Mark Pattie, one of the many great commenters on this blog, posted this comment on my piece about Open Britain launching a campaign to get people to get photographic ID so they can vote:
‘Apparently Tony Blair has crawled out of whatever stone he’s been hiding these past 15 years to demand “digital ID”! I’m not voting Labour if Starmer goes along with this- haven’t Bunter Johnson et al crushed our civil liberties enough?’
Yes, Blair has, and sent the paranoid conspiracy fringe into a further frenzy of disgust and anxiety. But they’ve got a point. When Blair and New Labour were in government, they were considering the possibility of introducing biometric identity cards, which would hold all your personal details. The new electronic ID cards Blair is now urging to be introduced would also contain all your personal details, including insurance. It looks like the same idea. And before Blair started considering them, I think John Major’s Tory government was also reviewing the same idea.
The conspiracy fringe has condemned it as a totalitarian policy and fear that it could lead to the rise over here as the social credit state surveillance and control programme of communist China. Years ago I read a book about biometric ID cards, the ‘electronic burse’ that was supposed to introduce a wonderful, cashless society and other similar ideas. The book criticised all of them as threats to civil liberties by the state and banks. They’re not for your convenience, but to allow the state to collect every bit of information about you, including your private financial transactions. And they are also horrendously fatally flawed. Similar IDs were introduced, according to the book, in that beacon of personal liberty, Indonesia. The cards were touted as being completely impervious to fraud and being hacked and duplicated by criminals. Famous last words. Within three weeks, Indonesia’s crims had worked out how to hack into them and produce fakes. As for the electronic burse, something similar was trialled in Australia, and abandoned. The reason was that if they were lost or stolen, people were left completely without any money whatsoever.
Not only did this book, whose title I’ve long since unfortunately forgotten, expose these ideas as totalitarian and unworkable, it also announced the existence of a watchdog organisation, Privacy International, that had been set up to guard against them and similar attacks by the state on personal liberty by demanding access to people’s private information. I don’t know if this is still going, but the political class is going to push this idea once more, we really do need it.
I wonder what Stalin Starmer will do it about it. Hopefully he’ll drop the idea, and Blair’s benighted waffling will be ignored. It is indeed true that Cameron and Johnson have both done their best to wreck our liberties through the introduction of secret courts and legislation designed to limit the right to protest, along with Sunak’s proposal to destroy the right to strike. But I’m afraid Starmer is far to enamoured of Blair and his wretched legacy. And I honestly don’t think this policy was Blair’s idea. The fact that Major was also considering it suggests that it was suggested to him, probably by the same people Blair took over along with Tory policies.
The conspiracy fringe are extreme right-wing clowns who believe stupid myths about the Rothschilds, the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, the Masons, Jewish bankers, the World Economic Forum and the ‘globalists’, if not indeed Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. But this time they’re right.
Personal liberty in the UK is under attack, and must be defended.
Further respect to Zelo Street for adding a few more details about Robin Simcox and his membership of some very nasty right-wing organisations. Simcox is professional smirking slime-bucket Priti Patel’s choice for head of the Commission for Countering Extremism. I put up a piece about him yesterday, based on a piece about him in the latest issue of Private Eye noting that Simcox has some views himself that many might consider extreme. Like he’s a Neocon member of the Heritage Foundation, who backs sending terrorist suspect to countries where they can be tortured and further infringement on the rule of law. But that’s not all. According to Wikipedia, the Heritage Foundation denies the reality of climate change and is funded by the American oil giant, Exxon Mobil. It also promoted the false claims of voter fraud. This was done through Hans von Spakovsky, the head of the Heritage Foundation’s Electoral Law Reform Initiative, who made such fears mainstream in the Republican Party. Von Spakovsky’s work, you won’t be surprised to hear, has been completely discredited according to Wikipedia.
The Heritage Foundation, according to the Byline Times, have on their board Rebekah Mercer and her father, Robert Mercer, who funded Breitbart News, which in turn supported Cambridge Analytica. And it was Cambridge Analytica that introduced Donald Trump to Steve Bannon, who founded Parler. But it was Simcox’s links to the racist extreme right that was more worrying to that authors of the Byline Times’ article. In 2019 Simcox spoke at a meeting of the Centre for Immigration Studies. The CIS has been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. The CIS has for ten years circulated anti-Semitic and White nationalist materials, included articles written by supporters of eugenics and Holocaust deniers. According to Wikipedia, the CIS’ reports have been criticised as false or misleading and with poor methodology by experts on immigration. The Byline Times stated that in his work for the Heritage Foundation, Simcox promoted the work of several racist and anti-Muslim conspiracy theorists, including a supporter of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, which has inspired many of the extreme right-wing terror attacks in recent years. He’s also been criticised for falsely equating British Islamic organisations with the Muslim brotherhood.
Simcox therefore has links to people, whose views could be described as genuinely Nazi. But as the Street notes, the self-appointed opponents of anti-Semitism are curiously silent about all this.
So who’s making their feelings known about this appointment? “Lord” Ian Austin? “Lord” John Mann? Wes Streeting? Stephen Pollard? John Woodcock? Margaret Hodge? Daniel Finkelstein? Crickets. If only Simcox had been pals with Jeremy Corbyn.
Quite. But the above weren’t opponents of anti-Semitism per se. They were simply determined to destroy the Labour left and protect Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. And as Tony Greenstein has shown ad nauseam, Israel has no problem collaborating with real Nazis if it will serve its interests.
As America gets ready to decide whether they want the Orange Generalissimo or Joe Biden in the White House for the next four years, it seems that many Black citizens in the American south are being put off voting by restrictive legislation. These laws, including one dating from the era of Jim Crow in Mississippi serve to disenfranchise the poor and minorities, and have prevented people of colour from being elected to government office in the state. The I published a report about this by Tim Sulllivan, ‘Laws continue to deter black voters in southern states’ in last Friday’s edition for 23rd October 2020. This ran
The weight of history and current laws are deterring the black vote in some southern states.
The opposition to black votes in Mississippi has changed since the 1960s, but it has not ended. There are no poll taxes any more, no tests on the state constitution. But on the eve for the most divisive presidential election in decades, voters face obstacles such as state-mandated ID laws that mostly affect poor and minority communities and the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of former prisoners.
And despite Mississippi having the largest percentage of black people of any state, a Jim Crow-era election law has ensured a black person has not been elected to statewide office in 130 years. Even today, the state has broad restrictions on absentee voting or online registration, absentee ballots that must be witnessed by notaries and voter ID laws that overwhelmingly affect the poor and minorities. Nearly a third of black people here live below the poverty line, and taking a day off work to vote can be too expensive. Then there are felony voting restrictions, which in Mississippi have disenfranchised almost 16 per cent of the black population, researchers say.
Distrust of the government runs deep. As a result, black politicians have long been fighting an apathy born of generations of frustration.
Anthony Boggan sometimes votes, but is sitting it out this year, disgusted at the choices. A 49-year-old black Jackson resident with a small moving company, Mr Boggan likes how the economy boomed during the Trump years, but cannot vote for a man known for his insults. As for Joe Biden, he and Donald Trump both “got dementia”, he says, and he hates how the former Vice President tries to curry favour in the black community. “They’re all going to tell you the same thing,” he said. “Anything to get elected.”
Some of these laws were put in place quite recently by the Republicans with the ostensible intention of reducing voter fraud. They chiefly affect the poor, Blacks and students, the section of the population most likely to vote Democrat. The Young Turks produced a report about them a few years ago, noting that one Republican politico let the cat out of the bag and actually admitted that they were intended to stop people voting for the Democrats.
Unfortunately, Mississippi isn’t the only southern state nor the Republicans the only party to rig regulations to stop Blacks voting. A few years ago the Democrats in Florida did something similar, manipulating the electoral rolls so that Blacks and Hispanics couldn’t vote.
And what the Republicans do, the Tory party copies. The Tories have also passed legislation supposedly designed to prevent voter fraud, but which also acts to prevent the poor, Blacks and other ethnic minorities from voting over here. Mike has published several articles on this, noting that the actual incidence of electoral fraud in this country is minuscule and covering reports that describe how they have operated to prevent people from voting. And it isn’t a coincidence that the sections of the population they prevent are those which also traditionally favour the Labour party.
It’s long past time these laws were repealed in both America and Britain. But this will require the election of genuinely reforming left-wing governments in each country. And I don’t see that happening any time soon with the corporatist right in control of the Democrats in America and Labour over here.
Another article Mike put up a few days ago, which reveals very clearly the Tory contempt for people of colour, is a piece about the massively disproportionate effect the Tories’ demand for Voter identification at polling stations has had on Black people. The Tories declared a year or so ago that they were seriously concerned about voter fraud, and so rolled out schemes demanding that voters should have proof of their identities when casting their votes. There was absolutely no need for it. This kind of voter fraud is absolutely negligible. I think Mike put up the stats for it in another of his articles, and hardly anyone has been caught doing it. I think there have literally only been one or two cases. But nevertheless, the Tories decided that it was a serious problem and a threat to democracy. Critics of the scheme also warned that their plans would actually be anti-democratic, as certain groups are far less likely to possess the necessary documentation to confirm their identities. Blacks would be particularly affected, and would be turned away and prevented from exercising their legal, democratic civil rights.
This was, of course, denied by the Tories. But it’s happened. Despite Cabinet Office Minister Chloe Smith telling us all in June that ““the evidence shows there is no impact on any particular demographic group … the evidence of our pilots shows that there is no impact on any particular demographic group from this policy”, the Electoral Commission has found evidence to the contrary. Findings from the 2018 and 2019 findings in Watford and Derby, two of the pilot areas, found that there was a strong correlation between Asians from each of the city’s wards not receiving a ballot paper. The Commission also reported that polling staff were not asked to collect demographic data about the people, who didn’t come back. This was due to the practical challenges of the data collection exercise. There wasn’t enough evidence yet to come to a conclusion about the scheme in any direction, and advised against doing so. But Mike accordingly reached the following :
If the Tories had wanted to know who would be deprived of the vote, and how badly it affected particular groups, they would have carried out the research. They didn’t.
They then went on to tell falsehoods that the research had been carried out when it hadn’t and that it showed no impact on any demographic group.
You don’t lie about something like this unless you are deliberately trying to harm people from ethnic minorities.
We can only conclude that the Tory voter ID plan is intended to stop black people and those from other ethnic minorities from voting:
And includes this tweet from Labour MP Cat Smith
The Government claim plans to require ID to vote doesn’t discriminate, but there’s no data to back this up.
Voter ID requirements come straight from the US-style voter suppression play book, and must be opposed by all who value inclusive democracy.
Smith’s absolutely right. The scheme was taken over from the Republicans in America, who have used to it to suppress the votes of certain groups – those that are most likely to vote Democrat. These are the poor, students and Blacks. There have been a number of videos about this produced by The Young Turks and other left-wing or liberal internet news sites. One particularly repulsive Republican politico actually let the cat out of the bag and admitted that it really was all about preventing Blacks from voting.
Which is just more evidence of how institutionally racist the Tories are, despite ostentatiously giving cabinet seats to BAME politicians like Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak. They’re really don’t want a less racist, more inclusive or simply more democratic society.
They are actively trying to increase discrimination all while keeping it carefully hidden through specious verbiage about protecting democracy. And that’s a threat to everyone’s right to vote.
Mike reported a little while ago that the Tories were going ahead with their plans to demand photographic identification of voters at polling stations before allowing people to cast their votes. This is supposedly to cut down on voting fraud, despite the fact that actual instances are so low they’re negligible. Of course, the people who will find it most difficult to produce such identification will be students and the poor. Which is why the Tories are introducing it.
It’s another trick they’ve learned from the American Republicans, who introduced similar legislation over there. It prevents the poor, students and Blacks – the demographics mostly likely to vote Democrat – from being able to vote. And such tricks to stop working class radicals and Blacks from voting have a long history in America. All the way back to the Populist movement in the 1890s. This was a left-wing movement of America’s rural poor against exploitation by the great landlords. Bhaskar Sankara gives a brief description of it, and its fall, in his book The Socialist Manifesto. He writes
But ferment was growing in rural America. The Populist Movement sprang from the 1870s struggles of indebted farmers in central Texas but soon spread throughout the country. As the price of cotton collapsed and the economy entered a depression in the 1890s, the Populists fervently supported Debs during the Pullman Strike, backed many demands made by labor, and were leading tenant and sharecropper efforts against the crop-lien system. Populist leader Tom Watson challenged white and black farmers to organise across racial lines, telling a crowd, “You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system that beggars both.”
In 1892, the movement formed a national political party around a progressive platform that called for a graduated income tax, nationalised railways, debt relief, and public works to combat unemployment. Planter elites responded with a campaign of electoral fraud and violence, including the lynching of hundreds of organisers, while the Democratic Party came to co-opt much of the movement’s platform in 1896. After the pro-Populist Democrat William Jennings Bryant’s election loss that year, the movement fell apart. Legislative efforts to disenfranchise blacks through poll taxes and biased “literacy tests” were expanded, helping prevent another multi-racial movement from emerging for decades. (pp. 163-4).
That’s the tactics of the Right. Keep whites and blacks attacking each other, so that they don’t unite against the system that’s oppressing both, and bring in laws to disqualify Blacks and the White poor from voting. The Tories also do both. But they haven’t yet started lynching members of the Labour party. So far, that’s been left to the far right. Thomas Mair and his assassination of Labour MP Jo Cox. Then there are the crazed Brexiteers who screamed at Anna Soubry that she was a traitor, and who took a model gibbet to their protests outside parliament, and the Nazi, homophobic thugs who beat up Owen Jones.
Perhaps after the Tories have introduced voter ID and similar legislation, they’ll bring back lynching as well. They’ve encouraged people to beat up the disabled already.
More dirty tricks from the party that’s incapable of doing anything fair and honourably. On Monday Mike published a piece stating that Johnson, on page 48 of his wretched manifesto, has promised to introduced legislation demanding that people carry photographic ID when voting. This is, allegedly, to prevent voting fraud, despite the fact that it’s vanishingly rare. But in a pilot project earlier this year 800 genuine voters were turned away from the polling station. Mike also reported that critics had also pointed out that Johnson was ignoring genuine threats to democracy such as anonymous political ads, dubious donations and fake news. He concluded
‘It seems that, while claiming to be improving democracy, Mr Johnson is in fact trying to, badly, limit it.’
Mike is here, as usual, absolutely correct. This seems to be another wretched policy Johnson and the Tories have copied from the Republicans over the other side of the Pond. They introduced similar legislation a few years ago on the same pretext. In fact American left-wing news sites reported that it was deliberately designed to prevent the Democrats winning elections by excluding their supporters from voting. These laws typically affect the young, especially students, the poor and ethnic minorities, who form a large part of the Democrat voter base. Over here, they comprise part of the Labour party’s voting base. And one Republican politico in one of the southern states was actually honest about this gerrymandering. When asked why his party was doing this, he actually admitted that it was about stopping the Democrats. But we obviously can’t expect such honesty from the Tory party.
So Mike’s right. This is all about trying turn away Labour voters and nothing to do with stopping voting fraud.
Because so much of that comes from and benefits the Tories.
Cynthia McKinnon is another Black female politico that the Israel lobby has tried to silence. She was an American congresswoman, whose career was targeted and destroyed by AIPAC, the very well-funded and powerful pro-Israel lobby group in the US, because she refused to sign the pledge they foist on American politicians. This pledge is an agreement that they’ll support Israel in return for funding from AIPAC. She was also targeted because she tried to reach out to the Muslim community in the US.
In this video, she talks to Press TV’s Marzieh Hashemi. McKinnon states that she went to Congress simply to concentrate on the Black community, who were in need, and America’s policy towards Africa, which she describes as abhorrent. She wasn’t interested in any other areas. But she bumped into special interests at every turn, and none of them have more influence than the pro-Israel lobby. She states that she bumped into the Israel lobby when she tried to reach out to the Muslims, because what they really didn’t want was a politicised Muslim community, which is as large and as wealthy as the pro-Israel lobby. She said that the political assaults on her were so bad that he father had to ask publicly ‘What does Stone Mountain, Georgia, have to do with Israel?’ She says with justifiable passion that she was prevented from serving her community because she did not toe the line on America’s policy towards Israel.
She describes how every candidate for Congress was given a pledge to sign, including herself. The pledge had Jerusalem as the capital city and the military superiority of Israel. She said that this was almost like water-torture for her. She would receive a phone call from someone saying that they wanted to organize a fund-raiser for her, she’d get excited about it, and then two or three weeks into the planning they’d ask her if she signed the pledge. And when she admitted she hadn’t, the fundraiser would go ‘kaput!’
She also says that the pledge also commits you to voting to support the economic assistance the country wants. Hashemi makes the obvious point that this means that American politicians, who are supposed to be representing their country, are pledging allegiance to a foreign state. McKinnon agrees, and says that she made it public, which nobody had probably done before. And then came the excuses that this was just overzealous advocates for Israel.
After she did this, the tactics changed. But this is what is done for the 535 members of Congress, 100 senators, 435 representatives, now have to write a paragraph, more or less amounting to the same thing. You are also expected to attend forums at the synagogues. If you don’t perform, you don’t get the money to run your campaign. It doesn’t matter if this is women’s organization or an environmental organization. She says that you can read about this on the internet, and directs the viewers to Thomas.loc.gov, the official US website, and put in the name ‘Gus Savage’, because Savage was a Black member of Congress, who was targeted by the Israel lobby. He had the foresight to put his experience on the Congressional record. Savage wrote that it was the Garden Club of New Jersey that gave his opponent $5,000. But it wasn’t really the Garden Club of New Jersey, but the activists associated with AIPAC.
McKinnon then moves on to talking about how she represented many different districts over her career, as her opponents used re-districting to try to eliminate her from Congress. Her original district comprised rural Blacks in what she describes as the Black belt of Georgia. These are people, who have never had access to equal opportunity at all. She said that when she went into that district, she found such poverty that she didn’t know existed in her own country. There were people in that district, in 1992, who didn’t have running water in their homes. She says that in the four years she was in Congress, she was able to bring Blacks into areas of power, which they never thought they could possess. And then the district was dismantled. It was challenged in the Supreme Court with the assistance of the Anti-Defamation League.
Hashemi notes that she lost the last election, thanks to the Zionist lobby, and asks her what her plans are. McKinnon states that she has a target on her forehead for taking the political positions she did, for supporting human rights and the Palestinians. This means that the Israel lobby will use whatever means to stop her occupying a position of authority. She states that fortunately for her, there is a very large peace community that is interested in change, that would like to have a tested, experienced voice in Congress so that at least they could have their voices heard, even if they can’t get the policy changed. The problem for her is that it will require an awful lot of money. She doesn’t have to match the others, because she is able to amass and organize people power. But even with that you need a lot of money to cover the basis of a political campaign – this is a minimum of $500,000 and could do great things with a million.
This video has much to say about the rotten state of contemporary American politics, quite apart from the pernicious influence of AIPAC. It’s disgusting enough that this clearly capable and efficient woman was prevented from serving her constituency and the Black American community because she dared to defy the Israel lobby and support American Muslims and the Palestinians.
I am also not surprised by what she says about the grinding poverty she found in rural America. One of the alternative American news shows, I can’t remember whether it was the David Pakman Show or Sam Seder’s Majority Report a little while ago tore into Trump’s speech, where the Orange Buffoon said that if he wasn’t successful, America would become a ‘Third World country’. They said that there were areas of America that already had that level of poverty, and not even of the most developed and prosperous countries within the Developing World.
And these area’s aren’t always Black. One of the poorest, if not the poorest, is a southern country where the population is 98 per cent White. But these folks vote Republican, partly because the Repugs tell them that the Blacks are dependent on welfare and state intervention in the economy. And this needs to be stopped, in order to turn Black Americans into sturdy, self-reliant citizens. The result is that the aid that could also give these people work and jobs is also cut, throwing them on welfare as well.
As for redistricting, I’m not surprised to hear about this either. Both Democrats and Republicans have gone in for voter suppression, and the Tories in this country are following the Americans in introducing legislation to stop the poor, students and ethnic minorities from voting under the pretext of stopping voter fraud. And the Tories over here are also talking about redrawing constituency boundaries, just like they redrew them under Thatcher to stop Labour getting a bigger percentage of the vote.
The Israel lobby has to be opposed and fought. But there’s also a strong argument for getting corporate money out of politics, so politicians return to serving their constituents rather than donors. And also for uniting Black and White – seeing that the Republicans and Conservatives in America and Britain are using racial prejudice to divide working people and keeping them down.
The council elections last Thursday were also the occasion for the Tories to test their latest wheeze regarding people’s right to vote. This purports to stamp out electoral fraud by demanding that only people carrying proof of their ID should be allowed to cast a vote at the polling station. The scheme was trialled in Bromley, Woking, Gosport and Swindon. As a result, a total 3,981 people were prevented from voting in these constituencies. People were turned away from about one in five polling stations.
Mike reported this on his blog, making the point that their were only 28 cases of voter fraud amongst 45 million people in 2917. He commented that as a scheme to allow everyone to vote, who had a right to vote, it was a complete disaster. But he went to suggest that this wasn’t the real reason for the scheme. This was to cut down on the number of people able to vote for the competing parties.
He then quoted Labour’s Cat Smith, the Shadow Minister for Voter Engagement and Youth Affairs, who stated that there was no point in introducing the scheme in the first place, and that the government had ignored the warning signs to set up a discriminatory scheme which denied people their right to vote.
She demanded that the government abandon the scheme, saying “We cannot allow the Conservative Party to undermine our democracy, which is why Labour is calling on the Government to scrap their voter ID plans as a matter of urgency.”
And Mike concluded his article with the comment
If the Conservatives go ahead with this, based on the evidence we’ve seen, we’ll know they are trying to nobble democracy.
Actually, there shouldn’t be any doubt about this. The Tories are trying to nobble democracy. A year or so ago I put up piece about a similar scheme introduced by the Republicans in America. This altered the rules for registering to vote, ostensibly with the same intention of preventing voter fraud. In fact, it was intended to deprive the Democrats of votes by making more difficult for students, the poor and Blacks, who form a large part of the Democrats’ electoral support, to vote. One Republican in one of the southern states actually admitted this. The issue was reported and heavily commented on by some of the American left-wing alternative news sites, like The Young Turks. I’d guess that there’s a similar situation in Britain, where support for the Labour party is strongest amongst the young, the poor and ethnic minorities. All of whom might find it more difficult to produce proof of their identities than older, richer Whites.
Not that the Democrats themselves haven’t been averse to using similar methods. Counterpunch in their book, End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate reported a similar scheme introduced by them in Florida, which resulted in thousands of Blacks and Latinos being turned away.
The Tories have taken very many of their ideas from the Republicans over the pond. These include the introduction of private police forces, which was dreamed up in the 1980s by Libertarians like Rothbard, E. Nozick and Gauthier in Canada, as part of their ideal ‘minarchist’ state. Rothbard wanted to privatise the courts, which is probably too loony even for the Tories and Republicans. But you never know. Fiddling the voting requirements to stop people voting for the opposing party, all under the pretense of fighting electoral fraud, seems to be another idea they’ve adopted from the Republicans.
Cat Smith and Mike are right. This is all about nobbling democracy and denying people their right to vote. And if the Tories think it has given them a better chance at the polls, they will introduce it nationally. It has to be stopped. Now.
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