We Own It on How People Can Join Their Day of Action on Wednesday, July 5th

‘Dear David,

Your wonderful NHS is turning 75 years old on Wednesday 5th of July.

This NHS birthday is a HUGE opportunity for us to pressure politicians to reinstate our NHS as the fully public service Nye Bevan founded it to be.

Can you take action on Wednesday 5th July?

Find out how you can take action by yourself or with others

We all have an NHS story – from being born in the NHS to seeing it save our friends and family.

We are massively thankful to our wonderful NHS and its brilliant staff for being there for us through the years.

But due to outsourcing and cuts, our NHS is on its knees. And if politicians think that we are going to just clap for the NHS on July 5th, they are sorely mistaken.

We will demand they reinstate our NHS as the fully public service it was created to be and fund it properly.

On a day when the public will be paying lots of attention to the NHS, you can help make sure they are hearing this demand and adding their voices to it.

Here’s how you can take action on the birthday of our NHS

After a decade of outsourcing and massive cuts, our NHS can longer be there for us when we need it.

7.3 million of us are now on NHS waiting lists. And as a result, 272,000 people in Britain paid out-of-pocket to get healthcare from the private sector in 2022.

You shouldn’t have to wait for months, sometimes over a year, for care because you don’t have money. That is American-style two-tier healthcare happening right here in the UK.

And it’s happening in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

We have a massive opportunity on Wednesday 5th July. Everyone will be talking about the birthday of our NHS on that day and we can make it impossible for our MPs to avoid your demand – on social media and your local high street – that they reinstate our NHS.

I’ll take action on our NHS’s birthday on July 5th

There are three ways that you can take action on Wednesday 5th of July to demand that your MP reinstate our NHS as a fully public service:

• Organise or attend a local action on your local high street and get messages from the public, which you will deliver to your MP and put pressure on them directly
• Make a selfie video or picture with your personal message and share it with the hashtag #NHS75 so that people on social media can help boost your message to your MP
• Join KONP’s online rally at 6:30 pm on Wednesday 5th July

You can find out more about how to take action HERE.

There is an action for everyone to take regardless of your situation – you can be part of making sure your MP gets the message. The more of us take action, the bigger the impact we can have together.

Find out more about each of those actions

Nye Bevan, the founder of our National Health Service, said that our NHS will survive so long as there are people willing to fight for it. And thanks to you and others fighting for our NHS, it is still here 75 years later.

Thank you so much for all you do to protect our NHS.

Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team’

My Video about a Broadside Ballad Supporting the Miners During the 1926 General Strike

I posted this video on my Beast Rabban YouTube channel yesterday about the ballad ‘Where the Trouble Lies’, written by Fred Stott, a Barnsley collier to support the children of striking miners during the 1926 general strike. I found it in Roy Palmer’s A Ballad History of England: From 1588 to the Present Day (London: BT Batsford 1979). The book also contains an extract from Walter Greenwood’s autobiography, There Was a Time, about the hardship that came to the workers in his native Salford afford the collapse of the strike. Unfortunately there’s no printed music for the ballad, so it’s just me reciting it as a piece of poetry along with the accompanying piece from Greenwood. I recorded it as I thought it was once again topical now that public sector workers are striking for fair wages above the inflation rate so they can afford to heat their homes and feed their families.

The words of the ballad are:

Where The Trouble Lies

There is trouble in England on this very day.

Royalty owners say there will be while Cooks wants his way,

But its those people who above miners hold the hammer

Who say out of every ton of coal you get we only want a tanner.

It is this class of people who have got the check

Never get out of bed before ten not one day in a week

While just four hours before they awake,

For the idle rich the colliers life is at stake.

They say they need these tanners to send their kids to college,

But its hard luck for the minders to have to pay for their knowledge,

Their children but have tennis and other sorts of games

Whilst a collier can’t afford a fire-guard to keep his off the flames.

A collier’s kid on scooter general scoots,

When he has had it just a week he needs a pair of boots,

But he cannot have any although he uses cheek

For his father is a miner and gets thirty bob a week.

We miners don’t want the Earth to which they owners say we belong,

But we want a living wage, in that there’s nothing wrong.

Nor we cannot help our fore-fathers who fought and lost the land,

So a fair’s day’s work and fair day’s pay, then we shall be a happy band.

The royalties referred to were paid to the landowners, who owned the land on which the mines were situated. They were paid per ton of coal extracted. A.J. Cook was the miner’s leader during the strike. He coined the slogan ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’.

Donors Abandoning Conservatives as Not Conservative Enough

This is another headline I caught from either Mahyar Tousi, Michael Heaver or one of the other hard-right Tory vlogs. I didn’t watch the video, as it seems to me all too credible that some extremely right-wing donors to the Tories may be withdrawing their support. If you look at the comments for many videos put up by the Brexiteer hard right, you find people complaining that the Tories are high-spending ‘Consocialists’ supporting the welfare state, high tax rates and promoting un-Tory policies like diversity and the transgender craze. There is very definitely a feeling among these people that the Tories are not Conservatives, or not conservative enough. Hence they state they’re going to support Reform or one of the right-wing populist parties. You even find the ludicrous claim that somehow Sunak’s Tories are ‘Communists’, as shown by a caller to Julia Hartley-Brewer’s show. The caller confused ‘communism’ with authoritarianism, which shows how little the British public really knows about Marxism and how effective it is as a term of political abuse.

This could pose problems for the Tories, as, like Starmer’s Labour party, they’ve been ignoring their membership in favour of donors for a long time. Ordinary grassroots Tories have complained and the membership of the party has declined., so this could put a financial squeeze on them. I remember Robin Ramsay in old issue of Lobster making the point that such policies had decimated political membership in America. The number of activists in each state was tiny, perhaps as low as two or so, because the parties had ignored ordinary membership recruitment to concentrate on the interests of the donors who set up PACs to fund individual politicians. This was a decade before Corbyn over here and Sanders in America and the explosion of political activism that followed them. The observation is therefore somewhat out of date, but the point remains.

My concern is that Starmer will try to hoover up these right-wing donors for the Labour party, just as Tony Blair did when donors and Tory-supporting businessmen and news magnates, like Murdoch, switched their support from the Conservatives to Labour. Blair was already a Thatcherite infiltrator, but the funding and support of these donors helped him continue Conservative policies, as well as reward the donors and their senior executives with positions in government. As a result, actual political engagement in Britain fell. People felt disenfranchised as it seemed whatever party you voted for, you got the same policies.

I can see this easily coming back with Starmer, accompanied by the alienation and anger this caused when Blair did it.

Open Britain on the Threat to Democracy from the Tech and Social Media Companies

I got this piece earlier this morning, and it’s well worth reading. The pro-democracy organisation show how the social media giants, like Cambridge Analytica, harvest our data so that they can target us specifically with material that matches our own opinions. This is making politics more polarised as people retreat into isolated communities of like-minded fellows. But a whistle blower also revealed that the company was targeting those with a conspiracy-based view of the world. The same tech giants are also publishing state disinformation, such as Putin’s propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine. The organisation states that the internet needs regulating, but it should be after the EU’s methods, not the Tories. Their proposed law would criminalise the publishing of views they don’t like, such as presenting a positive view of the Channel Migrants.

‘Dear David,

In recent weeks, we’ve been discussing the real threats to British sovereignty that you won’t hear about from fuming Brexiters or apathetic politicians. Opaque think-tanks lobby for unpopular and unworkable policies, celebrating when their proposals crash the economy; dark-money infiltrates UK political channels, warping our leaders’ priorities. These forces did more to prevent the UK from forging its own path than EU bureaucrats ever did. 

This week, we want to bring another phenomenon into the equation: Silicon Valley, social media, and disinformation. It’s a complicated topic, capable of filling many books (I’d recommend friend of OB Kyle Taylor’s Little Black Book of Social Media as a good starting place). This ‘Long Read’ Series newsletter will get to the core of why tech platforms threaten our democratic sovereignty, putting the business priorities of California Tech bros over the needs of regular people and undermining the very social fabric of Britain. 

If you don’t want to read all of it – here’s the takeaway: the social media business model is inherently harmful to democracy. It generates disinformation on an industrial scale because that is what is profitable. For those seeking to manipulate public opinion for their own benefit, spreading disinformation is a worthwhile investment. This process means that we can no longer engage in good-faith debates, siloed away in our own micro-communities and becoming increasingly polarised politically. It’s completely changed the nature of politics – and regular people are paying the price. These companies need to be regulated, democratically and transparently. We can’t keep playing by their rules. 

This newsletter starts with some context, explaining how these issues came to light. Then we’ll cover the scale of the threat democracy faces, which is only increasing due to pending government legislation. Finally, we’ll get to how we can fight back and create a political system fit for tackling 21st century challenges. 

Background – Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: 

Throughout the 2010s, the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) collected data on tens of millions of Facebook users, building psychological profiles designed for political advertising. Using this data, the company was hired by the 2016 Trump Campaign, the Vote Leave campaign, and many other right-wing political organisations around the world to use this data for political advertising. 

According to CA whistleblower Christopher Wylie, the firm targeted its ads towards users that they identified as “more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens”. Our partners at Fair Vote UK launched their organisation by publishing whistleblower evidence from CA’s Christopher Wylie and Vote Leave’s Shahmir Sanni, exposing the scandal and demanding more campaign transparency alongside strong digital regulation. 

In 2019, Facebook paid fines of $5 billion in the US and notably much lower £500k in the UK for exposing user’s data to “serious risk of harm”. Cambridge Analytica has now been shuttered, but the scale of the problem – our data being used to warp our opinions – has increased exponentially. What the scandal showed is that anyone can pay for political influence, and modern technology allows us to target people’s insecurities, vulnerabilities, and emotional states with terrifying precision. And things have only gotten worse since 2019. 

The Disinformation Factory: 

The fundamental problem, many argue, is the intrinsic business model of big tech. The vast majority of revenue for these companies, from Google to Youtube to Facebook to Twitter comes from this kind of “surveillance advertising”. A core problem is that harmful content spreads faster, giving platforms an incentive to attach ads to it and allow it to spread rapidly. There’s also a huge concern around the surveillance aspect, with giant companies monitoring every swipe and scroll on their platforms to better understand what kind of content to push in your direction. We never got to agree to this kind of data collection – or the ways in which it’s used. 

There are countless examples of this process in action, and the consequences have often been immense. State-backed disinformation campaigns from the Russian government have churned out pro-Kremlin propaganda related to the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine; Fossil fuel companies pay to convince us that the climate isn’t really changing or that it’s not really so bad if it is; The lie that the 2020 US Election was stolen was circulated on social media and the ensuing attempted coup was orchestrated on Facebook (and was copycatted in Brazil). The list goes on and on. 

The threat, then, to our democracy and our sovereignty is that we are no longer in control of our information environment. Anyone with enough cash can churn out content targeted directly at us to change our opinions and undermine the integrity of democratic debate. Moreover, that lack of control stems from the fact that we have no right to control our own personal data. This was all part of an unspoken deal that we were never given the chance to consent to – and now we’re forced to pay the price. 

Privacy Under Fire: 

The Online Safety Bill (OSB) emerged in response to these very real problems and others. Tragic cases, such as the untimely death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, further showed how social media platforms “monetise misery” with tragic real-world implications. However, after many revisions, postponements, and much Conservative in-fighting, the bill is now an absolute trainwreck. 

We won’t bore you with everything in this bill, but here’s a summary from our blog last November if you’re interested. Essentially, the OSB grants giant exceptions and exemptions to some of the most harmful actors, is immensely complicated to the point of being borderline incoherent, and fails to meaningfully address any of the problems we mentioned above. It causes more problems than it solves.

For example, the bill would make it illegal to share videos showing migrant crossings in a “positive-light”. It undermines end-to-end encryption, meaning the government could be looking over your WhatsApp messages and private conversations. Not only does it not protect us from corporate surveillance, it adds in state surveillance as well. 

In addition, a new government bill – the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill – could make things even worse. It looks to expand the government’s control over our data instead of protecting it and create new barriers to exercising the rights we already have. 

How We Fight Back: 

We fight back by pushing for functional legislation that will give us control over our data and force tech platforms to be transparent and accountable for their actions. We know it’s possible, because the EU has already done it. 

The EU’s Digital Services Act, effective from 2024, does what the OSB always should have done: 

• Legally binding transparency requirements for platforms, showing how they moderate content and how their algorithms work
  
• Consumer protection rules around “deceptive design” and “dark patterns”, preventing platforms from manipulating people into buying things or clicking links
  
• A ban on targeting people and content amplification using certain types of sensitive data (ie sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc). This goes a long way in addressing the fundamental harms ingrained in the business model of social media
  
• Requires social media platforms to tell people why they’re being targeted with certain kinds of content
  
• Requires large social media platforms to subject themselves to independent audits and rigorous risk assessments.

If we want to build a political system where we can not only exercise all of our rights effectively but engage in democratic debate freely and fairly, we need serious action on social media platforms. We’re working with our partners at Fair Vote, as well as international partners to not only oppose the Online Safety Bill and Data Bill, but to champion a new paradigm for digital rights that ensures we’re no longer at the whim of Silicon Valley tech barons. 

It’s just one more reason that we need a government which is on our side, to set in motion the policies that will keep democracy functioning well into the digital era. Right now, this administration’s actions only make us less safe online and further undermine our fundamental right to privacy.

It’s a huge challenge but with your support and by working with partners across the tech and democracy sectors, we can keep the pressure on as part of our overall mission to defend, strengthen and renew democracy.

Thank you for all your support.

The Open Britain team‘

My Video Supporting 38 Degrees’ Call for Videos about Bus Franchising

A few days ago I got another email from the internet democracy organisation 38 Degrees calling on their members and supporters to make and post to them their videos telling how terrible the bus services are in the area. 38 Degrees are pushing for the introduction of franchising to stop the endless cuts to bus services. I posted the video below to them, which I’ve also uploaded on my YouTube channel.

In the video I explain how the cuts to the bus services in my part of Bristol has meant that local people are no longer able to travel to the centre of town, nor to the city’s hospitals. We also cannot easily travel to the neighbouring towns of Keynsham and Bath, where many people from Bristol go to work. The changes have also had an impact on local businesses. Since the services were changed a few years ago, the buses have gone past local shops and shopping centres but do not stop at them. This has very obviously hit them, especially at a time when many small businesses have been struggling due to the lockdown and the increase in people shopping on line.

Not everybody has a car, and taxis are expensive. This is why we really need a bus franchising system and proper funding to support it.

Malaysia Worried about Falling Birthrates?

This afternoon I came across a video, in English, discussing the problem of the falling birth rate in Malaysia. The speakers were all women, including a medical lady, and I assume it came from one of the country’s news services. I didn’t watch it and don’t know anything about Malaysia bar the fact that it’s another country that used to be part of the British empire. But the video interests me as it seems to show that the Malaysians are worried about population decline. This is occurring all over the world. The Japanese have been worried about it for a very long time. Back in the 90s one of the Japanese papers – I have a feeling it may have been their equivalent of the Times, the Asahi Shimbun, declared that unless more children were born, the Japanese people would be extinct within a thousand years. In the west, the falling birth rate and mass immigration are the basis for the grotesque conspiracy theory of White Genocide. This was, apparently, invented in 2012 by a French rightist, and claims that the two are part of a plot by the Jews to exterminate the White race. I don’t think there are similar theories in Japan, because the Japanese don’t allow mass immigration and the constitution only grants citizenship to those who are full-blooded Japanese. The presence of the medical lady in the video suggests that the authorities in Malaysia are regarding it as a medical problem rather than a social one. But I could be wrong, and rather than seeing it as the result of physical problems in conceiving they could regard it as the fault of their citizens in not choosing to have more children. As with the Japanese, it doesn’t look like their blaming it on a conspiracy by some other ethnic group.

The video shows that it isn’t just Japan and the developed west that has these fears, and it’s possible that they will become more acute in the following decades. Way back in the 90s or early years of this century I read an interview with a demographer in New Scientist, who believed that there will be a global population crash c. 2050. This will be so catastrophic that countries will compete with each other to attract needed foreign labour. Since then I’ve seen more videos on this subject appear on YouTube. It’s very much a reversal of the fears of overpopulation – the population bomb – that appeared in the ’60s and ’70s.

Simon Webb Now Pushing NHS Privatisation

With the NHS crisis the Tories the Tories have created, the sharks really are circling in the water. Nana Akua of GB News seems to be one of those plugging its privatisation, along with broadcaster, stalker and jailbird Alex Belfield. And now they’ve been joined by Our Favourite Internet (non)Historian, Simon Webb. He put up a post this morning with the title ‘What’s So Bad About Privatising the NHS?’ It’s short, but I haven’t watched it on the grounds that I’d find it too infuriating. Webb is, of course, far right, and seems to get most of his views from the Torygraph, which has also been pushing this nonsense. As someone who takes history seriously, Webb should know what an immense difference the NHS and the welfare state made to the lives of ordinary Brits. I’ve blogged about it, citing my sources. But some of those I’ve used were by social worker types, the kind of people the Tory party has been trying to discredit for donkey’s years, and so someone like Webb would simply ignore them out of hand. But I’ve also used books from the time looking forward to the foundation of the NHS, as well as Jackie Davis’ and Ray Tallis’ excellent NHS – SOS. In contrast to what the privatisers will tell you, private healthcare is not more efficient. It’s less. Private hospitals are smaller, and in order to make a profit private healthcare largely ignores the long-term sick in order to concentrate on people who are mostly well. When private healthcare companies have taken over doctors’ surgeries in this country, they’ve closed down those they consider unprofitable, leaving thousands without a doctor. Also, private healthcare spends a large proportion of their running costs on administration, so as a consequence these costs have risen in the NHS as a consequence of its privatisation.

At the moment there seems to be a trend among the political class to be looking at the continental healthcare systems, where medical costs are paid by a mixture of state and private health insurance. But this also neglects the simple fact that these countries also spend much more on their healthcare generally than we do. The privatisation of the NHS won’t improve healthcare, but it will give private healthcare firms the support of the state sector, which is what they want.

And it seems to me that what the Tories really want is a completely private healthcare system, funded by private health insurance, like America. And that really would be disastrous. Except for their corporate friends, of course, who would get all those great profits.

A few years ago I wrote a book and a pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. Here’s their description. The pamphlets are available from me, if you want one, while the book’s available from Lulu.

Privatisation: Killing the NHS, by David Sivier, A5, 34 pp. This is a longer pamphlet against the privatisation of the NHS. It traces the gradual privatisation of the Health Service back to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, John Major’s Private Finance Initiative in the 1990s, the Blair and Brown ‘New Labour’ governments, and finally David Cameron and the Conservatives. There is a real, imminent danger that the NHS will be broken up and privatised, as envisioned by Andrew Lansley’s, the author of the Tories’ Health and Social Care Act of 2012. This would return us to the conditions of poor and expensive healthcare that existed before the foundation of the NHS by the Clement Atlee’s Labour government in 1948. Already the Tories have passed legislation permitting ‘healthcare providers’ – which include private companies – to charge for NHS services.

The book is fully referenced, with a list of books for further reading, and organisations campaigning to preserve the NHS and its mission to provide universal, free healthcare.

Don’t Let Cameron Privatise the NHS, David Sivier, A5, 10pp.

This is a brief critique of successive government’s gradual privatisation of the NHS, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair’s New Labour were determined to turn as much healthcare as possible over to private companies, on the advice of the consultants McKinsey and the American insurance companies. The Conservatives under David Cameron have continued and extended Blair’s privatisation, so that there is a real danger that the NHS, and the free, universal service it has provided for sixty-five years, will be destroyed. If the NHS is to be saved, we must act soon.

Here’s the video I made years ago for my book against the privatisation of the health service.

I also put up this video, which only four people have watched, asking people to vote Labour to defend the NHS. I hope people will, as some Labour MPs will defend it. But I’m not at all sure about Starmer.

Right-Wingers Outraged at Trans/Gay Pop Video, But It’s just a Return to the ’80s

Now for a bit about the latest right-wing rage about pop music. This morning there were a number of videos on YouTube by various pundits, right-wing and otherwise, discussing or denouncing a pop video. I honestly don’t know who the pop star who made it is, and have actually forgotten his name. I gather he had quite a successful career a few years ago, after which he came out of the closet and revealed he was gay. A little while later he said he was non-binary and now he seems to have gone a bit further in declaring his sexual identity. The video showed him in a revealing dress or robe, surrounded with dancers wearing chaps to expose their rear ends, during which he mimes various sex acts. Right-wing American YouTuber Matt Walsh was outraged, while somebody on GB News defended it, and claimed the video’s critics were homophobic.

What struck me, as someone who grew up in the 1980s, was how familiar it all was. I can remember when Frankie Goes to Hollywood were shocking the press and provoking scandal and outrage with their single ‘Relax’. It’s video seemed to be about a man in suit being pushed and pulled about the dance floor in a gay club by people dressed as gay bikers, watched by a fat bloke dressed as Nero. The single was banned, so say, by the BBC, although I’ve heard since that it was simply that one particular DJ refused to play it. This was entirely counterproductive, as the moment people heard it was banned they went out and bought it, with the result that it got to No. 1. And then there was Divine, an overweight drag queen and friend of American underground filmmaker John Waters, who starred in several of Waters’ deranged productions. Divine also had a hit in that decade, ‘Walk Like a Man’. Of course, Divine was a drag queen, rather than trans, but he wasn’t too far away from this latest attempt to climb the charts. The video’s shocking now, but it’s little different from what people were listening to and watching in the ’80s.

And the worst thing that came out of that decade was Margaret Thatcher. Her policies have done far more damage than anything that came out of the charts ever did.

Starmer Intends to Repeal Repressive Union Laws; Sunak Wants to Make Them Worse

Okay, I caught just a few minutes of Keir Starmer’s speech on the lunchtime news, and for once he said something I agreed with. He announced that Labour would repeal the repressive anti-union legislation put in place by the Tories. The excellent Irish left-wing YouTuber, Maximilien Robespierre, however, has put up a short video warning and commenting on what Sunak intends to do about trade union militancy. Yup, as a Tory, he has no response except more draconian legislation and repression. Sunak has announced that he intends to pass legislation demanding that unions provide a minimum service during the strikes. If they don’t, then the employers can fire workers and sue the unions. He also wants to raise the minimum proportion of votes necessary to call a strike from 40 to 50 per cent and possibly to the increase the period in which the unions must notify their employers that they’re about to call one from 14 to 28 days. Robespierre has said that the stipulation for minimum services fails, because this is precisely what the ambulance drivers have been providing. He considers that Sunak has taken to make these threats because he expected that the public would turn against the strikers, and they haven’t. He also makes the point that the Brexiteers are now making it very clear that they want to tear up the legal protections for workers under the mantra that this will make the country more competitive. Oh yes, and repealing all that pesky human rights legislation will protect us from the channel migrants. Or something.

I’m right with Starmer on this issue, if he can be believed. And that’s the problem, because Starmer is untrustworthy. He said he would retain Corbyn’s policies when campaigning for the Labour leadership. He didn’t. He promised to unify the party, but carried on the vindictive campaign against Corbyn and his supporters. He was going to improve the welfare state, but once head of Labour a little while later he either watered them down or forgot them. And some of the anti-union legislation was introduced by his hero, Tony Blair. Right at the start of Blair’s leadership campaign he told the trade unions that if they didn’t accept his further restrictions on them, then the party would cut ties with them. I’d like Starmer to keep this promise, but am afraid that, once he gets in No. 10, he won’t.

Here’s Robespierre’s video:

A Happy Star Trek Christmas

Okay, it’s New Year’s Eve and the Christmas season is nearly at an end. I thought I’d post this jolly Christmas video up before it’s all over and those who still have jobs go back to work. It was posted by ‘Why, Mr Spock’ on his YouTube channel, and shows various festival scenes from the original Star Trek series while Paul McCartney sings ‘Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time’. I suppose I could also run a quiz for Trekkers asking them to identity the individual episodes from which these clips are taken. Enjoy!