So it’s finally happened. As just about everyone expected, but nobody outside his circle of the Tory far right actually wanted, yesterday Boris Johnson finally slithered into office. It was already on the cards on Monday, when the papers published this piccie of an expectant, jubilant Boris.
It sounds ridiculous, but I know people, who were genuinely unsettled by this image. They described him as looking mad, possessed even. I think it was probably due to a loathing of the man’s vile personal character and views coupled to his goofy expression. It also struck me that with his eye’s wide and his mouth wide open, there’s a certain superficial resemblance to the expression on this notorious American mass murderer, Charles Manson.
Which means that when they saw the picture of Johnson, subconsciously they saw this:
Which is enough to give anyone the creeping horrors.
Now Johnson isn’t a vile, unrepentant serial killer and cult leader like the late Manson. But he is an obscenely wealthy aristo, who has just appointed a cabinet of similarly obscenely wealthy aristos, none of whom seem to have the old virtues of genuine concern for the poor of the Tory paternalists. Because being ‘wet’ went out with Maggie Thatcher. They also stand for nothing more than their own enrichment and the simultaneous impoverishment of the less fortunate. They are vehemently pro-Brexit, anti-welfare and for privatisation and deregulation, despite the immense harm these zombie economics have done to this country and its proud, fine people. And it hardly needs to be said that they’re also pro-fracking and against the environment.
Two days ago on Tuesday, male feminist and anti-Fascist YouTuber Kevin Logan put up a video, Super Rich F**ks, which exactly described the Tory front bench. It was a piece of musical satire, mirrored from Dirty Little Owl’s channel, which showed images of various leading Tory politicians, with captions showing their personal wealth and a short piece about their horrendous voting record, while a song plays in the background viciously sending them up.
It begins with the statement that the Tories have a combined net worth of £2.4 billion, before going to the following –
Michael Gove
Net worth, £1 million +
Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability.
Chris Grayling
Net worth, £1.5 million
Almost always voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms. (Bedroom tax).
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson
Net worth £1.5 million
Almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits.
Is a massive child.
Theresa May
Net worth: £2 million
While her husband’s £1.1 trillion investment firm avoided UK tax, she cut 2,000 police, raised tax on the self-employed and took benefits from 60,000 disabled people.
Penny Mordaunt
Net work: £2.5 million
Always voted to reduce help with council tax for those in financial need.
Philip Hammond
Net worth: £8.2 million.
Consistently voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices.
Sajid Javid
Net worth: £8.5 million
Almost always voted against spending public money to create jobs for young people who’ve spent a long time unemployed.
Lord Stratchclyde
Net worth: £10 million
Voted against free school meals and milk.
Wryly commenting on the girth of the above aristo, the video comments that ‘clearly hasn’t suffered a want of meals himself.’
Jeremy Hunt
Net worth: £14 million
Here the video quotes his views advocating the destruction of the NHS:
‘Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private and public provision, in effect denationalising the provision of healthcare in Britain.’
Adam Afriyie
Net worth: £50 million
Voted for reduction in benefits for disabled and ill claimants required to participate in activities intended to increase their chances of obtaining work.
Zac Goldsmith
Net worth: £75 million
Voted in favour of proposed spending cuts and changes to the welfare system in favour of spending on new nuclear weapons.
Lord Deighton
Net worth: £95 million
Voted against protections for pensions being ‘raided’ when the master trust fails.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Net worth: £100 million
Voted for cuts in Housing Benefits for recipients in homelessness hostels, refuges, sheltered housing and accommodation for people with ongoing support needs.
Richard Benyon – richest MP in the UK
Net worth: £110 million
Voted to set the rate of increase for certain benefits, payments and tax credits at 1%, rather than in line with the increase in prices at 2.2%.
The Marquess of Salisbury
Net worth: £330 million
Receives £250,000 each year of taxpayers’ money for his inherited 10,000 acres, mostly in Jersey.
Lord Ashcroft
Net worth: £1.2 billion.
A tax exile in Belize who has poured millions into the Conservative Party over the years and strongly supported Brexit, which would remove Britain from the jurisdiction of forthcoming tax avoidance rules in the EU.
This bit has a clip from Panorama showing Brexit hiding in the gents’ toilets to avoid having to answer questions on tax avoidance.
I dare say that some of these grotesques are no longer in power, like Theresa May, thanks to Johnson’s massive purge of the cabinet. But those, who have replaced them are pretty much the same. They are what Private Eye once described as ‘the futile rich’. Their only concern is to grab more money for themselves, and steal it from the mouths of the poor.
And the press are complicit in this. Owned by millionaires themselves, they’ve now started a campaign of truly nauseating sycophancy, praising Boris to the rafters. Toby Young even raved about how Boris was a type of ‘Nietzschean superman’.
And the Beeb enthusiastically joined in last night on the One Show, where one of the guests was his father.
It’s all just Tory lies, one after another. Boris won’t do anything for this country. He doesn’t stand for more investment in the NHS or public services. He won’t put 20,000 more rozzers on the street. But he will privatise the NHS and cut welfare spending like the Tories always have. And Brexit will decimate our manufacturing industry, just as they’re anti-environmentalism will destroy our natural environment.
Get these thugs and hypocrites out now!
Boris, do what you said ought to be done when Blair transferred power to Brown and call an election so we can kick your sorry rear end out of No. 10.
On Wednesday, Mike put up a piece reporting and commenting on a story by Business Insider about the rather unpleasant attitude Shaun Bailey, the Tory candidate for mayor of London, has for girls from poor backgrounds. He has made a series of comments in an article he wrote for the Torygraph, at the Tory party conference in 2008 and in 2005, when he was a social worker, claiming that young women deliberately became pregnant to get a flat or benefits. He also said that poor people need rules to stop them from turning to crime, and that girls were more likely to start smoking than boys because they had the ‘smoker’s attitude’.
Labour’s Rosina Allin-Khan told Buzzfeed, the site that uncovered some of these comments, that it was appalling sexism and misogyny.
Mike in his article points out that Bailey’s campaign team tried to excuse him by saying they were the “blunt words” of someone “who hasn’t figured it all out” but wanted to make a contribution to society by offering his experiences, “however raw they might seem now”.
Mike advises his readers to go to the Business Insider and Buzzfeed articles, look at them, and decide for themselves. But he doubt their decisions will be favourable to Bailey. He recognizes that people’s attitudes change over time, and that we might hear from Bailey a statement disowning his comments. But Mike won’t be holding his breath.
This isn’t the first time Bailey’s shown an unpleasant, bigoted attitude. At the end of last month, Mike put up a piece reporting that Bailey had retweeted an image of Sadiq Khan, the present London mayor, as the Mad Mullah of Londonistan. The Tory party tried to excuse this by saying that he didn’t really look at the image before he retweeted it. Or something like that.
‘Londonistan’ is the name ‘Mad’ Melanie Phillips, a writer for the Heil, has given to Muslim London in her book of the same name, because she claims the capital’s Islamic community is full of Islamist terrorists. And Mike’s article also shows that people on Twitter, including Jeremy Corbyn, were also quick to connect Bailey’s sneer with Zac Goldsmith’s Islamophobic campaign against Sadiq Khan, in which he claimed that his rival was indeed a supporter of Islamist terrorism.
Now we see Bailey repeating the old Tory lie that young women just get pregnant in order to sponge off the state. It’s a lie that’s been repeated endlessly in the Tory press, particularly the Heil. Now I dare say that in the case of some women, who are poor and desperate, this might be the case. I can remember a female friend telling me years ago that if she was homeless, she would try and get pregnant to be rehoused. Incidentally, that young woman was a very hardworking and responsible citizen. It was an expression of the desperate measures she would take, if she was in that position.
I don’t know if the young women Bailey encountered deliberately did get pregnant to get housing and benefits, as he said. For all the ranting about benefit fraud and unmarried mothers in Tory rags like Geordie Grieg’s esteemed organ, the rates of schoolgirl pregnancy and people fraudulently claiming benefits are absolutely miniscule, a fraction of a percent. But thanks to the vile Tory press, a poll of the British public found that they thought 25 per cent of all benefit claims were fraudulent, and the country was drowning in waves of schoolgirl mothers.
And unmarried mothers were on Peter Lilly’s foul little list of the people he hated, which he paraded at a Tory conference back in the 1990s in a weird parody of the Mikado. They’re also a threat to ‘our stock’, according to Maggie’s mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, showing his own eugenicist, Social Darwinist attitude to poverty.
I also wonder if there isn’t a little bit of racism in their as well. Bailey didn’t mention what colour these girls were, but it reminded me very much of the fear Reagan and his supporters whipped up over in America about Black ‘welfare queens’. These are young girls in the ghettos, who supposedly get pregnant by any number of different men in order to claim benefits. A little while ago I came across an article – I think it was in Counterpunch, the American radical magazine and news site – which argued that the Republicans used Blacks and ethnic minorities to hate on other people of colour. They supported the argument with numerous examples of BAME Republicans attacking Muslims as an invasive culture, incompatible with American culture and values, and the Black community for its supposed criminality and contentment to rely on state support. In actual fact, American sociologists have found that while there are real problems of poverty in Black America, they’re the same kind that afflicts White society. The only reason they’re more acute is because Blacks in general are much poorer than Whites.
But perhaps I’m wrong about Bailey. Perhaps he isn’t racist towards other, poorer Blacks. He is, however, retailing the same story the Tories use to justify benefit cuts. And these cuts are pushing people into grinding poverty, and claiming lives.
Racist or not, Bailey, and the party that has adopted and supported him, is a disgrace. He’s a bigot who has no business being mayor of world city like London. Just as Tweezer and the Tories have no business being Prime Minister and the government.
A few days ago Mike over at Vox Political put up a piece commenting on the lamestream media’s reaction, or lack of it, to the photos published in the Mirror of a group of Tory students at Plymouth University wearing some very offensive messages on their T-Shirts. These idiots had all thought it would be jolly japes to scrawl slogans like ‘F**K the NHS’ on their shirts. One of these clowns was wearing a Hitler moustache, and had drawn a Star of David and the word Jude. This was not the name Jude, as in the Beatles’ song ‘Hey, Jude’, or that of the actor, Jude Law. Or the Christian saint, St. Jude. No, this was the German Jude, meaning ‘Jew’. And the two together were a disgusting parody of the identifying marks Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, before they were deported and murdered wholesale under the Final Solution.
Mike in his article mentioned how the Beatles opened a fashion shop in the 1960s, only to find it physically attacked because of suspected anti-Semitism. They called it ‘Hey, Jude’, after their song. Unfortunately, some people thought that this was some kind of anti-Semitic message, as it brought back memories of Kristallnacht, the night when the Nazis systematically attacked Jewish shops and businesses, scrawling the word Jude on them. The night got its name, which means ‘Crystal Night’ in English, after the shards of broken glass when the Nazis smashed the shop windows. Now Macca and the Fab Four were and are anything but Nazis, but you can see how some people could make that mistake. And a decade later in the ’70s, some of the punks really did wear Nazi regalia in order to provoke that kind of outrage. Sid Vicious apparently went all the way through the Jewish section of Paris dressed as stormtrooper in a gratuitously tasteless and offensive display.
But while the media has gleefully seized upon and played up the entirely invented claims of anti-Semitism within the Labour party, they are very, very quiet about any such incidents in the Tories. The Mirror reported that the both the Tories and Plymouth University were planning to hold inquiries into the behaviour of these toff idiots and punish them. But that’s it. I think it was only the Mirror and possible one other newspaper that reported the incident. If it had been young members of the Labour party, there’d have been no end of outrage and denunciations in the media, by politicians and the public. And further calls for Corbyn to resign as he would be held responsible. But as it was the Tories all you could hear was a deafening silence.
Not only does the media not want to report Tory anti-Semitism, but the Jewish establishment wishes to deny that such a thing even exists. Marie van der Zyle (below) stated in one of her attacks on the Labour party that, in contrast to them, the Tories had always been ‘good friends of the Jews’.
You know I’m not going to get tired of this joke!
Van der Zyle’s bizarre claim whitewashes a very long history of anti-Semitism in the Tory party. One of the left-wing Jewish blogs was so upset by it, that they put up a list of some of the more notorious of incidents in the Tory party. This went, I seem to recall, from the British Brothers’ League and the passage of the Aliens Act by the Tory government at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th to ban Jewish immigration, to the comment by one Tory about the number of Jews in Thatcher’s government. He remarked that there were far Estonians there than Etonians. Apart from being anti-Semitic, it also shows the very distinct class prejudice and sense of entitlement in the Tory party. Etonians were expected to make up a good proportion of cabinet ministers, not the children of eastern European Jews.
In the 1930s a fair number of Tories sympathized with Nazi Germany and supported Oswald Mosley’s infamous British Union of Fascists. Amongst the various pro-Nazi outfits, like the Anglo-German Fellowship, was one specifically dedicated to purging Jews from the Tory party. By the 1970s certain sections of the Tory party had become so notorious for their anti-Semitism, that they had to take steps to assure the Jewish community that they were anything but. Thus the Monday Club, which has long been infamous for its racism and opposition to non-White immigration, opened its membership books to the Board of Deputies of British Jews to show that they didn’t have any Nazis among them.
David Cameron at the beginning of this century made gestures to expel and ban Nazis from the party during his modernization campaign. The party severed links with the Monday Club, and those with links to BNP and racist right were thrown out. But the Tories are still a very racist party, no matter how many BAME people they may make ministers or make MPs. Zac Goldsmith ran an islamophobic campaign against Sadiq Khan for mayor of London, smearing him as a supporter of terrorism. They put up posters and sent round vans calling on illegal immigrants to hand themselves in. And Tweezer herself was responsible for drafting the legislation that allowed them to deport the Windrush generation, who were British citizens and had every right to remain in this country. And I can remember when some branches of the Tory party, including the Union of Conservative Students, were debating adopting ‘racial nationalism’ as their official policy. That’s the doctrine of the BNP and NF: only those who are British by race, which here means ‘White’, are really citizens. Everyone else should be repatriated, voluntarily or involuntarily.
And you can bet that it isn’t just non-Whites that certain sections of the Tories loathe and despise. Somewhere there’s going to be real, anti-Semitism, no matter what Cameron, Tweezer and van der Zyle may say.
But the lamestream media aren’t going to poke their noses into this question. The press is almost wholly dominated by the Tory party, especially now that the Guardian and Observer have decided to throw in their lot with them. And just about all the papers seem to want to see Corbyn thrown out of power because of the threat he poses to Thatcherite neoliberalism.
And so the media is going to continue the lie, that on the one hand the Labour party is a party of anti-Semites, led by an anti-Semite, and on the other hand that the Tories are completely innocent of such ugly racism. No wonder people are choosing to get their information instead from the Net.
This is another great clip from RT. In it, Polly Boiko talks to Mo Shafiq, the Chief Executive of the Ramadhan Foundation about the calls from the Muslim Council for an inquiry into the endemic racism within the Tory party. Shafiq states that it isn’t just the everyday racism, but that it also comes from the very top. Like Zac Goldsmith’s islamophobic campaign when he was running for mayor of London, when he tried to connect Sadiq Khan with terrorism; or with the islamophobic remarks from David Cameron and the Tory leadership. Such as Cameron’s comment that if Muslim women didn’t learn English, this would leave them more open to terrorist propaganda.
Boiko asks him if this isn’t actually rather political. The Labour party has been attacked for anti-Semitism, and now the Tories are being accused of islamophobia. Shafiq states that it’s quite right to attack anti-Semitism, as it has no place in our society. Neither should Islamophobia. But there as been a continuous stream of attacks on Muslims, stating that Islam is alien to Britain, and that it’s now got to the point where people are scared to go to the mosque or wear headscarves in public.
Boiko then asks him if the calls for an investigation into the Tories’ Islamophobia won’t actually make people more scared and fearful. Shafiq replies that there isn’t just a problem with the Tories, but also with wider society. However, he doesn’t agree that the problem is as large as the polls suggest. He then goes to talk about the way Muslims have been presented negatively in the press since 9/11, and talks about the way it has become fashionable to attack Muslims in the media and on-line. He mentions Melania Phillips, the Times journalist, who rages about anti-Semitism, but is also constantly attacking Muslims. He goes on to claim that now, if you want to get hits, all you have to do is write pieces attacking Muslims and put a hashtag on it #HateMuslims.
Shafiq is absolutely right to welcome the Muslim council’s demand into the Tories’ Islamophobia. Zach Goldsmith’s Islamophobic campaign and Cameron’s comments about Muslim women, who can’t speak English being more vulnerable to terrorist propaganda were remarked on and condemned at the time. But nothing has been done, and Baroness Warsi complained the other week that Islamophobic incidents now occur at least once a week within the party.
As for Melanie ‘Mad Mel’ Phillips, what can you say? She used to write for the Daily Heil, and her columns were full of vitriol about Muslims then. She’s also the author of a book, Londonistan, about how London became a haven for Muslim terrorists. Unfortunately, London and Britain did give sanctuary for Muslim terrorists. This was under Maggie Thatcher, he gave some of the truly vile butchers from the Taliban in Afghanistan asylum in Britain, because they were anti-Communist and so ‘one of us’. And many Muslims were shocked at the way these creatures were free to preach hatred and violence from their mosques. There were numerous complaints against them, but these were systematically ignored.
The Tories are not only riddled with Islamophobia, but they have actively aided the immigration to Britain of the murderers, who inspire it. They are absolute hypocrites on this issue.
Way back on April 23rd, Mike also wrote an article commenting on the near complete media silence over islamophobia in the Tory party, contrasting this with the furore over the supposed anti-Semitism in Labour. Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi had appeared on Robert Peston’s programme to state that islamophobic incidents and rhetoric were almost weekly occurrences in the Tory party. The only news outlet that reported Warsi’s statement, which not even Peston himself commented on, was RT. Which shows just how much we need the Russian-owned broadcaster and supposed ‘propaganda outlet’ to correct the massive bias in our own media.
Aleesha, a Muslim female blogger and political activist, who talked about the massive increase she’d seen in Tory islamophobia, but which went unnoticed and unremarked by the media, and which no one was condemning or acting against. She discussed the vehemently islamophobic comments of the Tory MP, Bob Blackman, Zac Goldsmith’s campaign for the post of mayor of London against Sadiq Khan, and the official EU Leave campaign, which said that Europe has an ‘exploding Muslim population’.
Aleesha further asked
“Why is nobody acting? I have been blocked by Tory councillors and Tory MPs when I call islamophobia out. Why are these MPs and councillors supporting islamophobes? It makes me think that the Tory party has an actual problem with islamophobia, not to mention the dozens of times I’ve been religiously abused by Tories.
“Are we just going to ignore it? When will we give these cases the rightful outrage? Islamophobia is absolutely normalised in British politics and nobody is really doing anything about it. The silence from our politicians shows their inability to act and their legitimation/endorsement of these views. Are we going to act, or are we going to do nothing and let MPs like Bob Blackman host more extremists in Parliament?”
Mike ended his article by referring back to Baroness Warsi’s comments, and concluding that the real reason islamophobia is being ignored is because the Tories love it.
As Mike has pointed out repeatedly, racism of all types, including islamophobia, is far more prevalent amongst the Right, including the Tories, than the Left and the Labour party. But the media aren’t commenting on it, and are playing up the supposed anti-Semitism in Labour for purely political reasons. They fear Corbyn’s Labour and its programme of ending neoliberalism, renationalising the NHS, part of the electricity grid and the railways, and restoring the welfare state. The Blairites in the Labour party and their allies in the Israel lobby also despise him, not because he is an enemy of Israel, but because he demands dignity and justice for the Palestinians. This also attacks traditional geopolitics in the region, where the West has supported Israel and Saudi Arabia against Russia and the surrounding Arab nations. As a result, the Tories, the media, the Israel lobby and the Thatcherite Labour Right, the Blairites, have all seized on the spurious allegations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and his supporters as a way of trying to unseat the Labour leader and marginalise and expel his supporters.
There are also a number of reasons why islamophobia is far also far more acceptable than other forms of racial prejudice. Colour prejudice is one factor. Most Muslims in this country are Black or Asian, and Muslims may also be seen as more foreign than other ethnic groups because historically they lay outside and beyond the European Christian mainstream. While there have been Muslim communities in parts of Europe, like Spain, the Balkans and Russia and the Baltic states since the Middle Ages, they were always marginal communities outside the European mainstream. Europe in the Middle Ages was Christendom. Muslim Spain was part of the Islamic world, as were the Muslim communities in the Balkans which were established after the region was conquered by the Muslim Turks. The Ottoman Turks were an aggressive, expansionary threat to the European Christian states up until the late 17th century. The massacres of Christians carried out by the Ottomans at the end of the 19th century, when the Greeks and Serbs fought their wars of independence, became notorious, and so contributed to this stereotype of Islam as an innately hostile threat. At the same time, the massacres carried by Christians against Muslims was little reported and did not provoke the same outrage.
There is also the legacy of British imperialism, and its conquest of part of the Dar al-Islam in the creation of negative views of Islam and its peoples, followed by the continued instability of the region after independence. The result has been that Islam and Muslims have continued to be seen as a threat completely opposed to Europe and the West. The stereotype has been reinforced by the rise of militant Islam following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Islamist terrorism and highly emotive campaigns by some Muslims in Britain, such as the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the controversy over the Satanic verses, and the marches and demands for Pope Benedict’s death after he quoted a medieval Byzantine emperor’s negative comments about Mohammed.
And added to all this is Huntingdon’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis, which stated that after the collapse of Communism, there would be an inevitable conflict between the West and Islam. Huntingdon’s idea has been taken up by very many on the right, from the Republicans in America to UKIP, the Fascist and Nazi right in Britain and Europe, and now, it seems, a very large part of our own Conservative party.
But a few years ago, one right-wing writer also offered his own views on why prejudice against some minorities was more acceptable than others. He wrote
‘Is there, in effect, an unofficial pack of equality Top Trumps cards? In egalitarian Britain, who has the best minority credentials? They could go something like this:’
He then laid his scheme of how these cards would look as follows:
LESBIANS AND GAYS
Media Connections 9
Victim Status 4
Rarity Value 3
Fear Factor 6
Political/financial clout 8
MUSLIMS
Media Connections 4
Victim Status 6
Rarity Value 4
Fear Factor 9
Political/financial clout 4
JEWS
Media Connections 9
Victim Status 8
Rarity Value 6
Fear Factor 5
Political/financial clout 10
DISABLED
Media Connections 2
Victim Status 9
Rarity Value 8
Fear Factor 1
Political/financial clout 2
GURKHAS
Media Connections 7
Victim Status 5
Rarity Value 6
Fear Factor 9
Political/financial clout 4
TRANSSEXUALS
Media connections 1
Victim Status 3
Rarity Value 10
Fear Factor 2
Political/financial clout 3.
So who was the terrible person, who compiled this league table of marginalised groups? Well, actually it was Daily Mail sketch writer Quentin Letts, in his book Bog Standard Britain: How Mediocrity Ruined This Great Nation (London: Constable 2009), pages 115 to 117. They’re in the chapter ‘Bum Rap’, where he comments on the way the vile homophobia of some Caribbean rap lyrics are apparently considered acceptable, when Lynette Burrows was reported to the cops for homophobia when she questioned on the BBC the right of male gay couples to adopt baby girls. He concluded on this issue that
… it is hard to escape the conclusion that the police leave rap music alone because it has more minority value than the gay people it so charmlessly attacks. Lynette Burrows was collared because she was an easy target and because she was one of the majority. The rappers are more frightening and they have the political Scotchguard of victimhood.
But you could use his grading of the comparative power and victim status of various minority groups to argue that anti-Semitism is far more unacceptable than other forms of racial prejudice, because Jews have a greater victim status and political and financial power. If this came from someone on the left now, they would almost certainly be libelled as an anti-Semite. But there has been no such outcry against Letts. And I hope there isn’t, because I don’t believe he has written anything anti-Semitic.
There is some truth in what he writes, as the majority of Westerners are acutely aware of the long history of persecution the Jews have suffered in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust. Jews are also generally more integrated than some other groups, and Brits have a more positive attitude towards them. Only 7 per cent of Brits in polls say they are anti-Semitic. Many leading businessmen and media figures are Jewish, though this certainly does not mean that the vile conspiracy theories that claims Jews control business and the media are anything but murderous lies. And the anti-Semitic smears of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, and the Jewish Leadership Council carry weight, because they are part of the Tory establishment.
Against this, there are still anti-Semitic attacks and harassment. Nazi groups, like the banned National Action in England and the Alternative Fuer Deutschland in Germany have made terrifying speeches calling for the murder and extermination of Jews. And many of those libelled by the Blairites, the Tories and the Israel lobby as anti-Semites are self-respecting Jews, whose only crime is that, like their gentile anti-racist friends and comrades, they support Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left.
Real, murderous anti-Semitism, like other forms of racism, still exists, and Jews have given their support to other marginalised groups suffering racial abuse in the West. The ADL, the American Jewish organisation dedicated to tackling anti-Semitism, for example, also came out in support of Muslims against Donald Trump’s immigration ban.
Thus, for a variety of historical, social and economic reasons, prejudice against some minorities, such as Jews, is far less acceptable than others, such as Muslims. But racial prejudice generally is far more common in the Tory party, and the current attacks on anti-Semitism in the Labour party has far more to do with politics than real anti-Semitism, as shown by the fact that so many of those smeared are genuinely anti-racist and Jewish.
Mike today has put up a piece reporting that Jeremy Corbyn has not pulled back from his previous demands that Tony Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes. The Torygraph considers that Bliar will be heavily damaged by the Chilcot Inquiry’s report. The Labour leader has said that he believes the Iraq War was illegal, following UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s statement that it was. If so, Mr Cobyn believes Blair should indeed be prosecuted.
Mike in his comment says that if Blair is guilty of war crimes, then Corbyn is absolutely right to demand his prosecution. And this marks Labour out from the Conservatives. When Labour politicos commit wrongdoing, they’re prosecuted. Unlike the Tories, who have let Zac Goldsmith get away with his vile Islamophobic smears against Sadiq Khan.
In my view, there is no question whatsoever that Bliar was the instigator of an illegal war. Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Greg Palast, an American journalist formerly with the Groaniad shows this at length his fascinating book, Armed Madhouse. The Iraq invasion was primarily launched to allow the Saudis and the Americans to grab the Iraqi oil industry and its vast oil reserves, which are the second largest after Saudi Arabia. The Neocons in the Bush administration backed it, because they saw it is as their chance to get their mitts on the state’s nationalised industries, which could be privatised and sold off to the profit of American multinationals. They also fancied using it as a lab rat in a massive experiment at creating the kind of low tax, free market utopia demanded by Reaganomics and Libertarian frauds and nutters like Milton Friedman and von Hayek.
And back in 1995, the Likud party of Israel and the Republicans in America jointly produced a plan to invade Iraq, ’cause Saddam Hussein was sending arms to the Palestinians.
The result of the invasion for the Iraqis has been nothing but chaos and death. The privatisation of Iraq’s state enterprises and the lowering of it trade tariffs has meant that every country in the world dumped their goods on Iraq. The result has been that unemployment rocketed to 60 per cent.
Hussein was a brutal dictator, who cracked down ruthlessly on some of the country’s ethnic and religious groups. His gassing of the Kurds and massacre of Shi’as in the aftermath of Gulf War I (also illegal, in my view) is notorious. But the divisions in Iraqi society have only got worse, much worse, since the invasion. The country was relatively integrated before the invasion, and in the major cities like Baghdad the different quarters occupied by the different tribes and sects weren’t barricaded. That has now changed. The Shi’a and Sunni Muslim areas are now walled off from each other, in which reminds me of the ‘peace barriers’ put up between Nationalist and Loyalist areas in Belfast and other cities in Northern Ireland.
And it is not just a question of the justification for the invasion that may be considered a war crime. Other crimes have been committed, real crimes against humanity. Apart from the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the mercenaries sent in as part of the invasion force have run amok. There are reports of them abusing and raping civilians. One report described how cars of them would casually shoot Iraqi civilians driving along the country’s streets and roads. I’ve put up here a piece from either The Young Turks or Secular Talk about an American diplomat, who was sent to Iraq, who returned to America shocked by the casual brutality of the American troops towards the people they were supposed to have freed. He stated that the attitude was that ‘they were there to kill the N*ggers’. And leading American generals are involved in the state terror against minorities carried out by the post-war Iraqi government. One of them helped direct the death Shi’a death squads that massacred Iraqi civilians.
If the Chilcot does conclude that Bliar is a war criminal, as I believe it should, then I’ve no doubt Blair and the rest of his cabinet will fight like rats in a trap to avoid prosecution any way they can. If Blair goes down, it leaves the rest of the cabinet similarly open to corruption, or at least the other leading members of New Labour. And it may also serve as a precedent for prosecutions against Bush and elements in the Obama administration, including Shrillary, for their part in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Not to mention the complicity of Likud and large sectors of the American military-industrial complex.
Expect more accusations of anti-Semitism. When the Likud-Republican plans for the Iraq invasion were revealed almost a decade ago, it was very loudly denounced by the Zionist Right as another anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. This is, of course, rubbish. No-one was accusing the Jewish people of responsibility, or even necessarily the Israeli people. They had simply unearthed an historic fact: that Likud, an Israeli party, was partly responsible for the illegal invasion. Espionage agencies, industrial cartels and political groups engage in clandestine conspiracies, as Robin Ramsay in Lobster has been showing since the 1980s. The grand conspiracies involving global secret plots by the Freemasons, the Jews and Reptoid aliens are all rubbish, but smaller plots, concocted by the intelligence agencies, and leading figures in business and politics certainly did and do. The Iraq invasion is the product of several of them.
Corbyn will be absolutely right to demand Blair’s prosecution, but I’ve no doubt that there will be a lot of pressure for the Chilcot inquiry to find Blair either not guilty, or to discredit its findings and Corbyn himself. Too much of the British, American and Israeli establishment is implicated to allow Blair to be prosecuted.
Mike over at Vox Political has put up a very interesting piece from Naujawani, which I think is a specifically Sikh website. Entitled ‘Refuting London Mayoral Candidate’s Divide and Rule Tactics’, the piece’s author is bitterly critical of Goldsmith’s tactics of trying to stir up old ethnic divisions amongst the London Asian community to get Hindus and Sikhs to support him against his Muslim rival, Sadiq Khan. The author, Sukhraj Singh, states that Goldsmith’s just using the old British imperialist methods of divide and rule, and compares his attempt to smear Khan simply because of his religion to the Nazis recruitment of Slavonic non-Germans to the Waffen SS by playing on their hatred of the Jews. Singh describes Goldsmith’s divisive electoral strategy as
‘ruthlessly dehumanising, patronising and exploitative of the socio-historical tensions that still exist, but have diminished significantly among the Punjabi-Sikh, Hindu-Gujarati and Pakistani-Muslim communities in recent years, which is why even for Conservatives this attack is below the belt.’
If you follow Mike’s link to the original article, you’ll find they’ve also put up a short video explaining why should you vote for, well, anybody else except Goldsmith. They’re particularly concerned as Sikhs to oppose Goldsmith and his nasty tactics, because as Sikhs they’ve been on the forefront of Islamophobic attacks. This is absolutely true. The first victims of hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11 were Sikhs, because Sikh men wear turbans, just like Osama bin Laden. And so perfectly innocent people were singled out and attacked, simply because of the way they dressed.
Just as Goldsmith is now trying to stir up racist fears against Mr Khan, simply because he’s a Muslim. And hence the vile smears against the man in which he’s been declared ‘radical’ and the libellous accusation that an imam, who supported him, was also a supporter of ISIS. Which was completely and utterly the opposite of the truth.
But just to remind everyone how deeply racism goes in the Tory party, Mike’s also put up on this page this election poster from 1960.
This was the era of the infamous slogan, ‘If you want a N*gger for a neighbour, vote Labour’. And it wasn’t that long ago that the Tories were sending the vans round, offering to repatriate any immigrants, who didn’t want to be here any longer. That was over fifty years ago, but unfortunately, they’re still trying to play on racial prejudice.
I’ve put up today several articles on the about the controversy over anti-Semitism in the Labour party, and specifically the accusations directed at Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone, and, by extension, Jeremy Corbyn. I strongly believe that these are politically motivated by the Tories and the Blairite/Neo-Con faction in the Labour party.
The Tories have an obvious interest in smearing Labour. As Mike over at Vox Political has pointed out, it deflects attention from the fact that they’ve been running a very dirty, racist campaign of Islamophobic smears and insinuations against Sadiq Khan. Private Eye has run two separate stories on the election literature Hindus and Sikhs have had pushed through their doors in London, which seem tailored to exploit ethnic rivalries between members of these religions and Muslims. And Zac Goldsmith and Cameron have also labelled Mr Khan as a ‘radical’ and alleged that the Muslim preacher with whom he shared a platform at a speaking event was a supporter of ISIS. In fact, the Muslim preacher hates ISIS and was previously a supporter of the Tories. And the accusation that Khan is ‘radical’ seems to be calculated to play on fears of Islamic radicalism by association.
As for spurious accusations of anti-Semitism, these aren’t confined to British politics. They’ve also been made astonishingly against Bernie Sanders, who was competing against Hillary Clinton for the Democrat nomination for presidential candidate. Bernie’s Jewish. The Young Turks pointed out that he is the first Jew to come this far in the political campaign to be the next leader of his country. He has lived in Israel, and has family there. Yet because he made some criticism of the Israeli state, he was accused of anti-Semitism. Absolutely astonishing. It shows how grotesquely spurious these accusations have become. And as Uri Avnery has pointed out in his piece, ‘Manufacturing Anti-Semites’, there’s a danger that such gratuitous use of the accusation will alienate perfectly decent people, who just object to Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians, and make the term respectable through its over use.
Mike over at Vox Political has put up a piece reporting that Zac Goldsmith has appeared in the pages of the Richmond and Twickenham Times, defending his voting for the £30 cut in ESA. He was the patron of a local charity for the disabled, Richmond AID, which stands for Richmond Advice and Information on Disability. After he voted for the cuts, however, he resigned after he was criticised by the charity’s chief executive, Lucy Byrne, for the severe and detrimental effect the cuts would have on disabled people’s lives. Now he’s got into the pages of his local paper to try and justify himself.
He states that the government believes that people are best helped by being ‘enabled’ to get back into work. He states that it isn’t just a cut, and that there is a £100 million fund for disabled people. And then goes on to the make the populist argument that people are coming to him, concerned that people, who aren’t fit for work, are being seen as fit for work. It is his job as an MP to use his judgement to make sure this doesn’t happen.
It’s the usual rubbish, uttered by someone, who really hasn’t a clue how the other half live. His father was the millionaire James Goldsmith, or as Private Eye used to call him, Sir Jammy Fishpaste the Referendumfuhrer (he was head of the Referendum Party, UKIP’s rivals at the time for the Eurosceptic vote). He has no more idea of the lives of the poor than Matthew Freud did when he declared that poor people should be more flexible, as they have less to lose than the rich during economic depression.
Now let’s critique what he actually says. First of all, he states that he’s somehow against getting the genuinely ill thrown off benefits. But that is exactly what the benefit cut threatens to do. He’s right that there is subjective judgement involved, but his subjective judgement seems very firmly in the New Labour and Tory camp that essentially most of it is just malingering.
As for ‘enabling’ people to get back into work, this is pretty much a shorthand for ‘less eligibility’ – the idea that you make state support difficult and degrading to force people to get jobs. Which is all right, coming from an extremely rich ex-public schoolboy, who will probably never have to worry about joining the dole queue in the morning, thanks to the old school tie.
The statement about ‘enabling’ people back into work can be taken in a variety of ways. You could enable people back into work by offering a range of state benefits to help people with special needs get appropriate jobs or training. For example, paying for taxis or other transport if there are mobility issues. Or actually setting up workshops for the disabled where they can have genuine productive careers, like, oh, I don’t know, perhaps Remploy before they closed it down. Or even setting up schemes within firms to encourage them to take on disabled staff, perhaps helping with the costs through grants or tax cuts. I used to work in an office a long time ago with someone who had severe back problems. The firm had arranged for her to have an orthopaedic chair. Now that would also enable those with medical problems to get back into work. But all this has been cut, to save the government money and give lots of money back to people of Zac’s class in tax cuts.
As for the £100 million fund, I have no idea what he’s talking about here. PIP perhaps? Probably, not even that. It’s the usual Tory flannel of, yes, we’re cutting benefits, but look, we’re setting up this brave, new benefit system, which will target benefits to where it’s really need. The implication being that nobody will lose out, when the whole point of the system’s reform is to make sure that many more will do just that.
In short, it’s the usual specious Tory double-talk to hide the disgraceful actions of a spoilt, over-privileged public school brat, who clearly believes in punishing the disabled simply for being the disabled, and not rich like him or his dad.
Mike over at Vox Political has also this morning put up a piece commenting on Zac Goldsmith’s leaflet for his bid to become mayor of London. One of these is aimed at the metropolis’ Tamil community. Goldsmith is keen to present himself as someone, who has participated fully in the Indian communities festivals, supports family businesses and will protect their homes and valuables from thieves and footpads. This is contrasted with Khan, who supports the trade unions and threatens to nick their family jewels through a wealth tax. Mike comments on how desperate this is, reblogging a Tweet from Chesterfield’s Labour MP, Toby Perkins. Amongst other things, Perkins points out how patronising it is with the scaremongering about Khan coming for the family jewels. Mike’s piece is at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/03/15/goldsmith-calls-khan-divisive-then-targets-ethnic-minorities-with-scare-campaign-about-him/. Go and read it for more information.
In fact, the hysterical accusation about Mr Khan threatening to rob hardworking Indians of their mother’s jewels is one of the least offensive items in the entire wretched screed. Far more alarming is Goldsmith’s outrage that Khan supported Jeremy Corbyn, and Corbyn did not want the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, to come to the UK. The leaflet also claims that Khan did not attend the welcoming party for Modi when he did.
In point of fact, I can think of several reasons why no liberal person, and particularly no-one from a religious minority or from the Dalits should want to welcome Modi, any more than anyone would want to welcome any other Fascist. Because Fascist is what Modi is, just like General Pinochet and various other bigots, who have goose-stepped into power. Modi’s a member of the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party. These are militant Hindu nationalists. They even have a paramilitary wing, the RSSS, which was founded in the 1920s and partly modelled on Mussolini’s Blackshirts. They are just about as far away from Gandhi’s policy of ahimsa or non-violence as you can get. Since the BJP took power in the 1990s, they’ve been active fomenting riots against Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, including leading angry, violent mobs into non-Hindu areas to beat, kill and burn. They’ve been responsible for attacks on mosques, and clashes with Muslims, which have led to hundreds, if not thousands of deaths. The attacks on Christians also include a horrific gang rape of a nun, and the forced conversion of Christians to Hinduism in some areas by Hindu priests. As for the Dalits, their position has become much worse since the BJP took power. The upper castes have been pressing for the system of affirmative action which guarantees Dalits a certain number of places at university to be cut or removed. The Dalits have complained that they are being treated as slaves. They and the Muslim minority suffer high unemployment, and do the lowest, most degrading jobs. And under Modi human rights activists and campaigning journalists have been beaten, imprisoned and murdered.
There’s an entire chapter on India in John Kampfner’s Freedom For sale, including interviews with activists and campaigning journalists. One of these is Tarun Tejpal, who runs an investigative website Tehelka. This has not only uncovered cases of corruption, but in 2007 his organisation filmed a number of politicians, businessmen and policemen actually boasting about how they had supervised and managed the mass murder and rape of Muslims in Gujarat in 1982. Tejpal has said about the state of tolerance and democracy in his country
People abroad have been bowled a Gandhian googly. The myth of tolerance remains strong. In fact, through our treatment of caste, gender, children and class we must surely be one of the cruellest free societies in the world. (p. 161).
Modi is the Prime Minister of a great nation, but he’s a ruthless bigot from a party that supports violent thuggery towards the poorest and most marginal in Indian society. He no more deserves a welcome in Britain than that other aspiring bigot, Donald Trump. That Zac Goldsmith has decided that Sadiq Khan is somehow reprehensibly at fault for not welcoming Modi says less about Mr Khan, and much about the qualities Goldsmith clearly admires in a ruler: a jackboot aimed at the face of the poor.
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