labour Party
c.c.
Labour South West’
I’ve been late posting anything up about this because my reaction to it is that of Catherine Tate’s schoolgirl Lauren: ‘Am I bovvered? Do I look bovvered? I ain’t bovvered’. I was expecting to be thrown out, as so many excellent people have been before me. Indeed, considering the calibre of people purged or accused of alleged anti-Semitism, like Mike, Martin Odoni, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Mark Chilson, Marc Wadsworth, Asa Winstanley, Moshe Machover and far too many others, it’s almost a badge of honour to be included with them.
None of them are or have been in any way racist or anti-Semitic. And neither was the blog post that so offended someone that they felt they just had to complain about me. The post criticised Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. This is the state of Israel, not Jews and not Israelis either. Through reading material by Jews critical of Israel, like Tony Greenstein’s and David Rosenberg’s blogs, as well as Ilan Pappe’s 12 Myths About Israel, as well as online presentations by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, it’s massively apparent that there are very many Jews and Israelis who despise the Israeli state’s decades long ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arabs. The Jewish people have never been a homogenous, monolithic group. The Talmud, Judaism’s second holy book, contains the records of disputes over the Law by the sages and great rabbis of antiquity. Quite often these disputes ended with ‘and so they differed’. It’s no different today. There is a wide diversity in Jewish belief, observance and political and social attitudes, just as there is in every community. However, former president Netanyahu and the Israel lobby would like us all to believe that all Jews everywhere are citizens of Israel and passionately support it, to the extent that any criticism of the country is a terrible assault on their identity. Which isn’t necessarily the case. American Jewish young people are becoming increasingly less interested, even opposed, to Israel. One American Jewish vlogger put up a video stating that he found it ridiculous that he somehow had a right to settle in a country he’d never visited – he came from Anchorage, Alaska, while his Palestinian friend, who was born there, was forbidden to return. In fact, far from speaking for the majority of British Jews, organisations like the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Chief Rabbinate don’t speak for anyone except the United Synagogue, which is only one of a variety of Jewish denominations. But the Board and the Chief Rabbis were very vocal in the anti-Semitism smear campaign against the Labour party and specifically against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Despite the sectarian nature of their support, they did their level best to present themselves falsely as the true voice of British Jews, speaking for the majority.
As for the specific charges against me, I was accused of anti-Semitism because I said that before the Second World War Zionism was a minority position among European Jews. It was. Pappe’s book, and Tony Greenstein’s and David Rosenberg’s blogs have made it very clear that it was, quoting chapter and verse from scholarly studies of Jewish history. The majority of European Jews wished to remain proud citizens of the countries in which they were born, with equal rights and respect as their gentile fellow countrymen. Ditto for Jewish Americans. As late as 1969 one of the Jewish Zionist magazines lamented that there was little interested in Israel among Jewish Americans.
My anonymous accusers also disliked me stating that all ideologies should be open to examination and criticism. Well, they should. There is nothing anti-Semitic in that. It’s one of the cornerstones of real political freedom. Presumably this alarmed them because it means that Zionism should also be examined and criticised. Which is true. Zionism, as I’ve also pointed out, is a political ideology. It is not synonymous with Jews or Judaism. In fact for many years it was just the opposite. The return of the Jews to Israel was first proposed by Christians wishing to hasten Christ’s return, long before Theodor Herzl and Jewish Zionism. Even now the largest Zionist group in America is Pastor Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. It was also supported by real anti-Semites, like Richard Wagner and the various European Fascist parties before the Second World War as a way of removing them from their countries.
I also blotted my copybook defending awkward historical facts, which had resulted in the witch-hunters accusing other Labour party members of anti-Semitism. Ken Livingstone was smeared and then thrown out as an anti-Semite, because the Commie newt-fancier dared to state that Hitler supported Zionism. This is factually correct. It was the short-lived Ha’avara Agreement, in which the Nazis covertly supported the smuggling of Jewish Germans to Palestine. It’s in mainstream histories of Nazism and the Jews, and is mentioned on the website of the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem. But it does not support the myth the Zionists have constructed to present themselves as devoid of any collaboration with the Nazis.
Now let’s dismantle the Labour party’s statement that, because of my blog post criticising Zionism, I am harming the party’s efforts to fight racism. The simple answer is ‘No’, to the point where recent events in the Labour party make this sound like a sick, unfunny joke. The majority of the witch-hunt’s victims have been self-respecting Jews like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, to the point that they comprise 4/5 of those purged. From this angle, it very much looks like it’s the witch hunters who are motivated by a sectarian anti-Jewish prejudice. Because peeps like Jackie and Tony ain’t the right kind of Jews. Marc Wadsworth, another victim, is Black and has campaigned tirelessly against racism. He got Stephen Lawrence’s family to meet Nelson Mandela, and in the ’80s worked with the Board to put in place legislation against real anti-Semitic attacks by the BNP in the East End. But they accused him of anti-Semitism and so had him purged.
At the moment, the Labour party is losing many of its Black and Asian members. Some of this is undoubtedly for the same reasons the party’s losing members generally: the party no longer represents the genuinely popular polices put forward by Jeremy Corbyn, policies that inspired so many to join the party that under Corbyn’s leadership it became the largest socialist party in Europe. But there’s also been a rise in anti-Black and anti-Asian racism in the Labour party as well as islamophobia under Starmer. Black and Asian MPs and activists like Diane Abbott were bullied and racially abused. One third of Muslim members say they have encountered islamophobia. But Starmer has done absolutely nothing about this. And the reason is simple:
He doesn’t care.
Starmer describes himself as ‘100 per cent Zionist’. The people he wishes to appease is the Israel lobby, and so avoid the same charges of anti-Semitism that brought down Corbyn. He does not seem to care about racism against Blacks or Asians or hostility and prejudice against Muslims. And the party’s attitude to what it considers to be anti-Semitic is highly partisan.
Starmer has been using fake charges of anti-Semitism to purge the Labour left, and so make the Blairite grip on it permanent and unchallengeable. Blair did something similar when he was in power. He ignored the left and traditional Labour voters in favour of middle class, Thatcherite swing voters. He assumed that traditional Labour voters and supporters would continue supporting the party because they had nowhere else to go. As a result, many Labour supporters stopped voting, so that even when he won elections, the percentage of people voting Labour actually declined. Some of the party’s working class supporters may have gone over to UKIP, whose supporters were largely older working class Whites who felt left behind and ignored by the existing parties.
And today there are a number of competing parties. A poll a few months ago found that there would be massive support for a new party led by Jeremy Corbyn. A number of left-wing organisations are considering allying to form a competing party, not to mention the Trades Union and Socialist Alliance, which has been around for years. And the Green Party is also growing in popularity. At the moment it’s only just behind Labour in the number of seats it holds on Bristol city council. I’m sure it’s similar in other cities up and down the country.
Starmer’s playing a very dangerous game with his purges, because rather than people keeping on voting and joining Labour because there’s nowhere else, they may very well join or set up rival parties.
This could destroy the Labour party, but I really doubt Starmer and his allies care, just as long as they retain control of the party. And it doesn’t matter how many decent people they purge and smear as anti-Semites, Communists, Trotskyites or whatever.
It’s a horrifying thought, but that’s what this fortnight’s edition of Private Eye suggests in their piece, ‘Project Keir’ in the ‘H.P. Sauce’ column on page 14. They speculate that Starmer is deliberately planning to lose the next election so that he will be replaced by Wes Streeting, who will win the following election. He seems himself as the new Neil Kinnock, who lost his election but prepared the way for the success of Tony Blair. The article runs
“Don’t let anyone tell you that this is a two-term project,” shadow minister Wes Streeting told moderate group Labour First at his party’s conference last weekend. This phrase is familiar to the party’s right: a two-term project would mean Keir Starmer losing the next election but his sacrifice clearing the way for a properly moderate leader.
It was an acknowledgment that many on Labour’s right – including some in Starmer’s office – believe the leader’s focus on fixing Labour’s internal selections might not impress voters but will clear out the hard left, subdue the soft left and prepare the ground for the only way they believe Labour can win: Starmer must be a “Kinnock”, who loses elections but clears the way for a Blair figure who ultimately wins.” The rest of the article describes how Keef and his minions are already in talks with various big businesses. Well, Starmer is a Blairite, and Blair became notorious for granting favours to big corporations, including seats in government, in return for donations.
Before I start critiquing the article proper, look at the bias in its writing. Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters are ‘hard left’. Labour First is ‘moderate’. Not so. Jeremy Corbyn is actually very traditional Old Labour: a mixed economy, strong welfare state, properly nationalised and funded NHS, and strong trade unions. He wants the nationalisation of the utilities and the railways, which was the social democratic consensus, accepted by both Labour and the Tories, from 1945 to 1979 and the election of Maggie Thatcher. This is far less than the demands for further nationalisation from the real communist and Trotskyite left, who sneer at reformist socialist politicians like Corbyn. And Labour First is not remotely moderate. It’s far right in the same way Blair was far right. Blair was further right than the Tories in many issues. The Conservatives had tried taking schools out of the control of the LEAs, the precursors of Blair’s academies, found that they didn’t work and duly binned them. Blair took the idea out of the bin and then expanded it. He also went much further in privatising the NHS than the Tories dared. At the 2008 elections Cameron pretended to be further left than Blair in order to win. I think this lost him votes from traditional hard right Tory voters, but unfortunately it did give him the keys to 10 Downing Street. And we’ve been suffering ever since.
This scheme all depends on several factors, one of which is whether Starmer truly realises he’s going to lose the next election. He certainly doesn’t seem like it. Despite losing a whole series of local authorities and constituencies, including the north, he seems determined to present what few seats Labour did retain up north as stunning victories. In fact in many of them Labour only managed to scrape in. Now I think Starmer really is hoping that Tory voters, along with big business and the media, will turn to him, or his version of the Labour party, when they get sick of the Tories and their incompetence. But that’s a dangerous assumption. Blair was able to win over Murdoch and the majority of the press, but the Daily Mail held on to its wretched principles and carried on supporting the Tories. There is no guarantee that the British public, media and business will embrace Streeting if Labour does lose the next election and Starmer makes way for him. And even if Streeting did win the following election, it would probably be by a smaller number of people voting than actually voted in the 2019 election. At the 2017 election, Corbyn lost with a higher number of people voting for him than Blair did when he won. It’s been forgotten that when Blair was in power, people drifted away from Labour en masse and that there was a general feeling of alienation and disenfranchisement. People didn’t feel the parties represented them and some of them stopped voting. This will happen again, even if Streeting or someone like him wins.
And its dangerous, because when people feel alienated from supposedly democratic parties, they turn to the real extremists, the Communists or Fascists. Both of those are pretty much dead at the moment, despite the screams about Corbyn, but they could well revive, if under a less extreme guise, like UKIP or the Brexit party at the elections a few years ago.
My own guess is that such a plan would destroy Labour, at least as a mass party. Starmer treats the rank and file members with contempt, and as result they’re leaving. Without their membership subscriptions, Labour is facing bankruptcy. Starmer has also driven away the baker’s union, BFAWU, so he went get any money from that union either. If he drives further unions away, which he well might, that could provoke an even worse financial crisis. He needs those donations from big business, but there’s no guarantee he’ll get them.
Starmer’s slowly turning Labour into a minor party with little funding and small membership, also so he can appeal to business and hopefully get his rear end, or Streetings into power. It’s a truly risky strategy, and could kill the party long before either he or Streeting get anywhere close.
And as they’re doing this, they’re damaging democracy by ignoring the electorate and its wishes in favour of big business. A few years ago a report by Harvard University concluded that America was no longer a functioning democracy because of this. Instead it was a plutocracy or something like it, government by the rich.
I wonder sometimes if the Communists and Trotskyites didn’t throw in the towel too soon. They were always looking for the collapse of capitalism, and while that didn’t happen and probably won’t, they would have realised that Thatcherism, at least, isn’t working and made real efforts to make the British public realise it. Communism collapsed with the velvet revolution in eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the countries of the former Soviet bloc threw off their chains and embraced democracy and free market capitalism. Francis Fukuyama declared that it was ‘the end of history’. Liberalism in the broad sense of the mixture of liberal democracy and capitalism, had seen off its rivals and would now reign supreme and unchallenged as the global ideology bringing peace, freedom – both political and economic – and prosperity to everyone.
But it hasn’t worked out like that.
Thatcher’s privatisation of the public utilities here in Britain haven’t brought the necessary investment these sectors needed. As Ken Loach’s superb documentary, The Spirit of 45, makes very clear, the power, water and railway industries are natural monopolies that need national planning and support. This has been particularly shown time and again in the management of the railways. Major’s privatisation of British Rail in the 1990s and its breakup into separate companies resulted in a spate of horrendous train crashes. Insult was added to injury by the rail companies passing the buck and accusing each other of responsibility for the disasters. As a result, the company owning the railway network itself, Railtrack, had to be renationalised in 2002. Privatisation did not work. And it has continued to fail with the private railways companies. Several have had to be taken back into state administration after providing poor service. However, this has always been excused as a temporary measure and the government has insisted on finding some other private company to run those services afterwards. After a series of such failures, this strategy now looks more than a little desperate. It’s an attempt to fend off the obvious: that private enterprise isn’t providing a proper, decent rail service and the only way to run it properly is to renationalise it.
It is very much the same with the government’s part-privatisation of Britain’s schools. Declining standards in state schools led Thatcher to experiment with privately-run schools outside the control of Local Education Authorities. These were then called ‘city academies’. They were another failure, and her education secretary, Norman Fowler, was forced to wind them up quietly. Unfortunately, Tony Blair thought it was a wizard idea and it became a major part of New Labour education policy. Simply called ‘academies’, these schools would be run by private companies. Some of these would specialise in particularly subjects, such as Maths and science. Expertise from private industry would ensure that standards would be high, and they would provide a powerful incentive through their competition for the remaining state schools to improve their performance. Except that didn’t happen either. The academies don’t perform any better than ordinary state schools once the massive difference in funding is taken into account. An academy may receive tens of millions of funding compared to a fraction of million that the Local Education Authority receives to spend on all the schools it runs. Furthermore, many of the academies have only been able to maintain their high standards through being highly selective about their intakes. Pupils that may not reach the marks demanded by the schools, including those with behavioural problems or who come from poorer families, are often excluded and expelled. Educational performance and standards in many academies has been so abysmal that the chains managing them have collapsed and the schools once again taken into public administration. But private enterprise under the Tories cannot be allowed to fail, and so we had the grim spectacle a few years ago of Nicky Morgan, the Tory education secretary, repeatedly not answering the questions on the Andrew Marr show why the government was pushing ahead with turning schools into academies when just a little while ago 25 academies had had to be taken over by the government again.
Now, thanks to a mixture of Brexit and global problems elsewhere, the gas industry is in crisis. There are shortages of gas, a number of the smaller companies have already collapsed and customers are being faced with sharp price rises. Novara Media have even said that the government has admitted that if there are severe problems with the major gas suppliers, then they will have to be nationalised.
Gas, like electricity, should never have been privatised in the first place. When it was initially privatised, the company was not split up into separate, competing companies and so it was able to dominate the market as a private monopoly. Now some of those companies are suffering because they are unable to cope with free market conditions. This says to me very much that Jeremy Corbyn was right – that the public utilities need to be publicly owned and rationally managed as part of an integrated system. This is another point that Ken Loach’s documentary makes very well.
And Brexit has created further problems. The establishment of a customs border with Eire overturns one of the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and so threatens to return Northern Ireland to sectarian violence and chaos. There is a shortage of CO2 as a result of which some foods and other goods may suffer shortages. And there may be further shortages, including petrol and other fuels, because Brexit has also resulted in fewer haulage drivers. Some are even now predicting a new ‘Winter of Discontent’, like that in 1979 that resulted in the defeat of the-then Labour government and the election of Maggie Thatcher.
I remember the petrol crisis of the ’70s, when OPEC suddenly raised oil prices and there were queues at petrol pumps. Just as I remember how Ted Heath’s dispute with the coal miners resulted their strike, the three-day week and power cuts. It got to the point that by the middle of the decade the right were expecting a Communist takeover and the end of civilisation as we know it. There were supposedly private militias being formed by bonkers right-wingers while parts of the establishment wanted to overthrow the minority Labour government in a coup to be replaced by a kind of coalition government composed of representatives from all the parties. Well, that was what the Times discussed in its articles. The security services, however, were forming plans to round up trade unionists and left-wing politicians and activists and intern them on a Scottish island somewhere. The editor of the Mirror went to Sandhurst to interest them in overthrowing the government but was met with a no doubt polite refusal. I think he, or one of the other plotters, even went as far as Paris to see if that old Fascist, Oswald Mosley, would be interested in leading the new government.
All that has been used in the Tory myth that socialism doesn’t work, and only creates the economic and political chaos that helped bring Britain to its knees. Chaos that was only ended by the glorious reign of Maggie.
Except that these problems look like they’re coming back, and this time the fault is Brexit and the free market.
I think Boris will be able to find temporary solutions to alleviate, but not cure, some of these problems. He has, for example, introduced new legislation to encourage lorry drivers from the continent to come over here. But the underlying structural problems remain. The only way to solve them is through nationalisation.
The Labour party is in an excellent position to drive this home, at least in the case of gas. Even if it doesn’t go that far, it should still be landing hard blows on Johnson and the Tories because of Brexit’s massive failures. But Starmer isn’t doing that. Instead, as Zelo Street pointed out in a piece published a day or so ago, the Labour leader is more intent instead on destroying democracy in his party as part of his war on the left.
Which is why I’m almost nostalgic for the old Socialist Workers’ Party. They’re still around, rebranded as ‘the Socialist Party’, but they’re nowhere near as active as they were. Whenever there was any kind of crisis or major issue you could count on them turning up with their megaphones and copies of their newspaper to harangue the masses and demand further action against the problem. Unfortunately, in many cases the Socialist Workers’ Party were the problem. They colonised left-wing issues in an attempt to turn protest groups into front organisations, which they could then use to produce further discontent. Rock Against Racism collapsed when the SWP took over the leadership of that organisation, formed to protest against the rise of Fascism. They were also busy infiltrating the Labour party and other left-wing parties here and abroad with the intention of radicalising them. I think the eventual hope was to create some kind of mass revolutionary movement. It didn’t work, and has only resulted in purges, such as that of Militant Tendency by Kinnock in the 1980s. In fact, the policy has helped strengthen the right in the Labour party, as they smeared Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters as Trotskyite infiltrators as the pretext for their continue purge.
The Trotskyites lived, however, in the firm belief that capitalism would eventually fail. Well, it isn’t doing that now, but it should be abundantly clear that Thatcherite free market capitalism isn’t working. The SWP would have realised that and tried to get the message across. The Labour left, which isn’t remotely Trotskyite, realises too that Thatcherism isn’t working. Their solution is simply a return to the mixed economy of the social democratic consensus. This wasn’t perfect, but it operated far better than the free market shambles we have now. And no, mixed economies are not ‘Communist’, ‘Trotskyist’ or ‘far left’. The real Communists and Trotskyists hated it as a form of capitalism, just as they hated reformist socialist parties like Labour.
But Starmer’s leadership is pledged to propping up the same wretched free market capitalism. Which is why I really feel there should be a mass movement driving home the point, again and again, that Thatcherism is ideologically and economically bankrupt. It is doing nothing but producing chaos in the economy and industry, and poverty and starvation to Britain’s working people. And this poverty will get worse. This is why I’m almost nostalgic for the wretched SWP, as they would have been determined to drive this home. And who knows? Perhaps if they behaved like a reasonable party, they might have gained further support and forced the Labour party to rediscover its socialist heritage in order to head off a challenge from real Communists.
As I’ve said before, I’ve mixed feelings about the imminent demise of GB News. It is a right-wing news network, deliberately founded to provide an ‘objective’ alternative to the ‘wet, woke’, BBC with Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunset Times, Economist and head of the board that runs the increasingly far-right Spectator, as its main man. Well, the channel has failed to attract viewers, advertisers have been put off by what they see as its racist bias, and its main broadcaster now is former chief of the Brexit party, Nigel Farage. Neil has jumped ship like the proverbial rats and it’s highly debatable how long the channel’s investors will put up with it before they finally pull the plug. Plus Rupert Murdoch is planning his own rival in the shape of TVTalk. This won’t have the financial problems of GB News, because it’s going to be financed through subsidies from the other parts of Murdoch’s empire of filth. Which means that Britain could be getting a version of Fox News, a channel so untrustworthy and which tells so many lies that researchers found that people who took no news at all were better informed that viewers of Fox. Salvador Dali once said that he was intent on cretinizing the public. Dali was immensely talented, but greedy, treacherous, perverted and a supporter of General Franco. He died some time in the late ’70s or ’80s. But his mission to turn the west into a region of dribbling morons is being carried on by Dirty Rupe.
On the other hand, GB News does provide a valuable service by inviting guests to speak, who have been blogged or silenced by the other channels and media for their controversial views. These include critics of postmodernism, including Critical Race Theory and the transgender ideology like Helen Pluckrose. Another critic of the transgender ideology is Graham Linehan, the writer of such comedy greats as Father Ted, the IT Crowd, Big Train and co-creator of Black Books. In this interview with Andrew Doyle on GB News’ Free Speech Nation, Linehan talks about his activism challenging the transgender movement. He’s motivated by fear and outrage at the way he feels vulnerable people, especially girls and young women, are being misled into believing themselves to be transgender and the immense harm that such needless transitioning is doing to their bodies and minds. The puberty blockers not only halt the transition to physical adolescence but there is also evidence that it stops the crucial brain development that comes with it. The people given these drugs therefore stay locked in an emotional childhood. The double mastectomies performed on transitioning women leave the patient with no sensation in their chests. The use of male sex hormones causes the womb to atrophy and adhere to other organs, so that the transmen given these hormones often have to have hysterectomies in their 20s. He argues that there is no respectable science backing up the claims of the transgender movement, and that what science there that supports some of their claims comes from very small studies, and so is scientifically highly debatable.
Linehan is also concerned about the way sexually predatory men may claim to be transwomen in order to get into a position to abuse women. One example of this is the recent Wi spa incident, where a Black woman complained about a naked man in the women’s area. Although this was dismissed by pro-transgender activists as a hoax, further witnesses have come forward. And the perpetrator himself had multiple convictions for indecent exposure as well as burglary. He also talks about the way the Girl Guides have extensive, rigorous rules protecting girls and women if men go away with them, but these rules are somehow relaxed with transwomen, as if all such people were equally safe and nice. He draws a comparison between the paedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. For nearly a century, the priesthood were a protected caste. As a result, paedophiles could join the Roman Catholic clergy confident that they would be protect from prosecution. Transwomen in his view now form a similarly protected class who are somehow held to be immune from any wrongdoing.
Linehan has, unsurprisingly, been accused of transphobia, which he denies. He states that there are transpeople who support him, and says he has met more transpeople through his activism than possibly his critics. He certainly does have his supporters in the trans community, several of whom have appeared on his YouTube channel, The Mess We’re In. As for the position that transwomen aren’t women, he points out that there are transwomen like Debbie Hayden and Blair White who don’t describe themselves as women. He believes that in the coming years we will see a growth in the number of detransitioners, former transpeople who have found that transitioning has not cured their problems with gender identity and expression.
Linehan also views the trans movement as acting against gay people, particularly lesbians. He has spoken about Pride rallies, where much has been said about trans people, but lesbian women aren’t mentioned. He views the trans ideology as a new kind of conversion therapy designed to stop children from being gay. In his view, homophobic parents are putting gender non-conforming children – kids who play or adopt the dress of the opposite sex – forward as transgender out of the fear that they may be gay. They can’t handle that, and it’s easier for them to accept that they are really people of the opposite sex stuck in the wrong body. He’s particularly convinced of this since he heard a joke going round the Tavistock clinic, one of the main transgender clinic, that if they continue transitioning people, soon there won’t be any lesbians left. He also talks about how many gay people are worried about the way the main gay organisations, such as Stonewall, have thrown all their weight behind the trans ideology. They are afraid that when the transgender craze finally breaks and the bankruptcy of the ideology is finally revealed, then ordinary gay people will suffer because of the strong support organisations like Stonewall gave it.
He also talks about the attempts trans rights activists make to silence their opponents. He describes the abuse gender critical feminists receive and the refusal of TRAs to engage in any kind of dialogue with them. He states that a group of gender critical peeps wrote a letter to one of the papers requesting their opponents to tone the abuse down a bit. Not only was this polite request refused, but one of the signatories, a gay man, suffered attempts to wreck his career simply for signing the letter. James Dreyfus, a gay actor, who has appeared in the comedy programmes The Thin Blue Line and Gimme, Gimme, has also suffered from this. Dreyfus has played the Master in one of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays. Yet his gender critical stance has resulted him being airbrushed out of a list of actors who have played the Doctor’s arch-enemy. Trans Rights Activists refuse to appear on programmes or platforms with people like Linehan, stating that they will only debate the issue with trans people. But there’s silence from them when transpeople come forward, who oppose the ideology. They don’t want to debate them either. Linehan has said that the reason one very prominent feminist academic has refused to debate the issue on television is because this woman would be unable to credibly explain how Eddie Izzard is a woman in the same way as people’s mothers.
And Linehan has also suffered for his gender critical feminist views. His own career is comparatively safe, though he mentions that there is one episode of the IT Crowd that the broadcasters tried to censor. This was about one of the characters falling in love with a transwoman. It’s held to be transphobic, but he points out that the joke is actually that the transwoman, although identifying as female, still behaves like a man. Which makes her the ideal partner for the other character, who is quite blokey. His wife, however, suffered far more from attempts to wreck her career, simply because she was married to him.
I realise that this is a very, very, emotive and controversial position, but I strongly believe critics of the transgender movement like Linehan, Kellie-Jay Minshull and others, absolutely deserve to be heard. What should matter in a debate like this is reasoned debate, backed by scientific fact. But I don’t see this coming from the Trans Rights Activists, many of whom, Linehan alleges, really aren’t transgender. Instead I just see abuse, including horrific death threats and violence. For examples of this, go to the Women Are Human site.
I am aware that there are supporters of the new transgender ideology who read this site. I appreciate their fears and their views, and really don’t want them to feel excluded or vulnerable. I repeat: I don’t want to see anyone persecuted, discriminated against or victimised because of their sexuality or sexual orientation. I appreciate that there are people for whom transitioning to the opposite sex may be the best treatment for their condition. The statistics for the number of transpeople murdered in Britain is actually very low – perhaps about three in the last decade or so. It’s far lower than the murders of other demographic groups. But I do understand transpeople’s fears of violence against them. Way back in the 1990s there was a small press magazine for transpeople, Aeon: The Magazine of Transkind. This covered issues such as anti-trans violence. I definitely do not, in any way, support such violence against anyone because of their gender presentationor identification. I am also acutely aware that transgender people are definitely not all paedophiles, rapists or sexual predators, and don’t want to see them tarred as such because of those that are.
But there are real issues surrounding women’s safety, their ability to participate in women’s sports against transwomen, who may have a physical advantage from their former male physique and development. I think there is a problem with psychologically vulnerable young people, particularly girls, being misdiagnosed and put on the track for transition when it is medically inappropriate. One of the other issues Linehan and the gender critical feminists raise is that there are all kinds of medical complications with gender reassignment. It is difficult, painful and expensive, and can lead to poor health for the rest of the life of the transman or -woman. They feel that people with gender dysphoria – the medical term for dissatisfaction with one’s gender identity – are being miss-sold gender reassignment surgery as a cure for this problem when it may not. There are problems with the TRA claim that without surgery, trans-identified people will commit surgery. However, some transpeople have committed surgery, possibly because they have found out that it is not a cure for their problems.
This has certainly happened. Years ago there was a report in the papers about the discovery of the body, police had initially believed, of a young woman. Forensic investigation, however, revealed that this individual was a transwoman. From what I remember of the case, she had drowned herself, leaving a suicide note that read that she now regretted transitioning and wished she could turn back. It’s a tragic case, and I hope whatever side of the debate you’re on, we all agree that everything should be done to stop transpeople, or anyone else, taking their lifefor whatever reason.
These are vital issues, but any criticism of the trans ideology is being blocked and silenced. North of the border the Maria Miller, a gender critical feminist, is being prosecuted for hate speech because she put up stickers saying ‘Scottish women won’t wheesht’ – a Scots term meaning ‘shut up’ or ‘be silent’ – and a looped ribbon which her opponents claim is a noose. The SNP have also gone further and banned demonstrations outside the Scots parliament after the mass demonstration by Scots women and their male supporters a week or so ago. Every attempt is being made to silence gender critical people through the accusations that they are hateful and transphobic. The LGB Alliance, which believes trans is a separate issue and the gay organisations should return to fighting for gay rights, has been accused of being a hate group.
Horrendous as GB News is, I believe it is performing a vital service by allowing people like Helen Pluckrose and Graham Linehan to speak. This is a service that should be done by the BBC as the country’s public service broadcaster. But it isn’t. Linehan has pointed out that the Corporation backs the trans ideology to the extent that one of its children’s programmes presented a White, heterosexual couple as a pair of lesbians on the grounds that the male partner was trans-identified. He has become so disgusted with the Beeb that he has joined the right-wingers demanding the cancellation of the license fee. As for himself, he and Doyle have crossed swords in the past, though the discussion on here is entirely amicable. Linehan states that the debate is tribal, and that before he got involved in it he believed that everyone on the right really was evil. But after coming into contact with them, he finds that they are not. It’s just a different view of the world. Well, in the case of some Tories, that’s definitely the case. But I still believe that Therese Coffey, Esther McVey, Iain Duncan Smith and their ilk, who have been persecuting the disabled, the unemployed and the poor are genuinely evil, and don’t simply have a different opinion. Not with the number of people their policies have killed.
Controversial as they are, programmes and videos like this are an argument in favour of GB News. I’ve no time for the standard media rhetoric about how neoliberalism is absolutely correct and anyone challenging it, like Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, are evil Trotskyites and communists. That’s all over the media, including supposedly left-wing papers like the Groan and the Mirror. But the culture war issues cut across political boundaries and are the best argument for the channel’s continuation. But it’s these issues that are alienating the younger staff and causing them to leave.
I’m no fan of GB News nor the horrendous Farage and Brillo. I don’t think it’s remotely a loss to British broadcasting that the man who has no problems with Taki writing horrendous anti-Semitic screeds and praises the neo-Nazi Greek Golden Dawn in the pages of the Spectator. But I am afraid that dissenting voices that genuinely need to be heard will be left without a platform when it goes.
And I am very much afraid of Dirty Rupe’s planned replacement.
I’ve been putting up various cartoons I’ve drawn which express my anger at certain political issues, and particularly the anti-democratic and destructive current Labour leadership. Starmer and his allies, like General Secretary David Evans, seem determined to purge the party of any socialist content as well as attack its historic connections with the trade unions. All this is being done to turn it into another Tory party. The results have been disastrous. Labour took a hammering at the council elections, and when it has won, it’s been by a very bare margin. But Starmer and the Blairites carry on, firmly convinced that it will lead them to victory after they have purged the party of all those wretched ‘anti-Semites’ and ‘Trots’.
I got so annoyed with Starmer and his mercenary leadership that I drew this cartoon expressing my view of who Keef Stalin likes and who he doesn’t. What he likes is big corporate donations, while standing behind him are Blair and Thatcher. And the people he likes are the Israel lobby, right-wing journalists and big business.
The peeps he doesn’t like – who I’ve put in a dock marked ‘purged’ are non-Zionist Jews, Muslims, Blacks and the working class. Because most of the people being purged for anti-Semitism are Jewish critics of Israel. Muslims are experiencing rising islamophobia in the party, while Starmer has ignored the instances of bullying by members of the right-wing apparat against Black MPs and activists, like Diane Abbott. As for the working class, the Blairites never had any time for them. They were too keen chasing middle class Tory voters in swing constituencies. One of the women Stalin has taken on as his advisor also worked for Blair, and advised him to ignore the ‘underserving poor’. Thus Starmer and his fellows see the working people who physically build and make this country. And, of course, he hates socialists. I know some of the people really don’t look like who they’re meant to represent, but I hope you’ll forgive this.
Starmer’s a disaster, and the more he tries to tighten his grip and purge people, the further down the polls he goes. He must go.
This has been bugging me for the past week. Wales’ inspirational and triumphant Labour leader, Mark Drakeford, got the Blairites and ultra-Zionists in a tizzy this weekend. He committed the grave crime of speaking at The World Transformed, a fringe, left-Labour event, where he urged the adoption of Universal Basic Income. And plan that threatens to lift the poor in our society out of their starvation and misery is solidly verboten to the Thatcherite true believers. And so came the sneers. One ignorant far-right Labour councillor called the event ‘a Trots jamboree’, despite the fact that no Trotskyite organisations were there. No matter, I doubt the good councillor has any real idea what Trotskyism is anyway. It’s just a term of abuse intended to scare people, full of emotional content – Trots and Commies are everything evil – but I doubt if any of them really know what it is beyond Trotsky himself.
Inevitably the ultra-Zionists raised their heads and made started throwing around accusations of anti-Semitism. This was done by Elured Anderson, whose a member or representative of a Holocaust commemoration organisation. She was incensed that Drakeford was there alongside people who had been thrown out for anti-Semitism, Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn. Except neither of these two gents are remotely anti-Semitic. The accusations were contrived because both are long-term critics of Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Corbyn has a proud record of standing up for Britain’s diverse, pluralistic Jewish community, while Loach was warmly welcomed by the very Jewish members of Jewish Voice for Labour.
But I find her attitude towards Zionism and the Holocaust deeply repugnant. The various pro-Israel organisations seem to be trying to spread the message that Israel and Zionism have the exclusive ownership of the Shoah and its commemoration. It’s demonstrated by the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion, running Holocaust commemoration events. As they did when they secretly recorded Jackie Walker in order to leak it and get her thrown out. But ownership of the Holocaust doesn’t belong to Israel, Zionism or any single strand of the Jewish community. In my gentile view, and I apologise if I’m ‘Jewsplaining’, it belongs primarily to the victims and their families, and then to the Jewish community as a whole. And the Jewish community includes individuals and organisations that are critical of Israel.
The militant pro-Israel appropriation of the Holocaust is also hypocritical. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust after the War the Zionist organisations played it down. Instead of discussing the specific persecution of the Jews, the Zionists concentrated instead in talking about them as merely one group of a number of political prisoners imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis. This was because they were afraid that talking about the particular genocide of the Jewish people would give the impression that Jews were too weak to have their own country. It’s only since then that pro-Israel groups have embraced the Holocaust and presented themselves as the only worthy organisations capable of its proper commemoration.
And there have been Jewish critics of the way Israel has harnessed the Holocaust to militant Israeli nationalism. One Israeli critic described the way an Israeli jet flew over Auschwitz one year, presumably to show that Israel would protect Jews from any repeat of the horror. The critic stated that Israeli visitors to the murder factory weren’t told anything about the historical reasons for the Holocaust, the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution. It seemed to them to be just used for Israeli nationalist propaganda. Other Israeli critics of the persecution of the Palestinians have controversially said that it would be better for the Holocaust to be forgotten than for it to be used to justify the Israeli’s states continued attacks on their indigenous Arabs.
Now the Holocaust is being used to smear decent people as anti-Semites in order to get them purged from the Labour party. This includes Jews, who I’m sure have lost people in the Holocaust. Mike put up a meme earlier this week which ran:
Anti-Semitism is a real threat to Jews everywhere. It Is not an excuse to purge left-wingers from the Labour party.
I completely agree, and find it absolutely abhorrent that the Holocaust is being used as part of this smear campaign.
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