Fix Britain refuse to divulge the names of their financial backers.

 

Munira Mirza & Boris Johnson

In this article written for 'civilservice world, there's no mention that Munira Mirza was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) or wrote for their magazine 'Living Marxism'. Mirza will now play a key role in a new think tank called 'Fix Britain'. The group of technocrats say they have received substantial funding but refuse to disclose the names of their financial backers. As they say, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Mirza, a Trotskyist, or former Trotskyist, thinks that Britain is governed by amateurs and politicians who are more interested in their own popularity than in doing what is necessary to fix Britain. She favours "mission-led" government and cites the COVID lockdown as an example of mission-led government.

Government in Britain was always government by amateurs and that's why they employ an army of bureaucrats, called civil servants. Fix Britain and Munira Mirza, seem to want government by technocrats and less democracy - a sort of enlightened despotism that was much favoured by the Fabians. Some Neo-liberals also think that for Neoliberalism to survive, democracy must fade.

I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see other Trotskyists and former members of the RCP like the RCP guru Frank Furedi and Baroness Fox of Buckley, joining the new think tank.

The poachers who turned gamekeeper.

 

Frank Furedi

The Trotskyist and Marxist, Munira Mirza, was a prominent member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) with Baroness Clair Fox. Although Fox expressed support for the IRA and the Warrington bombing which killed two young children, she was nominated for a peerage by Boris Johnson who had probably never heard of her. As a member of the RCP, Fox had been in favour of abolishing the House of Lords.

Mirza worked for Boris Johnson when he was the Mayor of London and when he was the Conservative Prime Minister. She was the head of policy for Boris Johnson. She's now joined a think tank called 'Fix Britain'. Mirza used to write for the RCP magazine 'Living Marxism' but in 2019, she co-authored the Conservative Manifesto. Mirza is a former pupil of Breeze Hill School in Oldham and studied under the RCP guru, Frank Furedi, at the University of Kent.

The RCP were entryists who tended to recruit bright young students at university. Members of the RCP like Furedi, Brendan O'Neill and Mick Hulme, now write for the right-wing press and run a website called 'Spiked' which is pro-Israeli, pro-Brexit and anti-climate change. Spiked is also known to have received financial donations from the American billionaire capitalists, the Koch brothers, who were in the oil business. 

Banning Palestine Action, is just a foot in the door. Who will be next?

 

Banning the organisation Palestine Action is just a foot in the door, the thin end of the wedge. Who will be next?

The former Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, claims that Britain is becoming a police state under Labour and Sir Keir Starmer-oid. Johnson said recently that up to 10,000 people a year in Britain are being arrested by the police for online comments made on social media.

Many people are being arrested for expressing support for the Palestinians in Gaza. The International Criminal Court (ICC), have issued an international warrant for the arrest of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is what Nazi leadership were hung for at Nuremberg. Yet Starmer-oid has said publicly, that he supports Zionism without qualification.

The suspended Labour MP Zarah Sultana, told a crowd at Glastonbury that the Labour Party was "directly complicit in genocide" in Gaza.

John Amery - Britain's forgotten traitor.

 

John Amery

Most of us have heard of William Joyce who was better known as Lord Haw, Haw. Joyce, an American citizen with Irish parents, had been one of Oswald Moseley's fascist 'Blackshirts'. Joyce had lived in Ireland but seems to have got out of the country in a hurry, when he was suspected of being an informant for the Black & Tans. Joyce was dubbed Lord Haw, Haw, by the English because he made propaganda broadcast for the Nazis from Germany, which always began with "Germany Calling." William Joyce was captured by the British and tried for treason, convicted and hanged, even though he was an American citizen who owed no loyalty to Britain or its King.

Fewer people in Britain will have heard of another traitor called John Amery. He also made propaganda broadcast from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. I first heard of John Amery when I saw an interview with the famous English journalist Alan Whicker. He had been in Italy when Italian partisans captured Amery. It seems that Amery had been handed to the British and was grateful to be in British custody as he thought he was about to be shot by the partisans. He appears not to have fully appreciated the seriousness of the situation that he was in. He seems to have thought that his father would get him off the hook. John Amery was the son of the Conservative MP, Leopold Amery and the brother of the Conservative MP Julian Amery. His mother was of Hungarian Jewish heritage, which would have made Amery a Jew in Nazi Germany. As a youth, Amery had been at Harrow public school. After a number of failed business ventures that left him in debt, he fled abroad, married a prostitute and also worked himself, as a male prostitute.

I have just been reading the Wikipedia entry for Julian Amery who was a close friend of Margaret Thatcher's and I can find no mention of his treacherous brother, who betrayed his country. John Amery was charged with eight counts of high treason and eventually pleaded guilty. Before his trial, Leo Amery had tried to use his political influence as a member of Churchill's cabinet to save his son. He had even written to the King hoping that he would intervene. But it was all to no avail. The family tried to argue that John Amery had become a Spanish citizen when he'd been in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and therefore could not be tried for treason. But the legal documentation substantiating this could not be found or was found to be invalid. He was hanged in December 1945 by Albert Pierrepoint. Just before his execution, he supposed to have said, "I've always wanted to meet you Mr Pierrepoint, but not under these circumstances." 

MI5 used the Kray twins to gather intelligence on gay politicians and establishment figures.

 

Ronnie Kray & Lord Boothby

The Conservative MP, Robert Boothby, was married to Diana Cavendish (1935-37) and Wanda Sanna, (1967). He also had a long affair with Lady Dorothy Macmillan, the wife of Harold Macmillan.

In his book on Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson, the former Conservative Prime Minister, refers to him as "Boothby the Bisexual Bounder."  At Oxford, Boothby was nicknamed 'The Palladium', because he was twice a night. Boothby also had an affair with an East End cat burglar called Leslie Holt who introduced him to the London gangster Ronnie Kray.

It has been alleged that Kray supplied Boothby with young boys in return for favours. To the embarrassment of fellow peers, Boothby did campaign for the Krays in the House of Lords. Documents released in 2015, show that MI5 used the Kray twins to gather intelligence on homosexual politicians and establishment figures. The newspapers were aware of Boothby's underworld connections but were afraid to publish a story. It seems that Lord Arnold Goodman, an unmarried lawyer, was active on Boothby's behalf in suppressing stories about him. Journalists that investigated Boothby faced legal threats and even break-ins. The story was eventually reported in the Labour-supporting Sunday Mirror in 1964 and the German magazine Stern. Boothby denied the story and threatened to sue. The Labour leadership got the Mirror to drop the story because the senior Labour MP, Tom Driberg, was also implicated. The Mirror sacked the editor, apologised to Boothby and paid him £40,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

Boothby was friendly with Driberg, a homosexual, who had also known the communist spy, Kim Philby. Driberg also had connections with MI5 and the Kray twins. The journalist Woodrow Wyatt, claimed after the death of the Queen Mother, that she'd told him in an interview in 1991 that the press knew all about Boothby's affairs and had described Boothby as "a bounder but not a cad."

Both Booby and Driberg campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexual acts. The writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens, who knew Tom Driberg, says that Driberg came to regret that he had voted for the successful repeal of laws criminalising homosexuality. Hitchens says that Driberg would say wistfully, "I rather miss the old days.'

In his memoir called 'Ruling Passions', Driberg described his "chronic, lifelong, love-hate relationship with lavatories." Hitchens says that "he could talk by the hour about the variety and marvel of the 'public conveniences'...that were called 'in gay argot, cottages'. There was a cottage in Leicester Square that specialised in those whose passion was the armed forces. At the Institute of Contemporary Arts, much favoured by aesthetes, someone had written on the toilet door, 'beware of limbo dancers'." Christopher Hitchens says:

"What Driberg told me was this. The "thrills were twofold. First came the exhilaration of danger; the permanent risk of being caught and exposed. Second was the sense of superiority that a double life could give." Hitchens says that Driberg became distinctly melancholy in his later years that he'd voted to repeal laws criminalising homosexuality.

Are Labour trying to restore a law of blasphemy through the back door.

 

Christopher Hitchens

Under Keir Starmer, Britain is becoming like a Stasi-like police state. Boris Johnson said recently that there were around 10,000 arrest each year for comments that people had made on social media.

The crime of blasphemy was abolished many years ago in Britain but Starmer's Labour government are trying to bring it back through the back door. Christopher Hitchens called 'Islamophobia' a 'shady term' and warned that anyone accused of it would be instructed to shut up and forfeit their right to criticise religion. Hitchens said, "Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims to have temporal authority over citizens, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny."

When the former Labour MP Ann Cryer, spoke about Asian grooming gangs in Yorkshire who were sexually abusing young white girls, she was accused of 'Islamophobia' by many of her Labour colleague's. When the Labour MP Rosie Duffield said that only women had a cervix, she was accused of 'transphobia' by many of her Labour colleagues. When Starmer, a politically correct dipstick, told us that 99.9% of women didn't have a penis, many of us knew that this was preposterous - nonsense upon stilts, but he wanted us to collude in his fiction. As G.K Chesterton said, "Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."

I remember the case of the Batley Grammar School teacher who was hounded out of his job when he was accused of 'Islamophobia'. A mob turned up at the school demanding his dismissal. I believe that this man is still in hiding because he fears for his life and the life of his family. What Labour is trying to do will make these kinds of incidents more prevalent. Introducing a law of "Islamophobia' will open a Pandora's Box. 

The authorities "shied away from" identifying the ethnicity of grooming gangs says Baroness Casey.

 

Liam Billington

Baroness Casey's report into grooming gangs says that the ethnicity of people involved in grooming gangs has been "shied away from" by the authorities and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, "so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data."

In 2023, I submitted a FoI request to Greater Manchester Police (GMP), and inter alia, asked if GMP recorded details of the ethnicity of those engaged in Child Sexual Exploitation' (CSE), and they told me that they did record it. As to whether they share that data with other bodies, I wouldn't know.

In April 2023, Liam Billington, a Conservative councillor on Tameside Council, told a council meeting "that 120 children in Tameside were the victims of 'Child Sexual Exploitation' (CSE) every year. He claimed that the figures were based on a briefing issued by GMP and Tameside Council, which says this:

"Only since 2011 has CSE been recorded in a way that can be aggregated although there have been changes in the way this is recorded so historical comparison are not always possible. During any given quarter there are an average in excess of 30 active CSE cases in the Borough."

Neither the briefing or councillor Billington, say who is perpetrating this child sexual exploitation in Tameside. I have watched a video recording of councillor Billington making this presentation on Twitter (now X). Although it's possible to read the briefing which displays the logos of both TMBC and GMP, the former Labour leader of Tameside Council, Brenda Warrington, can be heard saying, "absolute rubbish" and "It's all lies." The microphone was then switched off and the debate was closed down and Billington was told to sit down. This has led to accusations on social media that councillor Billington has been gagged and that there's an attempt to cover up the issue of CSE in Tameside. Councillor Billington was also interviewed on GB News and claimed that he’d been gagged and censored. He also alleged that he had been interviewed by officers of GMP following an anonymous complaint and told "to be more considerate."

While Labour local authorities in Rotherham, Oldham and Rochdale, have been accused of trying to cover up CSE and grooming gangs, those on the right and far right of English politics, have been accused of trying to exploit the issue for racist and political purposes. The former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, did allege that the majority of the perpetrators who sexually abused children in grooming gangs in Britain, are "almost all British-Pakistani men" but this is not supported by Home Office data. Although there have been a number of high-profile cases in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, which have involved gangs of men of mainly Pakistan ethnicity, a Home Office report in 2020 which covered England, Scotland and Wales, found that the majority of child sexual abuse gangs, are made up of white men under the age of 30. It's also known that most children who are victims of sexual abuse often know the perpetrator who could be a close friend or relative within the family.

Starmer & Bottygate

 

Sir Keir Starmer is known for his ability to turn on a dime and this was evident before he became the Prime Minister. He also has form for breaking any promise or pledge. He now spends much of his time outside of Britain flying around the world at the taxpayers' expense and sucking up to Donald Trump. He seems more interested in the affairs of other countries like Israel and the Ukraine. He seems to be itching to draw British citizens into a conflict in the Middle East and the Ukraine.

A self-proclaimed Zionist, Starmer now wants to send aircraft to defend the racist state of Israel that's bombing just about everybody and trying to annihilate the Palestinian people in Gaza. There's an international arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), for the arrest of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is what the Nazis were accused of at Nuremberg and Starmer wants us to support Israel. He's a disgrace.

Boris Johnson recently described Starmer as an "orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels." I wonder if Johnson is trying to tell us something? Is this a reference to what has been called the Bottygate scandal.  

Is Britain becoming a third world country?

 

I think Daniel Hannan's take on Britain is rather romanticised. He talks about coming to Britain from Peru when he was aged seven. A name like Hannan, doesn't sound very Peruvian to me. His mother, a Scot, worked in the British embassy in Lima.

Now, Baron Hannan of Kingsclere, the Conservative peer aged 53, went to Winchester, Marlborough College and Oriel College Oxford. He says in those days Britain was a high trust society - people obeyed the laws and paid their taxes. It was a country where you didn't need private security guards and you could get into a taxi, confidant, that you wouldn't be mugged. He says Britain now faces an epidemic of shoplifting and filthy streets. Hannan thinks Britain is turning into a third world country. If it is, then I wonder who is responsible for that?

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, before Hannan was born, I don't remember hearing about food banks, and pawnbrokers' shops, were something that old timers used to reminisce about. Apart from the odd tramp, we never heard of rough sleepers and scroungers, as most people were in work and had access to housing. I also don't remember seeing beggars on the streets. We didn't have call centres, bots or self-service checkouts and most people seemed to be competent and knew what they were doing. You didn't become a tradesman after a six months’ apprenticeship at the school of motoring, and Britain wasn't full of cowboys, Bengal Lancers, and rogue tradesmen. A qualified electrician once told me that he'd met many so-called electricians on the job, who couldn't even splice a piece of wire properly. Employment was easy to obtain and so was affordable rented housing. Gun deaths and stabbings were also a rarity. Most working people were also members of trades unions. There was also nothing called student debt because those who went to university got full maintenance grants. There was also legal aid.

For me, the rot set in when Margaret Thatcher got elected the UK Prime Minister in 1979 and formed a Conservative government. Her Tory government pursued pro-rich policies. Maggie had been nicknamed "Thatcher the Milk Snatcher' because she'd taken free school milk off school kids. The Tories used the slogan 'Labour isn't working' because there was 1.5 million people out of work. By 1983, there was twice that number of people out of work under a Tory government. We also saw massive deindustrialization and the loss of many industries as Britain became less a manufacturing country and more a service-based economy. Many jobs were exported overseas where labour was cheaper.

I don't think parts of northern England have ever really recovered from the loss of those heavy manufacturing industries. Many young kids today work in supermarkets or in hospitality for places like Wetherspoon's or work as part of the gig economy, in precarious low-paid employment. Thatcherism and Maggie's loathing for organised labour, paved the way for the gig economy and flexible working. Thatcher's two favourite trade unionist were two scabs called Roy Lynk and Frank Chappel.

A major aim of Neoliberalism was to destroy organized labour. The pioneers of Neoliberalism drew a conclusion that has shaped our age: that a modern economy cannot exist with an organized working-class. Atomisation and the destruction of Labour's bargaining power, was the essence of the entire project. The smart arses at J.P Morgan Chase, like Blythe Masters, who gave us Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDO), that led to the 2008 financial crisis which almost brought down the capitalist financial system, believe that for Neoliberalism to survive, democracy must fade. We all know what happened after 2008. Capitalist debts were socialised and corporate profits were privatised. It was socialism for the rich and the free market for the rest of us.

The Spanish Civil War and the British government's covert support for Franco.

 

General Francisco Franco

The catalyst for the Spanish Civil War 1936-39 was a military coup that Franco urged others to commit to. General Mola was the Director of the coup. The revolution that the military rebels claimed to be forestalling was itself precipitated by the coup. The coup provoked the collapse of the state apparatus and power was assumed by the workers.

General Mola planned to seize all garrisons in Spain's fifty provinces and to annihilate the organized working-class. Franco had said that he was prepared to kill up to 50 percent of the Spanish proletariat to attain a rebel nationalist victory. In a speech that Mola made at the beginning of the war, he declared: "It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do."

In a speech that he made in Lugo in August 1942, Franco said - "Our crusade is the only struggle in which the rich who took part in the war emerged richer." Franco died a rich man in November 1975, with a fortune in the region of 400 million euros in 2015 terms. Franco was convinced that Judaism was the ally of American capitalism and Russian Communism, but he saw freemasonry as the biggest enemy. The triple pillars of Franco's regime were the church, the army and the Falange.

Franco's Spain in the 1940's was marked by appalling living standards of the working-class and fat living and corruption for the elite. In 1950, per capita meat consumption was only half of what it had been in 1926 and bread consumption was only half of what it had been in 1936. In 1957, the 'technocrats' were brought in to integrate Spain into the world economy because the Franco regime faced political and economic bankruptcy. The technocrats knew that modernization required Franco to be marginalized.

The transition to democracy in Spain wasn't triggered by the assassination of Carrero Blanco, but because Francoism had been rendered obsolete by the economic reforms of the technocrats. Between 1814 and 1981, Spain witnessed more than 25 relatively serious military coups. The Spanish church opposed liberalism and modernization in Spain in the 19th and 20th centuries and allied itself with the powerful. At the turn of the 20th century, 75 percent of the population of Spain were illiterate. Progressive reform movements in Spain were crushed by General O'Donnell in 1856, by General Pavia in 1874, by General Primo de Rivera in 1923'and by General Franco between 1936-39.

The historian Paul Preston, says the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, can be seen as either a rehearsal for WWII, or as a location for its first battles. Although Britain was supposed to be neutral as regards the events in Spain, Preston points out that the British Ambassador to Madrid, Sir Henry Chilton, who was anti-Republican, wanted the military coup to succeed. The Italian charge in London, Leonardo Vitelti, reported that widespread sympathy for the Spanish rebels and for Italian fascism was to be found within the highest reaches of the British Conservative Party. The journalist Henry Buckley was told by a British diplomat that - "the essential thing to remember in the case of Spain, is that it is a civil conflict and that it is very necessary that we stand by our class."

Preston writes: "Franco never admitted in public that 'perfidious Albion' had made an enormous contribution to his eventual success." However, Franco did send a letter to Neville Chamberlain thanking him for his support which caused Chamberlain some embarrassment.

The UK ranks among the lowest of OECD countries for welfare generosity, yet we're told the benefits system is "unsustainable."

 

Liz Kendall

Liz Kendall, the Labour Government Work & Pensions Secretary, says the UK benefits system is "unsustainable" and creates "perverse incentives."

According to a report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the UK ranks among the lowest of OECD countries for welfare generosity with the poorest UK households, worse off than those in Slovenia and Malta.

We should not forget what Labour told us when they were in opposition. Labour are not the party for people on state benefits but the party for people in work, so don't be surprised that they like to cut people's state benefits. Labour are the party of the deserving and undeserving. What does Alfred Doolittle say in Shaw's play 'Pygmalion', "

I'm one of the undeserving poor I am. Think what that means to a man. It means he's constantly up against middle-class morality. And what's middle-class morality? Just an excuse for giving me nothing."

If anything creates "perverse incentives", it is means testing. Why would anybody save money if at the end of the day you're going to get penalised because of means testing and you could lose your house to pay for your care costs. If people pay their taxes and find they aren't entitled to certain state benefits like a state retirement pension or help with residential care costs, because they've got too much money, they may well object to paying in at all and subsiding those who are less well off. You might as well as piss your money up against the wall. The welfare state in Britain was introduced on the basis of need and universalism.

Will Labour means test the state retirement pension?

 

Labour and the Conservatives have talked about means testing the State Retirement Pension (SRP). They claim that it's not affordable or sustainable in the long run. How true is this?

The British SRP, is one of the least generous state pensions in Europe. People who reached the state retirement age before April 2016, receive the old state pension of £176.45 a week, hardly enough to cover the rent these days. People who receive the full new state pension are entitled to £230.25 a week, which is less than half the annual salary of someone aged over 21 and in receipt of the National Minimum Wage.

The state retirement age is to increase to 67 next year. Many people will not live enough to claim the SRP and this includes people who have worked in manual occupations. Not very long ago, women retired at the age of 60 and we're entitled to the SRP. How much money did the British government save by increasing the state retirement age for women? Women now have to be 66 years old before they qualify for the SRP. 

Most social security spending in the UK goes on the SRP, but according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the UK ranks among the least generous of OECD countries for welfare generosity. According to the Institute, the poorest UK households are worse off than those in Slovenia and Malta.

Is social class a better indicator of inequality in British society than race?

 

Despite all the brouhaha about alleged antisemitism in Britain, the Jewish Anti-Zionist activist Tony Greenstein, maintains that British Jews are the most privileged white minority group in British society. He has asserted a number of times on his blog that compared to other white people in British society, British Jews are predominately middle-class and have higher incomes, better education, better jobs and homes. He has pointed out that as many British Jews have risen up from the working-class and into the middle-class, they ceased to be Labour voters or supporters of the left, and voted for the Conservative Party. Indeed, they couldn't even be persuaded to vote Labour when Ed Miliband was the leader of the Labour Party.

Almost all minority ethnic groups with perhaps the exception of black Afro-Caribbean male youths, do better in the British state education system than white working-class male youths. They are more likely to go into further education and enter university.

Britain is now a very inegalitarian country. Only around 7 percent of the British population go to public schools yet they are disproportionately represented in many of the top jobs in government, politics, the media, the law and academia. How many editors of the Guardian newspaper went to a comprehensive or secondary school?

These kinds of structural inequalities that we see in British society pose a bit of a conundrum. If the market is supposed to operate in a neutral and impartial way that isn't supposed to favour one group over another, then why does there appear to be so much inequality between socio-economic groups in British society? We're told that a rising tide lifts all boats. Moreover, we're led to believe that Britain is a meritocratic society where people get on because of their abilities. Yet it seems that the social bank of mum and dad opens as many doors as the financial bank of mum and dad.

Kierkegaard on Hegel.

 

Soren Kierkegaard

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, referred to Hegelianism as "this brilliant spirit of putridity" and the "most repugnant of all forms of looseness" and speaks of its "mildew of pomposity." Kierkegaard wrote:

"There were philosophers who tried before Hegel to explain...history. And providence could only smile when it saw these attempts. But providence did not laugh outright, for there was a human, honest sincerity about them. But Hegel! Here I need Homer's language. How did the gods roar with laughter! Such a horrid little professor who has simply seen through the necessity of anything and everything there is, and who now plays the whole affair on his barrel organ: listen, ye gods of Olympus." 

(Karl Popper - The Open Society & Its Enemies).

George Stinney - The boy who was sent to the electric chair aged fourteen.

 

George Stinney (centre)

On June 16, 1944, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy called George Stinney, was executed in the electric chair in South Carolina. He became the youngest person in the U.S. to be executed during the 20^th century.

With hardly evidence whatsoever, George had been charged and convicted by an all-white jury with the murder of two young white girls. It seems that while helping a search party to look for the two girls, George had disclosed that he’d seen the two girls the day before. He was then arrested.

The defence called no witnesses and no black people were allowed into the courtroom. The only witness to give evidence was the local sheriff who claimed that George had confessed during an interview. There was no written confession signed by George Stinney.  

George Stinney weighed 95 pounds and was five feet one inches tall. When the boy was placed in the electric chair the prison wardens had to place a book under his backside to lift him up. The mask slipped off his face and witnesses saw his wide open and weeping eyes and his dribbling mouth. The was then given a hit of 2,400 volts of electricity.

I have only recently become aware of this terrible and tragic case after reading about young George Stinney. The case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old child from Chicago, who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi, for allegedly wolf whistling at a white woman, is probably better known. Those two men, who later confessed to his murder in a magazine interview, were also acquitted of his murder by an all-white jury.

Britain's aristocratic Nazi sympathisers.

 

Fascist sympathiser - Lady Austen Chamberlain

My mother once told me that Churchill was considered a 'warmonger' by many British people before the country declared war on Germany in 1939, after the invasion of Poland. The House of Lords was packed with Nazi appeasers and sympathisers. The Duke of Windsor and his American wife, were both Nazi sympathisers. Lady Austen Chamberlain, was also a fascist sympathiser, who greatly admired Benito Mussolini. Dianna and Unity Mitford, the daughters of Lord Redesdale, were both Nazi sympathisers who knew Hitler, personally.

Churchill had visited Italy in 1927 and had called Mussolini the "Roman genius." Churchill told them that if he'd been an Italian, he would have been a fascist and said that Italy had done the world a favour by getting rid of Bolshevism in Italy.

Many of these aristocrats saw Nazi Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism and they knew that Hitler was on the side of the dividend drawer. Stalin had offered the British and French a non-aggression pact before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939. The French wanted to enter into a pact with the Soviet Union but were persuaded by the British not to do so.

I think Neville Chamberlain and many in the British establishment were happy to see Germany rearm and wanted to see Germany dragged into a war with Russia because Hitler would then keep his hands off the British Empire. They may have been surprised by the pact with Russia but they knew that Hitler had got his eye on Russia.

We should not forget that the treatment of German Jews and the mass murder of Jewish people in Europe was never a casus belli, for Britain going to war with Germany, nor was it used as propaganda against Germany. Most British people weren't aware of the concentration camps until the allies invaded Germany. This was later used as justification for the war.

Had it not been for Winston Churchill, it's likely that the British establishment would have sought terms with Nazi Germany, but Churchill was opposed to this. The Conservative politician, Enoch Powell, thought that the British ruling class were rather like the Athenian oligarchs who put their own direct class interests before the cultural and general interests of their own city state.

I know that General Franco wrote to Neville Chamberlain thanking him for his support during the Spanish Civil War even though Britain, was supposed to be neutral. There was a lot of British investment in Spain and the British ruling class identified their class interests with those of the wealthy Spanish landowners and Franco's nationalists, who we supplied with equipment. Those volunteers that fought on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), knew that they had to oppose fascism because they knew that a victory by Franco, who was supported by Germany and Italy, would lead to a much bigger European conflict, which is what happened. Those International Brigade volunteers like James Keogh, a working-class young man from Wellington Street, in Ashton-under-Lyne, in Lancashire, who fought in Spain, had more foresight than the British ruling class.

Is Britain pissing in the wind when it comes to climate change.

 

When it comes to the debate about climate change, I am something of an agnostic. Like many people, I do recognise that we do things that are ultimately injurious to the environment and the planet. Deforestation in the Amazon would be a good example.

Yet, If I look at the British environment today, it's a vast improvement in terms of what I saw as a young boy growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Children today don't know what a 'pea souper' is and London isn't plagued with the smog's that were frequent occurrence in the city. Things were so bad in London that people became disoriented and fell in the River Thames. The Great London Smog of 1952, is estimated to have caused around 12,000 deaths, though an immediate death toll of 4,000, was reported during the event. Nor do we see today, how pollution blackened buildings that were covered in a black soot.  We often walked to school with a handkerchief over our mouths and you could hardly see a couple of yards in front of you. Car drivers drove in daylight hours with their lights on so they could be seen.

Things improved with the Clean Air Act and when coal fires were gradually replaced by gas fires. In the North of England, primary school children were given sunray treatment to counter vitamin D deficiency.

Starmer-oid's Labour government and Ed Millipede, are obsessed with 'Net Zero', renewables and 'carbon capture and storage'. But if countries like China and India continue to spew out pollution, then what we do in Britain, is hardly likely to make one iota of difference to the climate. It's tantamount to pissing in the wind. The U.S. under the Trump administration is committed to the use of fossil fuels. Donald Trump says "Drill, Baby, Drill." 

British officials warned they will be denied U.S. visas if they breach free speech rights of U.S. citizens.

 

Britain's 'The Online Safety Act', requires social media organisations like X, (formerly Twitter), to remove harmful content from their platforms. If they fail to do so, they will face fines of £18 million pounds or 10 percent of their annual revenue.

Free speech advocates say that the Act could lead to excessive censorship and deter investment from American tech giants. The U.S. State Department has raised concerns regarding the laws capacity to restrict freedom of expression and the massive fines it could impose on U.S. tech companies. British officials now face being banned from the U.S. if they are found to have breached free speech rights of American citizens. The visa ban could apply to individuals working for Ofcom who are responsible for policing Britain's online safety laws. Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, said foreign officials "complicit in censoring" American citizens and media companies will be denied entry to the U.S.

The announcement is understood to have taken British officials by surprise. The Trump administration considers it unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies, or engage in censorship activity, that reaches beyond their authority and into the U.S. In an ominous warning, Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has said:

“We will throw the full force of the law at people: And whether you're in this country committing crimes or from further afield online, we will come after you."

It is known that U S. state officials have met with Foreign Office officials to convey their concerns about the Online Safety Act. They have also met with pro-life British activists over censorship concerns. The White House is also said to be 'monitoring' the case of Lucy Connolly, a British woman who was jailed for 31 months for comments that she made on social media.

Despite the apparent rift between the U.K. and U.S. governments over this issue, sources within the Foreign Office, said both countries would work together to protect freedom of speech across the world. The Foreign Office referred to comments made by Sir Keir Starmer when he visited the U.S. in February. Starmer said:

"We've had free speech for a very, very long time in the U.K. Certainly, we wouldn't want to reach across U.S. citizens and we don't, and that's absolutely right. But in relation to free speech in the U.K., I'm very proud of our history there."

Boris Johnson, the former Conservative Prime Minister, has warned that Britain has become a 'police state' under Sir Keir Starmer's Labour government. He recently said: "The UK police are now making over 10,000 arrests every year for online comments, more than the police in Russia itself, and this judgement is yet another gift for Vladimir Putin."

"Police the streets not our tweets!"

 

I think we ought to treat the attack on free speech in Britain seriously. In an article in the Telegraph on 21 May 2025, the former Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, claimed that Britain is becoming a police state under Labour and Sir Keir Starmer.  According to Johnson, "The UK police are now making over 10,000 arrests every year for online comments, more than that of the police in Russia itself, and this judgement is yet another propaganda gift for Vladimir Putin."

Only recently, an Irish singer with the band 'Kneecap', was charged with a terrorism offence for displaying the flag of Hezbollah a proscribed organisation in Britain, during a concert. Anti-abortion protestors have been arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics and one was fined £20,000 for holding a placard which said, "Here to talk if you want." A couple were even arrested and held for eight hours for writing emails and WhatsApp messages criticising their daughter's primary school. Even though there's no crime of blasphemy in Britain, a man is on trial for burning a copy of the Quran in front of London's Turkish consulate.

Apart from arrest of this kind, there are what's called "non-crime hate incidents" where the "thought police" warn people about the things they have said or done that fall below the criminal threshold. If a crime hasn't been committed, then why does it necessitate a police visit to your home?  The police recorded 13,200 of these in the year to June 2024.

What Boris Johnson fails to mention, is that many of the laws that the police are using to curtail free speech in Britain, were introduced during fourteen years of Conservative government.

Johnson and other prominent right-wingers, have also taken up the case of Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old mother and childminder from Northampton. Since losing her appeal against a sentence of 31 months' imprisonment for inciting online racial hatred after last year's attack on children and others in Southport, who were attending a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club, Connolly's plight has become a cause celebre, among some in the Conservative Party. The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer has defended the actions taken against Lucy Connolly.

Last September Connolly pleaded guilty to the offence of inciting racial hatred contrary to section 19(1) of the Public Order Act 1986. On 29 July 2024, Connolly had written on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) the following rant:

"Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you're at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me a racist, so be it."

We now know that in the aftermath of the Southport attack where three children were tragically killed, there were riots in Southport and attacks on Mosques and hotels accommodating refugees and asylum seekers. Yet the killer, Axel Rudakabana, who carried out this attack, was not an asylum seeker, but a 17-year-old local man living in Southport. It seems that Connolly removed that message just three and a half hours after publishing it. But within that time frame, the message had been reposted many times for others to read. The message was viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times. She was arrested on August 6, 2024.

An investigation showed that Connolly had expressed other views about illegal immigrants. A WhatsApp message sent to a friend on August 5, said: "The raging tweet about burning down hotels has bit me on the arse lol." In another message Connolly had said that if Ofsted got involved, she would tell them that she was not responsible, but was a victim of doxing. In another message she had said that if she was arrested, she would "play the mental health card."

Many other people were arrested, charged and convicted of offences of inciting racial hatred online, but Conservative politicians have been conspicuously silent about their plight. So, what makes Lucy Connolly's case different? Some think that she's been treated rather too harshly but others received similar sentences in the wake of the Southport attack for similar crimes. The crucial difference between Connolly's case and others, is that her husband Ray Connolly, is a West Northamptonshire Tory councillor.

Although so-called racial hatred posts don't violate X's rules, the company do explicitly prohibit "threats to inflict physical harm on others, which includes threatening to kill, torture, sexual assault, or otherwise hurt someone." A few days after Connolly made her post, X rejected a complaint from a user who flagged the message to it.

The right-wing in Britain is inclined to blame the left and state sponsored "wokery" for eroding free speech in Britain. But targeting migrants has become a politically convenient hobby horse for some politicians who like to whip things up for their own political ends. Prejudice is cultivated if it wins votes. It's easier for politicians to scapegoat one group or another rather than address the root causes of people's problems such as lack of affordable housing, long waits for GP appointments, unemployment and low wages. If you can't get an affordable rented home, then it's all the fault of immigrants.

There never has been an absolute right to free speech in Britain or anywhere else and any right that you believe that you have, had to be fought for. People like Lucy Connolly are encouraged by the state to harbour prejudices and hate but when they express those prejudices online, they get punished by the state. Some people do believe that the police crackdown on free speech in Britain is symptomatic of a Stasi-like police state and an attempt to intimidate and to silence people. I think they make a very good point. 

"This City is Ours" 9BBC 2025) - Review.

 

‘This City is Ours” (BBC 2025) – Gangsterism and the criminological imagination

By: Andrew Wallace (25/05/25)

Gangsterism along with other transgressive forms looms large in popular culture, documentaries and drama. As to why our morbid curiosities are engaged by edgy and unnerving content is an open question to human nature and a commentary on the dialectical interplay between order and anomic breakdown. Whilst the ‘civilising process’ (Elias) has arguably helped to contain and sanitise violence within modern societies with varying degrees of success, it has also provided paradoxical ‘violent entertainment’ on media platforms. Cultural criminology has drawn attention to how reality and media representations have become problematically enmeshed so that social investigators are no longer able to provide a prima facie ontology of crime.

Gangsterism remains intriguing as it captures the complexity of pre-modern forms of social organisation such as medieval warlords and its eventual accommodation to the secular meritocratic rationalism of contemporary standards. ‘This City is Ours’ (TCIO) is centred on a Liverpudlian crime family and the ensuing power struggle and vicious fall-outs that are precipitated as the son makes a bid to head the ‘firm’. There are copious gangster tropes drawn from the template of ‘The Godfather’ (1972), such as the Catholic hypocrisies of ritual piety versus the reality of murder and criminal mayhem. Criminal firms arguably provide an illuminating commentary on the nature of contemporary capitalism with its atomistic premise of welfare state retrenchment and hyper-individualistic modes of engagement. If collectivist pillars have continued to recede, political discourses continue to recalibrate their focus on canny self-enlightened consumerism and individual responsibilities. Wherein Thatcherism celebrated ‘individuals and families’, the firm of extended family ties and kinship help to ameliorate the creative destruction of the coldly secular cash nexus. Criminal enterprise is also a reflexive response to the permissive possibilities of the unfettered market and invites us to question the cultural limits of economic exchange. The libertarians would argue that much criminality stems from the erroneous attempts to regulate the licentious arenas of consumption such as pornography, prostitution, alcohol and drugs. If Prohibition gave us Al Capone, state regulations throw up the moral quandary of the black market, with Thatcherite injunctions that one cannot buck the universal laws of the market. Interestingly Mrs Thatcher proved inconsistent on this point given her socially conservative prescriptions along with Mrs Whitehouse against the permissive society (Campbell, 1987).

TCIO titillates our decadent curiosity in the criminal ‘other’, entrepreneurialism albeit heterodox in nature. Narcotics continue to be the primary activity for the Phelan-Kavanagh partnership and how they constitute their business through a set of intermediaries and their Columbian overlords. The firm also have their legitimate front-end ‘shells’, innocuous type business premises (laundry) or professional

associates (qualified accountants) who give the outward veneer of respectability. This is undoubtedly abetted by government rhetoric about the need to deregulate and cut red tape and illustrates the alarming symbiosis of formal business practice and the subterranean criminal operations. What lies beneath is often very unsavoury whilst also paradoxically providing us with several hours of compulsive viewing thanks to the charismatic presence of James Nelson Joyce (Michael Kavanagh) and Ronnie Phelan (Sean Bean). Definitely a guilty pleasure of the antihero genre, but somewhat disconcerting that others may watch this not as drama but a semi-documentary bolstering a seductive and transgressive career path for wannabe gangsters.

BBC: This City is Ours (2025). Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028mhs

(Accessed 25 March 2025)

Campbell, B (1987) The Iron Ladies. London. Virago Press

Elias, N (1939) The Civilizing Process. Basel. Switzerland.

IMDB: The Godfather (1972). Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068646/