Here’s another petition against the privatisation of the NHS, this time from pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation We Own It. They are naturally outraged that privatisation, according to a study by Cambridge university, has resulted in 500+ preventable deaths. They believe the Labour party is moving in the right direction, as Wes Streeting last week in an interview with New Statesman, said the party was considering moving more services back in house. But they want to press the point home, and so wish to present a petition to the party’s policy organisation demanding its complete renationalisation. They are also planning a major campaign next year against the health service’s privatisation.
I’ve signed the petition, and if you feel like me about this issue, please do so as well.
‘Dear David,
Last week Wes Streeting made his strongest case yet against NHS outsourcing.
He only did this after you took action to say NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
Now we want to push Labour to go even further and make reinstating the NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE their official policy.
We are making a submission to Labour’s policy-making body this Friday, 17th March. We want you to add your voice to it so they know thousands of us want this.
For the next 18 months, our message on the NHS is going to be really simple: NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
As you know, a recent Oxford University study has linked the preventable deaths of 557 people to the outsourcing of NHS services.
We want to hammer that message into every home in the country so that at the next election pro-privatisation politicians are forced to explain to voters why they are happy to put up with deaths just so private companies make a profit.
We will push all parties to reinstate our NHS as a fully public service. We are independent of all political parties and we lobby all of them.
But it is really important to focus on Labour because they currently have the best chance of winning the next election.
So we are going to ramp up the pressure on them month by month not just to make sure they sign up to this policy before the next election, but also to make sure they actually implement it if they win.
The public is on your side on this. Two-thirds of them, according to our latest polling, are concerned about NHS outsourcing and want our NHS reinstated as a fully public service.
Going by Wes Streeting’s tune last week, Labour has come a long way on this issue. And they look like they are now going in the right direction.
But they still have a long way to go to pledging to reinstate our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE.
That is why we are making a submission to their policy-making body – the National Policy Forum – to outline the evidence and demand they make kicking greedy private companies out of our NHS their policy.
If thousands of people add their voices to our submission, they will know that this is not just one organisation’s demand – reinstating our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE is backed by so many people.
The NHS is a devolved matter, which means that our submission is only about the NHS in England. But we all know that Labour in England has a strong influence on Labour in all the other nations.
If Labour in England pledges to reinstate our NHS as a fully public service, Labour in the other nations will likely follow.
So your voice is really important whether you live in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
We know that England is not alone in seeing the effects of private companies making profits from our healthcare.
Just today, we’ve seen a report by the Scotland Herald showing that private healthcare companies with links to UK politicians are charging Scots £250 to see a doctor for 15 minutes.
We know the situations in Wales and Northern Ireland are very similar.
The Labour Party taking a strong stance and pledging to reinstate our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE would send a strong message to all the nations.
A few weeks ago I wrote to my local MP for Bristol South, Karin Smyth, offering her copies of my self-published book and pamphlets against NHS Privatisation. I received this reply from her yesterday.
‘Dear David Sivier
Thank you for contacting me to raise concerns about NHS privatisation.
We must build capacity in the NHS so that all patients who need it can be treated on time again. But I believe we have a responsibility in the short term to utilise spare capacity in the private sector to get through the current crisis and bring down NHS waiting lists. Nobody should be left languishing in serious pain, while those who can afford to, pay to go private. That is the two-tier healthcare system that we need to end.
In the long term, I want the NHS to be so good that people never have to go private. There is, in my view, an incompatibility between the aims of private companies and the aims of the NHS. A company’s primary concern is its shareholders, not the patients.
Building an NHS fit for the future is one of Labour’s five key missions for government, reforming health and care services to speed up treatment, shifting the focus of healthcare out of the hospital and into the community, and reduce health inequalities.
Paid for by ending the non-dom tax status regime, the plan will double the number of medical school places, create 10,000 extra nursing and midwifery clinical placements a year, train double the number of district nurses each year, and deliver 5,000 more health visitors.
Thank you once again for contacting me about this issue.
Yours sincerely,
Karin Smyth MP Labour MP for Bristol South’
I very much support her comments about making the NHS so good that no-one would want to go private and the incompatibility between private enterprise and the aims of the NHS. I also fully support Labour’s proposal to increase the training of NHS nurses and midwives, paid for by ending the non-dom tax status. If that goes through, that will really hurt the proprietor of the Heil, who has inherited it from his wretched father but unlike him shows no sign of living in France.
However, I do not trust Keir Starmer and MPs like Wes Streeting to honour it. I hope I will be proved wrong. In the meantime, there is no chance of reversing privatisation with the Tories in power.
Brexit, we were told, was all about regaining Britain’s “sovereignty” and being in control of our own destiny. But big money in British politics is a more significant threat to our future than unelected EU bureaucrats ever were.
Even though the Brussels bureaucrats have been removed from the equation, people still don’t feel they have a proper say in how this country operates. One big reason for that is the amount of money, often from opaque sources, sloshing around our political system.
Have you ever thought that the national picture painted by the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Rishi Sunak differs significantly from the one you see when you look around your own family and friends? You’re not alone.
Britain ranks among the most socially liberal countries in the world on key issues, and a substantial majority now reject many of the established economic assumptions of recent decades. But you won’t see any of that reflected in the current government’s agenda. Westminster is becoming an island of irrelevance, increasingly detached from the concerns of ordinary people.
There’s a reason for that. The government cannot hear the concerns of ordinary people over the hubbub of wealthy donors and other lobbyists with shady financial backers.
As part of our Parliamentary work, we’ve been researching just how broken the system is. In this longer-than-usual email, we’d like to share some of that with you.
Dark Money and Foreign Influence
The UK has particularly lax campaign finance laws. As a result, many donations get through that probably shouldn’t. Yes, there are permissibility requirements in place, but there are plenty of ways to evade them if you want to.
The term “Dark money” refers to donations whose origins are untraceable. Because the ultimate source cannot be confirmed, there is no way of knowing whether that money comes from the kind of person or organisation that shouldn’t have influence over our lawmakers.
One example of dark money is the “Proxy Donation”. These are donations made by one person, who would not be a permitted donor, in the name of another who is. Some examples include:
Ehud Sheleg, art dealer and former Conservative party treasurer, gave over £600k to the Tory party. Documents later showed that the money originated in a Russian account of Sheleg’s father-in-law – a former official in the old pro-Putin regime in Ukraine. Proxy donations are a complete blindspot in the law, so there was no legal mechanism to hold him accountable for it.
Lubov Cherdukhin – back at it again – gave money to the Conservative party while her husband was receiving funds from business deals with sanctioned Russian oligarchs. She gave £50k to the Tories 8 days after Putin invaded Ukraine.
Mohamad Amersi has given over £200k to the Conservatives and worked closely with Boris Johnson on key policy decisions. Prior to the donation, he was given a large deposit from a Kremlin-linked company secretly owned by Putin’s telecoms minister Leonid Reiman.
“Shell Companies” are another way for dubious donors to evade the rules. According to Transparency International, 14% of LLPs established in the UK between 2001-2021 (21,000 companies) show signs of being shell companies. Here are some examples:
Conservative mega-donor Lubov Cherdukhin, who once paid £160k to play tennis with Boris Johnson, was being paid out by a shell company secretly owned by Russian senator and Putin ally Suleiman Kerimov, according to the BBC.
The offshore company Aquind is owned by a former Russian oil magnate and a Russian arms manufacturer. The company has donated heavily to the Conservative party.
Top Labour MPs Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, and Dan Jarvis received a combined £345,000 from a company called MPM Connect Ltd, which has no staff or website and is registered at an office where the secretary had never heard of the company.
“Unincorporated Associations” are nebulous groups with little oversight or legal classification. It’s essentially like ticking the “miscellaneous” box on a donation form when asked what kind of organisation you are.
Tory minister Steve Baker’s “Covid Recovery Group” organisation (a parliamentary coalition of anti-lockdown Conservative MPs) received tens of thousands from a UA called the Recovery Alliance. It has no digital footprint, no registered members, and its finances are completely opaque. Opendemocracy has linked it to a number of other covid conspiracy campaigns and anti-lockdown groups.
Richard Cook’s “Constitutional Research Group” – of which he is the only listed member and chair – gave £435,000 to the DUP’s Brexit campaign. No one knows for sure where the money came from, but investigative journalists discovered his involvement in a number of illicit trades, including underground trash-dumping and fire-arms sales.
According to Byline Times, 29 different opaque UAs donated £14 million to the Conservative party between 2010-2022.
Big Money
Between 2001 and 2021, one-fifth of all political donations in the UK came from just ten men with an average age of 70. If that doesn’t indicate that we have a big problem, we’re really not sure what would.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with political donations, huge amounts of money coming from multinational corporations and the mega-rich does raise questions about who really calls the shots. Especially when they seem to get things in return.
Here are some situations where extremely wealthy individuals and corporations used their financial heft to influence things:
In 2021, the Conservatives received £400k in donations from oil and gas companies while the government was deciding on new oil and gas licences.
More generally, the Tories took over a million from oil companies between 2019 and 2021.
From 2020-2022, the Conservatives took £15 million from the financial services industry, which they were certainly kind to when it came to dealing with banker’s bonuses.
Labour MP Wes Streeting received £15k from John Armitage, former Tory party donor and manager of a hedge fund that owns half a billion dollars in US health insurance and private healthcare. Streeting recently came out in support of private hospitals.
The “Leader’s Group” is a dining club of Tory super-donors that has given over £130 million to the party since 2010. The club’s billionaires and business moguls have been known to dine with Boris Johnson.
In 2022-2023, controversial groups, including gambling giants, climate sceptic organisations, and evangelical Christian groups, made over £1 million in donations for staffing the Labour front bench. Recipients include MPs Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, and Yvette Cooper. Reeves alone received nearly £250k.
Recently, Crossbench peer Caroline Cox received large donations from American evangelical Christian activists against gay marriage that used hateful language about Muslims.
While the Conservatives often top the list when it comes to money in politics, remember that this is a cross-party systemic problem. The real issue is that the rules that are supposed to prevent the wealthy from buying influence just aren’t strong enough. We’ve allowed a situation to emerge where money can buy outcomes almost directly, and the mechanisms to detect the sources of that money are ineffective. Our system just isn’t fit for the 21st century.
The first step to fixing any problem is admitting that there is a problem. Our political system is addicted to money, to the extent that we’re now shutting real people’s voices out on a regular basis.
As you know, Open Britain’s mission these days is to deliver a democracy that works for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. That means a political system primarily driven by people, not primarily driven by money. That’s what democracy was always meant to be about.
As you might expect from what you’ve read above, we don’t take donations from shady think tanks or Russian oligarchs. All our work is funded directly by you, our supporters. We believe that having our work funded through small donations from a large number of people is the healthiest model of all, one that allows us to say what needs to be said to whoever needs to hear it. We hope you agree.
I got this email from the Arise Festival of left Labour ideas giving the details for a pro-NHS rally this Saturday.
‘SOS NHS Demo, Saturday, London 📣
GET INVOLVED: RSVP here + Retweet here // Read more here
Hello David
A range of Labour left groups have come together to organise a ‘Labour bloc’ on this Saturday’s SOS NHS – End the Crisis – Support the Strikes demo. Supporters include the Labour Assembly Against Austerity, Momentum, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Labour Representation Committee, Red Labour and Labour Women Leading. Full info is below.
Supporting the initiative, John McDonnell MP, “We must make our voices heard collectively at the SOS NHS demonstration – bringing people together in the run-up to the Budget to fight for our NHS’ future.” You can read more from John, LAAA, Momentum, NHS Workers Say No and Diane Abbott here.
We will be meeting from 11.30 outside Lidl on Tottenham Court Rd and need volunteers to help carry our banner and promote our #PeoplesBudget event – please email arisefestival@yahoo.com if you can help!
Yours in solidarity, Matt Willgress, Labour Assembly & Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas.
DEMONSTRATION DETAILS! SOS NHS
Saturday March 11, 12.00pm, Warren St. (Labour bloc meet up 11.30 outside Lidl on Tottenham Court Rd.)
Get NHS demo info here & RSVP for Labour bloc here + Retweet here
Read more from LAAA’s Matt Willgress here on why with Wes Streeting backing NHS privatisation, the Left must back this important initiative.
I won’t be able to go because of the cost and ill health, but I’m putting this up for those who do want to go.
Here’s further evidence of the Tory campaign to run down the Health Service until they can sell it off and introduce an American-style private healthcare system where people have to pay for their care through private health insurance. I’m ashamed and horrified that this man comes from own, fair city of Bristol. According to Sky News, Javid has an opinion piece in the Times (prop: the Dirty Digger) pushing the idea that the health service should charge people going to their doctors and Accident and Emergency with means-tested fees in order to cut waiting times. Javid says that this would follow Ireland, Norway and Sweden, and the appreciation of the Health Service should become a religious fervour blocking reform. The broadcaster also notes that Sunak himself wanted people charged for missed appointments, but was forced to withdrawal that nasty suggestion. Sky’s report says that the current PM till the next one says that he is not considering the idea. Wes Streeting, in a rare occasion of standing up for proper Labour values, said that it would violate the 75 year old founding principle of the NHS that treatment should be free at the point of delivery. Only Labour, which set up the NHS, could properly reform it, and that the imposition of fees would happen ‘over my dead body’.
Well said. I just wish I could believe him.
Of course the Tories hate the NHS as it’s a nationalised service. They don’t understand or sympathise with the principles underlying it and so want it privatised. We’ve already seen another right-wing maniac from their benches calling for it to be run ‘like a business’. These people have their voices magnified by appearing on GB News, where they spout the same nonsense, along with newsreaders and commenters like Nana Akua. As for the nonsense about this cutting waiting times, that’s really only a pretext. I went to a meeting of my local Labour party a few months ago in which the Tories’ attack on the Health Service was being discussed. Someone there said quite clearly that the health service was in particular danger because of the pandemic because the Tories never fail to exploit a crisis. And now Javid has raised his head above the parapet to prove it.
The Sky report states that Javid will not be seeking re-election at the next election. Which is why he probably feels free to make this monstrous suggestion. He has nothing to lose. Unfortunately, his mentality is still shared by his party, and will remain there long after he’s gone.
As for the Labour party, I very much doubt that Starmer will honour his promise to make doctors state employees. He has also said he wants to make a rational use of private industry to clear the backlog. Over the past decade, doctors’ surgeries have been acquired by private healthcare companies like Circle Health, who have then sought to maximise profits by sacking staff and making working conditions worse. The standard privatisation modus operandi. Blair was enthusiastic about privatising the NHS, and Starmer shares the same ideology. He also said something about making a rational use of private healthcare companies. I honestly doubt that he will stop the privatisation of the NHS once he gets his behind in No. 10. If he allows private healthcare companies to continue to acquire doctors’ surgeries, then obviously the doctors working there will not become state employees. Starmer has massive previous for breaking promises, and I think it’s very clear that he intends to break this one.
But the main threat meanwhile is the Tories.
Get them out before they privatise the health service and start charging for care.
Some of the great commenters on this blog have been discussing the danger that Keir Starmer, once in power, will push through even more privatisation of the NHS like his Thatcherite predecessor, Tony Blair. In June last year, Left Horizons published an article reposted from the Skwawkbox reporting that his noxious Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, had received a £15,000 donation from a hedge fund which owns one of the giant American private healthcare firms, which is involved in the privatisation of the NHS. The article, ‘Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, takes donation from Tory donor with private health interests’, begins
‘Keir Starmer’s Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting accepted £15,000 from a donor with huge interests in privatised health care. The Electoral Commission’s register of donations shows that Streeting reported the receipt in January 2022 of the donation from John Armitage, a hedge fund founder and manager who has given over £3 million to the Tories.
Armitage, ranked number 138 on the 2021 Times ‘rich list’, is co-founder and director of the Egerton Capital hedge fund. According to the HedgeFollow site, among its almost £19bn of investments, Armitage’s fund owns shares worth almost £834m in UnitedHealth (UH), a vast US private health corporation that has spent millions lobbying US politicians for its interests. NHS campaigners told Skwawkbox that UH has played a key role in the ‘americanisation’ of the NHS that began under New Labour and continued apace under the Tories:
*the Health and Care Bill has just put into law an American scheme reducing state-funded services to profitable standards and pushing patients to pay for the rest, by rewarding providers who cut ‘unprofitable’ care (known as ACOs or ICSs) *UnitedHealth was among the companies who developed this system with New Labour. Blair advisor Simon Stevens even became UnitedHealth CEO, before being appointed by the Tories to run the NHS to push through their ‘reforms’ *UnitedHealth subsidiary Optum is ’embedded in the whole process’. Optum was accused in a 2019 Science Magazine study of racial bias in its systems that result in less money being allocated for the care of black patients. Optum responded that its systems help “clinicians provide more effective patient care every day“’
The article states that the donation has raised concerns among NHS supporters trying to protect the service’s mission to provide medical care free at the point of delivery.
It also notes that Streeting was approached for comment, but didn’t reply.
It’s a horrifying thought, but that’s what this fortnight’s edition of Private Eye suggests in their piece, ‘Project Keir’ in the ‘H.P. Sauce’ column on page 14. They speculate that Starmer is deliberately planning to lose the next election so that he will be replaced by Wes Streeting, who will win the following election. He seems himself as the new Neil Kinnock, who lost his election but prepared the way for the success of Tony Blair. The article runs
“Don’t let anyone tell you that this is a two-term project,” shadow minister Wes Streeting told moderate group Labour First at his party’s conference last weekend. This phrase is familiar to the party’s right: a two-term project would mean Keir Starmer losing the next election but his sacrifice clearing the way for a properly moderate leader.
It was an acknowledgment that many on Labour’s right – including some in Starmer’s office – believe the leader’s focus on fixing Labour’s internal selections might not impress voters but will clear out the hard left, subdue the soft left and prepare the ground for the only way they believe Labour can win: Starmer must be a “Kinnock”, who loses elections but clears the way for a Blair figure who ultimately wins.” The rest of the article describes how Keef and his minions are already in talks with various big businesses. Well, Starmer is a Blairite, and Blair became notorious for granting favours to big corporations, including seats in government, in return for donations.
Before I start critiquing the article proper, look at the bias in its writing. Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters are ‘hard left’. Labour First is ‘moderate’. Not so. Jeremy Corbyn is actually very traditional Old Labour: a mixed economy, strong welfare state, properly nationalised and funded NHS, and strong trade unions. He wants the nationalisation of the utilities and the railways, which was the social democratic consensus, accepted by both Labour and the Tories, from 1945 to 1979 and the election of Maggie Thatcher. This is far less than the demands for further nationalisation from the real communist and Trotskyite left, who sneer at reformist socialist politicians like Corbyn. And Labour First is not remotely moderate. It’s far right in the same way Blair was far right. Blair was further right than the Tories in many issues. The Conservatives had tried taking schools out of the control of the LEAs, the precursors of Blair’s academies, found that they didn’t work and duly binned them. Blair took the idea out of the bin and then expanded it. He also went much further in privatising the NHS than the Tories dared. At the 2008 elections Cameron pretended to be further left than Blair in order to win. I think this lost him votes from traditional hard right Tory voters, but unfortunately it did give him the keys to 10 Downing Street. And we’ve been suffering ever since.
This scheme all depends on several factors, one of which is whether Starmer truly realises he’s going to lose the next election. He certainly doesn’t seem like it. Despite losing a whole series of local authorities and constituencies, including the north, he seems determined to present what few seats Labour did retain up north as stunning victories. In fact in many of them Labour only managed to scrape in. Now I think Starmer really is hoping that Tory voters, along with big business and the media, will turn to him, or his version of the Labour party, when they get sick of the Tories and their incompetence. But that’s a dangerous assumption. Blair was able to win over Murdoch and the majority of the press, but the Daily Mail held on to its wretched principles and carried on supporting the Tories. There is no guarantee that the British public, media and business will embrace Streeting if Labour does lose the next election and Starmer makes way for him. And even if Streeting did win the following election, it would probably be by a smaller number of people voting than actually voted in the 2019 election. At the 2017 election, Corbyn lost with a higher number of people voting for him than Blair did when he won. It’s been forgotten that when Blair was in power, people drifted away from Labour en masse and that there was a general feeling of alienation and disenfranchisement. People didn’t feel the parties represented them and some of them stopped voting. This will happen again, even if Streeting or someone like him wins.
And its dangerous, because when people feel alienated from supposedly democratic parties, they turn to the real extremists, the Communists or Fascists. Both of those are pretty much dead at the moment, despite the screams about Corbyn, but they could well revive, if under a less extreme guise, like UKIP or the Brexit party at the elections a few years ago.
My own guess is that such a plan would destroy Labour, at least as a mass party. Starmer treats the rank and file members with contempt, and as result they’re leaving. Without their membership subscriptions, Labour is facing bankruptcy. Starmer has also driven away the baker’s union, BFAWU, so he went get any money from that union either. If he drives further unions away, which he well might, that could provoke an even worse financial crisis. He needs those donations from big business, but there’s no guarantee he’ll get them.
Starmer’s slowly turning Labour into a minor party with little funding and small membership, also so he can appeal to business and hopefully get his rear end, or Streetings into power. It’s a truly risky strategy, and could kill the party long before either he or Streeting get anywhere close.
And as they’re doing this, they’re damaging democracy by ignoring the electorate and its wishes in favour of big business. A few years ago a report by Harvard University concluded that America was no longer a functioning democracy because of this. Instead it was a plutocracy or something like it, government by the rich.
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.
The best comment I’ve seen about the current furore over the BBC’s supposed decision to ban the lyrics of ‘Rule, Britannia’, and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the Last Night of the Proms has come from the Labour MP Wes Streeting He’s said that it’s a distraction to divert attention away from the Tories and their repeated failures. And he’s right. More people are in grinding poverty, the Coronavirus rates appear to be heading back up, they’ve wound up the public body tasked with combating the outbreak right in the middle of the pandemic, and given it to a woman, who has no qualifications for the job apart from the fact that she’s close to Johnson’s coterie, the government’s exam algorithm unfairly marked down 40 per cent of schoolchildren, the vast majority from poor backgrounds, the public deficit has hit over a trillion pounds, thus destroying any credibility the Tories can claim for being the party of sound fiscal management, and they’re still trying to get away with the illegal deportation of the Windrush migrants. While blaming ‘activist lawyers’ of course. Then there’s the cronyism and corruption, as one after another government contracts are given to firms run by or with connections to the Tory party itself and its leaders. The mighty Ash Sarkar of Novara Media has also weighed in on the issue on YouTube with a video describing these claims as ‘a paranoid fantasia’.
But these aren’t the real issues! No! The real issue is that the Beeb is full of evil, unpatriotic, subversive lefties determined to blot out every last trace of British national pride and greatness. And they’re starting by banning the lyrics to ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Except they didn’t. The decision not sing them was due to the general restrictions on singing imposed by the lockdown. It’s for the same reason that, although churches are now open, worshippers can’t sing the hymns. It’s purely for health reasons, nothing more. But never mind, Boris Johnson has appeared and condemned the Beeb’s decision, thus rescuing us all from this latest Black Lives Matter attack on Britishness.
I have absolutely no problem with either of the two songs. I really enjoy them, and enjoyed the Proms itself when I went with a friend years ago. But I also remember that there have also been spoof versions of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ down the years. One of them was released in the mid-1990s by the Devon band, the Amphibians from Outer Space, fronted by the cryptozoologist Jon Downes. This had the title ‘Land of Dopes and Tories” and was a bitter comment on Britain under the-then Tory government of John Major. I can’t remember the lyrics exactly, but they went something like this:
Land of dopes and Tories,
Game shows and TV.
The land our fathers fought for
Don’t seem the same to me.
Land of idiot violence
Where innocent blood is shed
Land where only the assholes
Heard what Mosley said.
Downes clarified the last line, explaining that it referred to Mosley’s prediction that, who ever won the War, Britain would be finished as a world power. Mosley was right about that, but it still doesn’t make him less of a Fascist ***hole himself, who was responsible for so much of the idiot violence in his time.
The song went on for a few more lines before ending with Downes’ declaration that
Anarchy and freedom is everything I want.
With the recent riots in America and the horrific mess of the former anarchist commune in Seattle, anarchy looks much less attractive. But I think the parody, like so much of the bitter social comment of the 1990s, is still very relevant. Boris Johnson’s government is very like that of Major’s in its sleaze, corruption, privatisations and indifference to real, mass poverty. Except, compared to Johnson, Major seems to be a pillar of competence and statesmanship. And this from someone who was considered mediocre at best when he was actually in power.
The lyrics for ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ haven’t been banned for any left-wing ideological reasons. The Tories are lying when they tell you they are. And Downes’ spoof lyrics accurately describe them, and the Britain of hatred and violence they’ve created.
This is another video from Labour Against the Witchhunt, the group formed to defend the victims of the mass smear campaign against supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour party. The video was posted on YouTube on 2nd June 2018, and as Sayle says that he is there to support Marc Wadworth, my guess is that it was recorded as part of the tour Marc Wadsworth did of various cities up and down the country exposing the injustice of his own smearing and expulsion from Labour. Ruth Smeeth accused him of anti-Semitism, because he embarrassed her passing information on to a Torygraph journalist at a press conference. As Wadworth is a veteran campaigner against racism and anti-Semitism, who got Stephen Lawrence’s parents to meet Nelson Mandela and worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the ’90s when the BNP were beating up Jews once again in the east end of London, the charge is risible and obnoxious. But this didn’t stop the press, media and Blairites baying it at every opportunity.
Some of us of a certain vintage remember Sayle as the bald, sweary bloke, who was one of the leaders of Alternative Comedy that came out of the Comedy Store in the 1980s, along with Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, French and Saunders, and Ben Elton. They were an iconoclastic attack on the old style of comedy – anarchic and ‘politically correct’. They firmly rejected the racism and sexism that was part of the ’70s comedy scene. Sayle appeared in the groundbreaking sitcom, The Young Ones, as the heroes’ landlord, and later had his own show on BBC 2. He also did a car advert in which he sang ‘Ello, John, got a new motor?’ until you were heartily sick of it, but the less said about that the better.
He starts by talking about the forces ranged against Corbyn – Capita, neo-liberalism, and fanatical supporters of the state of Israel, for whom it is a fight to the death, and will do anything, to stop the prospect of someone, who prioritises the plight of the Palestinians, of the oppressed than the oppressor, leading a western nation. He says they will lie, cheat and do anything to stop that, and one of the people, who has been sacrificed, who he wanted to speak up for, was Marc Wadsworth.
He then says that perhaps the audience knows the Labour party better than he does, perhaps there’s a plan there. But if it was him, he’d just tell the Board of Deputies to f**k themselves. ‘Not a sophisticated response, but I dunno’. He speculates whether there is a plan to appease them, and wonders if it will work. He then talks about how he was busy with work a couple of weeks previously. It was the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. (Sayle’s parents where Jewish Romanian Communists, who settled in Liverpool, and much of Sayle’s comedy is about Marxism and the Russian Revolution. He once did a radio series about a football team, which was fable about the Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik revolution). However, the previous October was the centenary of the Russian Revolution. He expected to be busy with work then, and told his agent to block out all of October. However, nothing happened. But he was able to get a gig speaking at the British Library. He goes on to explain that the history of the Soviet Union has a bit of a blemish when you’re talking about Marxism. Some people would disagree. His own mother would never admit there was anything wrong with the Soviet project. The most she would says was, Mistakes were made’. Or as she would say, ‘You can’t make an omelette without murdering 40 million people’.
He goes on to say that the spirit – the purity of spirit – of the Russian Revolution was crushed when the Kronstadt uprising was put down, the sailors, who were asking for a return to the basic principles of Bolshevism, of the Revolution. He goes on
‘It seems to me a tremendous danger that if you concede, if you start to mess with the basic principles of who you are, if you start to make concessions to people like Ruth Smeeth and Wes Streeting, and these people. And if you start to self-harm in the hope of future gain, you are fundamentally undermining what you are about.’
Wise words indeed, as we have seen this week when the party has decided to suspend Chris Williamson for daring to defend the smeared innocent against their accusers.
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