I hope you’re all enjoying this Bank Holiday Monday, despite the drizzle. The Met police has been widely criticised for its heavy-handed conduct during the Coronation. They arrested 50 or so anti-monarchy protesters simply for standing there and protesting. According to this Channel 4 news report, the arrests were made under legislation that permits this to be done during large events. From what I’ve seen, some of the arrests were ‘pre-crime’, where someone was arrested carrying a banner or placard before they could demonstrate. This is, as I believe Mike over at Vox Political, has pointed out, another infringement of democracy. People have a right to demonstrate and protest, even at events like coronations. He fears, rightly, that this is going to have a chilling effect on young people’s engagement with politics. They will feel that they cannot express their views and so there is no point in becoming politically active. And so democracy withers away, rather than be felled in a swoop through a Fascist or Communist coup.
One of issues is the Met police’s arrest of three volunteers from the 5-Star movement – not the right-wing Italian party or the 1980s British pop band – who were handing out rape alarms the night before. The police claim that they had intelligence that the alarms were going to be used at the coronation to spook the horses. They alleged that some of the protesters were even planning to through them at the horses, causing them to bolt into the crowd. The volunteers, who I’ve heard were giving them away at 2 O’clock in the morning, have explained on the other hand that they do it to protect vulnerable women on girls on a night out. This seems to me far more plausible than the Met’s story. I’ll be interested to see what evidence the Met has for this intelligence, assuming we’re allowed to see it and it’s not another fairy tale to allow the cops to clamp down on peaceful protesters and perfectly innocent volunteers in a fit of judicial paranoia.
Reform posted this short video, just over two minutes long, on their YouTube channel. In it, their current fuehrer calls for the partial, and rather half-hearted renationalisation of the water and power companies. He tries to connect this with Brexit, and has a dig at Starmer for initially backing it and then dropping it, saying he was no longer interested. Tice begins by stating that we are being badly served by the water companies, who are foreign-owned and so use various dodges to avoid paying tax. No other country allows vital parts of their infrastructure to be owned by foreigners. This is quite true, and Mike has been pointing this out on Vox Political since forever and day. This has been the case since they were privatised by the Tories great, molten idol of private enterprise, Maggie Thatcher, in the 1980s. He wants them partly renationalised – 50 per cent owned by the state, 50 per cent owned by pension funds, and placed under private management. This, he feels, will bring it the best of both state and private enterprise.
He’s wrong, of course. There is no magic solution behind private industry. When they’ve been handed state enterprises or institutions, their policy has always been the same: sack people and make those who remain work for less in poorer conditions in order to deliver profits and shareholder dividends. This has been done in the NHS, when hospitals and doctors’ surgeries have been handed over to private companies. In the case of GPs, this has also resulted in unprofitable patients being dumped and their surgeries closed. It also reminds me slightly of the restructuring of industry under the Nazis. Companies were linked together in a series of industrial associations, set up as private companies but membership of whom was mandatory under the Nazi regime. These associations were under the direction of the state planning apparatus running the economy. And the head of these industrial associations always came from private industry, even when the companies under him were state-owned. Obviously Tice isn’t calling for an extension of this system to British industry as a whole or its transformation into a centrally-planned economy. But he makes the same assumptions that Hitler and the Nazis, as well as the Italian fascists did, about the superiority of private industry. And as a true-blue Brexiteer he tries to link it to Brexit by saying that, as with the departure from the EU, this is all part of Britain taking back control.
Still, Tice has got something right, even though I think his speech is partly influenced by a BBC report today that Oxford Council has called for the end of water privatisation, as well as the outrage of the massive profits the private power companies have been making while energy bills have rocketed.. He’s clearly looking around for policies which he thinks will resonate with the public, and so has recognised, albeit grudgingly from the half-hearted way he wants it done, that the majority of the British public want the renationalisation of the public services. Of course, he’s still extremely right-wing in demanding more cuts to the welfare state, which he’s justified with the bogus explanation that British people need to move into low paid jobs in order to stop the British state importing more foreigners to do them. I posted a piece yesterday rubbishing that, and you should also read the comments on the piece left by the greater people reading this blog, who have added much more relevant information. But it is interesting that in this area of policy, Reform has moved left of Labour.
Not that I’ll believe they’ll keep their promises, anymore than I believe Starmer will.
This was the headline for one of the videos pasted up by GB News this morning, and it’s one where I felt I didn’t need to watch the item itself. Because Mike and the other great left-wing bloggers and YouTubers have covered this issue before, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, and Private Eye would say. The Tories and Blairites – ’caused it was Blair who introduced the vile Work Capability Tests – are convinced and would like you to believe that a large portion of claims for disability benefit are fraudulent. Thanks to right-wing rags like the Heil, the British public believes that 25% of all disability claims are fake. In fact the opposite is true: the overwhelming number of claims for disability benefits are genuine. Only a vanishingly small number, less than 1 per cent, are attempts to defraud the benefits system. But obviously, this detracts from the Tory desire to punish the poor for not working or being able to work, while they could be gainfully exploited by all the rich industrialists they want to give massive tax cuts to. And so we have suffered 40 odd years of Thatcherite cuts to the benefits system while Tory and Blairite mouthpieces have told us that such cuts are ‘self-help’, encouraging self-reliance, going to revive proper Christian charity and private initiative without the safety net of the state. I’ve put up a number of posts about how Thatcher viewed the principle of less eligibility – how the whole process of claiming state support was to be as unpleasant as possible in order to deter people from doing so – was one of her ‘Victorian Values’ that she wished to reintroduce into the welfare system. So did Blair, who created the Work Capability Tests because of pseudoscientific, discredited research on behalf of US insurance fraudster Unum. This assumed that most disability claims were fake, and that getting people back into work would do them good.
Complete, destructive bilge.
The assumption that a certain percentage of all disability claims were fake has led, according to whistleblowers, to the imposition of quotas inside the DHSS which demand that a set percentage of disability claims should be turned down. This has led to severely ill, even terminally so patients, being judged fit for work. It has led to moronic D.H.S.S. clerks asking amputees when their absent limbs are expected to grow back. And it has led to hundreds, if not thousands of genuinely sick and disabled people dying from poverty and hunger because they were denied an income. This included people with serious mental health problems and conditions like diabetes, who were found starved to death.
It’s been denounced by disability activists as a genocide. Harsh words, but this is mass murder by governments who know exactly what the consequences of these sanctions are. They just don’t want you to know.
And whatever money has been saved by overturning benefit claims, has been massively outweighed by the cost to the government of challenging them in the courts. And the courts have upheld British law to the point where the overwhelming number of disability claims have been upheld.
This is a government that wasted nigh on nearly half a billion on a vindictive persecution of those who genuinely cannot work. It shows the real sadism at the heart of Tory attitudes to the poor.
Scrap Thatcherism, ditch Johnson and get rid of Starmer, who I believe will also do absolutely nothing to overturn this vile, murderous policy.
Okay, yesterday I flicked through the Daily Mail. I’m not proud of it, but there was precious little else to read and I was in the barber’s waiting for a haircut. The Heil was there as one of the newspapers put there for the customers to peruse while waiting. There was, as you’d expect, a great deal about the war in Ukraine. But what struck me was a little article at the bottom of a page further in. The headline of this little piece announced that, according to polls, 85 per cent of Brits would consider paying for private treatment to jump the queues in the NHS. I didn’t read any further, as I was feeling a bit rough already from the anticancer drugs, and didn’t want to feel worse. I don’t know what polls these were, who was behind it or even how accurate they were.
But I bet the Tories and the Heil were delighted.
The Tories and the Labour successors have been pushing for the privatisation of the NHS ever since Maggie Thatcher. She wanted to sell it off and replace it by an American-style for-profit system, financed by private health insurance. She was prevented from doing so by a massive cabinet revolt and the information from her secretary, Patrick Jenkin, of how terrible the American system was in practise. So she satisfied herself by aiming to get at least 10 per cent of the British public to take out private health insurance. The Tories also went on to try and get the NHS opened up to private healthcare companies, firstly through the Private Finance Initiative, in which new hospitals were supposed to be a joint project between the state and private industry, but which largely results in the state having to shoulder all the costs. This was then followed by Blair’s NHS reforms, in which the new health centres and polyclinics were supposed to be built and run by private firms for the NHS and the introduction of the Care Commissioning Groups of doctors within the health service, which were empowered to raise funding through private means as well as buy in services from private health companies. Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, wanted the NHS to be sold off completely and become nothing more than a kitemark on services provided by private healthcare companies. And private healthcare companies were to be allowed to compete for NHS contracts. These reforms were taken over and extended once again by the Tories under Dodgy Dave Cameron, Tweezer and now the blonde abomination occupying No. 10. At the same time, NHS budgets have repeatedly been cut as part of an efficiency scheme which has left the health service which lower levels of funding than other first world countries. And this is all part of pattern.
Mike has repeatedly quoted the awesome Noam Chomsky, who has said that the right’s strategy for gaining popular support for privatisation is always to run it down through repeated cuts before finally privatising it.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing here, and I doubt it’s a coincidence this story emerged just as the House of Lords was prepared to go through a reading of the government’s Health and Social Care bill which will push the NHS’s privatisation even further.
The Tories will no doubt blame the queues on Covid. The disease is part of it, but the queues and the problems of the NHS in coping with it were due to over ten years of Tory cuts and privatisation, which has seen the bureaucracy and consequent administration costs increase as service has declined. it’s been remarked that the Tories never waste a crisis to make things worse. And that’s what they’re doing with the Coronavirus and the delays it’s caused in routine health treatment.
And right-wing internet media hosts are all too keen to help the Tories privatise the NHS.
Alex Belfield, who says he’s about to depart YouTube for Ustreme and a paywall at the end of the month, has posted numerous videos demanding the health service’s privatisation. So has Nana Akua on GB News, Calvin Robinson and Nigel Farage. The latter should be no surprise, as when he was head of UKIP he’d made noises about it being possible that Britain would have to turn to a system of funded by private health insurance. But these people are only saying what the Tories believe secretly.
Don’t believe that the Tories even remotely care about the NHS. Many of them, including the owners of the right-wing rags, will be delighted by this story.
Get them out, and get their collaborators the Blairites out of Labour.
A few days ago Mike reported that the Labour party had declined to investigate right-wing Labour MP Neil Coyle for an anti-Semitic tweet he’d made about Jewish Voice for Labour. This was despite complaints from Sir Geoffrey Bindman, QC; Avi Shlaim, a very respected professor of Middle Eastern history at Oxford; and Harold Immanuel, all three of whom are Jewish, to Starmer. Coyle had tweeted that JVL’s members were “outright Communists who have their own political party/ies they can ruin”. Mike has pointed out that it fits the genuine Nazi anti-Semitic trope of identifying Jews with Communism. Hitler ranted about ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’. One of the accusations the Nazis hurled at the SPD, the rough German equivalent of the Labour party, was that it had been infiltrated by Jews, who were expelling its gentile members as part of a plot to take over the German parliament. And at the very least it demonstrates a clear anti-Semitism in the sense of a hatred of Jews as Jews, regardless of ideological, political and religious reasons.
However, the only response from the Labour party was two auto-acknowledgements, the first to the initial complaint, the second to the trio’s request for a meeting.
This shows the utter partisanship and ideological motivation of the anti-Semitism witch hunt. It was never about anti-Semitism – it was merely a useful pretext for the right to purge the party of socialists and critics of Israel, very many of whom are Jewish. As a result members of the JVL were 224 times more likely than gentiles to be accused and purged. But this has now increased to 300 times.
Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters were never anti-Semites. But it seems that Starmer’s supporters may be, despite their leader’s declaration that he is ‘100 per cent Zionist’.
But they’re good right-wing neoliberals, so they get away with it.
I’ve already written a long piece about the acquittal of the four people responsible for the attack on the statue of Edward Colston. They were accused of criminal damage, but successfully defended themselves on the grounds that the attack was justified as the statue constituted a hate crime. The 12 good men and women true agreed, or the majority did, and so they were found not guilty. The right has been outraged, fearing that this defence leaves other controversial monuments at risk of destruction by the woke. I don’t believe that this is necessarily the case, and think that the threat to Britain’s heritage is probably exaggerated. As for the case of the Colston statue itself, there were campaigns to have it taken down going back thirty years or so. The people of Bristol voted for it to stay when they were polled, but now that it’s been torn down I think probably most people in the city are sick and tired of hearing about it.
But not, it seems, the Conservatives. Suella Braverman, our wretched attorney-general has apparently appealed against the decision. Mike and Zelo Street have both put up excellent articles stating what this appeal actually means. It’s another attack on British justice. Braverman and the Tories have no evidence and don’t allege that there was a mistrial, and so there is no real justification for an appeal. It’s just the Tories trying to revoke a decision they don’t like. This is an attack on the independence of the judiciary, which is one of the fundamental constitutional checks against government power. And the Tories aren’t just doing it with the verdict for the Colston Four. They’re also trying to pass legislation that would allow them to set aside judicial decisions against the government and its policies. It’s another step towards the right-wing dictatorship Johnson and co seemingly want for this country. It’s not too far from the way judges in the 17th century would send juries back to reconsider their verdict, and even imprison them, if they gave one they disagreed with. That power was undermined and discredited in a historic trial in Bristol in the late 17th century when William Penn, a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania and a group of his co-religionists were put on trial for seditious preaching. The jury repeatedly refused to convict them, and so the beak kept sending them back until he had them imprisoned until they came in line with his views. Which they didn’t. As a result, Brits not only have the freedom to be tried by their peers, but their peers have the freedom to deliver verdicts which accord with their consciences, not the authorities. Braverman’s appeal isn’t going to restore this unjust practice exactly, but it is doing something similar.
But it may also be a case of ‘be careful what you wish for. You might just get it’. Zelo Street’s article gives the learned opinion of lawyer Adam Wagner, who tweeted “there is a basic issue which will be becoming clear to ministers – a jury verdict sets no precedent, so the law is as it was, but a Court of Appeal decision would set an important precedent, which may not be the one the govt want”.
The Sage of Crewe also gives the opinion of those other internet legal gents, the Secret Barrister and and Jolyon Maugham. The Barrister said: “Not a single high profile criminal case can now pass without the Attorney General – a person with no experience of criminal law – exploiting it for political gain. It is difficult to think of an AG who has more enthusiastically abused their office”.
And the foxhunting lawyer gave his opinion on how much Braverman’s and the Tories’ determination to attack the verdict showed they really cared about British tradition and liberty: “By attacking the jury verdict in the Colston case Braverman tells a simple truth about how much Government really cares … about ‘British traditions’ … Theirs is a government without principles, without substance, of empty nationalistic signalling”.
But you wouldn’t know that by the way the right keeps banging on about our ancient constitutional liberties and the philosophers and lawyers who contributed to and guarded them. Like Sargon of Gasbag and the other Lotus Eaters raving about John Locke against the threat of the woke. Locke is one of the country’s great constitutional theorists. His Two Treatises of Government attacked autocratic theories of absolute monarchical power and instead provided powerful justification for the people exercising their sovereignty through elected representatives. He wasn’t a democrat. Indeed, the constitution he worked out for Virginia is based very much on the contemporary British social hierarchy and the power of the landlords. But it was a vital step towards modern, liberal theories of democratic government.
The Tories’ attack on the verdict represent another attack on these vital traditions and liberties in favour of restoring the power of a ruling class threatened by any indication of dissenting popular opinion.
Okay, I only caught the tail end of the Despatches programme on Channel 4 Mike was recommending on his blog. This was a searing expose of the DWP’s persecution and denial of benefits to disabled claimants. Mike was urging his readers to watch it, as it is exactly the kind of programme Bojob and his fellow privileged, elite band of murderers really don’t want you to see. I heard the last few minutes of it, and that was enough. It included interviews with the relatives of people who had died after being thrown off the benefits they needed. One grieving mother, I remember, called the DWP exactly what they are: murderers. And then there were the stats of how harassment from the DWP had made disabled people’s conditions worse, further damaging their mental health and even giving them conditions they hadn’t had before. None of this is new or revelatory: Disabled rights groups like DPAC, doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists and carers have been talking about this for years, ever since the loathsome Iain Duncan Smith and the Esther ‘Wicked Witch of the Worral’ ran the DWP under Dodgy Dave Cameron and began their eugenic cull of the disabled. But what really shocked me was the closing comment. This was a statistic. A poll had found that 2/3 of the British considered the disabled a waste of money.
This is deeply shocking stuff. If it’s true, I can only conclude that it comes from the incessant propaganda from middle-market tabloids like the Heil and Depress, not to mention the dregs of print media, the Scum, to convince voters to support further cuts in welfare benefits to allow the Tories give more tax breaks to the bloated superrich. It’s no doubt related to all the propaganda that has convinced voters that most welfare claims are fraudulent, whereas such claims account for less than one per cent, a vanishingly small proportion.
More frightening still, it’s the attitude behind the Nazi sterilisation of the ‘dysgenic’, the biologically unfit, and the murder of the disabled and mentally ill under Aktion T4. Social Darwinist doctrine across the world, including Britain and America, claimed that it was useless supporting the biologically unfit, which included those with learning conditions. This wouldn’t solve their problems, and would only encourage them to breed, further contaminating the gene pool. The disabled should instead be isolated and prevented from breeding. The Nazis went further. The congenitally disabled and incurable schizophrenics were declared lebensunwertigen, ‘life unworthy of life’. The SS set up a special ambulance wing, in which the disabled were gassed in a horrifying prefiguration of the murder of the Jews later on. They were also transferred to specific hospitals and clinics, where again they were murdered. This caused a massive scandal and there was a successful campaign to stop it by the Roman Catholic nobleman, Count Galen. This episode also shows that, had there been sufficient opposition by the Christian churches, the Nazis would also have been forced to back down and halt the Holocaust. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few heroic clergymen and Christian laymen, the churches largely cooperated with the regime, despite papal opposition expressed in the encyclical ‘Mit brennenden Sorge‘ – ‘With Burning Sorrow’.
This attitude should be completely anathema to Christians. Christian theology has traditionally been opposed to euthanasia, viewing it as murder, because it holds that all humans have an intrinsic essential worth that makes their lives precious. We are all, male and female, Black and White, Jew and Greek, made in the image of the Almighty. And I also disagree with it on rational, practical grounds.
Technology is increasingly able to give the disabled the opportunities to live better lives and hold down jobs that they otherwise may not have been able to do. Becky Taylor, one of the artists exhibited in Grayson Perry’s Art Club exhibition at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, is an example of this. Left paralysed in a wheelchair and unable to speak naturally, she nevertheless is able to speak through the same kind of computerised voice synthesis used by Stephen Hawking. She was also able to paint a superb portrait of Perry through computer software that tracked the movements of her eyes. She is currently studying computers at university, and I predict she will have an excellent career ahead of her. Over a decade ago I met a similar young man at a social evening in a pub. This was a lad, who was also totally paralysed, though he still had the power of speech. But he was extremely intelligent, had a girlfriend, and, I learned later, held a very well paid job in computing. And I’ve heard of other disabled peeps in wheelchairs like him. Companies don’t pay the kind of money he was earning to people who can’t do the job. A waste of money? Nonsense! And nobody ever said that about Stephen Hawking.
I realise most disabled people aren’t computer geniuses, but they can do other jobs, although it might mean that they have to use adapted equipment. Or that in the case of those left brain damaged through head injury, they just take a little longer than everyone else. Unfortunately, I got the impression that the economics crisis caused by austerity has led firms to lay off these workers, even though having a job allows them to support themselves and contribute to the economy through their expenditure. And then the DWP harass them as if it’s their fault. And even those, who are unable to work, have an intrinsic worth that goes far beyond money. I was told years ago that some foster parents, for example, prefer to foster children with Down’s Syndrome, because they are more loving. Caring for the severely disabled is not a job I could do, but nevertheless I am extremely impressed by those who do and find it rewarding.
How we treat the poor, the sick and the disabled is a vital measure of how genuinely civilised a society is. The Byzantine Empire, the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire, had public hospitals. As did Islam. According to the programme, What Islam Did For Us, one of a series of programmes which examined the scientific contributions of civilisations around the world present by Adam Harte-Davis back in the ’90s, Haroun al-Rashid, one of the medieval Arab emperors, founded a hospital in Baghdad. Its staff included musicians, who were employed as it was believed their music would calm the shattered minds of the insane incarcerated there. Truly, a humane institution.
And unfortunately, these humane attitudes that have raised human civilisation up from the Dark Ages are being undermined by the vicious persecution of the disabled by the DWP and the vile propaganda of the right-wing press.
And the result of this is a return to the underlying attitudes of Nazi barbarism.
Well, Starmer has had his cabinet reshuffle, and as Mike and the good folks on Twitter are saying today, the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and immigrants should beware. Because he’s just made Yvette Cooper Shadow Home Secretary. Cooper previously had the job from 2011 to 2015 when, according to Damian Willey, she was all but invisible except for the times she deigned to give us all the benefits of her views on immigration. In 2014 she denounced Tweezer’s immigration bill as too soft on it, the same bill which caused the illegal deportation of the Windrush migrants. She also wanted to stop immigrants and asylum seekers claiming child benefit for children living abroad, and her voting on immigration is comparable to Priti Patel’s. Daniel Grigg summed up just what her appointment means on this issue: “Nothing says couldn’t give a toss about migrants’ rights more than promoting David Blunkett and Yvette Cooper. So this is Labour now is it?”
The vile woman was responsible for the introduction of the Work Capability Test in 2008. These were subsequently kept in place by those Tory monsters, Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVile. Kahlisee is right when he says, “In policy terms, it would appear Cooper has more in common with the Tories than she does with Labour values.” And other Tweeters described how Cooper’s fitness for work tests would dock points from the disabled for the following:
Amputees using their stumps to lift objects.
People being able to walk using an imaginary wheelchair.
People with speech problems who can nevertheless write down what they want to say, and deaf claimants who can read it.
On international issues, she voted for the illegal invasion of Iraq five times, 14 times voted against an inquiry into it, voted eight times for the use of British armed forces in overseas operations, and also voted to replace Trident with another nuclear missile. She and Ed Balls also flipped their homes three times. Ed Poole said of her appointment: “Yvette Cooper is an ableist nightmare. Among other things. If you need any more evidence that Labour is finished as a force for equality, democracy, socialism or just plain human decency her promotion is it.” And Julie Harrington said, “Labour is now a hard right party.”
And then there’s Starmer’s appointment of David Blunkett to his ‘skills council’. This has proven something of an embarrassment as the internet never forgets, and his critics were able to find a clip from years ago in which Blair’s former cabinet minister made a homophobic slur about legendary Queen singer, Freddie Mercury. Aaron Bastani posted a piece on Twitter which seems to be an extract from a longer film about Queen or Mercury. It begins with members of the band, including awesome axeman and astrophysicist Brian May, describing how hurtful some of the comments were when their friend and bandmate passed away of AIDS in 1991. This is followed by a clip of a much younger Blunkett on some kind of panel show saying that he didn’t want people idolising Mercury because of his ‘bizarre and perverted lifestyle’.
Now you could be generous, and argue that this is not homophobic but just fair comment about rock and pop stars. Gay, straight or whatever, pop music, especially Heavy Metal, is associated with debauchery and excess. Sex, drugs and rock and roll, as the old saying goes. I can remember the rumours going around college that the name of American rockers, WASP, was an acronym standing for ‘We Are Sexual Perverts’. Other suggestions are that it also stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or, as their lead singer answered a question about it on a chat show, ‘We Aren’t Sure, Pal’. Some of us can also remember that momentous occasion in the ’90s when Motorhead’s Lemmy got a letter of complaint and an apology published in one of the Brummie papers. They claimed that he’d hung a woman upside down from a cupboard for a day during about of rock and roll debauchery. No, corrected the late Mr. Kilminster. It was three days, and he tied her to a bed. The newspaper was happy to print apologise and print the correction. Which must be one of the few instances where someone has written to the press complaining that their article about them has made them appear less degenerate and degraded than they want to be known.
It may also have been a clumsy attempt to point out the dangers of getting AIDS through promiscuous sex. Part of the problem was that at the time there were parts of the gay community that were extremely promiscuous. I can remember one of the gay journos on the Observer writing an article about it back in 1984, with the detail that there was a self-group, Orgiasts Anonymous, in either LA or San Francisco. The group was set up to like Alcoholics Anonymous, but to help talk gay men out of going to the bathhouse every time they felt the overwhelming urge. Not that the dangers of catching the disease was limited to gays. It also affected promiscuous straight people having unprotected sex, as well those who caught it from their partners and haemophiliacs from contaminated blood products. It would have been possible to make a comment about the dangers of excessive sex without sounding anti-gay. But Blunkett didn’t. His comment about a ‘bizarre and perverted lifestyle’ sounds like the standard denunciations of homosexuality.
In fact Mercury’s sexuality really wasn’t all that remarkable, and not what he was celebrated for. The 1980s had seen the appearance of a number of openly gay and gender-nonconforming pop stars – Marc Almond and Jimmy Summerville with the Communards and Bronski Beat; Boy George of Culture Club, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Marilyn and the Pet Shop Boys. I can’t remember if Elton John and George Michael had come out of the closet by the time of Mercury’s death. And Mercury didn’t, as far as know, have the reputation of being the most promiscuous of them. There were rumours, for example, that either Almond or Summerville, I forget which, had had to have their stomach pumped following various shenanigans with a rugby team. I honestly don’t remember any such rumour about Freddie. And I think there were probably far more angry headlines in the Heil and other right-wing papers about Marc Almond and Frankie’s relax video than I ever remember about Mercury. People didn’t idolise him because of his sexuality or lifestyle, although I did notice than there was a fashion among young gays at the time to dress like him. What people celebrated him for was what he was: a superb performer with an incredible vocal range that even now few others can match.
Mercury passed away thirty years ago, but is still a towering presence in British pop music with legions of fans, many of whom will not have been best pleased by Blunkett’s denigration of their hero. As I doubt will many gays and their allies. Tony Blair was the Prime Minister who set the ball rolling for gay marriage with the introduction of civil partnerships, and this makes Blunkett’s comment seem very homophobic after the intervening years. And if Bastani hadn’t forgotten Blunkett’s views on Mercury’s death, you can bet others won’t have either. Quite apart from the other vile policies Blunkett shares responsibility for as a member of Blair’s cabinet.
Starmer has appointed as part of his team people who have caused untold suffering to the poor, the disabled, asylum seekers, immigrants and been responsible for the destruction and looting of an entire country, Iraq, for the benefit of the oil industry and multinationals. These are good reasons for anyone concerned about the massive growth of poverty and inequality and real imperialism and exploitation to despise Starmer and what he is turning the Labour party into.
Get Starmer, Cooper, Blunkett and the rest of the Blairites out before they do further damage.
This is very telling. Mike’s put up a piece this morning reporting that Keef Stalin has effectively abolished the post of Secretary of State for Employment Rights. The post was created in 2018 by Jeremy Corbyn, who appointed Laura Pidcock to it. Andy McDonald has been removed from it and so the post is now vacant. The peeps on Twitter weren’t slow to condemn the move and point out what it means. Damian Willey tweeted
Starmer hasn’t filled the vacant position of Shadow Minister for employment rights. The ‘party of the workers’ doesn’t represent workers rights on its own frontbench anymore. Perhaps he’ll appoint a shadow minister for donors, its what Keith prefers.
Which is fair comment – Stalin is ignoring ordinary, subscription-paying Labour members in order to appeal to the corporate donors he hopes will welcome the return of a New Labour government. And Steve Howell commented
It sums up Starmer’s politics that he’s cancelled the post of shadow secretary of state for employment rights. Presumably, it’s not needed because ‘when business profits, we all do’.
Actually, I think it’s significant that Starmer hasn’t abolished the post. It’s just kept vacant and ignored. My guess is that if someone actually raises it, he’ll try and justify himself by saying that no, it hasn’t been abolished, they’re just looking for the right person to fill, or some nonsense like that.
With the position now vacant, Mike asks what the Labour party now stands for. Good question. The party was founded as a federation of trade unions and socialist societies to fight for trade union rights and decent pay and conditions for working people. During the last four decades of Thatcherism, these have been decimated, including by Starmer’s molten idol, Tony Blair. Workers don’t need less rights – not when so many are caught and exploited in the gig economy with zero hours contracts and so on. But Starmer is clearly trying to appeal to that party of the Tory electorate that blames the unions and bureaucracy for stifling business and demands workers rights are cut even more in order to free business. Brown had the same attitude. He believed the labour market should be more fluid – by which he meant that business should be more able to hire and fire people. Well, we’ve had four decades of this assault on workers’ rights, and all it’s created is a cowed, poor, starving workforce, many of whom have to use food banks to support themselves because their pay is so rubbish.
These are the policies Starmer supports. He’s a Tory through and through, trying to transform Labour into another Tory party.
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I’ve also written the following books, which are available from Lulu.
As Mike’s reminding everyone on his blog, tomorrow parliament debates the government’s new Health and Social Care bill, which will open the NHS up to further privatisation while telling everyone that it isn’t. The anti-privatisation organisation We Own It sent me this message yesterday. It is an invitation to sign a petition against the bill. We Own It would like me to send it to ten people. I’m not on Twitter and the other social media, so I’m putting it up here for people to sign and reblog if they wish:
Dear David,
You and over 60,000 others have signed our petition asking parliament to scrap the Health and Care Bill AKA the NHS Corporate Takeover Bill.
That’s MASSIVE! But if we are going to get parliament to scrap the bill, we need even more.
Can you help us get the petition to 100,000 signatures before Monday by sharing it with 10 people today?
David, MPs will vote on whether to pass the NHS Corporate Takeover Bill this Tuesday, 23rd November.
This legislation threatens to give private companies a bigger role in our NHS so that profit-driven corporations like Virgin Care sit on NHS boards, paving the way for more privatisation and sleaze.
That’s why we are coming together with Keep Our NHS Public, Just Treatment and Your NHS Needs You, to visit Parliament and hand over the petition on Monday 22nd, when MPs begin voting on amendments.
We can pile the pressure on Conservative MPs and get enough of them to vote against this bill. Here’s how:
Right now Conservative MPs have their backs against the wall.
Because of public pressure, they’ve had to U-turn on their vote to allow private water companies to spew sewage into our rivers and on their vote to open the door to sleaze.
This shows that if we push hard, we can force them to change direction.
We can show them that the public means business and are willing to take a step to oppose the bill by making the petition go even bigger.
Can you take a few minutes to share the petition on your social media and directly with 10 of your friends and family members?
Together, we can convince Conservative MPs that people hate the NHS Corporate Takeover Bill enough to make them fear being forced to U-turn after voting for it.
But we can only do that by demonstrating mass opposition.
Two weeks ago our poll showed that 72% of the public are worried the bill will mean more NHS privatisation – including 70% of Conservatives. The next few days before Monday 22nd will be crucial for whether we can get the government to scrap their NHS Corporate Takeover Bill.
Thank you so much for taking action and for being involved in this fight to protect our NHS.
Cat, Alice, Zana, Matthew, Johnbosco – the We Own It team
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