British colonial rule in India.

 

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

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

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

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

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

The dark side of transgenderism.

 

Eddie Suzy Izzard

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

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

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

 

Marshall McLuhan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lenin's 'useful idiots'.

 

H.G.Wells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Courtney Wright

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do academic qualifications scare off potential UK employers.

 

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

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

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

Two tier politics and the case of Lucy Connolly.

 

"Keyboard Warrior" - Julie Sweeney

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

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

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

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

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

Karl Marx thought British imperialism had brought modernity to India.

 

Marx & Engels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Ben de Pear

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Temple Bar Dublin

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

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

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

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.