Nightmare on King Street (Part 17)

I read this interesting blog by Cllr Stephen Cowan, leader of the opposition Labour group on Hammersmith and Fulham Council, about last night’s Full Council meeting at Hammersmith Town Hall to decide the future of the well-performing Sulivan School in Fulham. The Tories want to sell the school off to a private boys’ school. The parents aren’t happy and rightly so.

Once again, we have a situation where a Tory councillor – in this case, Stephen Hamilton – says one thing and does the exact opposite. Hamilton, according to Cowan, stood up and spoke movingly in support of the Labour motion to keep the school. He then went and voted for a wrecking motion tabled by his fellow Tory, Cllr. Georgi Cooney.

Sulivan School’s supporters, apparently unaware which way Hamilton voted, heaped praise on the two-faced liar at The Salutation pub across the road from the Town Hall after the meeting.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve had stories about Tory councillors being distracted by other things rather than pay attention to what’s being said at meetings.  Hammersmith and Fulham Tories show they can do the same as their neighbours at Kensington and Chelsea. Step forward, Cllr. Adronie Alford, you’re the proud winner of the Nowhere Towers Chocolate Fireguard Award.

Many people complained that the Borough’s Deputy Mayor Cllr. Adronie Alford (Con) was apparently engaged in embroidery, uninterested in the arguments but voting with her Conservative colleagues on the school’s future throughout the evening.

Earlier in the year, Hammersmith and Fulham Tories represented by Tory Boy, Peter Graham, claimed that the Tories were opposed to the closure of Charing Cross Hospital. They were lying and actually voted in favour of selling off the site to developers. A few weeks later I received a flyer through the letter box that was promoting a private emergency service in Maida Vale.  Seriously. Anyone from Hammersmith who phoned them in an emergency would be dead by the time the private ambulance returned to the private emergency centre.

You can read Cllr Cowan’s account of the meeting here.

The Save our Sulivan’s campaign website can be found here.

You can sign the petition here.

Nice people, those Tories.

The Tory Whitewash of Aidan ‘Nazi Boy’ Burley

I meant to write something about the long-delayed Tory report into Aidan Burley’s behaviour last week, but I was overwhelmed with other commitments.  Needless to say The Cat is not surprised that an internal inquiry (the Tories despise such things as evidence and believed every word Nazi Boy told them) has exonerated him with little more than a slap on the wrist. The internal Conservative party report into Burley’s role in the SS uniform scandal nearly two years ago concluded that he is “not anti-Semitic” and behaved in a “stupid and offensive way”. So it was all just youthful high jinks then? Not as far as The Cat is concerned. The Tories even refused to accept first hand evidence from The Mail on Sunday… The Mail on Sunday. A Tory paper!

Here are the facts as I see them:

1. Burley paid for the SS uniform, knowing that the stag party was to be held in France, a country that has outlawed Holocaust denial, the wearing of Nazi uniforms and yes, toasts to the Third Reich.

2. Burley’s letter of apology to The Jewish Chronicle was a lie from start to finish.

The Guardian says:

In an article for the Jewish Chronicle on 15 December 2011, four days after the revelations about the stag do were published in the Mail on Sunday, Burley issued a strong apology but disassociated himself from the “clearly inappropriate behaviour” of other guests.

He was given the exact words to use in his letter by someone in Tory Central Office. You can be certain of that.

Burley’s pal, Mark Fournier, was fined 1,500 Euros by a French court, yet Burley escaped punishment. The question here is: why?

There have been calls for the Tories to reopen the Burley case. In true fashion, they have refused. Anyone would think they had something to hide.

So what is so special about Burley that Cameron and the leadership of the party feel such a desperate need to protect him? Is he being groomed for the Home Office or Works and Pensions portfolio? We already know that when the Tories took office in 2010, Burley hit the ground running with his guaranteed-to-please-David Cameron venture, the Trade Union Reform Campaign. Like Burley, the Nazis didn’t care much for trade unions either and banned them outright. In their place, Hitler created the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF), headed by Robert Ley, to organize workers along nationalist and militaristic lines.  DAF subgroups like Strength Through Joy and Beauty Through Work were also added to provide diversions.  The Reichsarbeitsdienst was created with the purpose of providing cheap (often forced) labour that exploited unemployed men, who were used for work on major infrastructure projects like the autobahn network. Is this what the Tories have in mind for trade unionists and the unemployed if they win the next General Election? There is already talk about creating work camps for the HS2 project.

Today, Political Scrapbook reports that Cannock Chase Conservative Association has been accusing Ian Austin (whose father escaped from Treblinka) of orchestrating a smear campaign against their beloved MP.

Nice people, these Tories.

Telegraph Comment of the Week (#24)

If you put the words ‘homosexual’ and ‘Africa’ into the same blog title, there is every chance that you’ll get a load of right-wing sad sacks with too much time on their hands leaving comments that vary from ‘gay is a disease and we are the cure’ to ‘the bloody Africans should be grateful to us for giving them Christianity’. And so it is with this blog from Tim Stanley, which on the face of things, seems reasonable enough. Here’s a snippet.

The snub to the outside world is important. Some African politicians argue that homosexuality is a Western import and gay rights a form of neo-colonialism – a way of exerting Western cultural influence on innocent, “God-fearing” countries. The argument goes that African societies have always been historically 100 per cent straight. An explosion in gays and lesbians is a recent thing, encouraged by foreign powers.

Doc Stanley’s efforts are like a red rag to the proverbial bull. The number of ignorant and offensive remarks left on the comments thread are too numerous to mention and I found it difficult to choose one in particular. Needless to say, there was the inevitable traipse into victimhood with, “Oh, so it’s all whitey’s fault”. Some commenters even tell the Doc to leave this country and go and live in Africa. Yes, this is the level of intelligence we’re dealing with here. I’ve heard Telegraph blogs being likened to a bear-pit. Frankly I think a bear-pit is a much kinder place.

This week’s comment was left by “molly black”, who saw an opportunity to launch into an attack on her favourite obsession: Muslims.

You can always tell what kind of person is making the comment by the way they use outdated words and terminology. Here, the word “Moslem” is used. “Yes, Moslems practice sodomy – we know that” says molly authoritatively. Nothing like a good old fashioned smear from the Middle Ages, eh? But who is “we”? I suspect “molly slackwit” is referring to the BNP or similar, in which case her use of the pronoun “we” is being used selectively to imply a consensus. Then there’s the much loved phraseological style of the typical right-winger: cram all your hatred into a single sentence by using as many clichés as possible, thus “molly” produces, “professional placard-carrying, mincing queen”. The beauty of this phrase is that you can replace “mincing queen” with “dirty layabout” or “soap-dodger” and voila, you’ve got a handy phrase for expressing your hatred of student protesters. Try it at home with whatever minority group takes your fancy. It’s so easy!

The comment beneath “molly” also interested me. Mainly because the commenter uses the name “indigenousbrit” in an ahistorical manner that not only evidences a lack of self-consciousness and erudition, but also because they crown it off by displaying Enoch Powell as their avatar. No prizes for guessing how this person feels about ethnic minorities.

There’s more white male heterosexual victimhood on this comments thread than you can shake a stick at. Welcome to the sewer.

The truth about Nigel Farage’s clash with protesters in Margate.

I keep saying how Media Studies is important and this is why. The British, well, English media continue to fawn over Farage and his party and present UKIP as the only alternative to the three main parties. Whatever you’ve seen reported about this incident is only one side of the story. Read on…

chazwoldalmighty

There has been a lot in the news yesterday about UKIP leader Nigel Farage being hit on the head by a protester, with the real facts of the incident not being reported. This is due to lies being spread in the media by UKIP about what happened. The idea for the protesters attendance was largely for those people to show their dissatisfaction with the comments and policies of UKIP. None of the protesters were looking to hurt Nigel Farage.

When I heard he was going to attend I went with my camera to film the events. It was my goal to hopefully gain his reaction to some questions and use the footage on my youtube channel. It is important to the freedom of speech in this country that people report the news themselves via the internet to stop this type of lying being done by politicians. The crowd were not one…

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Telegraph Comment of the Week (#23)

No matter how hard they try (perhaps they’re not trying at all) the Telegraph can’t stop the numbers of fruitcakes that flock to its comments threads. This is no doubt due to the kinds of blogs that are published on the site and, in spite of Dan Hannan’s complaint that the blogs shouldn’t be judged on the kinds of comments that appear below them, his complaint sounds like the insincere whining that’s born of a lack of self-awareness. “It’s not my fault, blame that lot over there”! These people know what they’re doing and the more clicks these blogs get, the more money for the Telegraph. Clickbait: it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3 clicks.

This week, a new horse arrived at the Telegraph stable. Posing as a recent history graduate, Jago Pearson wrote an article in support of Michael Gove’s education policies and complained that academia was “dominated by lefties”. The thing is, Pearson is actually working for a Tory-friendly PR company. This sort of thing happens a lot: the government has made much use of astroturfers and Twitter accounts that harass anyone who doesn’t support the government’s classist policies. Gove is not a pedagogue, he’s an ideologue and a former journalist and it shows. It’s all about the narrative. However, what Pearson seems to have forgotten is that universities do not fall under the auspices of The Department for Education, they are the responsibility of The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Oops! Perhaps he should have written an article in support of David Willetts instead?

Here are a couple of snippets from his first article.

The dominance of the Left is deep-rooted and for all to see, especially when it comes to the teaching of history. I write as a 21-year-old graduate of History and Politics, just six months out of university.

Don’t get me wrong: I had some superb teachers and lecturers, both throughout my time at school and while studying for my degree – individuals who enthused and inspired and knew their subjects inside out.

But the majority of them were rabidly Left-wing and the subjects they chose for their students matched their own misguided outlook on society.

Towards the end he tells us:

When it came to my dissertation, I managed to retreat to something more traditional, in the form of British defence policy and the Falklands conflict. Luckily, my supervisor was just about the only in the department without a Left-wing grudge to bear. To be expected I suppose, as an expert in intelligence and strategic defence.

Jesus H. Christ! Talk about paranoia. But “traditional”? What is that supposed to mean? Pearson’s prose style is reminiscent of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, but not quite as entertaining.

After he was exposed as a fraud by Tom Pride, Pearson thought he’d ask Damian ‘Blood Crazed Ferret’ Thompson for another crack at those awful, horrible lefties. The result is even more hilarious than the first article.

The tactics of the Left are so predictable, especially where certain subjects are concerned. You give them a prod; shake them around a little and they stir into life. How dare we criticise their cosy stranglehold on education?

The point of Higher Education is to get students to think critically and to ask questions. Pearson appears to have done neither during his time at Loughborough University, the alleged hotbed of academic radicalism and focus of his ire. The rest of the blog reads like a sixth form rant and it’s hard to imagine how Pearson managed to obtain a degree at all. On the basis of this, I’d say he’d have been lucky to achieve a third.

Now for the comment. This one is full of the usual clichés and hackneyed phrases that we’ve come to know and love.

“Jim Blane” just vomits the words onto the page. He opens with “White middle /upper class Neo-Leftism is a racist anti-White ideology”. So we now know this person is probably a white nationalist and possibly a member of the BNP or UKIP. But what is “anti-White ideology” other than paranoid drool? Have a look at the spelling, it’s clear this person doesn’t much time for such trivial things as grammar and sentence construction. Such things are, no doubt, indicative of ‘Left-wing indoctrination’. We can’t have that.

This comment wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory “Cultural Marxist” thrown in but, in typical headbanging style, Jim Bilge crams far too many epithets into his sentences and the result is a sort of mush with long sentences like: “Most self described Lefties and most NeoCons are Cultural Marxists or have adopoted the core tenets of Cultural Marxist /Cultural Deconstructionism / Blank Slate Theory / Critical Theory and yet at the same time don’t even know what these things are”.  Get all those hatreds in Jim, time’s running out.

Critical theory offends the far-right mind because nothing should be questioned. The leader is always right. The world was created in seven days and the story of Noah’s Ark is better than any scientific analysis.  Evolution, dear friends, is a commie…no, scratch that, Cultural Marxist plot to destroy the White ‘race’. That is what passes for free speech in Toryland, a country in which people accept their place under a regime of bullies, dummies and their pals in the PR industry.

This kind of rant against “left-wing intellectuals” is typical of the anti-intellectualism of, well, right-wing dictatorships. Oddly enough, it’s also the kind of thing that’s been happening in the States for decades where students are asked to report “left-wing” academics, who are then hounded out of their jobs.

Truth? These people haven’t got a clue.

Death of democracy is confirmed as Cameron ignores the will of Parliament

If the government defies the will of Parliament, then we’re a step closer to dictatorship. A must read.

Mike Sivier's blog

Ladies and gentlemen of the United Kingdom, your plight is worsening: The government now no longer pays any attention to the decisions of your Parliamentarians.

You’ll remember that a debate was held on Monday, in which MPs called for an inquiry into the effect of changes to the benefit system – introduced by the Conservative-led Coalition government – on the incidence of poverty in this country; the question was whether poverty was increasing as a result of the so-called reforms.

Parliament voted massively in favour of the inquiry (125 votes for; two against), as reported here.

We considered it a great victory at the time, and looked forward to the commissioning of the inquiry and its eventual report.

Now that dream is in tatters as Michael Meacher, the MP who brought the motion to Parliament, has reported that nothing is to happen and the government is ignoring the vote.

It seems…

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Telegraph Comment of the Week (#22)

If it’s one thing the Right loves to do it’s to claim that it’s philosophically and epistemologically superior to the Left. Yet its constant rewriting of history actually demonstrates the opposite. In recent years, many on the Right have claimed that the Nazis are ‘left-wing’. Why? Because they can’t cope with the idea that the Nazis (and fascists) occupy a space further along from them on the political Right. They do this for two reasons: first, to smear the Left and second, to claim a tenuous moral superiority over them. The Nazis are ‘socialists’ they will exclaim because the word ‘socialist’ appears in their name. There can be no more a feeble rationalization. For example, the Australian Liberal Party, in spite of its name, is not a centre left party but a right-wing party. If you tell them that, they start hurling insults. Names count for nothing but try telling them that.

This week’s comment was found on a Delingtroll blog, which makes the same tired claims about how Nazis aren’t really right-wing. In this blog, he attempts to create a space between Nigel Farage and the Front National’s Marine Le Pen but ends up making himself look foolish and ignorant in the process. No mean feat for Delingpole or Dan Hannan, who is cited in this hilarious piece.

To lump together fascist parties (Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, Jobbik in Hungary, the BNP) with bellicose but essentially constitutional anti-immigration movements (FN in France, PVV in the Netherlands, Freedom Party in Austria) is clumsy. To add in eurosceptic parties of the democratic right (AfD in Germany, Mouvement pour la France, Danish People’s Party, Ukip) is deliberately tendentious.

When someone groups all these parties together under the label ‘extreme right’, he is telling you more about himself than about them. Parties like Golden Dawn are not right-wing in any recognisable sense. They favour workers’ councils, higher spending, state-controlled industries; they march on May Day under red flags. They could just as easily sit at either end of the European Parliament’s hemicycle (our closest equivalent, in its combination of mystical nationalism and loathing for capitalism, is Sinn Féin). Calling such parties right-wing isn’t intended to make anyone think less of them; it’s intended to damage mainstream conservatives by implying that the difference between them and the Nazis is one of degree.

Hannan’s article for The Spectator Dictator is desperate as well as intellectually dishonest. UKIP have, through Godfrey Bloom, established friendly relations with Le Pen’s FN. Moreover, the FN recently met with Geert Wilders PVV with the intention of forming an electoral pact in the European Parliament. There’s nothing ‘clumsy’ about those connections. They are real.

The above quote is preceded by a characteristic whinge from Delingtroll:

Yet our lazy and parti-pris media – even many newspapers notionally on the right-wing side of the debate – continue to do the liberal-left’s dirty work for it by labelling any party with instincts which are nationalistic, anti-immigration, or anti-EU as belonging to the “far-right” – and therefore automatically beyond the pale of reasoned political discourse. The loons of the green-left, on the other hand, get a more or less free pass to spout their anti-democratic drivel at will.

The nationalism that is expressed by the likes of the PVV or the other parties mentioned here, belongs on the far-right. There can be no question about it. Furthermore, there is nothing ‘reasoned’ or reasonable about the shrill paranoia that dominates the Right’s anti-immigration discourses. Words like ‘floods’ and ‘tides’ are constantly used alongside exaggerations like ‘mass immigration’ which is itself a euphemization of the phrase ‘floods of immigrants’. These words are often joined by hygiene metaphors like ‘contamination’.

Now to this week’s comment. This one comes from ‘eufreedom’. Yeah, I laughed at that name too.

The key to this comment is “ALL British born” and in spite of “eufreedom’s” claims that no distinctions will be made according to colour, creed and denomination, questions are invariably asked by such parties regarding one’s right to claim national identity – particularly if they look different. Kippers often claim that they are “neither right nor left” but given their nationalism and obsession with difference, this is evidently dishonest. ‘eufreedom’ also takes umbrage with the fact that people disagree with his/her drivel and pronounces them “neo-fascist-marxist-EU drones and trolls”. This comment may look like a self-parody of a Kipper, but this is how they really think and talk.

For more hilarity, have a look at Toby Young’s feeble attempt to unite the Tories and UKIP under the “Country before Party” banner. 

Threats of death and violence after Channel 4 programme Benefits Street

Channel Four have, once again, shown us how far they’ve travelled from their former position as an innovative broadcaster. These days the channel flits between posh people helping other posh people to buy homes to outright voyeuristic trash like “My Big Gypsy Wedding”. Last night C4 took a leaf from Channel 5’s book and screened “Benefits Street”. Programmes such as these are produced for one purpose only: to give certain sections of the public a chance to indulge in a weekly 60 minutes of hate. The distorted picture of benefit claimants as pathologically workshy, shiftless and criminally-inclined is one that this venal government has worked tirelessly to construct. However it’s odd that the real villains (those who cheat their tax, for example or those companies who are addicted to state handouts) are given a free pass. C4 should not only hang its head in shame but those responsible for producing programmes like “Benefits Street” should be prosecuted for inciting hatred.

Pride's Purge

(not satire!)

Channel 4 executives should be proud of themselves. 

Their attempt to stereotype and demonise all of Britain’s 2.49 million unemployed by focussing on just 6 carefully chosen people and showing them in the worst possible light in their programme Benefits Street last night was so successful that Twitter exploded with threats of violence and even death against the participants:

The producers of the programme meanwhile defended it is a ‘sympathetic, humane and objective portrayal’ of those struggling to cope with austerity.

Not much sympathy, humanity or objectivity on display on Twitter however.

Isn’t there a law against this kind of incitement to violence in the UK?

If so, if any police officer would like to take this further, I’ve kept the names and IDs of the people responsible for the above (and more below) threatening tweets and I would be more than happy to help you with your…

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Telegraph Comment of the Week (#21)

For the last couple of weeks I have been without the internet, hence the lack of blogs. Admittedly the last year has been a very busy time for me and I haven’t been able to update this blog as much as I’d have liked.

Anyway, this week’s comment was found on a Toby Young blog, in which he claims ‘free market capitalism beats socialism’. To support his assertion, Tobes flourishes a graph from the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (there is considerable overlap between AEI and The Project for the New American Century). Essentially, Tobes’s blog is nothing less than bitchy ramble and his graph proves nothing.

So let’s hear it for the free enterprise system. Next time you hear John Pilger on the Today programme lambasting the evils of capitalism, remember the above chart. It is tough-minded entrepreneurs motivated by a desire for profit that have lifted the world out of poverty, not bleeding-heart liberals.

‘Free enterprise’? Is he for real? For all his ‘libertarian’ rhetoric, Hon Tobes doesn’t much care for opposing points of view. Here he claims that the profit motive has ‘lifted the world out of poverty’ but he offers no more than a dodgy chart to support his view. He’ll have to do much better, but I know he is neither capable nor willing to do so.

Now for this week’s comment. The Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has claimed that anyone can teach; it’s a simple job that requires no professional training. This commenter seems to feel that supermarket chains are better than local authorities at running schools.

This one repeats the stock line “leftist control of education”, which is much beloved of neo-cons and the self-styled ‘libertarians’ who fill  the Telegraph’s comments threads with inane drivel about markets and crypto-racist ejaculations. But how on earth could a supermarket chain like Tesco improve education standards? It can’t. Tesco is only interested in one thing: making profits. Education is not about making profit and even public schools are run as charities.  No matter how hard one tries to impose market ideas on education, they will always fail to provide, because the profit motive and pedagogy are in conflict with one another. As for a Tesco police force, I wonder if “northumbrianmariner” has ever seen Robocop? Probably not.

Where Does The Price Come From?

Our leaders and economic gurus need to read this.