Is Black Anti-Semitism Behind the Attacks on Jews in New York?

Yesterday came the shocking news that there had been yet another anti-Semitic attack in New York. The attacker had pushed into a rabbi’s house where he and a group of others were celebrating Hanukkah, and stabbed five of them. And Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, the Sage of Swindon, has posted a video about it.

Sargon is the right-wing ranter, who broke UKIP. He’s a ‘classical liberal’, or rather Libertarian, who believes in privatising everything, destroying the welfare state even further, and is anti-feminist and racist. So it should come as no surprise that he supports Donald Trump. Sargon is the man who sent the Tweet to Jess Philips telling her that he wouldn’t even rape her. When he joined UKIP and was selected as one of their two candidates for the south-west constituency in the Euro elections, the branch in his own town of Swindon asked for him to be deselected. Gloucestershire UKIP disbanded in disgust, and he was greeted with protests and thrown milkshakes and fish in places like Bristol and Truro on his election tour.

But this time Sargon seems to have raised an interesting issue and made a decent point. In his video, he goes through some of the newspaper coverage of the incidents. Yesterday’s attack is sadly only one of a number that have been carried out in recent weeks, so that several of the members of the Jewish community affected have said that they felt they were living in Nazi Germany.  Sargon noted how the newspapers claimed that the attackers were of both genders and all races, male and female, Black and White. He found a piece where one newspaper columnist called for Jews and Blacks to unite against their common enemy, white supremacy. But Sargon stated that in all the incidents he’d seen, the perpetrators had been very largely Black, although there were a few Hispanics. And he quite naturally wondered why.

Now it could be that the idea that the attacks are committed by Blacks is an illusion. It’s possible that there were equal numbers or more of Whites involved, but for some reason these were not covered as examples. Or else they were reported, but Sargon couldn’t find them when he searched the net. Certainly there have been terrible anti-Semitic attacks carried out by White racists this year.

But some of the attacks may also be due to causes peculiar to certain forms of Black radicalism. If that’s true, then it must also be stressed that this is only going to be a minority within America’s Black community, just as White racists like Richard Spencer certainly do not represent all White Americans.

Sargon suggested that it might be connected to a speech by the head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, which was taken down from YouTube. Farrakhan, whose anti-Semitism is notorious, had ranted about the Jews, at one point comparing them to Termites. Given that the attackers seemed to be largely Black, he didn’t see how Trump or White supremacy could be blamed. He claimed that Trump didn’t have any problem with Jews, as his daughter had converted to Judaism. So, he asked, why were Blacks attacking Jews? He then made the perfectly reasonable point that we wouldn’t know unless somebody asked them.

It is possible that Farrakhan’s highly inflammatory rhetoric against Jews could have inspired some of the attackers. Farrakhan is the head of the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim organisation that, from the standpoint of orthodox Islam, is highly heretical. It’s a mixture of 19th century Freemasonry, Sudanese Sufism and elements of Ufology. It’s central doctrine is that W.D. Fard, a Syrian immigrant to the US, is the Son of God. Farrakhan claims that he was taken up to a flying ‘mother wheel’ by a UFO from a mountain in Mexico, and shown that Fard is alive and well and living on Venus, directing the war against Whites. The religion calls for the creation of a separate nation for Black Americans as it considers that they will never have justice or equality under White domination. They also believe that hundreds of thousands of years ago Blacks had an advanced civilisation, travelling to and exploring the Moon. White people are albinistic mutants created by a renegade Meccan scientist. Way back in the 1990s Farrakhan was predicting that American would be destroyed by a nuclear attack from an alliance of Muslim nations, that would free Black Americans. The religion is obviously bitterly hostile to Whites, or at least White civilisation. Given the immense exploitation and injustice Blacks have suffered in American and western history, it’s understandable.

Farrakhan also has a particular hatred of the Jews, because he blames them for the slave trade. Mainstream, respectable scholarship, such as Hugh Thomas’ comprehensive The Slave Trade, actually shows that Jews formed a tiny minority of slave traders and slave-owners.

A number of right-wing American websites also reported that the man responsible for an attack on a Jewish supermarket just before Christmas was a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites. This was a response to one of the left-wing Democrat politicos, who claimed that it was the vile work of a White nationalist. The Black Hebrew Israelites were founded c. 1964 by two preachers of Black Judaism, Gerson Parker, who took the name Nasi Hashalom, and Louis Bryant, who became Nasi Shaliach Ben Yehuda. Hashalom was the group’s spokesman, and revered as the Messiah. In 1969 they established a community in Dimona in Israel. The group believe that the only real Jews are Black Americans of slave ancestry.  Jews are fakes, and are part of the conspiracy to hide Black Americans’ real, spiritual identity from them. They will be destroyed, along with the rest of the religion’s enemies, at the Battle of Armageddon. This didn’t impress the Israeli authorities, who ruled that the Black Hebrew Israelites were not genuine Jews, and so could be legally deported. However, this hadn’t occurred by 1992, and the group was reported to have good relations with the Israeli authorities.  

It’s possible that the growth in the Nazi and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the White population may also have encouraged similar poisonous ideas in the Nation of Islam. The September 8th, 1992 issue of the religion’s newspaper, The Final Call, carried an article that suggested that the American government was planning to fake an alien landing in order to set up a tyrannical one-world government. The article featured an interview with UFO researcher Nario Hayakawa, who said

The U.S. government behind a veil of secrecy, is testing these aerial devices or select pilots may be receiving instructions [from alien beings] on how to fly these disk shaped crafts developed by the government for the purpose of staging a fake extraterrestrial event in the very near future, perhaps around 1995… Secret international banking groups and other global secret groups are going to forcefully eliminate international borders and create some kind of controlled society… The most amazing weapon they will use to do this will be the extraterrestrial threat. 

(See Donna Kossy, Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief (Portland: Feral House 1994) 27).

This is very similar to some of the ideas promoted by White conspiracy theorists at the time, like Bill Cooper in his book, Behold a Pale Horse. Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince also suggested that there was a conspiracy to create a Fascist social order with a fake alien landing in their book, The Stargate Conspiracy, published at the same time. This last book does not, however, blame the Jews and is certainly not anti-Semitic.

These ideas have been around for decades, however. This raises the question of why these attacks are being carried out now.

While Sargon is right that Trump’s daughter converted to Judaism – she did so when she married Jared Kushner, his son-in-law – Trump’s administration did contain allegedly genuine anti-Semites like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, and he did have links to and sympathy for the Alt Right. It might be that the growth in far right activism and racist rhetoric that his presidency has encouraged among White nationalists and racists like Richard Spencer has encouraged a similar increase in racism and anti-Semitism among some Black radicals.

On the other hand, it may also be that these attacks arise from tensions that a particular to the Black community. But left-wing commenters may also be right in that Trump’s neoliberal economic policies have resulted in more Americans of all colours facing terrible poverty. This is going to exacerbate racial tensions as groups compete over scarce resources. And the economic and social sense of threat this creates may cause some to seek out the Jews as scapegoats.

Racism and anti-Semitism have to be fought in all their forms. But the underlying economic causes have to be tackled as well – the poverty and the sense of despair and alienation this generates.

And that means electing a government that Sargon is definitely opposed to: one that will overturn decades of neoliberalism and restore genuine prosperity and a proper welfare net to working people. A government headed by Bernie Sanders.

 

 

ITV Misrepresents Stormzy Racism Comment

Yesterday Mike put up a piece reporting that the Grime artist, Stormzy, had been misrepresent by ITV as claiming that Britain was totally racist. One of the broadcaster’s hacks had asked him if he thought Britain was racist. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘100 per cent’. Now it should be obvious even to the meanest intelligence that what he meant was that he believed 100 per cent that Britain was racist, not that Britain is 100 per cent racist. But we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, where the media is feeding us all kinds of lies, half-truths and distortions. Stormzy was pro-Labour and pro-Corbyn, and after the Beeb and its lead smear merchant, Laura Kuenssberg, had spent the election belittling Labour and promoting the Tories, it seems that ITV had decided it was their turn. There was an immediate backlash which resulted in the broadcaster releasing a statement retracting their claims about Stormzy, but which significantly did not include an apology.

The peeps on Twitter were not impressed. Mike has put up a number of tweets attacking ITV for this from people like Another Angry Voice, Laura Murray, the comedian and I journo Shappi Khorsandi, and Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar. Murray and Sarkar both noted that Stormzy was being smeared after Britain had elected Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. A racist, who talked about ‘picanninies with watermelon smiles’. Sarkar noted that Johnson also says he runs away from Black boys, Nigerians are obsessed with money and uses the N- and C- word for Blacks. Oh yes, and Britain is a country that illegal deported Black British citizens. But Britain isn’t racist, and it’s extraordinarily offensive to say that it does.

And after the Tory election victory that put Johnson into No. 10, I really wouldn’t have blamed Stormzy if he did believe that Britain was totally racist. Because as Murray and Sarkar note, 14 million people elected one. And it also looks like the broadcaster was using the same trick on Stormzy that the Sun in 1987 used to try to put the public off voting for Diane Abbott. They put a picture of her up in a feature on Labour MPs with left-wing or otherwise dangerous or offensive opinions, at least according to the Scum, claiming that she had said, ‘All White people are racist’. And now they misrepresented Stormzy to make it look like he had said something similar. The right-wing media in 1987 as part of their campaign against the Labour party deliberately misrepresented Black discontent not as resistance to racism, but as Black racism. And this looks very much the same tactic. Stormzy’s political views could be discounted, because he was yet another Black anti-White racist. That was the impression given.

Stormzy himself issued a very forthright attack on the smear. He declared, in language that in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home is described as ‘colourful metaphors’, that all the publications and media outlets distorting his words could perform oral sex for him, and should not bother asking for anything from him in the future.

Mike comments on this affair

The mainstream – Tory – media will take every opportunity to mislead the public about the opinions, actions and philosophy of those of us who want a better deal for everybody, rather than a bigger slice of pie for the few who are already grossly obese while everybody else is starving.

They’ll do it in the knowledge that most of the people they are misrepresenting do not have the means to challenge them.

And when they are exposed, they’ll simply change their headlines, happy in the knowledge that the damage is done.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/22/fake-news-row-as-itv-misrepresents-stormzy-comment/

And now today Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin is chuckling over a hashtag campaign calling Stormzy a ‘bellend’. Sargon is, of course, the man, who killed UKIP along with Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan and Paul Joseph Watson. A man so right-wing, racist and sexist that the UKIP branch in Swindon asked him to be deselected as one of their candidates for the south-west in this year’s Euro election. Gloucestershire UKIP disbanded when they heard he’d been selected, and he was greeted with anti-racism demonstrations when he turned up in Bristol as part of his election tour, and had milkshakes and fish thrown at him Truro and other places. Sargon’s support of this hashtag campaign tells you all you need to know about the racists supporting ITV’s smear. It comes after a similar hashtag campaign against Owen Jones yesterday by supporters of Rachel Riley and the Alt Right. Which reveals exactly who some of her supporters are.

And with this latest attack on Stormzy, it shows how Johnson’s victory has emboldened the real racists in this country.

Milkshake Thrown at Sargon as He Campaigns in Cornwall

There were several items of interest in yesterday’s I, for the 11th May 2019. One, on page 11, ‘Milkshake thrown at Ukip Candidate’, reported that the infamous extreme right-wing internet personality, Carl Benjamin, aka ‘Sargon of Akkad’, had had a milkshake thrown at him when out canvassing in Cornwall.

The article read

A scuffle broke out in Cornwall after two protesters attempted to throw a milkshake on the controversial Ukip election candidate Carl Benjamin.

The candidate for the European Parliament’s South West England constituency was canvassing in Truro when a man in a white scarf and a hooded woman tried to throw the beverages.

Reportedly, the drinks missed, and footage taken by BBC Cornwall shows when Mr Benjamin’s supporters pulled the man to the ground.

Sargon is the idiot responsible for sending the tweet ‘I wouldn’t even rape you’ to Labour MP Jess Phillips, and for making a series of videos attacking feminism, trying to justify the use of slurs against ethnic minorities, gays and the mentally handicapped, and for stating in internet conversations that he thought it was to sexually abuse children, as sexual maturity depended on the child. Oh yes, and the ancient Greeks abused boys. He describes himself as a ‘classical liberal’, which means that he’s an extreme conservative, who wants the end of the welfare state and the privatisation of whatever remains of nationalised industry, including the NHS. And when he was asked by a journalist for Sky News what his policies were, he said it was to combat ‘political correctness’ and Islam. The Gloucestershire branch of UKIP closed itself down rather than endorse him because of his vile views on rape and sexual abuse, and the Swindon branch of UKIP have called for his deselection. When he went to Gibraltar to campaign, governor Fabian Picardo refused to meet him, and then went on twitter to denounce his views as hate speech, which had no place in Gibraltar.

The attempt to throw a milkshake over him seems to be an attempt to copy similar attacks with other milkshakes on Tommy Robinson, the notorious islamophobe now campaigning to be an MEP in the north west. He and his followers went on social media to complain of the attacks, one of which didn’t actually happen, as attempts by the regressive left to silence him. Some would say that, given Robinson’s behaviour in trying to intimidate his critics through turning up on the doorstep mob-handed, and lying about them trying to attack him with guns, having a milkshake thrown at him was the least he deserved. Fifteen years ago, when Robert Kilroy-Silk went campaigning against immigrants, he had a load of ordure thrown over him.

Sargon’s a vile candidate for a vile party. But his political career may well be very shortlived. At the last poll of polls, UKIP was scoring 0.0 per cent. Much of this decline is due to him and the other far right personalities, who have also joined Batten’s band of squadristi. If he goes on, he’ll destroy UKIP completely. But left-wingers hope he won’t stop there. Kevin Logan has called for him to join the Conservatives in Britain, while the Canadian bloggers The Serfs wish he would go to Canada to join the Tories over there. If only he would!

The Pascon Agan Arluth and Other Classic Works of Cornish Literature

As this is Good Friday, I thought I write about one of treatments of Christ’s trial and crucifixion in one of the other languages of Britain, the Celtic language of Cornwall. The Pascon Agan Arluth translates as ‘The Passion of Our Lord’ I think it was originally written in 1637 in Middle Cornish. There is a bilingual edition of the text in both Cornish and English published in the 1980s by the Cornish language publishers Dyllansow Truran. Unfortunately, I can’t say much more about it nor show a picture, because I’m afraid I’ve mislaid my copy. Dam’. But like the English mystery plays in England, its a classic of literature for Cornish, regardless of whether you’re a Christian or not.

Dyllansow Truran have also published a number of other classic works of Cornish literature, which also date from the 17th century, and which are also on religious themes. These include

Gwryans an Bys: A Medieval Cornish Drama, William Jordan 1611, translated and amended by R. Morton Nance (Mordon) and A.S.D. Smith (Caradar), ed. by E.G. Retallack Hooper (Talek) (Redruth, Cornwall: Dyllansow Truran 1986).

It was written by William Jordan of Helston, and then translated into English by John Keigwin eight decades later in 1691, at the request of the Bishop of Exeter, Sir Jonathan Trelawney. This edition follows the translation and unified spelling of the two revivalists of the Cornish language, Nance and Smith. It’s a rough retelling of the story of Genesis from God’s creation of the world, the fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels, the temptation of Adam and Eve, Cain’s murder of Abel and his subsequent life, Enoch and his translation alive into heaven, and ends with Noah and God’s revelation to him of the Enochian laws. These are four simply laws that guarantee salvation to everyone, provided that they believe in one God. This is obviously one of them. I can’t remember the other two, but another is that people are not to eat meat cut from a living animal.

It begins with the lines from God the Father

Ego sum Alpha et Omega:
hep dalleth na dewethva
pur wyr my yu:
omma a-jy dhe’n clowdys
war fas an dowr, yn-certan,
Try Person yn un Deways,
ow kesregnya bya vyken
yn mur honor ha vertu.
My ha’w Map na’n Spyrys Sans
Try yth on yn un Substans,
comprehendys yn un Dew.
I am Alpha and Omega:
without beginning ore end
right truly am I:
here within the clouds
upon the face of the water, verily,
The Persons in one Godhead,
reigning together for ever
in great honour and power.
I and my son and the Holy Spirit
Three are we in one Substance,
Comprised in one God.

And ends with the epilogue

an keth jorna-ma y de –
deh’n Tas Dew re bo grassys:
why a welas, pup degree,
lyes mater gwaryes,
ha Creasyon oll a’n bys.
Ynweth oll why a welas
an keth bys-ma Consumyes
der lyvyow a dhowr pur vras.
Ny ve un mabden sparyas
ma’s Noy, y wrek, ha’y
fleghes.
Deugh avorow a dermyn:
why a wel maters pur vras
ha redempsyon grontys.

dre vercy a dhew on Tas
dhe sawya neb us Kellys.

Mynstrels, gwreugh heny pbyba
may hyllyn warbarth donsya,
del yu an vaner ha’n gys.

This same day is ended –
to the Father God be thanks:-
you have seen, every degree,
many matters acted,
and the creation of all the world.
Also you have seen, all of you,
this same world destroyed
by very great floods of water.
No one human being was spared
except Noah, his wife, and his children.
Come in time tomorrow:

you shall see very great matters,
and redemption granted
by the mercy of God the Father,
to save whoever is lost.

Minstrels, do you pipe for us
what we may dance together,
as is the manner and the fashion.

The play continued on a second day, but William Jordan didn’t write it down, and so it’s been lost.

The Camborne Play: A Verse Translation of the Beunans Meriasek by Myrna Combellach (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran 1988)

The play’s manuscript was written in 1504, though this is just the date the play was finally written down, and it may have been composed much earlier. The manuscript itself comprises there separate plays bound together in a logical sequence, with a cast of 120, and intended to be performed in the round, probably in a natural amphitheatre. Myrna Combellach’s version of the play was produced for a performance directed by Jerry Finch of for the Cornwall Drama Association at the Cornish Eisteddfod, 1986. It was rehearsed and performed at St. Paul’s Church, Truro, in February 1986, and the performers were a mixture of amateur, student and professional actors. The play is a treatment of the life of Camborne’s patron saint, Meriasek. Hence the title in Cornish Beunans Meriasek.

The blurb on the back cover reads

Vitality and joy of life are the keynotes of this new translation of the sixteenth century Cornish language play, Beunans Meriasek. In it, Camborne’s noble patron saint, Meriasek, is sent to school, refuses marriage and all world considerations, embarking instead on a priestly career of such piety that it ends in a bishopric of immense wealth and grandeur of the kind that he had studious worked to avoid all his life. Meanwhile, in Rome eight centuries earlier, the pagan emperor Constantine is stricken with leprosy, only to be cured by the outlawed Christian pope, Silvester, resulting in the Christian conversion of an empire. A black mass takes place, an evil worm of a dragon is slain, a forest is set on fire in Brittany, the Duke of Cornwall goes to war against paganism, and a third play on a completely different theme is added for good measure.

‘Lib Dems Offer Strong Opposition to Tories’ – Who’s Farron Trying to Kid?

May’s just called a snap election for June, hoping that she’ll get a 2/3 majority in parliament. She claims it’s about Brexit, and that she needs to challenge the Scots Nationalists and the House of Lords, some of whom – naughty boys and girls – are undermining her, and she wants a united front in dealing with Europe. I’m sceptical about this claim. I think it’s also, as Ian Duncan Smith, the former minister for disabled death, has admitted, about beating the Labour party when they’re weak. The BBC pollsters have put Corbyn 20 to 21 points behind May.

There are good reasons for doubting these figures. Guy Debord’s Cat has written a long article, pointing out that polls are done by newspapers and Conservative interest groups, in order to manufacture public support for the Tories. They aren’t about presenting an objective gauge of how the public feels about politics, as a form of ‘manufacturing consent’, in Chomsky’s words. See https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/how-polling-works/ Even so, I am terribly afraid that the British public will be taken in by the media and Tory spin, and vote for May.

And the lying has already started. Ignoring the lies coming from the Tories, every word of which is sheer is a carefully crafted falsehood, Tim Farron has started lying on behalf of the Lib Dems. He was in Cornwall campaigning. Speaking from Truro, he made the claim that, unlike Labour, the Lib Dems would offer ‘strong opposition’ to the Tories.

Eh? Who’s he trying to kid.

Remember the 2010 election? The first thing Nick Clegg, the leader of the Lib Dems at the time, did was arrange to go into a coalition with the Conservatives. He claimed that he had negotiated with Labour, but that they had refused to remove Gordon Brown as their leader. This was, apparently, one of his conditions to entering government with them. Not having got what he wanted, he then switched to the Tories.

Except it was lies. Clegg had already made his decision to go with them anyway.

Just like Clegg also lied about opposing tuition fees for students. Soon as he got into power with the Tories, he was in favour of raising them. Far more so than Cameron, who was prepared to compromise with him on this. But Clegg was determined to raise them, and so student debt was increased to an even more crippling amount.

The Lib Dems were also more than willing to continue the Tories’ and New Labour’s privatisation of the NHS.

They were also eager to join the Tories in getting rid of Habeas Corpus and setting up secret courts, so you can be tried in secret, using evidence withheld from your lawyer, for reasons of ‘national security’. Just like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia.

And there was a whole branch of Farron’s party – the ‘Orange Book’ Liberals, all slavering enthusiasts for massive privatisation, the destruction of the welfare state and workers’ rights. One of the noxious pratts promoting this bilge was the Lib Dem MP for Taunton Dean, who came from a very privileged background, having grown up in Kenya and other exotic locales.

It might be that Farron has been a new broom, sweeping all this away. But I doubt it. The Lib-Dems claimed to have opposed the Tories before. They also claimed to be a moderating force against Tory excesses when they were in power with them. That was not true. And I doubt it is now.

Day of Action against Benefit Sanctions on the 19th of March

Mike over at Vox Political has this story, National day of action to stop benefit sanctions – Unite the Union. It begins

More and more people are facing benefit sanctions. Over two million people have had their money stopped in the past two years, according to Unite.

That’s two million people, many of whom have been plunged into poverty, unable to heat their homes or even eat. How is this meant to help prepare people for work?

He also lists the four ways to get involved, with links. These include joining one of the events in your area, telling your story, if you’ve been sanctioned, and signing the petition against sanctions.

The article’s at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/02/28/national-day-of-action-to-stop-benefit-sanctions-unite-the-union/

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a demo in Bristol. There are, however, protests organised for further afield in Taunton, Exeter, Weymouth, Bideford and Truro further south, and Swindon further east.

From 2007: SERCO’s Appalling Mismanagement of GP Services in Cornwall

In my last post I put up a piece from Private Eye in 2012 about how SERCO was shedding 140 NHS community hospital jobs in Suffolk after they had been awarded the contract to run it. The Eye’s article stated that the loss of jobs was the same policy that SERCO had followed when it took over the GP’s out-of-hours service in Cornwall. This is an article from the Eye’s issue for 30th March – 12th April 2007, which describes the appalling low quality of service provided by the company after it was awarded the contract, beating a rival bid from a doctors’ not-for-profit co-operative that already ran the service efficiently.

Out-Of-Hours GPS

Counting the Cost

Patients in Cornwall are getting increasingly sick of the county’s shoddy privately run out-of-hours GP service.

Serco’s Kernow Urgent Care Service (KUCS) has been in charge for the past year, but has consistently failed to meet targets despite shipping doctors in from Eastern Europe because not enough local GPs would work for them. Serco replaced the not-for-profit GPs’ co-operative, KernowDoc last April, after bidding to run the service for £7.5m – £2.5m less than KernowDoc. The local patients’ forum and the paramedics’ union have called for the job to be handed over to the South Western Ambulance Trust, which already runs an effective service in Dorset and Somerset.

In a recent parliamentary debate, Truro and St Austell MP Matthew Taylor said it was clear that KUCS was “unfit for purpose”. At one point in December it was failing to answer one in five of all the calls it received. The Western Morning News reported last November that only five out of 49 monthly targets had been met in the seven months KUCS had been in charge. Dozens of patients have reported horror stories of having to wait hours for urgent treatment or doctors making serious errors.

“I do not recall receiving a complaint about KernowDoc for years,” said Taylor, “but now [KUCS]is a major part of my casework.” The MP said that at a meeting in February, Serco had admitted to problems but said it saw them as part of a learning curve. Taylor asked health minister Andy Burnham whether it was “remotely defensible” that the government’s drive to use the private sector in the NHS should subject patients to,, and put them at risk from, such an appalling learning curve.”

In reply, Burnham said the service provided by KernowDoc had been put out to tender because the Cornwall Primary Care Trust, er, “could not be sure that the service gave good value for money to the people of the county.”

They know now, of course. A not-for-profit service run by doctors willing to put in extra hours to help patients is – shockingly – better for patients than a cut-price service with agency staff.

The contract has another two years to run, but the Cornwall Primary Care Tr4ust has announced that it is reviewing the situation, telling the Eye that terminating the contract would be considered as “a last resort”.

Yes, I realise that at the time the article was written, Labour were in power. This doesn’t alter my point one little bit. New Labour pursued Neoliberal economic policies, including the partial privatisation of the NHS. This policy is being followed and massively extended by the Tories. It should be stopped. Stories like the above show how damaging private management of the NHS, driven by profit, is.