British colonial rule in India.

 

The British government took direct control of India in 1858 after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Before that the British government exercised control of India through the British East India Company from 1757.

At no time were there more than 100,000 Britons in India. All the governance was done with the complicit help of the Indians, who helped to subjugate a vast land and its people. There's no doubt that they did this to further and promote their own self interests.

Colonial rule during the British Raj, was made easier because the Indians were divided among themselves by religion, cast and tribe. It was a case of divide and conquer, separate and rule and the British were excellent at doing that. Many Indians seem to have looked up to their British colonial rulers, who they called Pukka Sahib. Hindu culture is hierarchical and many Indians wanted to join the white man's club.

In E.M. Forster's novel 'A Passage to India', Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate in Chandrapore, tells his mother Mrs Moore, that "all Indian's regardless of their caste will always forget their back collar-studs and this is one of the reasons we don't admit him to our clubs." His mother, says Ronny's sentiments are those of a god. Ronny, tells his mother, "Indians like gods."

To this day, many wealthy Indians and Pakistani's send their children to English public schools and Oxford and Cambridge to be educated in the ways of the Pukka Sahib. The British went to India to exploit the country and its people, but the British gave the Indians cricket, railways and the telegraph. When British colonial rule ended in India in 1947 and country was partitioned, the Indians didn't attack the English but attacked one another.  

The dark side of transgenderism.

 

Eddie Suzy Izzard

The transgender comedian Eddie Izzard has received that many awards and honours from British universities that you would think that he'd discovered a cure for cancer. He has received a number of honorary doctorate degrees and he's just received another honorary doctorate degree from the University of Sussex.

This award has been controversial because the University of Sussex was recently fined £585,000 by the Office for Students (OfS) for failing to protect and defend Kathleen Stock, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, from harassment and bullying by a student mob. Professor Stock was hounded out of her job when she said that people who have a penis are not women and that basic sexual biology, was not blasphemy. There were calls for her to be dismissed and even death threats. Professor Stock resigned her position as Professor of Philosophy in 2021.

Why are so many people susceptible to group think and gullibility?

 

Marshall McLuhan

The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, said that education was the best form of civil defence against media fallout. We're all subjected to virtual and semi-realities being constantly flashed before our minds by partisan causes and agencies wishing to sell us something - a product, an idea, a policy, a lie.

The philosopher A.C. Grayling says that the "human propensity for belief and superstition, is readily understood in psychological terms as the desire for explanatory closure in the face of uncertainty."

But it's not just semi or uneducated people that are gullible or who are susceptible to group think. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was the rector of Freiberg University, famously said: "The Fuhrer himself, and he alone, is Germany's reality."

The communist dictator Joseph Stalin, killed astronomers for taking a non-Marxist line on sunspots and endorsed the bogus science of the agronomist Lysenko. The peasant slayer Stalin, created unpersons and expunged others from history. In Stalinist Russia, reality became plastic like Salvador Dali's clocks; dual consciousness and double-think flourished. The Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, said that universal mendacity was the only safe from of existence in Stalinist Russia.

Life in Britain is becoming quite extraordinary. It resembles that final scene in Peter Pan where the children are told that if they don't shout out loud that they believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell will die. The Labour Prime Minister, Sir Ker Starmer, wants us all to collude in a fiction when he tells us the 99.9 percent of women don't have a penis. Most of us think it's 100 percent. Some members of his government can't even define the difference between a man and a woman.

This kind of nonsense upon stilts is now both widespread and endemic in Britain. The political theorist Hannah Arendt, said that what the Nazi and Communist regimes valued most was not the dedicated Nazi or Communist party member, but those people for whom reality had become blurred and who couldn't distinguish fact from fiction. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: "To be effective propaganda must harp on a few simple slogans appealing to the primitive sentiments of the broad masses." 

Lenin's 'useful idiots'.

 

H.G.Wells

The celebrated Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, seems to have seen the Soviet Union under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin as a worker's paradise, but he also expressed favourable views about Mussolini. He seems to have been in favour of the mass arrests, the Gulag, and the show trials, which he seems to have felt were necessary. Hitler is said to have killed fewer Communist than Stalin.

The Webb's, who were fellow Fabian's were obsessed with the Soviet Union. They wrote the pamphlet, 'Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation." The French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, said that the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia, had dressed up a turd and presented it as a caramel. Stalin's socialist experiment or "new civilisation", resembled a vast army of deliberately deprived workers, indentured peasants, and slave labourers, all toiling for the benefit of an unacknowledged political elite.

The peasant slayer, Joseph Stalin, was said to be a "sniggerer and a bad chuckler." In the early days Stalin had been nicknamed "Comrade Card Index" by some of his Bolshevik colleagues. After Stalin's death in March 1953, many later personal reminiscences of Stalin were to record that it was when he was in a genial mood that he was most to be feared.

The English writer H.G. Wells interviewed Joseph Stalin through an interpreter in July 1934. The interview lasted almost three hours. He seems to have found Stalin avuncular - a type of kind, pipe smoking, uncle. In his autobiography Wells wrote: "I have never met a man more fair, candid and honest."

In his book 'Arguably' (2011), the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, wrote: "If we look for explanations for the indulgences shown toward Stalinism by men like G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells, we will find part of the answer in the quasi-eugenic and quasi-anthropological approach they took to most questions. Fabian socialism, in the same period, emphasized the progressive aspects of social engineering in the British Empire."

The eugenicist movement has been described as the "dirty little secret of the British left." Wells, Shaw and the Webb's were all in favour of the selective breeding of man to improve the quality of the nation's genetic stock. They believed in compulsory sterilisation for the enfeebled.

Charles Darwin is said to have asked a man who bred racing dogs (greyhounds), how he got winning dog? He told Darwin that he bred many and hung many. That might be okay for a dog breeder but it's a bit more difficult to do it with human beings. The Nazis abhorred the Jewish ritual slaughter of animals and banned vivisection, but they had no qualms about the ritual slaughter of Jews and other members of the Untermensch.  

School girl banned from making a speech on cultural awareness because she wore a union Jack-style dress.

 

Courtney Wright

I think that young girl, Courtney Wright, from Rugby, deserved an apology from her school. What the school did was outrageous. The school were celebrating 'Culture Celebration Day' and she was prevented from making a speech and put in isolation, because she was wearing a union Jack-style dress, like one of the Spice Girls. It seems that nowadays in Britain, you can celebrate everybody else’s culture but not your own.

Unfortunately, many of the people today who teach in our schools, are politically correct dipsticks and snowflakes. They're more interested in sexual identities than national or regional identities.

When I was a schoolboy in the 1950s, our teachers would show us a map of the world and tells us that everything on the map that was coloured red belonged to Britain. They never stopped talking about Roger Bannister's four-minute mile or Edmund Hilary's ascent of Everest. We were raised as little imperialists and most of my fellow pupils were white.

I don't think being British means a great deal to most people of the British Isles and I think regional identities are probably stronger than national identities. The Scots are known to support any team that is playing against England in the World Cup. Yet as a northern Englishman, I identify more with a Scot than I would a Londoner or a person from Cornwall.

Britain is a deeply class-divided society that is governed by amateurs. In a famous essay, the author George Orwell, wrote: "England is the most class-ridden country under the Sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” Orwell said that "almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box..." When they used to play the national anthem at an English cinema, everybody used to run out to catch the last bus.

Edwardian English Middle-class families that produced Orwell, Philip Larkin and Stephen Spender, generally looked down their nose at the coloured subjects of the British Empire as well as Jews and the working-classes. Spender wrote about how his parents stopped him playing with "rough" children and Orwell's mother, who was a socialist, stopped him playing with the plumbers' daughter. Larkin's father had Nazi sympathies and supported Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.

Do academic qualifications scare off potential UK employers.

 

When I left school in 1970 aged 15, it wasn't difficult to get a job or an apprenticeship and most people were in work. If you got on a bus in a morning, the buses were packed with people going to work. Most people of my generation will tell you the same thing.

It became far more difficult to get work after 1979, with the election of a Conservative government and Margaret Thatcher. Between 1979 and 1983, unemployment doubled from 1.5m to 3.0m. There was also a great deal of deindustrialization as Britain moved from being a manufacturing country to a service economy. Many jobs were exported overseas where unit labour costs were cheaper. Courtaulds closed many textile mills and moved to the Mauritius. Most Royal Enfield motor bikes are now made in India. A large factory in my area that made cigarettes and paid very high wages, relocated to the North of Ireland after being given financial inducements at the time of the Conservative government of John Major. This occurred because the Major government used financial incentives in order to get the political support of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), to stay in power. In many parts of the north of England, factories that had employed thousands were closed. The north of England never really recovered from this.

They introduced something called the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), to train young unemployed people. It became known as the Youth Training Swindle. Over the years, I have known many highly qualified people who have spent years in unemployment. A friend of mine who has two science degrees including a Masters, and had spent two years doing a PhD, told me that she found it extremely difficult to get work. It's likely that she was considered over qualified for the type of bum jobs that were available. Another friend told me that he was told by his DWP Jobcentre adviser, not to mention that he had a University Degree because it might scare off potential employers.

Two tier politics and the case of Lucy Connolly.

 

"Keyboard Warrior" - Julie Sweeney

I have no time for Sir Keir Starmer-oid but he had nothing to do with the case of Lucy Connolly. He has said that he supports the police and courts in the way they treated Connolly who was convicted for inciting racial hatred and jailed for 31 months after the Southport attack.

But why are people like Jeremy Clarkson, Conservative MPs and the Daily Torygraph, talking about the case of Lucy Connolly. There were other "keyboard warriors" who were jailed for online comments after the Southport attack but nobody has spoken up for them.

Julie Sweeney, a 53-year-old carer from Church Lawton, in Cheshire, was jailed for 15 months for inflammatory language. She called for Mosques to be firebombed on social media.The Tories haven't taken up her case because her husband isn't a Conservative councillor like the husband of Lucy Connolly. That sounds like being "two tier" to me. Both Connolly and Sweeney pleaded guilty to the charges made against them.

When Essex police visited the home of the Daily Torygraph columnist Allison Pearson, after a complaint of "inciting racial hatred" on social media and alleged racism had been made against her, both Pearson and the newspaper castigated the police and said the visit to her home had been an affront to free speech. They declared that the police should "police the streets not our tweets."

Boris Johnson, the former Conservative Prime Minister, has said that up to 10,000 people a year are being arrested by the police for comments they have made on social media, but neither the press or politicians are likely to take up their cases. Are their cases not an affront to free speech? 

Karl Marx thought British imperialism had brought modernity to India.

 

Marx & Engels

Many Communist regimes including the Soviet Union in Russia and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia claimed to have been inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx, but they were hardly free countries. Both countries built a society on a mountain of corpses.

Well before the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian socialist, Alexander Herzen, had called Communism, Russian Tsarism turned upside down. So-called freedom in capitalist societies is something of a sham. It's freedom for the pike but not for the minnows. In one sense, political equality is rather meaningless when you have economic inequality. There's not a great deal of direct democracy in the workplace, and most people are just one wage away from the gutter. But some do argue that economic inequality is of great importance and even in some respects highly desirable, because it acts as a spur to incentivise people to strive to do better. It's rather a case of sink or swim.

Soviet society was notable for a lack of incentives and the wide levels of economic equality between citizens and the political elite. I don't think that Karl Marx believed that we're all endowed with the same equal abilities because he wrote, "From each according to his ability to each according to his need." To impose equality on people of unequal abilities certainly restricts freedom and liberty and this is why they talk about "equality of opportunity" which is also rather nebulous, because our opportunities are certainly constrained by our economic circumstances and the social class that we're born into.

Marx was certainly aware that people pursuing their own personal greed had transformed the world and this is clear from reading the Communist Manifesto that he co-authored with Friedrich Engels. Marx thought that the British had brought modernity to India - printing presses, railways, telegraph, and steamship contact with other countries. Marx didn't believe that the British had done this out of the kindness of their hearts. Until 1858, British rule in India was administered by the East India Company. Marx wrote:  

“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was actuated by the vilest interests...but that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the state of Asia.”

For Marx, conquest furnished an alternative to serfdom and stagnation. Creation could take a destructive form. In 1700, Britain banned cotton imports from India and by 1835, Lord Bentinck of the East India Company, declared: "the bones of Indian textile workers were bleaching the plains of India."

In the 1940s, when Bengal was under British colonial occupation, tens of thousands of people starved to death in areas that had overflowing granaries. It wasn't a shortage of food that led to the disaster, but a lack of information and proper administration.

Marx and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. Marx supported both Lincoln and the Union during the civil war and helped to organise a boycott of southern slave-picked cotton among British workers. Marx never called himself a Marxist, but from a Marxist point of view, revolutions were more likely to occur in countries like Britain and the USA which had attained a high level of capitalist development. They were not supposed to occur in peasant societies which has largely been the case. 

Film producer accuses BBC of trying to gag him on Gaza documentary.

 

Ben de Pear

I used to watch Al-Jazeera because it was one way of finding out what was not being reported on British TV about the genocide taking place in Gaza.

One of the people on the Board of Governors at the BBC, is Sir Robbie Gibb, who was part of a consortium that bought the Jewish Chronicle. I remember Max Keiser saying that he left the BBC because he was instructed by the BBC top-brass not to mention Israel in any context.

The suspended Labour MP Zarah Sultana, has accused the Labour Party of being complicit in genocide in Gaza. The Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer-oid, has said publicly that he supports Zionism without qualification.

A film producer called Ben de Pear, has now accused the BBC of trying to gag him when they dropped a documentary he'd produced about the bombing of hospitals in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces. The documentary called 'Gaza: Doctors Under Attack' was broadcast by Channel 4 on Wednesday. Over 400 media personalities have written to the BBC calling on them to sack Robbie Gibb.

The BBC prostate themselves before the Israeli government and are afraid of offending the Israeli lobby. They're not worth the license fee. The International Criminal Court (ICC), have issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was what got the Nazis hanged at Nuremberg at the end of WWII.

Labour promised to make people better off but data suggests disposable income is falling as prices spiral.

 

The Temple Bar Dublin

We know that the cost of living is going up in Britain and that disposable income for many people, is falling under Labour because of higher prices for rents, food, council tax, energy and water.

I was recently in a pub in Marsden, West Yorkshire, when I saw one customer at the bar, charged £90 for a round of drinks. He didn't bat an eyelid. He was probably one of those commuter middle-class blow-ins who have settled in the quaint little leafy villages of Saddleworth and West Yorkshire and work in high salaried jobs, in local government, the NHS, and the BBC. They've driven up house prices in most of these areas along the Huddersfield line and have made housing unaffordable for many local people in places like Greenfield and Uppermill. Some people on state welfare benefits, don't have £90 a week to live on.

I was recently shown this bar bill given to a customer in April in the famous Temple Bar in Dublin. I knew that pub prices in Dublin were expensive and in Ireland, in general, but I wasn't quite prepared for this. A pint of Heineken €11.45, two Malibu, €22.70, a Coke €4.95, and six baby Guinness, which isn't Guinness, but a shot of Tia Maria and Baileys, came to €68.10. The total bill came to €107.20.