The Killing Of A Black Man

I’m reblogging this from Carol Cadwalladr’s Substack. It’s a long read but worth it.

https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-killing-of-a-black-man?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1ju273

Starmer To Leave Parliament

That went well

So, Keir Starmer is resigning from the Commons after telling us that he would retire to the backbenches and continue to serve his constituents. Time was, when former Prime Ministers would spend more than a few weeks on the backbenches before either retiring or being ‘kicked upstairs’ to the House of Lords. These days, former PMs spend as little time as possible on the backbenches before joining the speaking circuit and taking up a ‘non-executive’ director appointment with a merchant bank.

One thing we need to remember about Starmer is that he’s only been an MP for 11 years. When he first became Prime Minister, he’d only been an MP for 9 years. Similarly, when David Cameron became PM, he’d only been in parliament for 10 years. Never has British politics had such inexperienced political leaders running the country. If we contrast Starmer and Cameron with two previous PMs, we can see that before the 1979 general election, Margaret Thatcher had been an MP for 21 years before entering Downing Street. James Callaghan had been an MP for 20 years before becoming PM in 1976. He’d also had extensive political experience: for example, he served as a junior minister in the Attlee government and was a shadow cabinet member under Hugh Gaitskell. After the 1964 general election, Harold Wilson appointed Callaghan to the role of Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was later appointed Home Secretary in 1967 and was responsible for the controversial (some might say ‘racist’) Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1968). It’s no surprise, therefore, that while Callaghan was PM, Britain saw the rise of the far-right on the streets.

Starmer’s time as PM will be remembered for his rudderless leadership, the stripping away of civil liberties, support for the genocide in Gaza, and his willingness to pander to the far-right. With such a massive majority, Starmer could have done a great deal to address the structural social and economic problems that have long dogged with country, but he chose not to. That will be his legacy.

Burnham, while being more personable and telegenic, isn’t all that different to Starmer. For example, after talking about nationalizing water, he’s quietly dropped the idea. He’s also adopted a similar line towards Israel as his predecessor. As for the far-right, I see no attempt to curb them or directly challenge the increase in racism and anti-Muslim hatred.

Ralph Miliband was right about the Labour Party.

Life On Gilligan’s Island (Part 52) or Andrew Gilligan Isn’t A Fit Person To Be A Journalist

Andrew Gilligan is a cheap hack and his latest article for The Spectator is a testament to that. In the early 2010s, I wrote over 50 blogs about Gilligan and many of those blogs were about his cynical and snide articles for The Daily Telegraph and its now defunct blog site. I also wrote about his use of sockpuppets, one of which was named ‘Kennite’, and claimed to be a big fan of Ken Livingstone (Kennite, geddit?).

Gilligan frequently leans into crypto-racism. Take this blog from 2012.

Gilligan makes reference to the colour of people’s skin in his blog as I have noted many times. He tends to make liberal use of phrases like “white establishment”. In this blog, he continues to insist that Livingstone is linked to “Islamic extremism”.  If you look at the comments on the blog, you can see that it has attracted the usual suspects (“Groovybear”, the ironically-named “imrankhan” and “cartimandua”). I won’t bother quoting any of them here.

Gilligan is also remembered for his part in Dr David Kelly’s mysterious death in 2003. In the Hutton Inquiry, Gilligan’s original accusation was discovered to have been unfounded.

When he was forced to leave the BBC in 2004, Gilligan started working for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, and churned out smear story after smear story, mostly about Ken Livingstone, but also about other Labour figures who had apparently crossed him. There was a rumour that Gilligan went after Labour figures with such vigour because he was hoping for a job as Ed Miliband’s press secretary, but was pipped at the post by Bob Roberts. He also spent quite a lot of time and effort attacking Lutfur Rahman, the leader, now mayor, of Tower Hamlets Council. Gilligan’s use of language is also quite instructive: he used the term, “sexed up” to sensationalize the dossier that led us to a disastrous war in Iraq. It was this, and the sloppy transcription of his interview with Dr Kelly that cost him his job at the BBC.

In 2004, Boris Johnson, under whom he would later serve as London’s ‘Cycling Czar’, offered him a gig at The Spectator. He continues to write for that publication, and it is his most recent article for that outlet that concerns The Cat.

First, we need to understand that Gilligan was part of the same racist chorus that attacked Prof Jason Arday. Filled with disgust and loathing, he’s now turned his attention to calling for the dismissal of Lord Simon Woolley, the Principal of Homerton College at the University of Cambridge. Why? Because during the vigil for Prof Arday, Woolley had the temerity to use language that didn’t sit well with white colonialists and their lackeys in whose minds Black people should be seen and not heard – if at all. Here’s what he wrote in his article:

A man stands at a rally in Trafalgar Square, ranting that Jason Arday was murdered in a ‘lynching’ and ‘public assassination’ by ‘rabid wolves’ and ‘dogs of hell’ who had decided that ‘Jason doesn’t deserve to be alive’.

Some rabble-rouser from the lower shallows of race activism? No, or at least not solely. The man who said these inflammatory words is a peer of the realm and the principal of Homerton College, Cambridge: Simon Woolley, Lord Woolley of Woodford. His behaviour at the rally last week, surely unprecedented for someone in those roles, is further evidence that unsuitable appointments at Cambridge did not begin with Jason Arday.

Character assassination is a Gilligan speciality. For someone who has a degree in History from Cambridge University, Gilligan seems remarkably ignorant of figurative speech and, more importantly, rhetoric. This is odd, given that his erstwhile boss, Boris Johnson, was fond of using soaring, quasi-classical rhetoric – often badly so.

Here he paints a picture of a sinister Black cabal that allied itself with an Islamist ‘hate preacher’. Remember, if you can’t make it stick, accuse your quarry of ‘Islamism’.

Woolley was part of the supporting claque regularly rolled out by Livingstone to attack his opponents as racist and defend the mayor against any race-related controversy. One example was when Livingstone hosted the anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi (some kinds of bigot are allowed, it would seem). During the grants scandal Woolley was also the key media defender of Jasper, who he calls his ‘hero and mentor’ and with whom he still maintains close links. He used the same tactics as he has with journalistic critics of Arday, accusing me of trying to murder Jasper with a campaign of lies. My peers disagreed, giving my stories the top award in British print journalism that year, and Jasper, happily, is still with us.

Here, Gilligan goes for the ‘wrong kind of Black man’ angle. As Fanon reminds us, “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (Fanon, 1986: pp82-83). Any Black person who doesn’t perform according to the expectations of the – to use Gilligan’s formulation – white establishment is automatically placed under suspicion. How dare they think for themselves?

But, like Arday, Woolley is, in my opinion, underqualified for the job he has been given. The advert for the Homerton principal demanded ‘an outstanding record of leadership and achievement in their field’. Woolley’s predecessor, Geoff Ward, was a lecturer, then professor, then department head, with an extensive academic publication record, as well as a published poet and novelist.

In this paragraph, Gilligan demonstrates a bitterness and spite that comes from his mediocrity.

True, non-academics are often appointed to lead colleges at Cambridge. But the university’s other current non-academic heads of house – former ambassadors and permanent secretaries, a former head of the BBC World Service, a former army general, a former chief executive of a top-ten charity, a former chief medical officer – have without exception led more people, achieved more, or attained higher rank than Woolley.

Like many of his fellow Fleet Street hacks, Gilligan is white and sees Black people demanding equity as problematic and ‘uppity’. He prefers to see to Black people playing up to white expectations of Blackness. Gilligan also confuses Islam with Islamism. Thus, in his mind, all Muslims are ‘Islamists’.

If there are three things that Gilligan hates, it’s Muslims, Black people who stand up for themselves, and the remnants of the British parliamentary left, which he laughably labels as “far-left”. Now that Ken Livingstone has retired, Jeremy Corbyn is now the focus of Gilligan’s anti-left slurs.

In 2016, The Daily Telegraph was compelled to pay substantial damages and publish an apology to Mujibul Islam, whom Gilligan had libelled over a series of defamatory articles. East London News reported:

From 18th January 2014 to 24th April 2015 the Telegraph Media Group and Andrew Gilligan published a series of 19 articles in The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and online at www.telegraph.co.uk which referred to Mujibul Islam, an East London businessman. The articles alleged, in summary, that Mr Islam had been a willing beneficiary of corruption on the part of Lutfur Rahman while Mr Rahman was the mayor of Tower Hamlets. It was suggested that Mr Rahman had enabled Mr Islam to purchase the Old Poplar Town Hall building from Tower Hamlets council for substantially less than its true value as a corrupt reward for Mr Islam’s political support. It was also suggested that as a further corrupt reward from Mr Rahman, Mr Islam had been able to obtain planning permission for the redevelopment of the Old Poplar Town Hall as a hotel through a means whereby scrutiny from the council’s Planning Committee was improperly bypassed.

In 2018, the Telegraph was forced to pay substantial damages to Mohammed Kozbar, the chairman of the Finsbury Park mosque, over an article in the Sunday Telegraph in which Gilligan claimed Kozbar held “extremist views”.  Middle East Eye reported:

The article highlighted Kozbar’s relationship with Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party and the member of parliament for the north London constituency where the Finsbury Park mosque is located.

In comments reported by the Guardian newspaper, Kozbar said the article had also been an attack on Corbyn.

“It was not just myself who was the target of this article, it was Jeremy Corbyn,” he said.

“The aim was to damage the reputation of Jeremy and make his progress with the Labour party more difficult.”

After the High Court ruled in Kozbar’s favour, the Telegraph removed the article from its website and posted a statement to say that it had “accepted an offer to settle the claim by payment of substantial damages and his costs to be agreed”.

In 2019, the press regulator, IPSO, ruled against a misleading Sunday Times article in which Gilligan claimed that “Ladies’ loos at City landmarks may open to trans women”. Pink News says:

The Sunday Times appears to have removed the online copy of the article.

A correction states: “Our report “Ladies’ loos at City landmarks may open to trans women” (News, July 29) was misleading because it did not accurately explain the current rights of transgender women under the Equality Act.

“Service providers can allow transgender people to use single-sex spaces such as toilets but can exclude them if this can be justified as a proportionate way to achieve a legitimate aim.”

The original article was penned by Andrew Gilligan, who has attracted criticism from LGBT+ campaigners previously for his critical coverage of trans issues.

Gilligan appears to have learnt no lessons from 2003 and is more than happy to keep churning out slop, smears and wilful inaccuracies for the Murdoch press or whichever rag will pay him. The Cat has also learned that Gilligan is also a ‘Senior Fellow and Head of Transport, Infrastructure and Liveable London’ for the right-wing think-tank, Policy Exchange. Make of that what you will.

Reference

Fanon, Frantz (1986). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto

Nathan Cofnas: ‘After the revolution, I’ll be the head of the dept of eugenics & race science at Harvard’.

Nathan Cofnas who "broke" the story about Jason Arday: "After the revolution, I'll be the head of the dept of eugenics & race science at Harvard'.
byu/Nikhilvoid inBritain

This is chilling stuff.

Cofnas Admits To Revenge For Sacking

https://x.com/i/status/2088588003530711533

Jason Arday, Racism, Eugenics And The British Press

I started writing this blog post days before the news broke that Professor Jason Arday had been found ‘unresponsive’. For weeks, Prof Arday had been the target of the right-wing press and their outriders on social media, all of them either mocking him or expressing delight in the fact that he’d resigned from his post. The Daily Telegraph, which, along with The Daily Mail, had spearheaded a witch-hunt against Prof Arday. The rest of the media duly hopped aboard the bandwagon. One of them was the Times Educational Supplement and the other, perhaps unsurprisingly, was The Spectator.

The focus of this blog post is, therefore, not about the allegations of plagiarism, but on the eugenicist and racist discourses that informed and underpinned the attack pieces on the late professor.

Already, comparisons have been made with the press hounding of Caroline Flack, and these seem to me to be a reasonable comparison. Whatever the case, we need to remember that the British press operates with near impunity and attempts to rein it in have been unsuccessful, not least because of the power the press wields but also because of the weakness of our politicians. The British press targets and destroys people. If you are defamed in the British newspaper, it is difficult and expensive to get redress in the courts. They know this. The most one can expect from the press is a mealy-mouthed apology buried in a box on page 27.

The press aren’t the only ones with blood on their hands. Cambridge University abdicated their duty of care to Prof Arday. They used him as a sacrificial lamb. That cannot be forgiven nor should it be forgotten.

British academia is notoriously white. Only 1% of professors are Black or Brown. Most academics from racialized minority groups are employed on casualized contracts. It’s no wonder that many Black academics leave Britain to further their careers abroad.

Here’s The Telegraph’s response to Prof Arday’s death.

The Telegraph’s brass neck is off the charts.

<Start of the original article>

Right, I’m going to talk about the Jason Arday case which has been in the news for the last two or three weeks. I’m going to start off by saying that this case has provided Britain’s culture warriors – people like Toby Young and the staff writers at The Spectator with loads of ammunition and a vindication of their eugenicist beliefs that Black people have lower IQs than white people. We are told by the media that Arday was facing scrutiny for plagiarism, but if that’s the case, why the focus on him when other examples of plagiarization and CV embellishment take place all the time? Interestingly, in 2023 when William O’Reilly a professor of history at Cambridge University was found to have plagiarized sections of his journal articles, the same press that witch-hunted Prof Arday was eerily silent. Varsity reports:

Dr William O’Reilly, an associate professor in early modern history, was allowed to return to his job last term after telling a University tribunal that he copied around 4,000 words of his student’s essays “inadvertently” and “in a situation of extreme personal difficulty”.

However, new evidence published to the academic portal PubPeer has revealed a pattern of verbatim plagiarism dating back to 2006.

Three different journal articles by O’Reilly – published between 2006 and 2016 – have been found to have large sections of verbatim overlap with uncredited sources.

In O’Reilly’s 2011 article ‘Movements of People in the Atlantic World, 1450-1850’, two pages appear to have been lifted almost directly from a 1995 article by Michael Heffernan. O’Reilly does not credit or cite Heffernan anywhere in the article.

More than a third of O’Reilly’s 2016 article ‘Non-Knowledge and Decision Making: The Challenge for the Historian’ similarly copies word for word the work of two other academic papers without acknowledgement.

Contrast this with the Arday case and the response from Britain’s culture warriors, racists and eugenicists in the press and on social media, and a picture of a witch-hunt begins to emerge.

Toby Young didn’t say anything about O’Reilly, and neither did a former Cambridge academic called Nathan Cofnas, who is now working at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Cofnas styles himself as a “race realist”, who works in the discredited field of ‘race science’. To this end, he doesn’t believe that black people should be in academia. More about him later.

I think it’s important to remember that the two newspapers that spearheaded this witch hunt against Jason Arday were the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail; neither paper is amenable to black people – although the Daily Mail had a campaign to find or at least to prosecute Stephen Lawrence’s killers – but beyond that, they’re very much a racist daily and they have a track record of supporting fascism. The Daily Telegraph, on the other hand, has a reputation for printing falsehoods there’s a famous case of when, in 2003, they claimed that George Galloway had embezzled money that he’d raised for War On Want. It turned out to be an absolute fabrication, and Galloway took them to court and won substantial damages. The Telegraph also gives a platform to racists and eugenicists. When the Telegraph was running its blog pages, the below the line comments threads were crawling with racists and eugenicists who heaped praise on racist content producers and offered their own takes on the subject. The Telegraph closed its blogs in 2014, but it remains committed to rehabilitating eugenics.

The Spectator isn’t known for its accommodating attitude to Black and Brown people, either. It’s been the home of racists, Nazi sympathizers and all manner of reactionaries and bigots for decades. It’s a place where Toby Young feels at home and the Arday story is, for him, like manna from heaven. Young’s Spectator article opens thus:

Are congratulations in order for Sacha Baron Cohen? The more I read about Jason Arday, the Cambridge sociology professor and DEI poster boy caught up in a plagiarism row, the more convinced I am he’s the comedian’s greatest creation. 

Here, Young presents Prof Arday as a comedy character from one of Sacha Baron Cohen’s films. Ridiculing and mocking Black people is a trick that’s been used since the days of slavery (think of blackface minstrelsy).You’ll also notice that Young uses “DEI” instead of EDI, which is used by British institutions. The former is used in the United States. and has been used as a bogeyman by the likes of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, who believed that DEI policies promote (inferior) Black people over “better qualified whites”. It was also a push to end what they called ‘wokeness’ in the military and civil service. It’s worth remembering that the word ‘woke’ was appropriated by the right and far-right during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and was redefined and weaponized. It was then used as a way to mock and ridicule Black people agitating for social justice. Perhaps the most vivid example of the attacks on ‘woke’ was the way Hegseth, himself a white supremacist, set about erasing the history of African-Americans in the armed forces. Take this example:

There’s still an empty wall inside the Pentagon where a portrait used to hang.

It belonged to Gen. Daniel “Chappie” James Jr., the combat legend who became the first Black four-star general in American history. 

Pete Hegseth had the picture taken down. 

To give his article an academic sheen, Young enlisted the support of Kathleen Stock and, erm, Nathan Cofnas.

[Cofnas] identified dozens of passages in Arday’s PhD thesis that are almost identical to passages in a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a reader at Brunel University. An independent analysis by the Times corroborated the charge, citing ‘multiple examples of identical or near identical passages’, and Kathleen Stock, reviewing Arday’s academic output in UnHerd, pronounced it ‘unambiguously mediocre, bordering on comically terrible’.

So, that’s conclusive, right?

Toby Young concludes his article with the following words:

But because Arday is black and neurodivergent, he has been instinctively defended by people desperate not to seem racist. As Cofnas points out, to hold a scholar to lower standards because he is black is effectively to say that if he was held to the same standards as a white scholar, he couldn’t possibly succeed – and that, surely, is a tad patronising, if not outright racist. 

What Young knows about racism could barely fill a medicine dropper. You’ll notice that he omits the fact that Cofnas is a self-styled “race realist” and, therefore, one can conclude that Young reached out to Cofnas on the basis that they’re ideological soulmates. The choice of Stock is harder to fathom. Until a few years ago, Cofnas was Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Emmanuel College and the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Cambridge. In 2024, the University and College Union (UCU) Cambridge University branch published this article on their website.

Cofnas has a history of publishing work which addresses the supposed ‘genetic evidence’ for IQ differences between ethnic groups. Indeed, Cofnas’ CV is a solid indication of his beliefs and scholarly commitments. It is therefore deeply concerning that neither the Leverhulme Trust, nor any of the bodies of the University of Cambridge, caught this at the time of his appointment. It is moreover deeply concerning that racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge. Cambridge UCU firmly believes that there is no place for racism in our university and in academia more broadly, whether it has the appearance of science or not.

We are concerned to see how Cofnas legitimises his appalling recent blog post and broader agenda as constituting ‘free speech’ within the laws and regulations of UK higher education. We call on the University of Cambridge and the UK government to assess how its free speech regulations are being used to platform pseudo-scientific racism and eugenicist visions of society.

One of Cofnas’s racist claims is that if Harvard were a meritocracy, there would be almost no black professors. This is particularly tasteless in the Cambridge context, because Cambridge has a disgraceful record on racial pay and promotion gaps which we have demanded be closed as part of the national Four Fights campaign. We once again call on the University of Cambridge to urgently address the racial pay and promotion gap, as well as to do more to make Cambridge an equal opportunities employer.

We welcome the Leverhulme Trust’s investigation into Cofnas’s racist blog post. We urge both the University of Cambridge and Emmanuel College to open their own investigations into whether Cofnas’s work contravenes the Equality Act. We hope to see the University of Cambridge enact its proclaimed commitments to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

Emmanuel College cleared Cofnas of racism (despite the evidence) and refused to dismiss him. Instead, under pressure, Cofnas resigned from his post in 2024. It seems to me that his attacks on Arday were motivated in part by revenge and in part by his belief in scientific racism, which posits that IQ (itself a contested concept with deep roots in eugenics) is genetic and that Black people have “lower IQs” than white people.

Here’s Cofnas appearing on David Starkey’s podcast. At the start, Starkey tells Cofnas that they “have two things in common. [They] both have real degrees”.

As for Young, who self-styles as “General Secretary” of the Free Speech Union (FSU), he happily defends certain kinds of speech but not others. Thus, he’s quite happy for white people to go around shouting ‘n*gger’ at Black people but looks the other way when senior citizens are arrested for holding up placards expressing support for Palestine Action. That’s his idea of free speech.  We should also recall that he wrote an article in 2015 that promoted “progressive eugenics”, which I wrote about in this blog post in 2018.

In 2024, the FSU website published an article in defence of Cofnas by Freddie Attenborough. Two years later and Attenborough had this article published on the right-wing site The Critic, which further defends Cofnas as just a mere victim whose only crime was to hold challenging views that need to be heard. The fact of the matter is that eugenicist beliefs are almost entirely the province of white bourgeois racists, who believe their position in society is due to their ‘superior genes’. You won’t find a single working-class person talking enthusiastically about eugenics, because they are the focus of bourgeois disgust.

As for Cofnas, it’s worth reminding him that the Victorian colonialist hegemony believed that Eastern European Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian pogroms had lower IQs and that they would ‘infect’ the ‘native’ population with their ‘defective genes’. Furthermore, Nazi Germany exterminated six million Jews because they were seen a genetically inferior. Does Cofnas, who’s Jewish, know this, and would he listen? Cofnas may be Jewish, but he is using his whiteness to fit in with the eugenics and fascist communities. Here’s what he wrote on his blog.

“Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0 per cent.”

In such a system, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”, he wrote.

Cofnas also edits Aporia, an online journal that was founded by Emil Kirkegaard (real name William Engman) and is funded by the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF). The HDF is a rebranding of the neo-Nazi Pioneer Fund, and has ties to Germany’s far-right, Alternativ Für Deutschland. Aporia is therefore ostensibly part of HDF. Organizations like HDF are part of a growing ecosystem of far-right and neo-feudalist groups that are dedicated to creating a new world order in which the world is not only governed by tech billionaires and their close associates, but one which expels non-white people from Europe.

In many respects, the Arday case has echoes of the Claudine Gay affair. Gay, the first Black president of Harvard was accused by Christopher Rufo and his associate, Christopher Brunet, of plagiarizing her dissertation and journal articles. Additionally, she was also accused of antisemitism. Rufo is also known for his opposition to Critical Race Theory, a bogeyman of white supremacy. For his part, Rufo is a public relations person; not an academic. Thus, he’s in the business of creating illusions and diversions.

Finally, we should remember that Toby Young was accepted into Oxford University not on merit or his good grades (he didn’t have any), but because of the intervention of his father. So much for the role of race in determining IQ.

Rest In Peace, Professor Jason Arday.

Why Is Trump Talking About Communism?

Sometimes I think that I’ve gone to bed the previous night and woken up in the 1950s with the Second Red Scare in full swing and “Reds under the bed”. Recently, we’ve heard Donald Trump talking darkly about a communist threat. Let’s be clear, it doesn’t exist. It’s a phantom. A bogeyman. The kind of language being deployed bout this imaginary threat comes to us unchanged and undiluted from the same anti-communist lexicon that was used in the 1950s. Trump has recently attacked The Smithsonian for being insufficiently deferential to him and his white supremacy, as this clip from NBC tells us.

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/trump-is-trying-to-create-a-red-scare-on-steroids-presidential-historian-266254405656

At the risk of sounding like Adam Curtis, playing fast and loosed loose with history or using events from the past to shore up your flagging support, will release forces that are going to be very difficult to control. We saw this with the Tory and right-wing media’s attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, who was accused variously of being a Czech spy, a Putin stooge, a terrorist sympathiser even a member of the IRA itself. This has provided far-right thugs with further proof, as they see it, that the country is and has been ruled by the far-left for the last 45 years.

So why this and why now?

The fact of the matter is that Trump wants his MAGAtized party to win the midterm elections, and he’s using fear to galvanize his barely-literate voter base, very few of whom will remember the Second Red Scare. Trump also realizes that he’s being accused of having fascist politics and he sees people who oppose fascism as his mortal enemies and wants to marginalize or crush them. He’s even suggested that Antifa which stands for anti-fascism, is some kind of shadowy left-wing conspiracy. Indeed, the sudden announcement from his racist Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in which he claimed the Left were some kind of existential threat to civilization, has echoes of Operation Condor, which was a campaign of political oppression waged by right-wing and often military dictatorships in South America. These were, in no particular order, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and, of course, Chile under Augusto Pinochet. Without realizing it, Trump has tacitly admitted that he is a fascist.

So, what is it with Trump and the Communist bogeyman? I think we need to remember something: Trump’s attorney, Roy Cohn, was obsessed with Communists, but he was also a deeply closeted gay man who blackmailed other gay men. Cohn was also Senator Joseph McCarthy’s counsel and If we go back to 1951, Cohn played an instrumental role in the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg trial. It was for that reason that McCarthy hired him. For those who don’t know, the Rosenberg’s were charged and convicted with spying for the Soviet Union, and sentenced to death. Thus, Cohn spent at least two or three decades being this fierce anti-communist warrior, and Trump’s proximity to him would suggest that Cohn’s anti-communist paranoia has rubbed off on him. Let’s remember that Trump is somewhat limited in his way of thinking. I don’t agree with capital punishment, and this was an excessive display of state revenge on two people. The state sanctioned murders of the Rosenbergs orphaned their two children.

The idea that communism and organised communists are somehow wielding enormous power behind the scenes is quite laughable really when you consider that the strength of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) is actually far down from what it was in the 1920s, the 1930s and 1940s. Today, the CPUSA has around 11,000 members at its peak it had something like 75,000 members. 11,000 members isn’t massive, and, compared to the size of the Republican and Democratic parties, it’s miniscule. The CPUSA has elected officials across the United states here and there, but again, these aren’t large numbers of elected representatives, and no communists have been elected to federal office and I’m talking here about Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. So, this idea that communism represents a serious or credible threat to the United States and the world, is nothing more than a conspiracy theory on Trump’s part.

Donald Trump is very much the creation of Roy Cohn.

Keep Politics Out Of Sport And Art?

How many times have you heard the words “keep politics out of sport or art”? Too many, I would imagine. The thing is both of those sporting activities are intrinsically political so you if have an opinion on a particular sports personality or a particular work of art then that’s a political opinion; the idea that art and sports should become isolated from society and the activities that take place within societies be they party political or otherwise is patently absurd.

The most recent FIFA World Cup was nakedly political, and Donald Trump used it for political posturing and to distract from his flagging domestic poll ratings. The event itself was heavily Americanized. The hydration breaks, for example, reminded me very much of the way American sports like American football or baseball are divided into quarters, which tends to make a 90 minute game one that lasts longer. The only thing that was probably missing were the time outs, because time outs are often used as soon as the team is doing badly, the coach calls a time out or at least I think that’s how it works. The actual World Cup final had a 30-minute gaudy, ostentatious, half-time show. Again, this is what one comes to expect of the Superbowl and not the FIFA World Cup or even the FA Cup final.

Then, if we look at the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, we see, not only a very political figure and a very divisive figure, but a deeply compromised figure. Who could forget the moment when he gave Trump a FIFA World Peace Prize? It was a moment that will be forever etched upon my mind. This was an absurd spectacle that exposed the corruption at the heart of FIFA.  It was one of those ‘Wizard of Oz’ moments when the curtain was pulled back to reveal a little man pulling the levers and turning the knobs. If someone like Trump says they deserve to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, then they plainly don’t deserve it. I doubt we’ll see the same FIFA prize being awarded to anyone either next year or far into the future. As for Trump’s peacemaking credentials, if you look at his so-called Board of Peace in Gaza, we see that it’s populated with people who are property developers, and people who have blood on their hands like Tony Blair. These are not people of peace; these are warmongers, carpetbaggers and megalomaniacs. It’s also very revealing that the entire board is mostly composed of men.

Let’s return to Infantino and the issue of Folarin Balogun’s red card, which was overturned, ostensibly, upon the insistence of Donald Trump, who apparently had phoned Infantino to arrange to have the card overturned. The Cat understands that, according to The Daily Mirror, human rights organization, FairSquare, has submitted a complaint to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The complaint submission lists five alleged violations of the IOC’s guidelines on political neutrality, as well as “prima facie” evidence of two more serious breaches — one of which is the Balogun incident.

This is hardly the first time that FairSquare has taken aim at Infantino. Last December, the group sent in another complaint to FIFA’s ethics committee that was acknowledged but didn’t result in any further action.

Well, there you go. Don’t hold your breath.

In the 1980s, there was a series of so-called rebel cricket tours of South Africa where the England cricket team played the South African national side in South Africa during the height of the apartheid era. All the England cricketers were white and those who went on that tour were banned from playing test cricket afterwards. I think Mike Gatting, who led the rebel cricket tour served a three-year ban from cricket for playing cricket. Thus, this idea that sport should be politics-free is once again, revealed to be an absurdity. The ‘rebel’ cricket tour was very much a political gesture of solidarity on the part of the breakaway England cricket players, who stood in support of apartheid and South Africa.  It’s also easy to see just how white English cricket was back in the 1980s and for the most part that’s still the case today in test cricket.

 The English cricket team wasn’t the only such team to play in South Africa; the New Zealand team, who called themselves the New Zealand Cavaliers, also played in the apartheid state. There were also rebel rugby union tours of South Africa during the apartheid era.  In the case of rugby union, I think it’s worth bearing in mind that in apartheid era South Africa, rugby union was a sport played mainly by white men. There were only a few exceptions – Errol Tobias (a Cape Coloured), who played for the Springboks in the 1980s; Dikuli Ndlela and Chester Williams.

A few months ago, I was on Facebook and I think it was Paul Weller who announced that he was releasing a new song. It could have been him, or it could have been somebody else, but a few of those who were replying on the comments thread were complaining that he was political, “oh I don’t like his politics why does he have to be political? I’m not gonna buy any more of his music”.  Well, look, if artists want to express their political beliefs and their political views through their music or their paintings or their poetry it’s up to them. It’s all political – even the opinion that they shouldn’t do those things is a political opinion that comes from a political position. Of course, if you tell the people who said those things that they’re being political, they will deny it, and they’d say, “I’m not political; I’m apolitical”. but even a position of apoliticality is itself, paradoxically, a political position.

Finally, I have a pinned tweet on my Twitter/X feed that reads: “If you’re the sort of person who says, ‘keep politics out of sport/art’, then you don’t know what the word, politics, means”. Everything is political.

The Contradiction Of The Far-Right’s Security Concerns

Following Ann Widdecombe’s murder, far-right politicians like Reform’s Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, and Restore’s sole MP, Rupert Lowe, have been demanding taxpayer-funded security. Here’s the irony: Farage actually refused parliamentary-appointed protection, claiming that it was “inadequate”. Now, it seems, he’s changed his tune.

Nigel Farage turned down taxpayer-funded security which reportedly included a trained driver, car, and bodyguard last year because he deemed it “inadequate”.

The Reform UK leader was offered the package, which was on the same level as high-profile Cabinet ministers and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, following police advice, according to The i Paper.

But Mr Farage turned the security down. In a statement to The Independent, Reform UK said the offering, which came days after the assissination of Charlie Kirk, did not match the threat against the party leader.

Why, in Farage’s view, was the security being proposed “inadequate”? Is it because an armoured ZiL wasn’t included in the package? Did he want a detachment of SAS to stand guard outside his many properties?

Farage, Tice, Lowe and the others are complaining that they’ve become targets of would-be assassins. There’s a glaring lack of self-awareness here: all of these characters have used their platforms to whip up hatred and incite their members to violence. For example, in the aftermath of the murder of Henry Nowak, Farage urged people to express their “white cold rage“. His followers heard the word, “rage” and acted accordingly. Now, Farage can deny it all he likes, but his words had an effect on his followers, because speech and indeed, language, don’t exist in an discourse-free vacuum. Speech is a physical act that has as physical effect on listeners, and can impel those who are pre-disposed to violent acts to go out and smash things up, and even kill people who get in the way.

I found this on the Daily Express‘s Facebook page.

If there’s an upsurge in random acts of violence carried out by Reform and Restore supporters on people of colour going about their business, watch how quickly Pochin slams into reverse and denies her words had any causal effect on those who committed such acts. Remember, this is the woman who said, “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of Black people, full of Asian people, full of people that are basically anything other than White.” Those who agree with Pochin will see this as a green light to carry out random acts of violence against anyone who ‘looks foreign’. And here is the contradiction at the heart of Reform’s and Restore’s demand for greater personal security: they’re quite happy to have taxpayer-funded security, but their words and actions put certain members of the public in grave danger. Furthermore, they don’t care. These people are narcissists and they expect to be treated more favourably than those of us outside the Palace of Westminster, and that’s wrong.

If anyone needs greater security, it’s those of us who are targets of far-right violence: LGBTQI+ people, Muslims, people of colour, women and the disabled.

The Nigel Farage Show

On Tuesday, Nigel Farage resigned his Clacton seat. Only, it wasn’t so much a resignation as it was a flounce for the cameras. Everything he does is for the cameras. Farage said that he was triggering a by-election and claimed, “This will be a people vs the establishment by-election”, adding, “It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where to go.” The Cat found it hard to keep a straight face. There’s a word that people in Northern England use to describe people like Farage: mardy. Here’s another: grifter.

Despite his claims, Farage isn’t some rank outsider, who grew up on a council estate; an ordinary working man leading an insurgency against the Empire. He is part of the Empire, and he is part of the establishment. You can’t get more establishment than a privately-schooled, former commodity trading Conservative, who adored Thatcher. It’s worth remembering how fascists always claim to be acting on behalf of ordinary people, and how they’re political outsiders who are being mistreated by the ‘elite’. In the case of Farage and his party, nothing could be further from the truth.

Farage has been platformed by the BBC for the better part of 26 years. His first appearance on BBC Question Time was in 2000. Since then, he has appeared on the show nearly 40 times. One is entitled to beg the question: why? Is it because the BBC has a morbid fascination with far-right politicians, or is it because the views of such politicians are aligned with the values and ethos of the BBC itself? Here, it’s worth noting that the father of the BBC, John Reith, greatly admired Mussolini and Hitler. It’s also worth remembering that during the 1970s and 1980s, the corporation conducted sympathetic ‘interviews’ with figures like British National Party leader, John Tyndall.

Since he was elected to parliament in 2024, Farage has rarely been seen in the Commons chamber and, according to Adam Bienkov, he’s only voted a handful of times. He spends more time in the United States or working for media outlets like GB “News” or Sky News Australia. Additionally, he pens articles for The Daily Telegraph and makes Cameo videos for people who don’t exist (see below), sells gold bullion and accepts donations in crypto currencies that are linked to crime. He even flogs his own brand of gin. However, Nowhere Towers understands that Farage’s gin has been struck off.

The Guardian has unearthed Cameo clips in which Farage repeats antisemitic conspiracy theories, far-right slogans, and promotes neo-Nazi events.

When he was an MEP, he misused Parliamentary expenses to the tune of €2 million and had his salary docked. Farage rarely appeared in the European Parliament and when he deigned to show up, it was to be abusive. In 2010, he attacked Herman van Rompuy, the incoming President of the European Council as having the “charisma of a damp rag” and the appearance of “a low grade bank clerk” adding “Who are you? I’d never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you”. He did this entirely for the cameras. It may have played well to audience of Little Englanders back home, but it cost him 10 days’ worth of allowances and he was duly reprimanded. Farage was also a member of the EU Parliament’s Fisheries Committee and was absent for all but one out of 42 meetings.

Since he was elected MP for Clacton, he’s rarely seen in the constituency and doesn’t hold regular surgeries. He wants the locals to vote for him, but isn’t prepared to meet them face-to-face to listen to their concerns.  In a 2025 interview with The Times, he said, “Do I want to be an MP? Do I want to spend every Friday for the next five years in Clacton?”.  Farage isn’t prepared to do the job of an MP, but wants the prestige and expenses that comes with the role. Farage also claimed to have bought a house in Clacton, but the property was apparently bought by his girlfriend, Laure Ferrari.

Everything that Nigel Farage does is for Nigel Farage. Like his hero, Donald Trump, Farage is the star of his own TV show, but unlike Trump, he stands little chance of governing an entire country.