The Managerial Revolution & Trump's evolution

Editorial Comment:

EIGHTY YEARS AGO James Burnham published his book The Managerial Revolution, which in 1941 caused a stir both in the USA and in this country. It recently occured to me as I struggled to make sense of what was going on now, that what was happening in the United States with Trump had something to do with the phenomena of managerialism. In this book Burnham took the view that capitalism was on the way out, but that Socialism was not replacing it, and that what was emerging was a kind of planned, centralized society which would be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.

In such a society what may be called the new boss class was arising, and was to be composed of, in Burnham's view; business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers, lumped together as 'managers'. What it gave us in 1945 with in the UK, under the Labour government, was nationalisation and the NHS, and the New Deal in the USA.

Below is an account by Timothy Shenk on what lies behind the developments which have led to what has now come to be called 'Trumpism'.

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The Dark History Behind Donald Trump

'The Republican intellectual establishment (in the USA) is united against Trump – but his message of cultural and racial resentment has deep roots in the American right' so wrote Timothy Shenk, in an article in The Guardian (Tue 16 Aug 2016) entitled 'The dark history of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt'.

And he added: 'Trump is a unique character, but the principles he defends and the passions he inflames have been part of the modern American right since its formation in the aftermath of the second world war. Most conservative thinkers have forgotten or repressed this part of their history, which is why they are undergoing a collective nervous breakdown today. Like addicts the morning after a bender, they are baffled at the face they see in the mirror.'

Conservatives tend to portray their cause as the child of a revolt against the liberal status quo that began in the aftermath of the second world war, gained momentum in the 1950s when a cohort of intellectuals supplied the right with its philosophical underpinning, attained political consciousness in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and won vindication with Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House. Ideas have consequences, they proclaimed. Just look at us.

But there is another way of interpreting the history of the American right, one that puts less emphasis on the power of ideas and more on power itself – a history of white voters fighting to defend their place in the social hierarchy, politicians appealing to the prejudices of their constituents so they can satisfy the wishes of their donors, and the industry that has turned conservatism into a billion-dollar business.

This is the explanation preferred by leftwing critics, who typically regard the Republican party as a coalition fuelled by white nationalism and funded by billionaires. But this line of attack also has a long history on the right, where a dissenting minority has been waging a guerrilla war against the conservative establishment for three decades. Now the unlikely figure of Donald Trump has brought in a wave of reinforcements – over 13 million in the primaries alone. Their target is the managerial elite, and their history begins in the run-up to the second world war, when a forgotten founder of modern American conservatism became a public sensation with a book that announced the dawning of a civilisation ruled by experts.

'The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World' was the most unlikely bestseller of 1941. The author, James Burnham, was a philosophy professor at New York University who until the previous year had been one of Leon Trotsky’s most trusted counsellors in the US. Time called Burnham’s work a grim outline of “the totalitarian world soon to come” that was “as morbidly fascinating as a textbook vivisection”.

The son of a wealthy railway executive, Burnham graduated near the top of his class in Princeton in 1927 before studying at Oxford and then securing his post at NYU. But the Great Depression radicalised him, and he began a double life, lecturing on Aquinas by day and polemicising against capital by night. By 1940, Burnham had lost his faith in the revolution of the proletariat. While Trotsky denounced his erstwhile disciple as an “educated witch doctor”, Burnham started work on the book that would justify his apostasy.

According to Burnham, Marxists were right to anticipate capitalism’s imminent demise but wrong about what would come next. Around the turn of the 20th century, he claimed, the scale of life had changed. Population growth surged, immense corporations gobbled up smaller rivals, and government officials struggled to expand their powers to match the growing size of the challenges they faced.

These structural changes fundamentally altered the distribution of power in society. In the 18th century, authority had rested with aristocrats; in the 19th century with capitalists; in the 20th century it had passed on to the managers, whose authority derived from their unique ability to operate the complex institutions that now dominated mass society.

Technocrats had become the new ruling class. According to Burnham, fascism, Stalinism and Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal were all products of this transformation, and there was no use struggling against the world that was coming into being – a world where state ownership of the means of production had become the norm, where sovereignty had shifted to a bureaucratic elite, and where the globe was divided into rival superstates.

Burnham was not the first to foresee a society run by managers, but the arguments he borrowed from others took on a different meaning when brought together in this form. His sweep was global, his narrative reached back centuries, and he almost seemed to welcome a totalitarian future. For Burnham, the only sensible response to the managerial revolution was to recognise that it had occurred and accept there was no point in trying to bring back a world that was already lost. This bleak forecast captured the public imagination. Fortune called it “the most debated book published so far this year” and it went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.

But Burnham quickly moved on to new territory. His true subject, he concluded, was power, and to understand power he needed a theory of politics. Marx had been his guiding influence in The Managerial Revolution; now he turned to Machiavelli, constructing the genealogy of a political theory that began with the author of The Prince and continued into the present.

For a Machiavellian, Burnham wrote, politics was an unending war for dominance: democracy was a myth, and all ideologies were thinly veiled rationalisations for self-interest. The great mass of humanity, in Burnham’s dark vision, would never have any control over their own lives. They could only hope that clashes between rival elites might weaken the power of the ruling class and open up small spaces of freedom.

Burnham’s new found zeal for defending freedom led him, in 1955, to a conservative magazine called National Review, and to the magazine’s charismatic young founder, William F Buckley Jr. Buckley’s goal was to turn a scattered collection of reactionaries into the seeds of a movement. His journal set out to make the right intellectually respectable, stripping it of the associations with kooks and cranks that allowed liberals to depict it as a politics for cave-dwellers who had not reconciled themselves to modernity. Burnham was there at the start, one of five senior editors on the masthead of the first issue.

Soon Burnham was Buckley’s ranking deputy. But in an editorial staff riven by abstract debates between ardent libertarians and devout Christians, Burnham was the pragmatist who urged his colleagues not to ask politicians for more than the electorate would accept. For the right to win over working-class voters, Burnham argued, the movement had to embrace a more populist economic policy – contrary to the wishes of his anti-statist colleagues and their corporate backers, who wanted to lower taxes on the rich and roll back the welfare state. “Much of conservative doctrine,” Burnham wrote in 1972, “is, if not quite bankrupt, more and more obviously obsolescent.” Less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan was president, and it was Burnham who seemed like a relic of the past.

For a long time, the only major study of Burnham’s work was a slim volume published in 1984 by a minor academic press under the title Power and History. The book’s author, Samuel Francis, seemed a typical product of the insurgent conservative movement Burnham had helped to create – though by the late 1990s, when Francis published an updated version of Power and History, it made more sense to speak of a new conservative establishment. Outsiders who arrived at the White House with Reagan had become senior executives in Conservatism Inc. With the end of the cold war, the right had lost the glue that had bound its coalition, but there were still battles to be waged, and the money was better than ever.

Francis was never going to become a star in the emerging rightwing infotainment complex. Shy and overweight, with teeth stained from smoking, he had difficulty making it through cocktail parties. After completing a PhD in British history at the University of North Carolina, Francis left academia for Washington – first working at a rightwing thinktank, then serving as an aide to a Republican senator, and finally joining the editorial staff of the capital’s influential conservative daily newspaper, the Washington Times.

Francis retained his academic interests while he ascended into the ranks of the conservative establishment. He published six books in his lifetime, but he worked in private on one massive volume that he hoped would bring together all the disparate strands of his thought. Finished in 1995 but not discovered until after his death a decade later, the result was published earlier this year under the title Leviathan and Its Enemies. It is a sprawling text, more than 700 pages long, digressive, repetitive and in desperate need of an editor.

It is also one of the most impressive books to come out of the American right in a generation – and the most frightening. It is a searching diagnosis of managerial society, written by an author looking for a strategy that could break it apart.

Like much of Francis’s writing, Leviathan and Its Enemies began with Burnham – in this case, quite literally. “This book,” Francis announced in the first sentence, “is an effort to revise and reformulate the theory of the managerial revolution as advanced by James Burnham in 1941.”

Francis agreed that society had been taken over by managers, but he believed the new ruling class was far more vulnerable than Burnham had realised. Not everyone had benefited from the rise of the experts – and Francis saw this unequal distribution of rewards as the managerial regime’s greatest weakness.

For reasons he never quite explained, he insisted that the cosmopolitan elite threatened the traditional values cherished by most Americans: “morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times racial integrity and identity”. These were sacred principles for members of a new “post-bourgeois proletariat” drawn from the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Lacking the skills prized by technocrats, but not far enough down the social ladder to win the attention of reformers, these white voters considered themselves victims of a coalition between the top and bottom against the middle.

According to Francis, this cohort had supplied the animating spirit of rightwing politics since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. They had supported Goldwater – but Francis regarded Goldwater’s programme, like the “movement conservatism” of the National Review, as a “quaintly bourgeois” throwback to the oligarchic politics of the 19th century, with nothing to offer the modern working man. Their tribune was not Goldwater but George Wallace, the notorious segregationist and Democratic governor of Alabama – who won five southern states as an anti-civil rights third-party candidate in the 1968 presidential election. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had appealed to this group, too, but neglected their interests after taking office. Despite having elected multiple presidents, the post-bourgeois proletariat had yet to find a voice.

But not all of the right’s intellectuals have been so blind. While keepers of the conservative flame in Washington and New York repeatedly proclaimed that Trump could never win the Republican nomination, in February a small group of anonymous writers from inside the conservative movement launched a blog that championed “Trumpism” – and attacked their former allies on the right, who were determined to halt its ascent. In recognition of the man who inspired it, they called their site the Journal of American Greatness.

Yet Francis had difficulty explaining why managerial society would generate so much opposition in the first place. In Leviathan and Its Enemies, he argued that resistance to the cosmopolitan elite would be driven by “immutable elements of human nature” that “necessitate attachment to the concrete and historical roots of moral values and meaning”.

He was more candid in a speech he gave while working on the book. “What we as whites must do,” he declared, “is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” Where mainstream conservatives depicted the US as a nation whose diverse population was linked by devotion to its founding principles, Francis viewed it as a racial project inextricably bound up with white rule. The managerial revolution jeopardised this racial hierarchy, and so it must be overthrown.

Francis delivered his remarks on racial consciousness at a conference organised by American Renaissance, an obscure journal devoted to promoting white nationalism. Years earlier, Francis had struck up a friendship with Jared Taylor, who went on to found the magazine with Francis’s encouragement. From their first encounter, Taylor recalled, he and Francis “understood each other immediately”.

Francis’s employers at the Washington Times were not as sympathetic. The paper fired him after his comments were released, a move that was part of his larger expulsion from the respectable right. Buckley himself dismissed Francis as “spokesman” for a group that had “earned their exclusion from thoughtful conservative ranks”.

Yet Francis would not be so easily purged. For years he had cultivated a relationship with Pat Buchanan, a one-time Nixon protege who had become one of the country’s most recognisable conservatives thanks to his role as co-host of CNN’s popular debating programme Crossfire. In 1992, Buchanan launched a long-shot campaign against incumbent president George HW Bush that, against all expectations, garnered almost 3m votes in the primaries. While all this was going on, Buchanan was growing closer to Francis, whom he later called “perhaps the brightest and best thinker on the right”.

Francis and Buchanan were linked by their association with a breakaway faction on the right known as paleoconservatism. While mainstream conservatives had taken advantage of cushy gigs in New York and Washington, paleocons depicted themselves as spokesmen for the forgotten residents of flyover country. Francis urged Buchanan to make another run for the White House in 1996, this time as the candidate of the post-bourgeois resistance. That campaign would be based on three issues: protectionism, opposition to immigration and an “America First” foreign policy that repudiated global commitments and foreign interventions in order to focus on defending the national interest.

Buchanan listened, and he went on to a surprise win in New Hampshire’s pivotal early primary, convincing Francis that the managerial elite was more vulnerable than at any point in his lifetime. While mainstream Republicans and Democrats celebrated forecasts that the US population was on track to become less than 50% white as a sign of America’s capacity to adapt and grow, Francis believed that the members of his post-bourgeois proletariat regarded these shifting demographics as another reminder of their dwindling power.

Buchanan’s campaign fizzled after New Hampshire, but Francis had a ready explanation for the collapse: Buchanan was too loyal to the Republican party to seize the opportunity he had been granted. “Don’t even use the word ‘conservative,’” Francis told Buchanan. “It doesn’t mean anything any more.” The managerial class had absorbed Buckley and his followers. They, too, were the enemy.

After Buchanan’s defeat and his own exile from mainstream conservatism, Francis devoted himself to what he called “racialpolitik”. He was a regular contributor to outlets promoting white racial consciousness – becoming, in Jared Taylor’s words, “the intellectual leader of a small but growing movement”. Francis denied that he was a white supremacist, but he condemned interracial sex, warned of “incipient race war” and drafted a manifesto for a white nationalist group arguing: “The American people and government should remain European in their composition and character.”

When he looked ahead, Francis was especially concerned with the threat that one rising political star posed to his vision of the future. Barack Obama, he remarked in 2004, was “the model of what the New American is supposed to be”. Ivy League-educated, effortlessly cosmopolitan, promising to transcend barriers of race – Obama was the embodiment of the managerial elite. He represented everything Francis loathed about the contemporary United States.

The fact that Obama, Francis’s symbol for American decadence, became one of the most popular figures in the country brought the great contradiction of his thought into relief. The 19th century belonged to the bourgeoisie and the 20th century to the managers, he argued, because these rising classes had performed necessary social functions. His post-bourgeois proletariat, by contrast, were on the decline.

So was Francis. The supposed realist who cast hunger for power as the driving force of world history spent most of his time writing for journals with subscribers in the low five figures. In his last years, he was a lonely man. Before his sudden death from a cardiac aneurism in 2005, he had begun a study of conservatism and race. His masterpiece, Leviathan and Its Enemies, was still tucked away in a box of floppy disks; when it was published 11 years later, it would be under the auspices of a white-nationalist press. The right-leaning Washington Examiner ran one of his few obituaries. “Sam Francis,” it said, “was merely a racist and doesn’t deserve to be remembered as anything less.” It seemed just as likely that Francis would not be remembered at all.

"You want you to really listen to this,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in January this year. The king of rightwing talk radio was lecturing his audience, which averages around 13 million people a week, on Samuel Francis. Prompted by a magazine article casting Francis as the prophet of Trumpism, Limbaugh read aloud from one of Francis’s post-mortems on the Buchanan campaign. “What’s interesting,” Limbaugh said, “is how right on it is in foretelling Trump.” Before abandoning the subject, he added one point. Francis, Limbaugh noted, “later in life suffered the – acquired the – reputation of being a white supremacist”, a reputation Limbaugh insisted was undeserved.

The white nationalists who rallied to Francis in the last decade of his life disagree on that point, but they also see Trump as a vindication of their longtime inspiration. “Sam would have said that Trump is doing exactly what he advised Patrick Buchanan to do,” maintains Jared Taylor, who made news in the primary season when it was revealed that he had recorded automated phone messages endorsing Trump. (“White Supremacist Robocall Heartily Urges Iowa Voters to Support Trump,” reported a headline in the conservative Daily Caller.) According to Taylor’s American Renaissance, “Francis would be very pleased to see the GOP and conservative establishments mocked and destroyed.”

Even liberal commentators are looking back at Francis – whose prediction of a white working-class backlash against a globalist ruling elite seems to be coming true not just in the US but across Europe. “If you just drop the white nationalism a lot of Francis makes sense,” says Michael Lind, who once worked as an assistant to Buckley but now describes himself as a “radical centrist”. According to Lind, conservatives have been “spurning their natural constituency – the mostly white working class”, creating space for the rise of Trump.

Francis was also an inspiration for the team at the Journal of American Greatness, who called him “the closest thing to what could be described as the source of Trumpian thought” in their very first post. They admitted that Francis’s writing “overtly indulges various Southern nostalgias”, but insisted that his “deservedly criticised statements on race” could be separated from the core of his analysis. The managerial class was still the enemy, and only Trump seemed even dimly aware of what it would take to mount an effective challenge.

Trump the candidate, they admitted, was at best an imperfect messenger. But it was the message that counted: “The American regime – like nearly all its cousins in the west – has devolved into an oligarchy.” JAG was not just arguing that Trump’s campaign had a coherent agenda – a controversial assertion, given that many on both the left and right have dismissed Trump as an unhinged demagogue jabbing randomly at pressure points in the electorate. It was arguing that Trump succeeded because of his platform. Without those ideas, he would have been just another novelty candidate. Armed with them, any of Trump’s more disciplined rivals might have stolen the nomination from him – but instead they opted for recycled bromides from the Reagan era.

The site could be fiery in its defence of Trump, but the best moments came when its targets were the grandees of the right. There are plenty of scathing articles about rightwing thinktanks written from the left, but none of their authors could write a sentence such as “Seeing conservatives court billionaires – which I have had occasion to do dozens, if not hundreds, of times – is like watching dorks tell cheerleaders how pretty they are.”

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Insurrection Or Farce? by Les May

THE events of the last couple of days in Washington can be taken as a convenient précis of the four years of Trump in the White House. On Wednesday he uses flattery to incite his followers to march to the Capitol building, thousands mill around outside, inside a few windows and doors get smashed, a few offices are ransacked and someone is immortalised by having his photo taken in Nancy Pelosi’s chair. Having eventually been evicted from the Capitol they all went home to tea.

The day after Trump denounces them and tells the world the miscreants will be punished. Elizabeth from Knoxville is amazed that whilst in her words ‘trying to storm the Capitol‘ she finds herself on the wrong end of a police pepper spray. If this was an insurrection it wasn’t very well organised; if a rioter had not been shot and a police officer died of his injuries, it would rank as a farce. As one Twitterer put it, ‘I think my brain just exploded'. She talks about a revolution like it's a tour of Disneyland. "I came to burn the place to the ground and they pushed me! Where are my rights? This is the worst revolution I've ever been to! I wanna talk to the manager!"

Having got his followers marching to the Capitol to prevent the Congress certifying the result of the Electoral College vote, it seems that whether they succeeded or failed, Trump had no idea what to do next. Ditto pulling out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, cosying up to Putin and Kim Jong-un and the Covid 19 pandemic. Nothing about Trump gives the impression that he ever has a plan before he opens his mouth. It’s difficult to discern anything that can be called a political philosophy or a consistent policy that has guided him during the last four years.

Trump’s only loyalty is to himself as those deluded followers who find themselves facing a court will find out

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PEACE NEWS & THE TRUMP COUP?

Where was the activist army when it was needed, Milan?

MILAN RAI in PEACE NEWS (December 2020 - January 2021) wrote an editorial entitled 'Countering Trump's Coup':

'As we went to press, Donald Trump had just sent a tweet which was the closest thing to conceeding that he lost the US presidential election that we're probably going to get.'

There had been speculation for some time that Trump would not accept the election result, and well before the US election Milan Rai's friend, Noam Chomsky, had been predicting that Trump supporters would stage a 'Coup' in the event that he lost the election.

Thus in last month's editorial Mr. Rai suggested investigative journalist Alan Nairn put it well on Democracy Now!:

'...in the crucial hours after late election night, when Trump went into his tent and started sulking like a bully who had been thwarted, I think he may have missed his moment, because that was the key moment to call his people on to the streets and start stopping and trashing the votes, and he failed to do that.'

Milan Rai then felt it necessary to claim: 'If Trump had seized his moment for creating chaos, his forces would have been met by a national nonviolent mobilisation against the coup attempt. Tens of thousands of US activists had been preparing for that exact situation. They had been organised by dozens of groups specifically to opose a Trump coup.'

Indeed Mr Rai argued: 'Choose Democracy, one of the new groups, held online anti-coup trainings with over 1,000 participants at a time' and that '(o)ver 37,000 people signed the Choose Democracy pledge of resistance, committing themselves to civil disobedience in event of an attempted coup.'

However, when the coup attempt actually came on Wednesday I may have overlooked their manifestaion of resistance, but I didn't see much of the non-violent resistance in evidence on Capitol Hill. Perhaps despite all their earlier forcasts and predictions, they were genuinely taken by surprise?

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A Bolt Hole For Trump? by Les May

LAST weekend the Sunday Post newspaper carried a piece about how a request had been made for a US military plane to be allowed to land at Prestwich airport on the day before the swearing in of Joe Biden as the next US president. There has been speculation that Donald Trump will be on that plane.

Boris Johnson has condemned what he called the "disgraceful scenes" in the US, after supporters of Donald Trump stormed Congress and clashed with police. The Senate minority leader has placed responsibility for what happened on Trump

.

Is it too much to ask that Johnson should refuse to allow Trump to use the UK as a bolt hole in a fortnight’s time?

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Two Sides Of The Same Coin? by Les May

THERE are two aspects of Donald Trump’s personality which he shares with both Hitler and Mussolini; his contempt for democracy and his belief that he is a great man, a man of destiny sent to save the nation. As with Adolf and Benito there are those who accept his assessment of himself at face value and came out to say so yesterday. In spite of what many of us might feel is good evidence to the contrary they accept at face value his assertion that he won the election. They KNOW that must be true because he says so and anyone who refuses to believe him is just plain wrong.

To some who see themselves being ‘of the left’ Trump’s behaviour is typical of right wing authoritarian politicians. But Trump was sowing the seeds of authoritarianism and intolerance in ground which had been thoroughly tilled by others, in the universities, in some seemingly respectable newspapers and on social media. With the certainty in the absolute truth of one’s beliefs comes an intolerance of the views of those who disagree.

This phenomenon is not confined to the US and the UK exponents of ‘Identity Politics’ are at their core just as authoritarian and intolerant as those who deserve to be labelled ‘Far Right’. They differ only in their chosen weapon. For the far right it’s violence, for those wedded to identity politics it’s no platforming. Both are pernicious.

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Brexit: Gibraltar & UK-Spain deal for open border

SPAIN has reached a deal with the UK to maintain free movement to and from Gibraltar once the UK formally leaves the EU on Friday.

To avoid a hard border, Gibraltar will join the EU's Schengen zone and follow other EU rules, while remaining a British Overseas Territory.

The deal was announced by Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya, just hours before the UK exits the EU.

The Rock voted Remain in 2016 and about 15,000 Spanish workers go there daily.*

"With this [agreement], the fence is removed, Schengen is applied to Gibraltar... it allows for the lifting of controls between Gibraltar and Spain," said Ms González Laya.

The Gibraltar deal will mean the EU sending Frontex border guards to facilitate free movement to and from Gibraltar. Their role is planned to last four years.

Gibraltarians are British citizens. They elect their own representatives to the territory's House of Assembly, while the British monarch appoints a governor.

The territory - home to a British military garrison and naval base - is self-governing in all areas except defence and foreign policy.

Ms González Laya did not say whether Spanish border guards would eventually be posted at Gibraltar's airport and/or seaport which, under the deal, will be de facto part of the EU's external border.

The Gibraltar deal would also mean the territory complying with EU fair competition rules in areas such as financial policy, the environment and the labour market, Ms González Laya said.

Twenty-two EU states are in the passport-free Schengen zone, as are Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein, but the UK has never been in it.

Once Gibraltar joins it, EU citizens arriving from Spain or another Schengen country will avoid passport checks, while arrivals from the UK will have to go through passport control, as is already the case.

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called Thursday's deal a "political framework" to form the basis of a separate treaty with the EU regarding Gibraltar.

The deal does not address the thorny issue of sovereignty. Spain has long disputed British sovereignty over the Rock which was ceded to Britain in 1713 and which is now home to about 34,000 people. The Remain vote there was an overwhelming 96% in the 2016 EU referendum.

The plan is to have a six-month transition period and then formalise the new arrangements with a treaty.

Under the current tight Covid rules, there are restrictions on UK citizens arriving via Gibraltar's airport, the UK Foreign Office says.

Dominic Raab said "all sides are committed to mitigating the effects of the end of the [Brexit] Transition Period on Gibraltar, and in particular ensure border fluidity, which is clearly in the best interests of the people living on both sides.

"We remain steadfast in our support for Gibraltar, and its sovereignty is safeguarded."

* There has been a history of Spaniards providing labour on the Rock going back to the Treaty of Utrect in 1713. Hence, any Spanish tightening of controls at Gibraltar’s land border would have also hurt about 10,000 workers like Mr. Moya who commute there daily, mostly from nearby towns that form an economically depressed area known as the Campo de Gibraltar.

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Judge Rejects Extradition of Julian Assange

A JUDGE today has refused to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US.

In a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this morning, Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the extradition on grounds that Assange is a suicide risk and extradition to the US prison system would be oppressive, given the likely impact on his fragile mental health.

The US, which has been seeking to bring Assange to the country to put him on trial for conspiracy to hack as well as a number of charges under the controversial Espionage Act, has said it will appeal.

Assange, she said, is "a depressed and sometimes despairing man genuinely fearful about his future," and if extradited, would be "housed in conditions of significant isolation," hampering contact with family.

There was evidence of a risk to Assange's health if he were to face trial in the United States, Baraitser said, adding that the 49-year-old activist's risk of committing suicide appeared to be "substantial."

Lawyers for the United States immediately said they would appeal the ruling.

Assange was arrested in April 2019 and has since been held in a high-security prison. He had been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012, where he sought asylum to dodge sexual assault charges in Sweden.

Assange was arrested after Ecuador withdrew its offer of asylum. Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno said the country's patience for Assange had "reached its limit" after "repeated violations to international conventions and daily life."

Assange was indicted on 17 new charges of violating the Espionage Act in 2019 and already faced a charge from March 2018 of conspiring to commit unlawful computer intrusion, which carried a maximum five years in prison.

He was accused of working with former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain and publicly release classified information. The new charges brought his total charges to 18 counts with each violation of the Espionage Act carrying a maximum 10-year sentence.

Assange has consistently claimed he was acting as a journalist but Baraitser said earlier in extradition hearing that his receipt of thousands of classified files went beyond investigative journalism.

In her ruling, the judge dismissed arguments from Assange's legal team that he couldn't be afforded protections under the U.S. Constitution, but agreed that he could not be extradited on health grounds.

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Scrap GCSEs & A-Levels, say 2000 Headteachers

TODAY on the Lockdown Sceptic's website edited by Toby Young, reported:

As night follows day, headteachers are now demanding that GCSEs and A-levels be scrapped again this year. Why? To protect their staff from being infected with a virus that, if you’re under-70 and healthy, is less deadly than seasonal flu....

Head teachers have warned that GCSE and A-level exams cannot go ahead this summer after plans for reopening schools for the spring term were thrown into chaos.

Most primary schools in England are due to open tomorrow, followed by a phased start for secondary schools a week later with GCSE and A-level pupils returning first. The Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, still insists that teenagers must sit the national exams.

However, a network of 2,000 head teachers in 80 local authorities will today insist that teachers, pupils and parents should not be put at risk of contracting COVID-19 in order to protect the GCSE and A-level timetables.

“Wider public health, pupil and staff safety should be prioritised ahead of examinations,” said the head teachers from the WorthLess? campaign group.

“Public safety should not be risked or driven by an inflexible pursuit of GCSE and A-levels.”

Surely Toby Young, the editor of the Lockdown Sceptic's website, should support this downgrading of A-levels given his own historic poor performance when doing them years ago?

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COVID-19: 'SCIENCE ON TRIAL' ?

THIAGO CARVALHO* in this weekend's Financial Times asks: 'So what have we learned about the limits of science? First, we were reminded that spectacular successes are built on a foundation of decades of basic research. Even the novel, first-in-class vaccines are at the end of a long road. It was slow-going to get to warp speed. We learned that there are no shortcuts to deciphering how a new virus makes us sick (and kills us) and that there is no ignoring the importance of human diversity for cracking this code. Diabetes, obesity, hypertension - we are still finding our way through a comorbidity labyrinth. Most of all, we have learned an old lesson again: science is the art of the soluable. No amount of resorces and personnel, no Manhattan Project, can ensure that science will solve a problem in the absence of a well-stocked toolbox and a solid, painstaking built theoretical framework.'

He reminds us: 'South Korea recorded its first Covid-19 case on January 20. Eleven days later, Spain confirmed its first infection: a German tourist in the Canary Islands. Spain and South Korea have similar populations of about 50m people. As of ublication of this piece, South Korea has had 879 deaths, while Spain reports over 50,000. The west missed its moment.'

* The writer is an immunologist at the Champalimaud Foundation, Lisbon.

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Toby Young's slip-up on Twitter

SOME weeks ago Toby Young, editor of the Lockdown Sceptics website, tweeted: 'New study suggests more than five million Britons have had the coronavirus. Given that -50,000 people have died from it, that means an IFR [infection fatality rate] of 0.1%.'

Tim Harford, the UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST in the Financial Times [19th, DECEMBER 2020] wrote 'There was just one small problem with that tweet: the arithmatic.' Young duly clarified: 'That last tweet was wrong... had a brain fart. If 5 million Brits have been infected and -50,000 have died, that equals an IFR of 1%.'

Tbat suggests that Young's second tweet admits that the virus is 10 times more deadly than he had thought. Meaning that rather that anticipating one death per thousand infections, his updated calculation suggests we should expect 10.

Tim Harford admits that it is easy to slip-up with decimal points, and thus to make false statements about Covid-19. He argues that the 'strongest arguements in favour of lockdowns is the kind of information peddled by some lockdown sceptics.' He writes: 'When you see demonstratably false claims that most people who died with Covid-19 did not die of it, that we are seeing a "casedemic" founded on false postives or most infections are asymptomatic throughout - that's the point you think: gosh, maybe we really can't be trusted after all.'

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Government to Close Schools

THE Government has announced targeted school closures for England in an attempt to control the spread of the virus (though it’s unlikely to help much, as Toby explained yesterday). The Telegraph has the details.

One million primary school pupils will not return to classrooms as planned next term as Boris Johnson unveiled sweeping school closures and warned more could follow.

The Prime Minister said that in order to combat the spread of the new coronavirus variant, the majority of secondary school pupils will now stay at home until “at least” January 18th, two weeks after term was supposed to start. Those in exam years 11 and 13 will return on January 11th.

Only the children of key workers and vulnerable children will go back on January 4th, the scheduled start date. It means the staggered start to term which had previously been announced will be moved back by a week.

Primary schools in “high infection areas”, estimated to affect one million pupils, will also close for the first time since the spring for at least two weeks as Mr Johnson said “even tougher action” was needed because of the “sheer pace” of the rising infections.

The Prime Minister said there was no guarantee that the January 18th return date would not slip further, as the latest data on infection rates would be reviewed at that point.

He added: “I want to stress that, depending on the spread of the disease, it may be necessary to take further action in their cases as well.”

The announcement came as three quarters of the population of England were quarantined in Tier 4 as of this morning, with the rest of the country left in the scarcely less restrictive Tier 3, creating a new national lockdown in all but name.

LOCKDOWN SCEPTICS' Stop Press: In Sarah Vine’s column in yesterday’s Daily Mail she opposed school closures, saying “it’s madness to treat our schools like nail bars or nightclubs“. Yet her husband Michael Gove is reported to have sided with Matt Hancock and opposed Gavin Williamson’s efforts to keep schools open. Trouble in paradise?

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LOCKDOWN SCEPTICS & a new strain of virus!

TODAY TIM JONES on the Lockdown Sceptics website asks: 'If the new strain has a biological advantage that makes it more transmissible why isn’t it taking over in every region?'

He continues: 'However it is a real question that needs answering, and one that’s also being asked by Professor Francois Balloux on Twitter:

'The new 'UK #SARSCoV2 variant' (lineage B 1.1.7) which has recently gone up in frequency in the UK has been identified in numerous countries including in Denmark, where its frequency remained at ~1% in mid-December.

1/ https://t.co/ElOC2zqTAW

— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) December 29, 2020 'A number of media outlets have reported on the new technical briefing from Public Health England that shows considerably more being infected by carriers of the new variant than carriers of other variants. Here’s the report in the Times. 'Contacts of people with the new coronavirus variant are 54% more likely to develop the disease, according to new analysis from Public Health England. 'They found, however, that it did not appear likely to cause more severe disease or higher death rates.

'Researchers found the “secondary attack rate”, or proportion of contacts of confirmed cases that develop the disease themselves, was 15.1% for people with a confirmed case of the new variant and 9.8% for people confirmed to have another variant.'

The figures were published yesterday in a technical report on the variant, now named VOC (variant of concern) 202012/01.

Ministers pointed to the variant’s increased infectiousness when announcing higher Tier 4 restrictions for much of England earlier this month.

However, according to Tim Jones, 'the PHE briefing does not draw any conclusions about transmissibility from the data it presents (it doesn’t mention transmissibility at all). Is this because the authors are aware that this may be just coincidence? In other words, that it appears to be more transmissible just because most of the infections with it happen to be in the areas that are currently surging? This by itself would explain why the secondary attack rate (the proportion of contacts who become infected) for the new variant in England is higher in recent weeks – because it happens to be the variant most prevalent in the areas of the country where more people are currently being infected. To know whether it is the new variant itself that is responsible for the higher secondary attack rate, or something else, we would need to see it higher in other regions, not just the one currently surging. And as Loftus and Prof Balloux observe, there is not currently evidence of that.'

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Zhang Zhan, sentenced to 4-years by Shanghai Court for reporting on pandemic outbreak

Chinese Citizen Journalist Jailed For 4 Years For Wuhan Virus Reports

Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, was sentenced at a brief hearing in a Shanghai court for allegedly "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" for her reporting in the chaotic initial stages of the outbreak.

Shanghai:

Updated: December 28, 2020

A Chinese citizen journalist was jailed for four years Monday for her reporting from Wuhan as the Covid-19 outbreak unfurled, her lawyer said, almost a year after details of an "unknown viral pneumonia" surfaced in the central China city.

Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer, was sentenced at a brief hearing in a Shanghai court for allegedly "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" during her reporting in the chaotic initial stages of the outbreak.

Her live reports and essays were shared on social media platforms in February, grabbing the attention of authorities, who have punished eight virus whistleblowers so far as they defang criticism of the government's response to the outbreak.

Beijing has congratulated itself for "extraordinary" success in controlling the virus inside its borders, with an economy on the rebound while much of the rest of the world stutters through painful lockdowns and surging caseloads a year on from the start of the pandemic in Wuhan.

Controlling the information flow during an unprecedented global health crisis has been pivotal in allowing China's communist authorities to reframe the narrative in their favour, with President Xi Jinping being garlanded for his leadership by the country's ruling party.

But that has come at a serious cost to anyone who has picked holes in the official storyline.

The court said Zhang Zhan had spread "false remarks" online, according to one of her lawyers Zhang Keke, but the prosecution did not fully divulge its evidence in court.

"We had no way of understanding what exactly Zhang Zhan was accused of doing," he added, describing it as "a speedy, rushed hearing."

In return the defendant "didn't respond [to questions]... She refused to answer when the judge asked her to confirm her identity."

The defendant's mother sobbed loudly as the verdict was read out, Ren Quanniu, another member of Zhang's defence team, told reporters who were barred from entering the court.

Concerns are mounting over the health of 37-year-old Zhang, who began a hunger strike in June and has been force-fed via a nasal tube.

Her legal team said her health was in decline and she suffered from headaches, dizziness and stomach pain, and that she had appeared in court in a wheelchair.

"She said when I visited her (last week): 'If they give me a heavy sentence then I will refuse food until the very end.'... She thinks she will die in prison,"Ren said before the trial.

"It's an extreme method of protesting against this society and this environment."

China's communist authorities have a history of putting dissidents on trial in opaque courts between Christmas and New Year in an effort to minimise Western scrutiny.

Example made

The sentencing comes just weeks before an international team of World Health Organization experts is expected to arrive in China to investigate the origins of Covid-19.

Zhang was critical of the early response in Wuhan, writing in a February essay that the government "didn't give people enough information, then simply locked down the city".

"This is a great violation of human rights," she wrote.

Rights groups and embassies have also drawn attention to her case, although diplomats from several countries were denied requests to monitor the hearing. "Zhang Zhan's case raises serious concerns about media freedom in China," the British embassy in Beijing said, urging "China to release all those detained for their reporting."

Authorities "want to use her case as an example to scare off other dissidents from raising questions about the pandemic situation in Wuhan earlier this year", added Leo Lan, research and advocacy consultant at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders NGO.

Zhang is the first of a group of four citizen journalists detained by authorities after reporting from Wuhan to face trial.

Previous attempts by AFP to contact the other three -- Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Li Zehua -- were unsuccessful.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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The Death of George Blake by Brian Bamford

GEORGE Blake, a notorious British double agent who betrayed Cold War secrets and Western spies to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and, after being caught, staged a spectacular escape to live out his life as a K.G.B. colonel in Moscow, has died. He was 98.

Like the Cambridge-educated moles Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Mr. Blake became a dedicated Marxist, disillusioned with the West, and a high British intelligence officer while secretly working for the Soviets. His clandestine life had lasted less than a decade, but cost the lives of many agents and destroyed vital British and American operations in Europe.

Unlike the Cambridge clique, who defected when the authorities closed in, Mr. Blake was caught in 1961, tried secretly and sentenced to 42 years in prison. Five years later, with inside and outside help, he escaped from the Wormwood Scrubs prison in London and fled to Moscow. He left behind a wife, three children and an uproar over his getaway, the tatters of a case that encapsulated the intrigues of a perilous nuclear age, with flash points in Korea and Germany, where Blake served.

Settling into a new life in Moscow in 1966, Mr. Blake assumed the identity of Colonel Georgiy Ivanovich Bleyk and was awarded the Order of Lenin and given a pension and an apartment. He divorced his wife, remarried and had a son and grandson, helped train Soviet agents and in 2007, on his 85th birthday, received the Order of Friendship from President Putin. He wrote an autobiography, “No Other Choice” (1990), and a memoir, “Transparent Walls” (2006).

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IN HIS AUTHORIZED HISTORY OF MI5 'The Defence of the Realm' Christopher Andrew wrote:

'To general astonishment, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, sentenced [George] Blake to forty-two years' imprisonment, the longest sentence ever imposed by a British court. Blake appeared stummed. Sir Dick White later said that he too had been shocked by the severity of the sentence. J.Edgar Hoover, by contrast, was delighted, telling the Washington SLO approvingly: "Anyway, the British have guts!" Macmillan, however, found the spy scandals of the early 1960s even more distastful than the furore which had surrounded his clearing of Philby in 1955. Instead of congadulating MI5 for its part in tracking down a series of Soviet spies, he blamed the Service for causing him public embarrassment. The Prime Minister complained in his diary after Blake's conviction that he public, already shocked by media reports, "do not know and cannot be told that he belonged to MI6, an organisation which does not theoretically exist. So I had rater a rough passage in the House of Commons..." Though the British press did not reveal that Blake was an SIS officer when repoting the verdict, the foreign press had no such inhibitions and the secret soon leaked out.'

This incident seems to capture the thankless job of spy-catching by MI5.

Later when Sir Roger Hollis had alerted Macmillan of the arrest of the spy John Vassal it was claimed that Hollis had told him 'I've got this fellow [Vassall], I've got him!' When Macmillan failed to show any enthusiasm for this MI5 success, Hollis allegedly remarked, 'You don't seem very pleased, Prime Minister.' Macmillan, by his own account, replied:

'No, I'm not pleased. When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn't go and hang it up outside the Master of the Foxhounds' drawing room; he buries it out of sight. But you just can't shoot a spy as you did in the war. You have to try him... better to discover him, and then control him, but never catch him... There will be a terrible row in the press, there will be a debate in the House of Commons and the government will probably fall. Why the devil did you catch him?'

This is the curious paradox presented by Sir Roger Hollis the spy-catcher to the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in the 1960s, it was not unlike that described in the essay 'Shooting an Elephant' by George Orwell: 'The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant, like a mad dog, if the owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and gave me sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.'

Appearances are often more important than crude political considerations, and that's why cases like that of George Blake are so significant in so far as they often serve to ridicule and undermine political authority.

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An appeal for help from workers in Ukraine

ALL over the world, working people are suffering due to the global pandemic and economic crisis. Many have lost their jobs. Many businesses are failing.

But not all these problems are being caused by Covid.

We've received an appeal for help from workers in Ukraine who have not received their wages for more than three YEARS.

And the business that employs them - KVARSYT - is state-owned.

According to Ukraine's constitution, every worker must be paid for their work.

The decision of the management to not pay these workers is also in breach of ILO Convention 95, entitled 'Protection of Wages'TRADE (1949), which was ratified in 1961 by the Ukrainian government.

Please take a moment to protest to the Ukrainian government - and to show your solidarity with these workers.

And please spread the word to your friends, family and fellow union members.

Thank you.

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UK FREEDOM PASSPORTS TO BE ISSUED TO THE COVID NEGATIVE?

UK government is awarding contracts to firms to design an app that can be used to show a person is Covid-19 negative. This will allow the user to acquire a 'freedom passport' which will allow you to enter pubs, schools, and workplaces, and other public venues. The article says the government haven't quite decided to do this, but it looks like they're thinking in that direction.

The article raises the question of how the 'hapless', would be able to prove their 'negativity' if they haven't got a smartphone or some other whiz kid device. Presumably, they would have to go out and buy one or be refused admittance. Needles to say, this would be classed as essential shopping. 

Although I don't take a blasé attitude towards the Covid pandemic and take precautions, it does raise serious issues concerning civil liberties and possibly discrimination.

A university lecturer said to me only recently, that he thought Britain was beginning to resemble Vichy France. I said, I thought, a more appropriate comparison was with East Germany - more state control, the erosion of civil liberties, shop a neighbour, more spying, and the Stasi on your back. 

I just wonder what Mrs Gamp would have made of all this surveillance? After all, "I am not  a Rooshan  or a Prooshan" as she says: "and consequently cannot suffer spies to be set over me."

It’s Time To Report The Pay Gap by Les May

WHEN I first became interested in left wing politics in the early 1960s the people I met were primarily interested reducing inequalities of income, wealth, power and influence. Times change; being ‘of the left’ today frequently means an obsession with identity politics. Inequalities between groups which can be attributed to differences of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, you name it, are all seen as grist to the mill. Inequalities of income, wealth, power and influence within these different groups are largely ignored.

Today the BBC reported; ‘Three quarters of employers want large firms to be forced to release data on the pay gap between staff of different ethnicities, a leaked report shows. The findings, seen by the BBC, came from a consultation exercise on ethnicity pay gap reporting launched by Theresa May in October 2018. The then PM promised to 'help employers identify the actions needed to create a fairer and more diverse workforce'. But two years later, the government has yet to respond’.

The news report included an interview with someone who was described as a ‘consultant’, which presumably means they were being paid quite a lot of money for doing this very important job. Now it happens that the interviewee was a woman and she was black. But the question which occurs to me is should I get more excited that in some big company someone who happens to be black and/or a woman is being paid a paltry £110,000 when her white male counterpart is being paid £120,000, or should I be more concerned that the same company has a proportion of it’s staff on zero hours contracts being paid minimum wage.

If we are going to have big companies forced to report the pay gap between staff of different ethnicities and sexes, then by the same token companies should be forced to report the differences in remuneration between executives, managers, shop floor workers and toilet cleaners.

One of the ways I shall judge Keir Starmer is whether he shows any sign of a commitment to reducing income and wealth inequalities. Signposting his willingness to support mandatory reporting of the pay gap within companies would be a good start.

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Manchester Chief Constable quits as force is put into special measures for 'outstandingly bad' results

Labour Mayor Andy Burnham says 'SORRY' promises to improve!

LAST THURSDAY the Greater Manchester Police force (GMP) was placed into an "advanced phase" of monitoring, after inspectors found it had failed to record 80,000 crimes in a year.

Yesterday, the Chief Constable Ian Hopkins, who earlier revealed he was on sick leave, said he would now step down with immediate effect.

Inspectors had said GMP's service to victims of crime was a "serious cause of concern".

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) said it was left 'deeply troubled' over how cases handled by GMP were closed without proper investigation.

It said about 220 crimes a day went unrecorded in the year up to June 2020.

Victims' Commissioner for England and Wales, Dame Vera Baird, told BBC Radio 4's PM programme that the force's failures were "outstandingly bad".

She said crimes like stalking and coercive control were "profoundly traumatising" and victims needed "not only the support of police to get orders restraining the perpetrator and to take them to court, but they also need to be safeguarded and referred to appropriate victim's services".

She added that "none of that was happening" and vulnerable people had "simply been deserted".

In a statement, Mr Hopkins has said that these are "challenging times" for the Greater Manchester Police and he believed a chief constable should oversee the force's 'long-term strategic plan' to address the issues raised from "start to finish".

Mr Hopkins revealed on Wednesday he had been suffering from labyrinthitis - an inner-ear infection which affects balance - since the end of October.

He said "given my current ill health", he would bring his retirement, which he was due to take in autumn 2021, forward, adding that it had been "an honour to serve the public for 32 years".

Mr Hopkins has been chief constable of GMP since October 2015, leading a force of almost 7,000 officers.

"Throughout my career, I have been committed to achieving the best outcomes for the people I serve [and] the decision to stand down is not one I have taken lightly, but I feel the time is right," he said.

The Blame Game Continues!

Meanwhile, the Conservative MP for Bolton West Chris Green has urged Andy Burnham, who oversees policing in the area, to step down.

Earlier, Mr Green said Mr Burnham should 'resign now' as he has 'absolute responsibility for policing, its failures'.

'His role ultimately is to ensure that GMP is delivering. He is in a position if he doesn't think GMP is performing and is delivering then he can challenge and if necessary he can sack the chief of police,' he said.

'That is Andy Burnham's power over policing in Manchester. He has absolute authority.'

But the Labour mayor said he would not be stepping down.

Following the publication of the daming report earlier in the week, and Mr Burnham had apologised on behalf of the Greater Manchester Police.

'I would like to say sorry to all of the victims of crime who have found that the service has not been good enough. We owe it to them to improve and we will and we will do it fast,' he said.

The 'Culture of Arrogance and Cover-ups'

A former GMP detective Maggie Oliver, who resigned over the way grooming cases in Rochdale were handled by the force, has said she and two ex-colleagues had a meeting with Mr Burnham in 2018 to highlight "serious concerns" and were "treated with contempt".

She said they gave him 26 examples of victims being failed by GMP, including "people dying as a result of gross neglect" and he "basically slammed the door in our face".

There was a "culture of arrogance and cover-ups" at the force, she said, and a "radical overhaul" was needed.

Ms Oliver said victim's "trust in the police had gone" and her charity, she claimed the Maggie Oliver Foundation, was "drowning in cries for help" from people who "have nowhere else to turn".

Sir Richard Leese, Manchester City Council leader, said the watchdog's findings indicate there are "major issues" that need to be addressed.

"I think it kind of says it all that GMP so far have not put up a spokesperson to explain what the situation is, what's been going on," he added.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the mayor and deputy mayor said they were "putting in place the necessary actions to improve standards of service to victims of crime in Greater Manchester".

Mr Burnham announced that a dedicated hotline for victims who have any complaints was also being set up.

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The Importance of Professor Priyamvada Gopal

by Brian Bamford

EDITORIAL NOTE:

COLONIALISM in my experience corrupts both the colonialists and the people being colonised. I recognised that while working in Gibraltar. Hence it should not surprise us that someone like Prof. Priyamvada Gopal should herself show signs demanding entitlement and making claims to privillege about her status at Cambridge. She is clearly a creature of the caste system* which is a 'defining feature of Hinduism' which is part of her own culture.

'"Untouchability" and Segregation

* 'India's caste system is perhaps the world's longest surviving social hierarchy. A defining feature of Hinduism, caste encompasses a complex ordering of social groups on the basis of ritual purity. A person is considered a member of the caste into which he or she is born and remains within that caste until death, although the particular ranking of that caste may vary among regions and over time. Differences in status are traditionally justified by the religious doctrine of karma, a belief that one's place in life is determined by one's deeds in previous lifetimes.

COLOUR COMPLEXIONS ON THE INDIAN SUB-CONTINENT

ON June 25th, this year, the CAMBRIDGE VARSITY website announced that the controversal academic Priyamvada Gopal, Churchill fellow and academic in postcolonial literature in the English Faculty, had been promoted to full Professorial Chair despite a petition on change.org which called for her removal from the University. This comes following news that she was briefly suspended from Facebook and Twitter after sharing some of the messages of the hateful abuse she has received by a campaign launched on a 4chan forum encouraging users to contact the University to call for Gopal’s removal.

The Cambridge University professor Gopal had taken to Twitter to write: 'I'll say it again. White Lives Don't Matter. As white lives'

She argues that whiteness is primarily a cultural category, not a biological one, and is useful for explaining how western societies work in terms of how society is structured, and how such structures determine power relations between dominant and non-dominant groups.

These remarks came as India's multibillion-dollar skin lightening industry is under fire as Indians seek whiter shade of pale, and India's Bollywood actor, Abhay Deol, said: 'You have to stop buying into the idea that a particular shade is better than others,' Abhay Deol, an actor famous for playing offbeat roles, said on his Facebook page.

Deol had lambasted his Bollywood peers - including Shah Rukh Khan, John Abraham, Shahid Kapur and Deepika Padukone - for endorsing so-called fairness brands and urged them to stop using their popularity to peddle products he called racist.

Meanwhile in India, where Gopal received a BA from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, controversy around 'fairness' products has raged for decades, with darker skin shades variously described as "dusky" and "wheatish", and lighter tones sold as more attractive.

The market - which includes creams, face washes, deodorants, even a vaginal whitener - is estimated to be worth about 270 billion rupees ($4 billion) and is growing at a steady clip.

The World Health Organization banned the active ingredients – hydroquinone and mercury – from unregulated skin products.

Research firm Centre for Science and Environment said in a 2014 study that nearly half the creams it tested in India contained mercury, which is "completely illegal and unlawful".

CASTE at the ROOT of RACISM

SOME activists link the bias to an entrenched caste system, where higher-caste Brahmins generally have lighter skin.

In a country where arranged marriages are still the norm, matrimonial ads consistently describe a woman's complexion, and dark-skinned women often pay a higher dowry, activists say.

Bullying and taunting of dark-skinned girls and women is common, while dark-skinned actors complain of fewer roles.

Advertising campaigns for various brands have typically depicted women - and increasingly men - as winning better jobs and partners, thanks to the fairness creams.

But Kiran Khalap, co-founder of brand consultancy Chlorophyll in Mumbai, said the adverts were not to blame.

"Our obsession with fair skin didn't come from HUL or Emami: it's a deep-seated cultural bias that equates being fair with being superior," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

So when we examine Prof Gopal's background on the Indian sub-continent we can perhaps better understand her anxieties about 'blackness', 'whiteness' and colour in general which may make her a bit touchy

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Cambridge University dumps proposal it be 'respectful' of all views

THE GUARDIAN Ben Quinn @BenQuinn75

Wed 9 Dec 2020 19.26 GMT

Proposals requiring Cambridge University staff and students to be “respectful” of differing views under a freedom of speech policy have been overwhelmingly rejected in a vote by its governing body.

The policy will instead emphasise “tolerance” of differing views after an amendment put forward by those concerned about the impact on academic freedom was carried by a landslide majority (86.9%).

Cambridge alumni including Stephen Fry had been among those who had opposed elements of the new policy, which the actor and writer had described as “muddled”.

Visitors to the university would also have been asked to be “respectful” of the views and “diverse identities” of others.

It was subject to a ballot in recent weeks among members of the institution’s Regent House, its official governing body, which is largely comprised of academic and senior administrative staff.

There are also implications for the issue of “no platforming” as a result of the support for three amendments, elements of which stress that those invited to speak at the university “must not be stopped from doing so” as long as they remain within the law.

The vote was welcomed by Cambridge’s vice-chancellor, Prof Stephen Toope, as “an emphatic reaffirmation of free speech in our university”.

He added: “Freedom of speech is a right that sits at the heart of the university. This statement is a robust defence of that right.

“The university will always be a place where anyone can express new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, and where those views can be robustly challenged. The statement also makes it clear that it is unacceptable to censor, or disinvite, speakers whose views are lawful but may be seen as controversial.

“Rigorous debate is fundamental to the pursuit of academic excellence and the University of Cambridge will always be a place where freedom of speech is not only protected, but strongly encouraged.”

The new policy reads: “In exercising their right to freedom of expression, the university expects its staff, students and visitors to be tolerant of the differing opinions of others, in line with the university’s core value of freedom of expression.

“The university also expects its staff, students and visitors to be tolerant of the diverse identities of others, in line with the university’s core value of freedom from discrimination.”

However, other academics at the university have expressed concern about the changes to the original policy statement, while the Cambridge branch of the Universities and Colleges Union has said that it and the amendments are not “fit for purpose”.

Prof Priyamvada Gopal, an academic at the university, tweeted: “There is no ‘free speech row’ at Cambridge. There is the university scrambling to follow government orders based on false moral panic, there are the poor students trying to make it less draconian, & there are the Freeze Peach brigade trying to stop the right to protest.”

The controversy has played out against the backdrop of increasingly fraught debates on campuses and elsewhere about the limits of freedom of speech.

Students at Cambridge University called earlier this year for a porter at Clare College to be suspended from his job after he resigned from his role on the city council in protest over a motion in support of transgender rights.

Opposition to the original freedom of speech policy proposal was spearheaded by a number of people at the university including Dr Arif Ahmed, who is a reader in philosophy there.

He told The Times last week: “A lot of people feel as if they’re living in an atmosphere where there are witch-hunts going on, a sort of academic version of Salem in the 17th century or the McCarthyite era.”

• This article was amended on 10 December 2020 to add Gopal’s title as a professor, to give Dr Ahmed his correct honorific and to describe him as a reader in philosophy rather than a philosophy professor.

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Meet The Wrong Type of Jew, The Media Doesn't Want You To Know Exists | ...

Nothing To Gain, Everything To Lose by Les May

A JEWISH lady by the name of Jenny Manson had an interesting message left on her answerphone which went as follows, "You fucking Nazi bitch… You should burn in the gas oven. You dirty fucking bitch… Stinking, stinking swine… You deserve … to burn in acid." Even more interesting is that the police tracked down the caller and found him to be a middle-aged Jewish man. He was formally cautioned for the offence of malicious communications in May 2019.

Manson it seems is ‘the wrong sort of Jew’. Her crime is that as a co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) she draws attention to the fact that there is a diversity of opinion amongst British Jews both about the level of anti-semitism in the Labour party and about the behaviour of the government of Israel towards Palestinians.

In November she was interviewed by Kirsty Wark about the decision to readmit Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party. According the Jewish Chronicle there were ‘complaints logged with the BBC by Jewish campaigners angry at Newsnight’s decision to invite Ms Manson onto the show only a few weeks after the appearance of another leading figure in JVL Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi.’

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi was suspended from the Labour party a few days ago. Her crime? There were complaints that she had made some members ‘uncomfortable’ perhaps because she had said, ‘The idea that Jewish people require for their comfort that whole swathes of subjects should not be debated by the membership of this party is insulting to Jewish people.’

The Labour party bars everyone suspended or investigated from sharing any details of their cases. But we do know that Wimborne-Idrissi is not the only Jewish member of the party to have been suspended or investigated on accusations of anti-semitism. The figure now seems to be more than twenty, and includes a significant proportion of the members of the JVL committee. Commenting on the psychological impact on Labour party members who have received Notices of Investigation. She has said: ‘It is Kafkaesque, You are not told who is accusing you. And you are not allowed to discuss it with anyone. So you receive this devastating letter – and are immediately isolated.’

We can gain some insight into what is going on from a comment made about her; ‘She can marry whomever she pleases and hold whatever ideological stance she finds attractive. Naomi Wimborne was free to marry a Muslim, and become Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi... But, given her life choices, is Naomi really in a position to talk publicly as if she is representative of British Jewish identity?’

Some people might find the comment implicitly offensive or suggest it verges on ‘racism’. But the real import of it, as with the complaints to the BBC about interviewing two members of Jewish Voice for Labour on Newsnight, is that it is an attempt to silence people who will not accept that the views presented in Jewish Chronicle and by the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), are representative of those of all British Jews.

In addition to Jewish Voices for Labour there are a number of other organisations, Independent Jewish Voices, Jewish Socialists’ Group, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Manchester Jewish Action for Palestine, Free Speech on Israel, which are equally representative of the views of British Jews. The JLM organisation differs from these other Jewish organisations because it has what Jewish Voices for Labour has called a ‘profoundly Zionist orientation’ and seems to be unwilling to be in any way critical of the treatment of Palestinians by the state of Israel.

So anxious is JLM to control the narrative around accusations and definition of anti-semitism, and by inference around Labour’s attitude to the treatment of Palestinians by the state of Israel, that in April 2018 it asked for, and received, a guarantee that JLM would remain Labour's only Jewish affiliate, after suggestions that Jewish Voices for Labour might be allowed to affiliate.

The Jewish Chronicle has described JLM as a 'gathering-place for moderates concerned about the direction the party is taking under Mr Corbyn' and JLM has changed its rules to facilitate this by allowing non-Jews to have affiliate membership so providing a base for attacking him. But the fact that so many Jewish members of the Labour party have been accused of anti-semitism suggests to me that what we are seeing is Labour being the battleground chosen by the Zionist oriented JLM to drown out the voices of protest from other non-Zionist oriented Jews. Corbyn was a reluctant accessory to this; Starmer, Nandy, Long-Bailey and Rayner have jumped in with both feet and embraced it by signing up to the ‘Ten Pledges’ I have written about previously.

Is it not absurd that a definition of anti-semitism is being adopted by the Labour party which can be used against Jewish members on the basis of complaints made by other Jewish members and organisations, some of which like CAA, (Campaign Against Antisemitism) are utterly pernicious and adopt dubious tactics to discredit their opponents? Labour has nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing this battle to be fought on its territory. Blackmailers always come back for more.

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An Appeal By David Graeber Re: Labour 'Antisemitism'

Navigating 'Hell' in troubling times!

CHRIS DRAPER reviewing the English film 'THE ROAD TO HELL' which he claims was the 'first socialist film' writes:

'Premiered in London on Friday 28 July 1933, Lansbury himself attended the show and a couple of months later introduced the film to delegates attending the Labour Party’s annual conference in the White Rock Pavilion, Hastings. Although the film was generally well received where shown it proved impossible to secure a general release. Cinemas were dominated by Hollywood and ultimately controlled by local authority licensing committees eager to ban Socialist Film Council films as did Birmingham Council in 1935.'

This film fills a very narrow canvas much of it filmed in George Lansbury's home portraying the impact of the then National Government's Means Test on a family in a city, London. Most of the domestic scenes were filmed in George Lansbury’s 39, Bow Road home making it, as Chris Draper himself says: 'an accomplished though economical production.' It shows the struggles of an urban lower middle-class family dealing with the difficulties of the economic depression.

It is tempting now to compare this film with the European film Kameradschaft produced in 1931 shortly before 'THE ROAD TO HELL'. Kameradschaft is also based on a real life disaster, perhaps one of the worst industrial accidents in history; the Courrières mine disaster in 1906 in Courrières, France, where rescue efforts after a coal dust explosion were hampered by the lack of trained mine rescuers. Expert teams from Paris and miners from the Westphalia region of Germany came to the assistance of the French miners. There were 1,099 fatalities.

Kameradschaft (English: Comradeship, known in France asLa Tragédie de la mine) is a 1931 dramatic film directed by Austrian director G. W. Pabst. The French-German co-production drama is noted for combining expressionism and realism. It reflects the spirit of European internationalism, while the English film is much more parochial.

It would be hard to find an better example of the Little Englander phenomena of an island people contrasting so vividly with the concept of continental co-operation as in these two films.

The plot of the European film Kameradschaft is as follows:

'Two boys, one French and the other German, are playing marbles near the border. When the game is over, both boys claim to have won, and complain that the other is trying to steal their marbles. Their fathers, border guards, come and separate the boys.

'In 1919, at the end of World War I the border changes, and an underground mine is divided, with a gate dividing the two sections. An economic downturn and rising unemployment adds to tension, as German workers seek employment in France but are turned away, since there are hardly enough jobs for French workers. In the French part of the mine fires break out, which they try to contain by building brick walls, with the bricklayers wearing breathing apparatus. The Germans continue to work in their section, but start to feel the heat from the French fires.

'The fire gets out of control, igniting gas and causing roof collapses that traps many French miners. In response, the German miner, Wittkopp, appeals successfully to his bosses to send a rescue team. As the German rescue team leave in two lorries, its leader explains to his wife that the French are men with women and children and he would hope that they would come to his aid in similar circumstances. In the mine itself, a trio of German miners breaks through the grille on the border between the two countries. On the French side, an old retired miner sneaks into the shaft hoping to rescue his young grandson. The Germans rescue the French miners, not without difficulties. After all the survivors are rescued, there is a big party with speeches about friendship between the French and Germans. French and German officials then reinstall the underground border grille and things return to the way they were before.'

It is very apt that these reviews are appearing now as the EU and the UK are arguing over rights to fishing.

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Britain’s First Socialist Film?

(and where you can watch it for free!)

by Christopher Draper

I GREW UP addicted to TV and loved “Robin Hood”, “Play for Today”, “Boys from the Blackstuff” and “The Monocled Mutineer” but kicked the habit long before the emergence of shopping channels, Ant & Dec and Jeremy Kyle. If Britain’s Got Talent it’s not evident from TV – the opium of the people.

Radical Cinema

RADICAL director Ken Loach was on telly in the 1960’s but as the medium grew increasingly idiotic shifted to cinema, where for decades he’s almost single-handedly kept alive the fragile flame of Britain’s socialist film culture. Loach wasn’t our first socialist director yet so little regarded is political cinema in Britain that lefties are more able to identify radical foreign film makers like Eisenstein, Vigo or Bunuel than any British pioneer.

Socialists and Film Makers

THERE were four decades of film making in Britain before in 1933 a trio of iconoclastic activists created the Socialist Film Council (SFC) with the intention of producing politically conscious films for public showing. The leading lights were Rudolph Messel (1905-1958), Raymond Postgate (1896-1971) and George Lansbury (1859-1940) with Messel the prime mover. Postgate was a writer and founder member of the British Communist Party and as a left-wing dissident, he was one of the first to resign in 1922 for refusing to follow the Moscow line. During WWI Postgate had been expelled from university, gone on the run and been gaoled for conscientious objection. George Lansbury was President of the Socialist Film Council and leader of the Labour Party, a role he’d accepted in 1931 when Ramsey MacDonald “ratted”, allied with the Tories, formed a “National Government” and imposed savage cuts and the “Household Means Test” on the unemployed.

As a Labour activist and accomplished amateur film maker Rudolph Messel was a key player in bringing socialist politics to the big screen. Like Postgate he’d enjoyed a privileged upbringing but was much slower to embrace socialism. At Oxford he’d participated in the notorious “Hypocrites Club” whose membership included Evelyn Waugh, Terrence Greenidge, Anthony Powell, Tom Driberg and Roger Hollis. In 1924 Messel and fellow hypocrite Greenidge jointly produced an amateur film entitled, “Big Dog”. The club was closed down by the University authorities the following year after staging an outrageous “Nuns and Choirboys” event. Messel’s friendship with Greenidge endured and in 1926 the pair jointly produced and directed “Next Gentleman, Please!” featuring their hypocritical associates in a film exhibited in Oxford’s “Super Cinema”. During the 1926 General Strike Messel, still firmly enamoured of the louche lifestyle, pitched in on the government side but educated by the experience he moved ever closer to socialism and developed a particular interest in Soviet film making. After visiting Hollywood in 1927, the following year he wrote “This Cinema Business”, described by his publisher, Ernest Benn, as “the first comprehensive and serious study of the Film in our language”. In 1929 and 1931 Messel stood unsuccessfully as a Labour parliamentary candidate and in 1932 was a member of a prestigious Fabian Research Bureau group that enjoyed a two month long “fact-finding” tour of the Soviet Union.

Socialist Film Council

RAYMOND Postgate and novelist Naomi Mitchison accompanied Messel touring Russia and on their return all three contributed chapters on their observations to a compendium volume, “Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia” edited by Margaret Cole and published by Gollancz. They also collaborated in producing the Socialist Film Council’s first film “The Road to Hell”, written by Postgate and directed by Messel. The film depicts the devastating effects of the National Government’s austerity policies upon a working class East End family. The novelist Naomi Mitchison, in the words of the Daily Herald critic “acted beautifully” in the role of the mother of the family. Postgate played the role of the father. Messel also appeared in the guise of a drunken playboy while fellow “hypocrite” Terrence Greenidge played the part of Freddy, the family’s elder son. Daisy Postgate, Raymond’s wife, and George Lansbury’s daughter, played Freddy’s girlfriend. With many of the domestic scenes filmed in Lansbury’s 39, Bow Road home it all made for an accomplished though economical production. Premiered in London on Friday 28 July 1933, Lansbury himself attended the show and a couple of months later introduced the film to delegates attending the Labour Party’s annual conference in the White Rock Pavilion, Hastings. Although the film was generally well received where shown it proved impossible to secure a general release. Cinemas were dominated by Hollywood and ultimately controlled by local authority licensing committees eager to ban Socialist Film Council films as did Birmingham Council in 1935.

Watch “The Road to Hell”

DESPITE Lansbury’s influence the labour movement gave little material support to the SFC and although it managed to complete one more film this spark of socialist cinema would have been extinguished if it had relied entirely on the organised labour movement. Fortunately a few isolated though determined and largely forgotten individuals did successfully produce politically radical films into the 1960’s when Ken Loach memorably lit the “Big Flame”. I’ll post more on these overlooked directors and studios in future NV posts but for now watch and be inspired by “The Road to Hell” on the British Film Institute website (no charge or registration required!)

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An academic version of McCarthyism?

by Brian Bamford

A CAMBRIDGE philosophy professor has branded as 'woke' the constraints on freedom of speech in higher education an academic version of McCarthyism.

Dr Arif Ahmed has spoken out as his university is being balloted today to approve a policy requiring students, staff and visitors to be 'respectful' of different views and opinions.

Last Saturday in the Financial Times, Camillia Cavendish wrote a piece entitled 'Mandating "respect" for other people's opinions hurts free speech' in which she said: 'The university's governing body, the Regent House, is voting... on a new code of conduct which demands that staff, students and visitors be "respectful" of different opinions [and that this] harmless-soundng clause is meant to support free speech.' Ms Cavendish claims: '"Respect" is a soft-edged word that means different things to different people', and it 'can easily morph into a prohibition against giving offence.' Arif Ahmed who is leading the academic rebellion against the 'Respect' code said: 'There's no limit to how far this can go'! adding: 'Did the Charlie Hebro catoons respect Islam?' or 'Was [18th-century Scottish philosopher]David Hulme a respecter of religion?' He concluded: 'Who decides? A word like "respect" is worse than useless.' And the result would end with people sliding 'all the way from civility to a kind of deference which would refrain from attacking Islam, Christianity or Judaism.' Ms. Cavendish argues: 'The Cambrige row shows how hard it is for institutions to keep their footing in this new world of outrage. Twenty years ago, English universities felt little responsibility towards students beyond the lecture hall. Today, they are beset by activism for censorship from the political left and right.'

As a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Mr Ahmed is leading the Campaign for Cambridge Freedom, which wants to amend the policy to require differences of opinion to be 'tolerated' rather than 'respected'.

'A lot of people feel as if they're living in an atmosphere where there are witch-hunts going on, a sort of academic version of Salem in the 17th century or the McCarthyite era,' he told The Times.

Arguing that the notion of 'respect' is 'dangerously vague and open-ended', he urged his fellow academics to back his amendment requiring 'tolerance' as they vote to approve the new policy.

'The more long-term danger is that this language will be weaponised so that we will be subject to discipline if we try to invite someone who's disrespectful or if we ourselves speak in a disrespectful way,' he said.

'If a view is idiotic we should be quite free to say a view is idiotic. If a religious or political or other position is a tissue of bigotry and superstition, then we should be free to say those things without fear that somebody would find it disrespectful.'

Cambridge Professor, Ross Anderson told Ms. Cavendish: 'If the respect agenda becomes entrenched in disiplinary and grievance proceedures, and arguements which used used to be sorted out by people saying "grow up and stop being silly" fall to intervention by HR busybodies, that will mean the end of academic academic tenure as we know it".'

Ms. Cavendish says though such claims may be 'exaggerated' the Cabridge 'fudge' is dangerous, and she asks 'Do we really want to risk returning to a world where enquiring minds huddle together in secret, debating bann4ed works and wondering if they dare say what they believe?'

Let's see what happens in the Cambridge vote later today.

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'Wild West' Approach to Apprenticeships in the UK

by Brian Bamford

CAMILLA CAVENDISH writing in the FT on 4th, October, wrote: 'The gulf between academic and vocational education in the UK has depressed productivity and exacerbated skills shortages.' She added that: 'Many of the largest shortages reported by employers are in sectors such as construction, health and IT.'

Meanwhile, in the UK only one one in ten adults hold a higher technical qualification as their highest qualification compared to about one in five in Germany and one in three in Canada. Camilla Cavendish estimates that 'as much as 20% of the UK workforce will be significantly under-skilled for their jobs by 2030'.

In this country the government wants to bridge the gap, and according to Ms. Cavendish 'create a "world-class, German-style further education system".' The government has promised a 'lifetime skills guarantee' with the offer of free further education courses to adults without A-levels or the equivalent. Yet Ms. Cavendish insists 'The challenge [for the government] is to make them good enough ans to offer people who didn't enjoy school something better the second time around' and she says: 'Until now, the UK has not done this well.' And she argues that in the 'UK ministers must fight their urge to centralise'.

The trouble is that anyone in the UK can set-up as a joiner without any qualifications. Yet in Germany you can't be a carpenter or plumber unless you have mastered a trade doing an apprenticeship of about three years, often followed by evening classes. The handwerk curriculum is also guided by master craftsmen who know the job, and not what Ms. Cavendish calls: 'pseudo-academics'.

She viciously compares the two systems saying: 'In contrast, vocational training in the UK is a Wild West. There are a bewildering array of more than 12,000 different qualifications. Students are often jammed through courses in which "competition", not actual learning, commands the fee. Sub-contracting is rife, making it hard to monitor quality. There are some excellent courses; but also mis-selling. Good further education courses have also been denuded of funding with their teachers paid less, on average, than their counterparts in schools.'

It may be argued that the German guild system is a bit 'inflexible', and it could opperate a bit like closed shops. Also in the rapidly shifting situation even a gold standard apprenticeship may not last a lifetime. Yet surely it offers a better set-up than we've got now with all kinds of chancers and scallwags passing themselves-off as tradesmen in this country. This decline in workmanship was brought forward with Margaret Thatcher's attack on the trade unions in the 1970s and 80s, and the replacement of the one-to-one traing on the job with the 'pseudo-academics' and the prioritisation of classroom learning.

The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was clearly aware of this vast gulf between practical know-how on the job and speculative classroom efforts to solve problems when he remarked to his student Maurice Drury: 'You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect. When I was building the house for for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go out to a "flick" every night.'

Based on his own building site experiences and observations, Wittgenstein noted the language games employed by building workers giving orders and obeying them in building a wall: such as for example shouting 'brick' and not 'bring me a brick' and so forth to his mate (see his Philosophical Investigations). Classroom learning creates a completely different language game which somehow lacks the quality of the practical situation. In Wittgenstein's terms they are two distinct 'forms of life' and two different 'language games'.

The snobbery of the middle class will naturally continue to prefer the full time graduate degree as the ideal. But it will still not help when we want to get the roof fixed.

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