I’ve just received a pamphlet from Keir Starmer’s campaign team, promoting him as the future of leader of the Labour Party. It begins with this quote
“I’ve spent my life fighting injustice. I’m standing to be leader of our Labour Party because I’m determined to unite our movement, take on the Tories and build a better future. If all parts of our movement come together, we can achieve anything.”
There’s a brief biography that runs
A Life Devoted to Fighting Injustice
Keir is the son of an NHS nurse and a toolmaker. As a former human rights lawyer, Keir is dedicated to Labour’s core principles of fairness and justice.
He has devoted his whole life to fighting injustice and defending the powerless against the powerful, as his ten-year unpaid battle over the McLibel case goes to show. he has fought against the death penalty abroad, defended mining communities against pit closures, and taken up hundreds of employment rights and trade union cases. After being the Director of Public Prosecutions, he was elected MP for Holborn & St Pancras in 2015, later becoming Shadow Brexit Secretary. Defeating Boris Johnson is a huge task but Keir knows that if we bring our movement together and stay true to our values, we can win, and change Britain for the better.
As leader of the Labour Party, Keir will contine to fight for justice in all its forms: social justice, climate justice, economic justice.
There’s then three columns of endorsement from people such as Dawn French, Rokhsana Fiaz, the elected mayor of Lewisham, Laura Parker, the former National Coordinator of Momentum, Emma Hardy, the MP for Hull West and Hessle, Aneira Thomas, the first baby born on the NHS, Sarah Sackman, a public and environmental lawyer, Alf Dubs, the refugee campaigner, Paul Sweeney, the former MP for Glasgow North East, Ricky Tomlinson, David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, Doreen Lawrence, Konnie Huq, the TV presenter and writer, Mick Antoniw, the member of the Welsh Assembly for Pontypridd, Ross Millard of the Sunderland band, the Futureheads, Lucio Buffone, a member of ASLEF and LGBT+ Labour national committee member, and the Unison General Secretary, Dave Prentis.
The back page contains his ‘My Pledges To You’. He says
My promise is that I will maintain our radical values and work tirelessly to get Labour in to power – so that we can advance the interests of the people our party was created to serve. Based on the moral case for socialism, here is where I stand.
His pledges are as follows
Economic Justice.
Increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations. No stepping back from our core principles.
2. Social Justice.
Abolish Universal Credit and end the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime. Set a national goal for wellbeing to make health as important as GDP; invest in services that help shift to a preventive approach. Stand up for universal services and defend our NHS. Support the abolition of tuition fees and invest in lifelong learning.
3. Climate Justice
Put the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do. There is no issue more important to our future than the climate emergency. A Clean Air Act to tackle pollution locally. Demand international action on climate rights.
4. Promote Peace and Human Rights.
No more illegal wars. Introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice.
5. Common Ownership.
Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water; end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system.
6. Defend Migrant’s Rights.
Full voting rights for EU nationals. Defend free movement as we leave the EU. An immigration system based on compassion and dignity. End indefinite detention and call for the closure of centres such as Yarl’s Wood.
7. Strengthen Workers’ Rights and Trade Unions.
Work shoulder to should with trade unions to stand up for working people, tackle insecure work and low pay. Repeal the Trade Union Act. Oppose Tory attacks on the right to take industrial action and the weakening of workplace rights.
8. Radical Devolution of Power, Wealth and Opportunity.
Push power, wealth and opportunity away from Whitehall. A federal system to devolve powers – including through regional investment banks and control over regional industrial strategy. Abolish the House of Lords – replace it with an elected chamber of regions and nations.
9. Equality.
Pull down obstacles that limit opportunities and talent. we are the party of the Equal Pay Act, Sure Start, BAME representation and the abolition of Section 28 – we must build on that for a new decade.
10. Effective Opposition to the Tories.
Forensic, effective opposition to the Tories in Parliament – linked up to our mass membership and a professional election operation. Never lose sight of the votes ‘leant’ to the Tories in 2019. Unite our party, promote pluralism and improve our culture. Robust action to eradicate the scourge of antisemitism. Maintain our collective link with the unions.
This is all good, radical stuff, but there are problems. Firstly, his commitment to taking ‘robust action to eradicate the scourge of antisemitism’ and his decision, along with the rest of the Labour leadership contenders, to sign the Board of Deputies’ highly manipulative pledges, means that more people are going to be thrown out of the party without any opportunity to defend themselves, based only the allegations of anonymous accusers. We’ve seen innocents like Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Mike Sivier, Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and so many others suspended and thrown out through the party’s kangaroo courts. One poor lady has died through the shock of being so expelled, even though she was a passionate anti-racist. This isn’t justice, it’s a pledge to renew the witch hunt.
As for promoting peace and human rights – how long will that last with the Board of Deputies demanding to supervise everything relating to Jews? Israel is a gross violator of human rights, but the Board has consistently defended it and its deplorable actions. Their demands that Labour adopt the IHRC definition of anti-Semitism was to stifle criticism of Israel by declaring them ‘anti-Semitic’. This pledge might be genuine, but the momentum anyone applies it to Israel the BoD will start howling ‘anti-Semitism!’ again and decent people will start getting expelled. Especially if they’re Jewish.
And his plan for giving Britain a federal constitution doesn’t seem to be a good one. From what I’ve read, it has been discussed before, and while it may solve some problems it creates others. It’s supposed to be no better than the current arrangement, which is why it hasn’t been implemented.
I also don’t back him on Europe. Oh, I’m a remainer at heart, but I think a large part of the reason we lost the election was because, instead of accepting the results of referendum, Labour pledged itself to return to the EU. This was partly on Starmer’s insistence. He is right, however, that EU nationals in the UK should have voting rights.
But I have to say that I don’t trust Starmer. His campaign team were all supporters of Owen Smith, one of those who challenged Corbyn’s leadership. They include Luke Akehurst, one of the leading figures of the Israel lobby within the Labour Party. Tony Greenstein a few days ago put up a piece arguing that, whatever he claims to the contrary, as Director of Public Prosecutions he always sided with the authorities – the police, military and intelligence services – against everyone else.
My fear is that if he becomes leader of the Labour Party, he will quietly forget these pledges and continue the Blair project.
This video is George Galloway’s take on the plot exposed by Al-Jazeera in their documentary ‘The Lobby’, and published in the press by the Mail on Sunday, of Shai Masot and various Labour and Conservative Friends of Israel to ‘take down’ various politicians the Israelis found inconvenient.
One of the politicos they discussed doing this to was the Conservative minister, Alan Duncan. Galloway notes that Duncan is one of the first openly gay Tory MPs, so you don’t have to be Einstein to imagine what kind of scandal they would invent to bring him down. Galloway states that this should have been enough for Duncan’s boss, Boris Johnson, who Masot described as ‘an idiot’ to summon the Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev, to London and give him his marching orders. Another MP they also discussed bringing down in a scandal was Sir Crispin Blunt, the chairman of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, who is also gay. Again, you don’t have to spend much time wondering what that scandal might have been. He speculates whether they would have tried to bring Duncan and Blunt together as sexual partners.
But Boris immediately declared the matter closed, leading Galloway to ask this question: if that had been a Russian or Iranian embassy official doing the plotting, would the affair then have been closed? Or would the ambassadors have been brought into the Foreign Office and then expelled from the country? If this had been any other state, we would now be in the middle of a state to state crisis because of it.
Galloway then leaves Duncan and Blunt, as they can look after themselves. He’s far more interested in the Labour aspects of the scandal. Galloway recalls how he and Corbyn have marched together in support of the Palestinians for over 30 years. Which is why, the moment Corbyn was elected, and even before, when it seemed he would win the leadership of the Labour party, the Israel lobby went ‘bananas’. They persecuted him every step of the way to the leadership, and once he had, they conspired to have him overthrown. They concocted the fake anti-Semitism scare within the Labour party, making it seem that it was a nest of racism, when in fact there was nothing to these allegations whatsoever. He states that the only thing the mass of Labour members have in common with Jeremy Corbyn in this is their support for the Palestinian people, and their opposition to Israel’s crimes.
Galloway then moves on to talk about Joan Ryan, the Labour MP for Enfield North, who was also at the lunch with Masot. But you wouldn’t know represented Enfield; she’s better described as the MP for Tel Aviv, and is the chair of Labour Friends of Israel. Ryan was filmed grinning all over her face when Masot told her the good news that he had secured a million pound slush fund to secure Labour politicians to come to Israel’s aid. This was dressed up as a fund to fly Labour MPs to Israel for ‘fact-finding missions’, a pretext which Galloway describes as entirely bogus. He points out that most of them have already been on several ‘fact-finding’ missions to Israel. You can also fly to Israel for well under a thousand pounds. So if half of all Labour MPs have taken the Shekel, that only means an expenditure of 100,000 pounds. What’s the other 900,000 quid for?
He answers that it was a slush fund to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn, to remove him as the leader of the Labour party, by Labour MPs themselves, on behalf of a foreign power. And Israel isn’t just any foreign power, but the biggest violator of international law, and one which has just been condemned by the entire Security Council of the United Nations for its crimes against the Palestinians. He asks what kind of Labour MP is not only in bed with a state like that, but is covertly receiving money from a foreign embassy, for the defence of that country, when it stands in public disapproval amongst all Labour members and most people in Britain, and most countries in the world?
He then goes on to discuss the Conservative official’s remark at the lunch that almost all Conservative MPs are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel. Galloway says that he can tell you himself that at least half of Labour MPs are members of the Labour Friends of Israel. He states ‘Isn’t it about time that you demanded that your MP’s first allegiance was to Britain? That their first responsibility should be to debate and decide what Britain’s foreign policy should be, rather than be agents for a somebody’s else’s country?’ He then goes on to say, ‘And when that somebody else’s country is a country of gangsters that murder people, including British people, and for a very long time’.
He states that the Israel lobby has been in Westminster and Whitehall before, they tried to murder Churchill when he was leading the country in the epic battle against Fascism, the perpetrators of the Holocaust which murdered six million Jews. They planted bombs in the Foreign Office and Whitehall, which killed British officials. Talking about the Stern Gang in Israel, he describes how they hanged two British sergeants in an orange grove and took pictures of it so that it could be used as propaganda around the world. The blew up more than 90 British civil servants in a hotel in Jerusalem. He goes on to say that Israel invented terrorism, or at least, modern terrorism. Yet it now calls its victims, the Palestinians, terrorists and themselves the victims of terror. Before we sort out the Middle East and its problems, we have to sort out our own parliament and democratic system. He states
We must not tolerate its subversion by a foreign power. We cannot tolerate members of Parliament being bought and paid for by a foreign power. Because we can never know, when they say, when they ask, when they do what they do in parliament, we can never know if its in our interests or it’s in the interests of someone else.
He states that he hasn’t seen the Al-Jazeera documentary yet, but when he does, he’s sure he’ll have the chance to come to talk to us about it again.
The Israelis didn’t invent modern terrorism. It first seems to have appeared in the wave of assassinations carried out by nationalists and radicals, including anarchists and socialists/ Communists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like the various plots in Russia to kill the tsar. But certainly the founders of Israel used terror in their attempt to overthrow British rule in Palestine. The Stern Gang not only killed the two sergeants, they also booby-trapped the bodies to kill the British squaddies come to retrieve their remains. The bombing of the hotel in Jerusalem was the King David, and the attack is notorious. However, I was not aware that Zionist terrorists had planted a bomb in Whitehall, though I don’t doubt it occurred. Galloway is also clearly speculating when he describes the slush fund procured by Masot as mainly for the overthrow of Jeremy Corbyn, but I have no doubt that here he’s also right.
And he’s right about the threat they pose to British politics and democracy, no matter how much they may try to pose as victims and whine about anti-Semitic tropes.
One of the speakers at the far right ‘free speech’ rally in Whitehall tomorrow is Stefan Molyneaux. Molyneaux’s a libertarian with a bitter hatred of Islam, and is one of the major figures in the antifeminist men’s rights movement. British male feminist and scourge of racists and fascists Kevin Logan has a video on him as part of his series on misogynists, ‘The Descent of the Manosphere’. In this video from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, one of Seder’s fellow hosts talks about a disturbing rant from Molyneux they’ve been sent from a listener.
It’s truly scary. In it, Molyneux tells one of his listeners that he is right to blame his mother for the bad treatment he had from his father, because women love, marry and procreate with stupid and evil men. He then goes on to blame women for just about all the evils of the modern world, including nuclear weapons, national debt and genocide.
The presenter also points out that Molyneux and the people, who follow him up, also seem similar to the mass shooter Elliot Roger. Roger was frustrated at not being able to get a girlfriend, made a video in which he also ranted about girls and women choosing bad men over a ‘gentleman’ like him, and then went off on his shooter spree to kill a few women, and the men, who attempted to defend them or simply got in the way. These people really believe that women are only there for their sexual pleasure.
It says very much about the type of people speaking at the rally tomorrow, which include Tommy Robinson of the EDL and Lauren Southern, that Molyneux’s with them. Quite apart from Molyneux’s own libertarianism, which would have everything privatised and the welfare state utterly destroyed.
Tomorrow the far right will be holding a ‘Day for Freedom’ rally in Whitehall in London. Speakers at the rally include racists and xenophobes such as Tommy Robinson, the founder of the EDL, Laura Southern, and ‘virtuous troll’ Milo Yiannopoulos. This is part of the general strategy of the far right in America and Canada to claim that they are defending free speech against the attempts by the left to close it down. They are trying to roll back the left’s attacks on hate speech against minorities, such as ethnic minorities, Muslims, gays, women and the transgendered.
In this video, male feminist and foe of the far right, Kevin Logan, comments on how ridiculous their promotional video for the event is. This shows the various speakers with tape covering their mouths. Then, to funky background music, they take the tape off. Logan first of all comments that the production standards for the Daesh videos have really improved, before making the point that, for people who are supposedly silenced, they’re very vocal. They never shut up.
There is an issue here with the free speech, as I’ve said before. Milo Yiannopoulos did a tour of American campuses ostensibly to promote it and attack the left’s policy of no-platforming extreme rightwing speakers. In fact, this is an pretext for them trying to bring racism, Islamophobia, homophobia and anti-feminism back into the mainstream.
Some of the campus bans on speakers are excessive and, in my view, do severely limit free speech. Germaine Greer, for example, was given a no-platform at one university, because of her attitude that transwomen – male to female transsexuals – aren’t real women. It’s a very controversial position, and other feminists have accused her of bigotry and misogyny. But behind the laws limiting hate speech and the no-platforming policy is are several very good reasons. The demonization of ethnic minorities by the far right is an attempt to whip up hatred against them, hatred that does lead to real, brutal violence, apart from massive social injustice. And it is extremely dangerous, as shown very clearly by the history of apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, and other Fascist regimes around the world. And the same is true for gays, and transpeople. Logan himself has also attacked the various members of the anti-feminist far right for their sheer misogyny, which can lead to them defending and validating violence against women and even rape. See his series of vlogs, ‘Descent of the Manosphere’ for far too many examples.
Antifa are also planning to turn up tomorrow, so there will be counterprotests. I’m afraid that there might be violence, so it might be wise for some people to avoid that area tomorrow.
This is another little video from RT, warning about a demonstration at Whitehall which is due to be held this Sunday, 6th May 2018. The demonstration is being organised by the far right, and include Tommy Robinson, Milo Yiannopolous, Count Dankula and Laura Southern.
The organisers have said it is to defend freedom of speech, without which our other freedoms crumble away.
Antifa have said that it will be a march of far right, anti-Muslim bigots and ‘anti-Fascists from across the country need to take to the streets to oppose them.’
Tommy Robinson is the founder and former leader of the Islamophobic English Defence League. Milo Yiannopoulos is the Alt-Right speaker and ‘virtuous troll’, who attacks gays, ethnic minorities, feminism, Islam and the left in general. Earlier this week I put up a video of him leaving a New York bar. He’d popped in just as the Democratic Socialists of America New York chapter were holding a meeting. So they chanted at him, ‘Get out, Nazi scum!’
Yiannopoulos was claiming that he was pushed and threatened, but as the video shows, nothing of the sort happened. Sam Seder and his team over at Sam Seder’s Majority Report also questioned whether it was quite an accident that Yiannopoulos just happened to go there for a drink while the Democratic Socialists were holding a meeting. It looks, they said, like he was trying to put himself back in the news and trying to boost his ailing career again.
And Lauren Southern is another fixture of the Far Right. She was part of the anti-immigrant team, who were planning to cruise round the Med rounding up immigrant boats. They were stopped after a massive outcry and campaigns by anti-racist groups like Hope Not Hate.
Yiannopoulos and the rest of the Far Right have been trying to organise meetings and conferences under the claim that they are defending freedom of speech against attack by the left.
There are issues of democracy involved, so they’re right about that. The legislation criminalising ‘hate speech’ does contravene absolute freedom of speech. But it does so in order to protect ordinary people from abuse, assault and possibly murder whipped up against them for no other reason than that they are of a different ethnicity, colour or religion.
And I don’t believe for a single minute that the far right believes in true freedom of speech either. Fascists have always done their level best to suppress the activities and arguments of their enemies through brute force.
I don’t like the implicit threat in this report, that the meeting will result in violence between the Far Right and the anti-Fascists. But I agree with the principle that anti-Fascists have to march to protest them.
Robin Ramsay, the editor of Lobster, has some very interesting comments about the recent libels in the Torygraph about Jeremy Corbyn meeting a Czech spy, going under cover as a diplomat, in his ‘The View from the Bridge’ column in the latest issue, no. 75.. Or rather, not about that story so much – he considers most of it invention, especially the part about money changing hands – but about another story in the same issue of the Torygraph about Rob Hayward. Hayward was the General Secretary of the Labour Party from 1972 to 1982. According to the Torygraph article, he had secret meetings with KGB officials at the Russian Embassy, where he talked about circumventing the power of the parliamentary Labour party, which would allow him to come out with the same agenda alongside the Communists. The article was written by one Giles Udy, who is described in his publisher’s blurb as a member of the council of the Keston Institute.
The Keston Institute specialises in the study of religion in the Soviet Union and the Communist states. It was set up by the Reverend Michael Bourdeaux, Sir John Lawrence, Leonard Schapiro and Peter Reddaway. Ramsay writes of it and its founders
Schapiro wrote books for, and Reddaway was a member of, the Information Research Department (IRD) the Foreign Office’s anti-subversion, anti-Soviet organisation about which a great deal has been written, not least in these columns. Schapiro was also a member, and briefly chair of, Brian Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). 6 In other words, the Keston Institute is a product of the Anglo-American anti-Soviet and anti-communist apparatus created during the Cold War. This explains why Mr Udy was given access to surveillance tapes of the Soviet embassy in London. If it isn’t funded by them, Keston liaises with the British security and intelligence services. With the arrival of Jeremy Corby and a left-leaning Labour Party membership, the dust is being blown off a lot of old files all over Whitehall . . . .
The Cold Warriors are back. All the bug-eyed paranoiacs, who were convinced that Harold Wilson was a KGB spy, whose number included James Jesus Angleton, the head of the CIA, and Margaret Thatcher, are now back at it running red scare stories against Jeremy Corbyn. ‘Cos he threatens the course of western capitalism by wanting to renationalise the health service, parts of the national grid and the railways. And this is clearly enough to panic the secret state’s guardians of neoliberalism, the same kind of people who used to rant about ‘union subversion’ and thought up schemes to have left wingers, including journos, interned somewhere in the Hebrides or Shetland after a right-wing coup had overthrown the Labour government.
Lobster is at https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/. Go to number 75 on the side column, click on it, and open ‘The View From the Bridge’. This piece about the Torygraph is entitled ‘Just Like Old Times’, because, obviously, it is just like old times when the British Secret State was doing its level best to bring down Labour.
The I newspaper on Friday (25th November 2016) carried a report that recently released cabinet papers reveal that Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe continued to plan for the abolition of the welfare state and the privatisation of the NHS even after the rest of the cabinet violently and vehemently rejected her plans. Here’s what the paper wrote
Thatcher’s plan to abolish the welfare state outraged MPs
The Prime Minister tried to advance incendiary proposals despite uproar in Cabinet. By Cahal Milmo.
Margaret Thatcher and her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe secretly sought to breathe new life into incendiary plans to dismantle the welfare state even after they had been defeated in a cabinet “riot”, newly released files show.
Shortly after she came to power in 1979, Mrs Thatcher instructed a Whitehall think-tank to put forward proposals on how to shake up long-term public spending based on the free market principles she spent her 11 years in office seeking to apply.
But what the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) put forward in 1982 was the most radical and vexing blueprint of the Thatcher era, including a call for the end of the NHS by scrapping free universal healthcare, introducing compulsory charges for schooling and sweeping defence cuts.
The proposals proved far too militant for the “wets” in Mrs Thatcher’s frontbench team and were shouted down at a meeting in September that year which Nigel Lawson, the then Energy Secretary, later described in his memoirs as “the nearest thing to a Cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration.”
A chastened Mrs Thatcher, who later claimed she had been “horrified” at the CPRS document, responded to the leak of a watered-down version of the paper by using her speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1982 to insist that the NHS is “safe with us”.
But Treasury documents released at the National Archives in Kew, west London, show that the Iron Lady and her first Chancellor did not let the project drop and planned behind the scenes to “soften up” the ministers in charge of the main departments targeted by the CPRS.
In November 1982, a memo was sent informing Sir Geoffrey that Mrs Thatcher had set up meetings with her Health Secretary, Norman Fowler, Education Secretary Keith Joseph and Defence Secretary John Nott. The memo said: “This series of meetings is designed to soften up the three big spenders. Without their support the operation will not work.”
The document details a political pincer movement between No 10 and the Treasury with Sir Geoffrey asked to ensure that no department’s funding was ring-fenced – although there was recognition that the Prime Minister’s public position on the NHS made that difficult. It said: “Your main aim, I suggest, should be to ensure that no sacred cows are prematurely identified. Given the Prime Minister’s concern about the NHS, this may be difficult.”
The files suggest the ploy met immediate opposition. A later Treasury memo said: “DHSS [Department of Health and Social Security] officials say there is no chance that Mr Fowler would agree to further study of this idea. I imagine that in the circumstances, and especially given the Prime Minister’s speech at Brighton, it is difficult to press them.”
The documents go on to reveal that Sir Geoffrey had a certain ambivalence towards how the Thatcherite project should proceed.
When the Adam Smith Institute came forward with a project to set out a plan for radical Whitehall restructuring to be enacted after the 1983 general election, Sir Geoffrey accepted the concerns of his political adviser that the scheme would fail.
Sir Geoffrey Wrote: “Every proposal will be seized on and hung round our neck. I see v great harm.” (p. 16).
This gives the lie to Thatcher’s claim in her autobiography that when she reviewed the NHS, she found it to be basically found, and only felt that it should have given more space to private industry. It also shows that Leon Brittan was also lying in his autobiography when he also claimed that the Labour party had lied about the Tories planning to abolish the NHS. They had considered it in 1983, and again considered it four years later in 1987.
As for the cabinet rebels who ‘rioted’ against Thatcher’s scheme, from what I’ve read they were motivated not from principle but from the realisation that if she tried to carry out her plans, they’d all be out of a job come the next election.
This did not stop the Tories carrying on the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS. Thatcher carried on chipping away at it. So did John Major, and it was kicked into a higher gear by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And now David Cameron and his wretched successor, Theresa May, have nearly completed the job.
I also like to know who the members of the CPRS were, who recommended the complete dismantlement of the welfare state. At the moment, ideological thugs like them hide behind their extremely low profiles. If the politicians, who’ve embraced their ideas are attacked on lose their seats, these people are nevertheless safe, in that they slink off and get another seat at the governmental table somewhere else. Mike on his blog pointed out how Wasserman, one of the architects behind Thatcher’s plan to privatise the NHS, was also one of the official invited back to advise Cameron on how to ‘reform’ it, in other words, privatise more of it.
It’s about time the shadowy figures behind these ideas were named and shamed, as well as the foul politicos who back them.
I found this description of the profoundly anti-democratic nature of the British public school system, and its pernicious effect in creating class inequality and blocking genuine modernisation and social, political and technological improvements in British society in C.A.R. Crosland’s The Conservative Enemy: A Programme of Radical Reform for the 1960s (London: Jonathan Cape 1962). Despite the fact that this was written well over fifty years ago, it’s still, unfortunately, very true and is amply demonstrated by the current Tory government, headed as it is by the old Etonian limpet, David Cameron.
The public schools offend not only against the ‘weak’, let alone the ‘strong’, ideal of equal opportunity; they offend even more against any ideal of social cohesion or democracy. This privileged stratum of education, the exclusive preserve of the wealthier classes, socially and physically segregated from the state educational system, is the greatest single cause of stratification and class-consciousness in Britain.
It is not, of course, the only cause. The effect of being for so long a great imperial power, and the psychology of discipline, hierarchy, and master-subject relationships which this induced; the persistence (and indeed continual reinforcement ) of an hereditary aristocracy; the absurd flummery surrounding the Monarchy; the obsessive snobbery (even amongst a section of the intelligentsia) about birth and titles; the deep-seated differences in accent; the national propensity to kowtow and manoeuvre for precedence – these would produce strong feelings of social deference and superiority whatever the educational system.
But the school system is the greatest divisive influence. It is no accident that Britain, the only advanced country with a national private elite system of education, should also be the most class-ridden country. The Scandinavian countries, the least class-ridden, have no significant private sector; such few private schools as exist are mainly for backward children. In France, while many private primary schools exist, middle-class children normally go tot he public lycee at the secondary stage. In Germany there are half a dozen would-be-English public schools. But only an insignificant minority even of wealthier children attend them, and the carry no national prestige; an Old Salem boy may care as passionately about his alma mater as an Old Etonian, but his prospective employer or bank manager, let along the rest of the population, could not care less. In the United States, it is true, there are not only a large number of non-exclusive private Catholic schools, but a growing number of ‘smart’ upper-class private schools which, being often academically superior to the state schools, confer an advantage in getting into the best universities. But disturbing as this trend is, these schools still do not constitute a nation-wide elite system with the divisive social influence of the English public schools; nor, given the anti-elitist psychology of the American people, are they ever likely to.
No historically-minded champion of the public schools could possibly deny that schools can have either an integrative or divisive social influence. For it was indeed the historic function of the public schools in the nineteenth century to assimilate the sons of the new and self-made middle class into the ranks of the hereditary ruling class; and even today they fulfil an integrative role for the sons of self-made men. Similarly the American high school, whatever else may be said about it, has brilliantly fulfilled the function of assimilating ethnically diverse groups into a common national culture. (As a matter of fact, most of what else is said about it by English critics is false. They always assume that its lower educational standards are due to the fact of its being ‘comprehensive’, whereas in reality they are due, as the quite different Swedish experience demonstrates, to certain specifically American factors – the attachment to ‘life-adjustment’ education, the automatic ‘social promotion by age groups and the lack of grading by ability, the preference for vocational courses, the acute shortage of teachers, the low quality of many of the teachers, and so on.) A school system can either increase or diminish social disparities; and the British public schools manifestly increase them.
And they do not even, today, provide efficient leadership. It is again no coincidence that Britain, the only country with a national elite system of private boarding schools, from which its leadership is still disproportionately drawn, should be falling so badly behind other democratic countries in the achievement of widely-accepted national goals – behind western Europe in economic performance, Scandinavia in social welfare and urban planning, the United States in technology and innovation. In the nineteenth century the public schools, disagreeable as they may have been, did at least train a leadership perfectly fitted to the needs of a growing empire. For this training, their characteristic features – the boarding, the hierarchical discipline, the emphasis on games, the carefully-nurtured sense of innate superiority – were precisely apt. They are not, however, (although now considerably modified), equally apt for a mid-twentieth-century world full of computers, Communism, trade unions and African nationalism. This is hardly surprising. The quality of leadership is not, after all, an absolute and unvarying quality. It is specific to particular situations; and what makes for good leadership in one situation may make for bad leadership in another. The public schools today, although providing ‘a good education’ in a rather narrow sense, do not generate the right type of leadership for a democratic, scientific, welfare world.
Almost every emphasis which they inculcate – on manners and ‘character’, on the all-rounder and the amateur, on the insular, the orthodox and the traditional – is wrong from the point of view of contemporary goals. it is this which partly explains those national characteristics which are at long last becoming the subject of widespread hostile comment: the reluctance to innovate, the refusal to grapple with problems, the lack of pride in maximum professional achievement, and the cult of the gifted amateur, of the smooth and rounded Wykehamist who can turn his hand to anything with a natural, effortless superiority, and with no need to stoop to the humourless professionalism of Huns or Yanks. Fundamentally this reflects a failure of English elite education to achieve the highest of all education ideals: that of fostering inquiry, dissent, and critical intellectuality. A country in which the most damning insult which Lord Salisbury could fling at Mr Iain Macleod was that he is ‘too clever by half’ is not a good prospect in the modern world. Some of our upper classes are as anti-intellectual as the Know-Nothings.
But this attitude might be attributable to aristocracy, not to the schools themselves. Unfortunately, parallel faults can found in those fields which traditional represent the culmination of the British elite system of education: the Civil Service, and Oxford and Cambridge. Beautifully adapted to its pristine task of administering a going concern without excessive interference, the British Civil Service remains notable for its honesty, industry and administrative competence. But it has failed to adapt to a world which requires the long rather than the short view, active planning rather than passive administration, novel rather than traditional ideas. Thus the Treasury has been astonishingly behind France, Holland and Sweden in adopting long-term economic planning. The Foreign Office was ponderously slow to wake up to the existence of new and revolutionary post-war situations in the Middle East and elsewhere. The Ministries of Health and National Insurance have introduced new social policies without even a research unit to investigate their probably effects. The Ministry of Education takes decisions for or against different types of school without conducting any research into their different consequences, and has little idea of how many teachers we need to carry out its own policies. The typical Whitehall attitude of mind-thorough and precise, but pedantic and unadventurous – is in part a reflection of the Oxford and Cambridge background from which most Civil Servants come. But are Oxford and Cambridge really as good as Harvard and the Sorbonne! Their farcical performance over the introduction of sociology – a lamentable compound of hidebound traditionalism and facetious superciliousness – makes one doubt it….
The need is not for more public-school-type education for the top few per cent of the population. Indeed, the whole notion of an elite-type education is inappropriate in Britain today. For both our greatest need and our largest untapped resource now lie below the level of the cleverest few per cent – although disastrously many even of these are still slipping through the net. From the viewpoint of efficiency as well as equality, we need less concentration on an educational elite and more on the average standard of attainment.
The case against the public schools, then, has grown stronger even in the last few years. First, the type of leadership which they provide is seen to be less and less appropriate to the national goals of the 1960s. Secondly, as we grasp the fact that intelligence is partly an acquired characteristic, we see even more clearly that the whole notion of an exclusive and privileged education is inconsistent with equality of opportunity. Thirdly, despite the gradual process of democratic reform in other directions, the socially divisive influence which these schools exert show disturbingly little sign of abating. (pp.174-8).
This is clearly a dated piece, as Britain was, until we left the EU, something like the fifth largest economy in the world, and England has led the world in the number of patents that come out of our universities, quite apart from the more obvious points such as the collapse of Communism. But as this government’s policies amply demonstrate, the wealth is increasingly concentrate in a very narrow circle of the extremely rich, at the expense of everyone else. And while Britain may be scientifically immensely innovative, those innovations have tended to be developed elsewhere. Maglev transport is a case in point. The idea of trains powered by magnetic levitation was the idea of the British scientist, Laithwaite. There were serious experiments in its application by British Rail, until this was axed during the cost-cutting of the early 1970s. Research was then taken over by the Germans. Which partly explains why Volkswagen’s slogan, Vorsprung durch Technik – something like ‘Advance through Technology’, isn’t translated into English.
In short, the main function of the British public schools is to lock the upper classes in power, and the rest of the country in a quasi-feudal class servility. And one of its products, Boris Johnson, looks like he’s going to be the next PM.
Oh, couldn’t we have at last at least one leader, who went to a comprehensive!
The veteran Labour MP and trade unionist, Dennis Skinner, also makes some political recommendations of his own in his autobiographical Sailing Close to the Wind: Reminiscences, published two years ago in 2014. He summarises his plans, saying
So I’m fighting for a new Labour government to axe the bedroom tax, save the NHS, cut fuel bills, created jobs for the young and raise living standards. My personal manifesto will be to the left of that of the party but I’m committed 100 per cent to the election of Labour candidates across Britain. (p.313).
As for the proposals themselves, he writes (headlines in bold are mine)
I’ve a few suggestions of my own to boost Labour’s popularity and beat the Tories.
End Privatisation
To start the ball rolling we should end expensive privatisation instead of paying a fortune to contractors such as G4S, Serco and Capita that make a mess of services in the process. It’s time we got back to publicly run, publicly owned services provided in the public interest.
Nationalise the Railways
On the railways, the £900m surplus on East Coast trains, operated publicly after the private sector crashed twice, shows us the way ahead. Instead of boosting Richard Branson’s profits, a nationalised railway could make a profit and generate the cash to improve every station in Britain.
A ‘Robin Hood’ Tax on City Speculators
If we want extra money for the National Health Service and social care, we should levy a Robin Hood tax on speculators in the city. Directing the funds raised directly to health and care, including help for the mentally handicapped, rather than to the Treasury, would be immensely popular. We could start with a low rate and increase it when the tax proves to be popular, as I’m sure it will be, by emulating the one per cent National Insurance rise for the NHS when Gordon Brown was Chancellor.
Scrap Trident
Scrapping Trident would free up billions of pounds for a massive house building programme so everybody has a roof over their head and nobody is homeless. The position on council house sales has to change or local authorities won’t build houses if they know they must sell them cheaply after a few years.
End Nuclear Weapons, Restore Local Democracy
The savings from defusing nuclear weapons can also help save local democracy. Councils are being swamped by central government. Powers are either grabbed by Whitehall or transferred to unelected quangos. Ever since the Clay Cross rent rebellion, Whitehall has dictated to communities. We need to reverse the trend.
Nationalise the Utilities
On the question of the utilities – gas, electricity, water – this is the moment to start taking them back into public ownership. We took control after 1945 and right up to Wilson’s final government, when he nationalised aerospace with a majority of only three, public ownership was advanced. To cap energy bills is a good idea but a better plan is to control utilities by restoring public ownership in Britain of firms that are currently owned in France, Germany and almost every country on the globe.
Spend More on Education; End Privatised Schooling
Spending on education more than doubled under the last Labour government, which was impressive. let’s stop the growth of faith schools and misnamed free schools – tax payers fund them so they’re not free – by enhancing the powers of local authorities to champion the education of every single child.
Raise Minimum Wage
We need to end the pay freezes. The people that are carrying the burden of the bankers’ ramp are mainly workers at the bottom of the scale. The Living Wage shouldn’t be optional. Everybody should get it. But let’s not stop at £7.65 an hour outside London and £8.80 in the capital. The trade union campaign for 10 an hour should be Labour policy. A decent day’s work deserves a decent day’s pay.
Ban Zero Hours Contracts
We should introduce legislation to outlaw zero hours contracts and private employment agencies. Playing off worker against worker, ferrying into Britain cheap labour to undercut employees, is poisoning community relations. Sticking 10, 12 or 15 eastern Europeans into a house then deducting large sums form their earnings is in nobody’s interests except cowboy employers. Reasserting the role of Jobcentres as local labour exchanges will improve wages and conditions.
Increase Trade Union Rights
Trade union rights must be strengthened significantly, including the abolition of sequestration. Industrial action requires two sides to be involved in a dispute, yet it is union funds that are seized. Rebalancing employment rights in favour of workers and unions is essential if we are to build a fairer economy.
Abandon Tory Obsession with Fiscal Restraint
And we must escape the dumb economic mantra about balancing the books. There would have been no Spirit of ’45 if Clement Attlee’s goal was to balance the books. There would have been no NHS, new Welfare State, new council houses and unemployment wouldn’t have dropped to 440,000 in 1950, after only five years of the finest Labour government ever. In fact the finest government ever.
We need spending to get people to work and the economy growing. You don’t need a crystal ball to see where we should be going. We can find the way ahead by reading the history books. (pp. 309-12).
He states that they’re not just his ideas, but have been discussed for the last 10 or 20 years in the Bolsover constituency.
I have some caveats. I don’t like the attack on faith schools, having been to an Anglican faith school myself, and I don’t share his euroscepticism. But other than that, I think he’s absolutely right. Thatcherism has done immense damage to this country. Now, after thirty years of it, it is long past the time it should have been discarded.
One of the most frightening developments in contemporary international politics is the rise of extreme Right-wing, nationalist and indeed, explicitly neo-Nazi movements across Europe – from Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, PEGIDA and the Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany, and similar regimes in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine. Germany has some legal protection against extremist radicalism in the Basic Law. Under the Grundgesetz, the only political organisations that are tolerated are those which recognise democracy. It was introduced after the War as part of the denazification process, and has been used against the extreme Right and Left. It was invoked in the 1970s to ban the NPD, or National Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi outfit, and earlier in the 1950s it was invoked against the KPD, the German Communist Party. They survived by reforming, and inserting a clause into their constitution stating that they recognised a period of democracy in the development towards Socialism. I also wonder if some of the Islamist firebrands that were thrown out of the Federal Republic a few years ago weren’t also deported because their preaching violated the Basic Law. After all, if anything violates a law protecting democracy, it’s the preachers’ violent denunciation of it and demands for the establishment of an absolute caliphate.
There have been attempts by the UN to pass laws against the glorification of the Nazis and the Third Reich. Michelle, one of the commenters on this blog, posted this comment about them, and the countries that either voted against the motion or abstained.
Countries at the UN vote on fighting the forces of international Nazism “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”
For most people and nations, passing laws against the glamorisation of the Nazis and everything they stood for really isn’t a problem. The horrors committed by the Third Reich are widely known, at least in the West, and the regime has been consistently condemned by mainstream media and politicians since the War and its attendant horrors, particularly the Holocaust.
In the case of Ukraine, it’s not hard to see why the country voted against the ban. Modern Ukraine’s national hero is Stepan Bandera, who led the campaign against what he viewed as the Russian/ Soviet occupation of his country during the Second World War. Ukraine had broken away and tried to seek independence after the First World War, but was then annexed by the emerging Soviet Union under Lenin. Unfortunately, Bandera attempted to gain Ukraine’s independence by allying and collaborating with the invading Nazis, though he was briefly interned in a concentration camp. See this documentary.
It’s less obvious why supposedly democratic nations, like America and Canada, that have never had to make a terrible choice between occupying totalitarian governments, should vote against the motion. Or why Britain should have abstained. One solution to the problem is that since before the Second World War, the British and American security agencies have recruited extreme Right-wing eastern European nationalists as part of their strategy to contain the Soviet Union and the rise of Communism. John Burns in his review of Stephen Dorril’s MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (Fourth Estate: London 2000) in Lobster 40 notes the involvement of both the British and French intelligence services in the Intermarium movement. This was a Roman Catholic lay organisation, formed in Paris in the mid-1930s, which had as its goal the creation of a federation of stretching from Lithuania in the north to Croatia in the Adriatic, with Poland at its centre. The organisation’s chief, Otto von Habsburg, was given a subsidy of £50,000 a month by the head of MI6, Menzies. Habsburg later moved to the US, and the British tried to get the Americans to take over its funding. It officially died the death when Molotov rejected it on the grounds that it was anti-Soviet, a view which was then conceded by the US.
The scheme was supported after the War by the Vatican, where many senior priests and clergy took the leadership of the organisation. It became one of the first organisations that openly campaigned for the release of Waffen-SS Prisoners of War. The movement’s headquarters moved to Rome after the French lost interest in 1946. They then moved to the US, where they were heavily involved in CIA anti-Communist front organisations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation. The article states that these became the bases for the liberation movements in those countries sponsored by the CIA and MI6.
The article also discusses the involvement of the British and American intelligence services in the Promethean League. This was formed shortly after the Russian Revolution, and was a conspiratorial independence movement for all of the minorities in the Soviet Union. However, the most prominent members were the Ukrainians and Georgians. By 1925 it was also receiving financial support from MI6’s Menzies. Kim Philby and Guy Burgess were also involved in this, and duly kept their Soviet masters well informed. It ceased to exist by 1949, but supplied many of the personnel for later, anti-Soviet eastern European nationalist groups, most notably the Belorussians and Ukrainians. These formed another organisation, INTEGRAL. This, according to Dorril, was a deliberate attempt to invoke the memory of the ‘integral nationalists’ of 1930s Europe, who held Fascistic views about race and culture. Stephen Dorril himself, writing in Lobster 15, states that MI6 used former collaborators with the Nazis in its anti-Communist operations in Latvia and Albania. See his review of Anthony Cavendish’s Inside Intelligence (Palu Publishing Ltd 1987), pp. 1-3, (p.1). Lobster’s long term editor, Robin Ramsay, also discusses the very strong Nazi element in WACL – the World Anti-Communist League, which includes Conservatives, anti-Semites, Nazis and the leaders of South American death squads. He states that CIA involvement in the organisation has always been strong, and that every now and then there are hints that the dividing line between it and the Agency has now ceased to exist. Ramsay also notes that Radio Liberty, one of the CIA financed stations broadcasting to the Soviet Union, was transmitting increasingly anti-Semitic material from Ukrainian emigres.
Ramsay also states that it the Ukrainian community in Britain, which formed the backbone of the World Anti-Communist League. It was led here by Yaroslav Stetso. Stetso styled himself the former Ukrainian Prime Minister. He was also the head of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, or ABN, which was formed after the War and financied by the British and US intelligence agencies. In Ukraine itself, Stetso had been part of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, which had collaborated with the Nazis and took part in pogroms and atrocities against the Jews. At WACL’s AGM in 1986, General Singlaub told the assembled Rightists that Stetso’s widow had received a personal message of condolence from Ronald Reagan praising her husband’s contribution to the struggle against tyranny.
The same issue of Lobster also carries a review of Scott and Jon Lee Anderson’s Inside the League (Dodd, Mead and Co., New York 1986), on WACL. This again notes that in this country, the League was headed by Stetso and the ABN ‘a bunch of Nazi-collaborators, murderers and anti-Semites funded after WW2 by the US and British governments’. It also is very pessimistic about Britain actually doing anything about the remaining former Nazis living in the UK, as to do so would risk exposing their links to MI5, MI6 and the mandarins at Whitehall.
There is also a review of ‘Date-Line Washington: Anti-Semitism and the Airwaves’, by Lars-Erik Nelson in Foreign Policy 65, Winter 1986. That also discusses the way the involvement of Ukrainian ex-pats in Radio Liberty under Reagan has also resulted in the broadcaster becoming anti-Semitic, while at the same time these groups are whitewashing history, claiming that they didn’t collaborate with Nazis, form a Ukrainian division in the SS, or assist in the persecution of the Jews and the pogroms.
From this, it looks very much like ‘No’ vote by the US and Canada, and Britain’s abstention, was due to a desire to preserve the links between the intelligence services and extreme Right-wing groups in countries like Ukraine. As well as to avoid anyone starting to do anything dodgy, such as invoking such a law to examine such links.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 