Why did Muslims in Gorton & Denton vote for a progressive party led by a gay Jew?

 

Green MP - Hannah Spencer

White people in the constituency of Gorton & Denton are not an "ethnic minority" as claimed by the Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin. White people still make up a majority of the population. 

There's a big Muslim/Asian population in the west of the constituency and they do speak and understand English, perfectly well; it's in their interests to do so. In four of the wards in the west of the constituency, those closest to Manchester city centre, around 40 per cent of the constituents are university graduates or university students. 

The Green Party did target the British Asian vote but if support for the Green's was orchestrated by 'family voting' or the 'Biradari' (brotherhood/caste), why did Muslims vote for a progressive party led by a gay Jewish person? I don't think it was down to the influence of George Galloway as Keir Starmer claimed, but probably down to the influence of the university educated young Asian people in the constituency. 

Reform UK are the Alf Garnett’s of British politics. They are an atavistic personality cult centred around their spiv leader, Nigel Farage. Some Reform UK MPs, like Sarah Pochin, talk like white supremacists. Pochin recently complained that there were too many black faces in British advertising and that this made her blood boil.

Parts of Gorton & Denton, are areas of high social deprivation and many people are on state benefits. Many young people feel they've been stuffed and abandoned by the mainstream political system. 

In remembrance of Dave Hallsworth.

 

Dave Hallsworth

I think I first met David Phipps Hallsworth, when I supported a strike at Intex Yarns, in Ashton-under-Lyne, in the early 1970s. In all my years spent in the British trade union movement, I have rarely met a person whose was more dogmatic and less tolerant of other people's opinions, than David Hallsworth. He literally smashed people into the ground.

For Dave, there was only one point of view, and that was his point of view. Yet, he was one of best militants that I have ever known and he wasn't lacking when it came to having guts. That's why I attended a memorial event to Dave Hallsworth at the Palace Hotel on Oxford Road, Manchester, in September 2007. Both Mick Hulme and Frank Furedi of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), spoke at that memorial event which was well attended.

I remember the strike at Laurence Scott Electromotors in 1981. The firm had been acquired by an asset stripper called Arthur Snipe of 'Mining Supplies'. An ex-miner, Snipe, closed the factory and sacked all the workers. This led to the men taking industrial action. Dave told me how he admired the tenacity of Arthur Snipe. One-day Snipe turned up in his Rolls Royce at his firm in Doncaster and run all the picket chairs over. He then stood at the factory gates giving the pickets the V sign.

Dave Hallsworth played a leading role in that strike but he wasn't the shop steward. He told me that shop steward was called by the men the "shop stupid" and every time he stood against him for the job of shop steward, to Dave's dismay, the men always voted for the shop stupid. Dave was a member of the RCP but I wonder what he would make of his former comrades today? Clair Fox became a Baroness. Munira Mirza who used to write for Spiked Online and 'Living Marxism', co-authored the 2019 Conservative Party Manifesto and Brendan O'Neill has just come out in defence of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. I bet Dave Hallsworth is turning in his grave. 

Imperial blowback and WWI.

 

Gertrude Bell - The Queen of the Desert

Britain and France redesigned and redrew the boundaries of the Middle East after the end of WWI in 1918 with the Sykes-Picot Agreement. They basically carved up between themselves what was left of the Ottoman Empire. 

The English half spy and half archaeologist, Gertrude Bell, in her letters described walking through the desert after WWI, tracing the new boundary of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, with her walking stick. Sir Percy Cox fatefully determined that a portion of Iraq, would henceforth, be known as Kuwait. Much later, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, fixed the frontiers of India and Pakistan, to carve out a Pakistani state. All these regions have experienced what George Monbiot calls "imperial blowback." 

At the time of WWI, most British people had no clear idea what they were fighting for on the Western Front in France. Millions were dying to grab a few hundred yards of land. They knew that Britain was fighting the 'Hun' but it was never a war aim of Imperial Germany, to invade Britain. There were calls for the British government to declare what their war aims were in continuing to propagate a war against Imperial Germany. The German Kaiser, wanted to build a railway line from Berlin to Baghdad and paid for the restoration of the tomb of Saladin. He also told the Muslim Arabs that Germany wanted to join a jihad against the infidel. 

After WWI the British invaded Mesopotamia/Iraq, to grab the oil fields and bombed and fought the Arabs. Imperial conquest and grabbing colonies were really what WWI was about.

Is Labour in danger of becoming irrelevant under Keir Starmer?

 

Sir Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer is typically evasive. He can’t shoot straight. What a wimp! Who are "those people" that he constantly refers to who want 'change'. It's such a nebulous term. These are the people that Starmer says he came into politics to help and will always fight for. Starmer is so amorphous that he's the ultimate plasticine man. He can be bent into any shape and bears the imprint of the last man who sat on him. 

The Labour Party was set up by the trade unions to represent the interest of the "working class" but he's afraid to use the term. All this Puritanical Labour Party nonsense about "working hard" and "hard working families" is depressingly Victorian. Most people undertake paid work to live; they don't live to work. People should be leading more fulfilled and diverse lives and not grinding away like some donkey on a treadmill, until they drop dead. Many people are going to lose their jobs to AI and automation and so we ought to be thinking about a post-work society and redistribution. 

When I was a kid in an English primary school in the 1950s and 1960s, the teachers used to talk to us about the "leisure society." We were told that when we grew up a lot of work would be done by machines giving people a lot more time for leisure. Those people who lose their jobs to AI and automation, what is to be done with them? 

The Green Party wants to introduce a citizens Universal Basic Income. This could be paid to people both in and out of work. Labour managerialism has nothing to offer. The Labour Party is well past its sell-by date and is in danger of becoming an irrelevance under Keir Starmer.

Blake & Jerusalem

 

William Blake

If there are three pieces of music that symbolise 'Englishness' for me, they're Elgar's Enigma Variations; Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Jerusalem, the unofficial national anthem of England. The music was composed by Sir Hubert Parry and the words are by William Blake.

The words come from 'Milton: A Poem' by Blake. Blake's lyrics are not meant to convey some kind of sentimental patriotism for England. For Blake, Jerusalem represents an ideal utopian society of Universal love, liberty and spiritual freedom; the antithesis of the 'dark satanic mills' and the restoration of a 'green and pleasant land'.

William Blake viewed the industrial revolution as destroying the English landscape and the human spirit. The 18^th century capitalist, Josiah Wedgewood, spoke of "making such machines of men, that cannot err." That would have appalled William Blake. As Blake wrote: "He who binds to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies, Lives in eternity's sunrise."

Why does Britain have such a big problem solving homelessness?

 

As a country Britain has gone to the dogs. What we see emerging is a kind of Victorian underclass. 

Last December, two men, Michael Heaton, 26, and Anthony Horn, 46, froze to death on the streets of Manchester in a city where the Labour Mayor, Andy Burnham, pledged to eradicate rough sleeping from the streets of Greater Manchester, when he was first elected. 

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I don't remember seeing rough sleepers or people begging in the street. I realise that it takes time to build housing, so why haven't the authorities resorted to building prefabs, to house people or provided some other kind of temporary accommodation? Private rents in Britain are completely out of sync with most people's incomes and there ought to be rent controls. Housing Benefit is also capped. 

The problem of homelessness isn't insoluble if there's the political will to do something about it. But some politicians like the former Conservative Home Secretary, Suella (Cruella) Braverman, would have us believe that homelessness is a lifestyle choice. I never met either Mr Heaton or Mr Horn, but I can't believe that they chose to freeze to death on the streets of Manchester, because it was lifestyle choice. Nor do I believe that if people can't get a job, a GP appointment, or an affordable rented home, it is somehow the fault of migrants. It has more to do with government policy. Some British politicians don't believe that it's the job of the government to provide people with affordable social housing. They think that's the responsibility of the individual to find their own accommodation. 

I am reliably informed that a country like Finland doesn't have a homelessness problem because homeless people are offered shelter and if they have problems with substance misuse, they get help and treatment. 

I remember all the brouhaha about the Bibby Stockholm that was moored at Weymouth naval dockyard to house asylum seekers. We had the ridiculous and farcical situation of homeless English people sleeping rough in doorways in Weymouth, while migrants were being housed. I gather that a number of the asylum seekers were undertaking voluntary work with the local homeless. Why weren't the rough sleepers in Weymouth offered a warm berth on the Bibby Stockholm or hotel accommodation? I was told that many of the rough sleepers in Weymouth, were former ex-servicemen in the British armed forces. 

Some British slum landlords have made millions out of housing asylum seekers and refugees after receiving taxpayers' money from the British government. 

Reform UK are the Alf Garnett's of British politics.

 

Reform UK are the Alf Garnett's of British politics. They're a kind of atavistic personality cult centred around their spiv leader, Nigel Farage. Most British people haven't much of clue what they stand for. They just know that they talk tough on immigration and wrap themselves up in the Union Jack flag. 

Matt Goodwin of Reform UK needs to make his mind up. He says that many people from ethnic minority backgrounds haven't integrated into the British way of life, but even if they do so, people with coloured faces can't be British. That sounds like there ain't no black in the Union Jack. Suella (Cruella) Braverman who is married to a Jew, says the same thing. 

The Reform UK MP, Sarah Pochin, is obsessed with the colour of people's skin. She sounds like a white supremacist. She recently complained that some schools in her constituency won't give her access because they don't want a racist on the school premises. She's also complained that there are far too many black faces being used in British advertising.