Janner Request To Keep Seat In Lords

According to news reports this week, Greville (Lord) Janner will not be facing prosecution on charges of child sexual abuse because he’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. This was the same excuse that allowed Ernest Saunders to escape a prison sentence and Augusto Pinochet to avoid justice. In Saunder’s case, he made a miraculous recovery. To the best of my knowledge, no one has recovered from Alzheimer’s. Pinochet was similar: as soon as he touched down in Santiago, he practically danced across the tarmac. As The Needle points out, Janner recently requested to keep his seat in the Lords. Interesting. No?

theneedleblog

From today’s edition of The Sunday Times

The reference to the general election indicates that this is a recent development. Lord Janner seems to have been well enough to sign a letter requesting that he remain a voting member of the House of Lords.

It seems that he is fit enough to plead for his job but not fit enough to enter a plea regarding the  very serious criminal allegations that have been made.

I think it is fair to ask, what the hell is going on here ?

Janner can’t have it both ways !

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Life on Hannan World (Part 16)

Russell Brand: he must be doing something right if Hannan hates him.

I realise there has been little activity on my blog for a number of weeks. This is because I have been very busy with other things. I won’t go into detail but these things have taken a great deal of my time and demanded my utmost attnetion. It’s also likely that my blog output will be patchy over the coming weeks, though I expect to do some blogging closer to the General Election.

I’ve resisted the temptation to comment on Russell Brand because he has been covered from all different angles by all manner of people. Brand’s associations with Laurence Easeman have been the subject of considerable discussion since last October, when his book launch was cancelled after Easeman’s anti-Semitism and fascism were revealed. Under the circumstances, Brand did the right thing by cancelling the launch. At least Brand turns his back on fash and racists. Daniel ‘Anglosphere’ Hannan, on the other hand, airbrushes the latter.

Brand’s appearance on the national political stage has got tongues wagging on the Left and as for the Right? Well, they aren’t taking this at all well. Why? Because they’re in the firing line and they know it. I found this blog from Hannan that attempts to paint Brand as a wannabe dictator.

Russell Brand describes himself as a “comedian and campaigner”. While we might wonder at the first epithet, we can’t argue with the second. The man has built up a huge following among the angry teenage Lefties who dominate Twitter. His theme is that all politics is corrupt, all MPs are plutocrats’ stooges, and all rich people – except him, naturally – are part of a racket.

Bitchy and bitter. “Twitter” Hannan opines, is dominated by “angry teenage Lefties”. Really? That’s news to me. I’ve found many lefties on Twitter but equally, I’ve encountered plenty of vile right-wingers whose idea of free speech begins and ends at insult. They’re also rather fond of the kind of racist and sexist language that wouldn’t sound out of place coming from John Tyndall (deceased) or the bully boys (and girl) of Britain First.

Think about that for a moment. Russell Brand’s quarrel isn’t with the people who have more courage than him; it’s with parliamentary democracy itself. A chap might be making an honest living as, say, a “comedian and campaigner”; but the very fact of bothering to ask his countrymen for their votes would turn him into a shyster.

I love the way The Lyin’ King opens this paragraph with the word “Think”. Thinking isn’t something that either he or his brethren do very well. They react and they presume. Hannan, a Conservative MEP for the South-east, spends his time attacking the European Union, while taking his not-too-insubstantial salary from it. His position on the EU doesn’t differ that much from the Kippers. He is a very part of the corrupt system that Brand stands against.

OK, Russell, so if you don’t like representative democracy, what’s your alternative? Anarchy? Fascism? Monarchical absolutism? An Islamic Caliphate? Because you can’t have a functioning democracy without politicians; and politicians, in every parliament, tend to group themselves officially or unofficially into parties.

More bitchiness. Let’s get something straight: anarchism is a political philosophy; anarchy is a state in which there is chaos and disorder… which is what would happen if we lived in the kind of Randian world that Dan and his buddy Carswell dream about. Most right-wingers can’t tell the difference between anarchism and anarchy and if you attempt to point out the differences, they put their fingers in their ears. Hannan squeals “you can’t have a functioning democracy without politicians”. Well, that depends on what you mean by “democracy” and it also depends on what you mean by the word “politicians”. I suspect Hannan is only thinking of professional politicians that are drawn, as they currently are, from the ranks of the bourgeoisie and the grand bourgeoisie; the scions of the aristocracy, landed gentry and the so-called captains of industry. The very same people Hannan went to school with: in other words, those who believe it is their right to govern by dint of their circumstances of birth. We also see how the political world is explained to us on television by members of the same class as the politicians themselves, who coincidentally attended the same educational institutions. Nick Robinson? James Landale? Tom Bradby?

You might think that Brand’s contention is so puerile as not to merit serious refutation. The chap is, if nothing else, brilliant at promoting his book by courting controversy. But, listen to the ululations of the studio audience when he speaks; read the ecstasy of his Twitter followers. Russell Brand may be cynically boosting his sales, but there are millions out there who take him seriously, parroting his line about parliamentary government being a scam.

Yawn. Someone’s jealous they’re not getting enough attention. Dan? Is that you? Daft question. Hannan is rather good at promoting his dismal books too (like How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters). In fact, he’s a well-versed in the art of self-publicity to such an extent that when he farts, Fox News is on hand to cover the event. Let’s have a look at the last phrase about parliamentary government. Hannan clearly believes there is nothing wrong and that it doesn’t need to be fixed. Parliamentary politics, as they are currently constituted, is a political dead end. Neoliberalism dominates the thinking of most of Westminster’s politicians and they countenance nothing else. “The market” we are told, “is moral” and the best we’re ever likely to get. We don’t live in a democracy, we live in a tyranny – albeit an elected one. Welcome to the dystopia, leave your dreams, hopes and desires at the door.

I remember hearing the same remarks in South America during the 1990s. Democracy is a sham, all politicians are crooks, voting only encourages them, blah blah. Such disillusionment was the prelude to the populist authoritarianism than has since spread across the continent, knocking aside parliamentary rule in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and elsewhere. The new caudillos aren’t exactly dictators: they were more or less fairly elected. But, once in office, they set about destroying every check on their power, from opposition media to independent courts, justifying every power-grab as a way of getting even with the old elites.

There’s only one problem with Hannan’s thesis and it’s the kind of people who were running these South American countries: the oligarchs and bootlickers who were in thrall to Washington. They were displaced through a combination of popular suffrage and education; two of the things that were denied to ordinary people during the rule of the caudillos. No doubt The Lyin’ King would like to see a return to the days of Operation Condor when people knew their place and those who didn’t were crushed under the military’s jackboot. How dare you question capitalism’s evident limits and fallibilities?

Could something similar happen in Europe? Well, look at what has already happened. In 2011, Brussels imposed civilian juntas on Italy and Greece, toppling elected governments in favour of Eurocrats. What was the justification for these Euro-coups? Pretty much the same as Russell Brand’s: that democracy had failed. As the then President of the European Commission, José Manuel Durrão Barroso, had put it a few months earlier: “Governments are not always right. If governments were right, we wouldn’t have the situation we have today. Decisions taken by the most democratic decisions in the world are very often wrong”.

Hannan’s reasoning here is sloppy, confused and relies heavily on two things: his antithesis to the EU and his love of laissez-faire capitalism. If you hate the EU so much, Dan, you could always stop taking a salary from it. Just a thought, eh? The idea that you’re fighting an ‘evil’ entity from the inside just doesn’t ring true.

Let me put the question again: what is the alternative? Dislike of party politics has been the justification for every autocrat in history: Cromwell, Bonaparte, Lenin, Mussolini, Franco. And it always starts in the same way, with the arguments now being put forward by Russell Brand.

Scaremongering and histrionics. You will notice how Pinochet is absent from his list of autocrats. Presumably, he was the right kind of autocrat. Pinochet, after all, was bolstered by the Chicago Boys, a group of Friedmanite economists who privatized everything in sight and provided the template for Thatcher and Reagan’s assault on the working class. Hannan is an admirer of Thatcher and the notion that markets will provide [for the rich].  For Hannan, all that matters is the idea of growth but it’s the kind of growth that most ordinary folk can’t see in their wage packets. It’s the kind of growth that only benefits the rich and powerful, who continue to increase rents and prices. In fact, Hannan has written a panegyric to the supposed economic growth in the 1930s in another blog. I shall carve that up in due course.

UKIP, Robin Birley And The Peterloo Massacre

UKIP funder, Robin Birley

Many observers have commented on UKIP’s anti-establishment credentials and found them wanting. Farage’s “People’s Army” is a top-down party, which while claiming to be a grassroots movement full of ordinary people, is run by the same vested interests that control the Conservative Party and share close ties to the unseen hand of Britain’s security services. Those ordinary voters who believe that by supporting UKIP they will, somehow, effect great change on Britain’s political landscape are in for a surprise. With UKIP, it’s business as usual but with an extra dose of Thatcherism. We already know that a number of aristocrats and  ex-public school boys fill the top positions in the party. We also know that many of their MEPs are former Conservatives and a few, like Jeffrey Titford, were members of extreme right-wing parties.  Prominent Kippers like Malcolm (Lord) Pearson and Roger Helmer are also members of the Orwellian-sounding Freedom Association (TFA). TFA, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere on this blog, is not concerned with freedom per se but with protecting the freedom of the ruling classes.  TFA, through John Gouriet, was heavily involved in strike-breaking, the Grunwick Dispute being a notable example. TFA were also supportive of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

UKIP, as Another Angry Voice points out, is not an anti-establishment party, it is an establishment party. This article from The Socialist discusses the establishment position of UKIP . Unfortunately, neither article discusses how deeply UKIP is rooted in Britain’s ruling class. These are roots that go deep and wide, and stretch back to the early 19th century.

A couple of days ago, I saw a Facebook status update that linked to an article which reported that Robin Birley, ‘businessman’, son of hospitality industry mogul, Mark Birley, and stepson of James Goldsmith, has been funding UKIP. Birley was previously involved in his stepdad’s Referendum Party, which folded shortly after Sir Jams Fishpaste (qv. Private Eye) died. Add the names Goldsmith and Birley to the name of John Aspinall and chuck in his zoo and the Clermont Club and what do you have? Britain’s reactionary establishment. So reactionary were the group that gathered at Aspinall’s Clermont Club to gamble and hobnob with others of their class that they formed GB75 with a few disgruntled Army officers with the intention of fomenting a coup against the Wilson government. This subject has already been covered at some length in Adam Curtis’s BAFTA award-winning, The Mayfair Set and by the para-politics journal, Lobster. These paranoiacs seriously believed that Harold Wilson was a KGB spy. Seriously. Is this the Harold Wilson, who sucked up to big business and turned a blind eye to US involvement in Vietnam? Yes, it’s that Harold Wilson. He was hardly a socialist and barely a social democrat. Wilson was a massive disappointment to the Labour left, who had hoped for better things after years of Tory rule.

The Clermont Club boasted  no less than five dukes, five marquesses, twenty earls (including the infamous Lord Lucan) and two cabinet ministers. Colonel David Stirling, the founder of the Special Air Service (SAS) was also a prominent member as were James Bond author, Ian Fleming and Peter Sellers. Stirling was the son of a Brigadier General Archibald Stirling and Margaret Fraser, the daughter of Simon Fraser, the 14th Lord Lovat (his uncle), who was a descendant of Charles II.  Lord Lucan was also a member of the Clermont Club. Because of his charisma and charm, he was considered for the role of James Bond, though he had no acting experience or clear talent. Lucan disappeared in 1974 after killing his nanny, Sandra Rivett. If anyone knew the whereabouts of Lord Lucan, it was Aspinall. Lucan was, himself, a notorious fascist and I’m not using that word pejoratively. Lucan actually sympathised with fascists and even supported the creation of a British fascist state. He was also a rotten gambler and was used by Aspinall to bring a “touch of class” to the club. In 1972, Aspinall was forced to sell the Clermont to Playboy, who in turn disposed of the club. However, Aspinall remained in the gambling business and you can see one of his clubs, called “Aspers”, at the Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford, East London. Aspinall died in 2000. His son, Damien, runs the business.

Robin Birley had his face mauled by a tiger at Howlett’s Zoo in 1970. Aspinall, an eccentric as well as a reactionary right-winger, believed that people should be able to interact with animals at zoos, which he referred to as ‘animal parks’. Even the most dangerous of animals, like the big cats, were considered harmless and people were encouraged to stroke, pet and even play with lions. So even when the bones on the left side of Birley’s face were crushed, Aspinall stuck to his guns and refused to change his zoo’s policy. There was no falling out between the families and no legal suit for damages was filed. Aspinall also stood as an unsuccessful candidate for The Referendum Party in 1997.

George Osborne’s grandfather, Sir George Francis Osborne, was married to Mary Grace Horn, who was previously married to Robert Stavali Aspinall, an Army surgeon. They had a son, John Victor Aspinall and yes, that’s the same Aspinall who owned the Clermont. In effect, John Aspinall is Gidiot’s step-uncle. But Aspinall’s real father was apparently an unnamed soldier. The rich have trouble keeping it in their pants, but are quite happy to lecture the working class about their sexual habits. Surprised? No? Neither am I.

Robin Birley was also involved with fellow UKIP donor, Paul Sykes, in the anti-EU pressure group Democracy Movement that was founded by his mother,  Lady Annabel Goldsmith (the daughter of the Marquess of Londonderry and mother of Ben, Zac and Jemima) as a continuation of the Referendum Party. Sykes also financed the project. Birley was also president of the Mozambique Institute which supported RENAMO, a reactionary conservative party in Mozambique that was also supported by the apartheid regime in South Africa in its struggle against the anti-colonialist FRELIMO during the Mozambique Civil War. As a leading member of Chilean Supporters Abroad, he also supported the Pinochet regime in Chile, and complained bitterly at Pinochet’s detention in 1998 telling the press “It’s a case of rank hypocrisy. It’s also an abuse of hospitality to ambush an old man when he has come to this country year after year. He has done an immense amount for Chile. No one is supporting him and I have sympathy for the underdog”.  Birley also financed Pinochet’s luxury house in Wentworth, Surrey.

When Mark Birley was confined to a wheelchair following a stroke, he handed the reins of Annabel’s (named after his ex-wife) to Robin and his sister, India Jane.  However in 2006, he dismissed Robin after discovering that he’d hired a private detective to conduct a background check on his sister’s boyfriend. The private eye turned out to be a fraudster and Birley had actually paid £200,000 for false information. There’s no sucker like a dim posh sucker. Mark Birley died in 2007 after suffering a massive stroke. India Jane and Robin remained estranged to this day.

So how does the Peterloo Massacre figure in all of this? Robin Birley’s great- great-grandfather, Hugh Hornby Birley was a prominent Manchester Tory and businessman, who led the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry in the fatal charge against unarmed men, women and children at St Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819.  According to reports, the yeomanry were drunk and spoiling for a fight. 15 people were killed and hundreds were injured, many of them seriously. Birley had been previously involved in violent confrontations with workers in 1818. Birley and the yeomanry had, according to Spartacus Educational, a “deep hatred of reformers”. It seems as though little as changed since then. This is what UKIP stands for.

A vote for UKIP is vote for the same old tired system. A vote for UKIP is effectively a vote for Britain’s aristocracy. A vote for UKIP is a vote to sign away the hard-fought rights that we take for granted today. If it ever got anywhere near real power, UKIP would take us back to the past. It is a party that concerns itself with nostalgia and its idea of freedom is the continuation of a system that brutalizes workers and represses progressive forces through the use of violence and intimidation. UKIP is a party of anti-intellectuals, nationalist romantics, bullies and reactionaries. A vote for UKIP is a vote for your own enslavement – unless you happen to be a member of the establishment.

PS Robin Birley should not be confused with the archaeologist, Robin Birley, of the Vindolanda Trust. They are, however, cousins.

Life on Hannan World (Part 9)

The occasion of Milton Friedman’s 101st birthday…no, he’s still dead, I just checked… has moved the Lyin’ King to pen this gushing tribute to the man whose economic theories have quite literally turned the world into a toilet. Dan opines:

Today would have been Milton Friedman’s hundred-and-first birthday. The Chicago economist, who died in 2006, is already acquiring that almost Homeric status that normally comes only decades after a man’s life.  Perhaps social media have speeded up the process, or perhaps it’s the fact that Friedman’s strongest enthusiasts are often students with no direct memory of their hero.

Friedman, darling of neoliberals everywhere and supporter of Pinochet’s Chile, where his theories were rammed down people’s throats, is given the airbrush treatment… well, that’s not quite true. Friedman’s supporters refuse to see any flaws in the man. In their eyes, he was the very model of economic perfection. So no need for the airbrush.

Yet for someone who talked so movingly about ‘freedom’, Friedman was capable of turning a blind eye to political repression. For him, all that mattered was the functioning of the free market with its insistence that social relations be reduced to financial transactions between actors. Friedman was also fervently against any form of regulation, so in a pure Friedmanite dystopia, surgeons can practice without proper qualifications and driving licenses would be banned. Can you see the dangers? Yes? Well, Dan can’t.

Here, Hannan tells us:

Friedman did not limit himself to academic theories; he had a keen sense of how to translate ideas into action. He understood politics very well, and used to say that his aim was not to get the right people elected, but to create a climate where even the wrong people would do the right thing. Every year I spend in politics I find that insight more brilliant.

Yes, Friedman understood politics so well that in his perfect world, certain kinds of political activity would have been outlawed because they didn’t fit into his perfect model of a rampant capitalist society.

Here we get to the core of the blog:

What mattered to him most of all? Oddly enough, it was nothing to do with monetary policy, or indeed with economics at all. He believed that the single measure that would do most to ameliorate society was school vouchers.

School vouchers, loved by Pinochet’s Chicago Boys and loathed by those who have had to put up with a substandard education, have become a sort of gold standard in the eyes of the Right.  Higher education, too, has moved backwards. For the last few years, students have been protesting over the inequalities of the education system. Dan simply ignores this.

He had first suggested the idea as early as 1955 – in an intellectual climate so unfriendly that he might as well have been proposing that children be cooked and eaten.

You can see where this is heading and predictably enough, Dan tells us:

But the climate shifted, not least through Friedman’s own interventions and, by the end of his life, a few places were prepared to give his idea a go. Chile had led the way in the 1980s, followed by Sweden in the early 1990s. Milwaukee became the first city in the US to adopt vouchers 23 years ago, and around a quarter of a million American pupils are now benefiting.

“Chile had led the way in the 1980s” he says. No mention of the oppressive weight of the Chilean ‘small state’ crushing those below. No mention of the thousands rounded up, tortured and executed. No mention of the oligarchical free-for-all ushered in by Pinochet’s ‘hands off’ approach to the economy and its disastrous consequences for ordinary Chileans. He continues:

Though Britain has stopped short of full-blown vouchers, Michael Gove has plainly embraced the idea that governments can fund schools without running them, and the free schools programme is one of the greatest of the Coalition’s achievements.

The truth of the matter is that the Tories have been historically opposed to the state school system and have spent the better part of 60 years talking it down when they’re out of power and running it into the ground when they’re in government.  The unspoken dictum here is “some state schools are bad, therefore the state education system is bad”.

The Cat believes that the Tories would prefer it if everyone paid for their schooling and if you can’t find the money, that’s tough. You will die illiterate and ignorant. Why? Because it’s God’s will. That’s why.

Finally Dan tells us:

With his wife, he established the Milton Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which has helped thousands of students, especially poor students, to get a decent education.

“Choice” has been used as a battering ram since the 1980s. But choice is neither here nor there. You can only have what is available. The Tories believe that if you don’t live in the catchment area of a school that you’ve fetishised, then you should be able to bypass the rules and send your kid there anyway. Better still, set up your own free school where you can be free to inculcate children in any superstitious tosh that occupies your thoughts.

While 75% of free schools were found to be “good” or “outstanding” by OFSTED inspectors, 25% were not. This article from The Guardian says:

One of the first free schools to open has been placed on special measures and given an inadequate rating by Ofsted inspectors, in an untimely blow to the government’s flagship education policy.

Adding:

Inspectors were severe on the primary school’s leadership, saying its governors failed to grasp the school’s “serious shortcomings”, while school leaders “believe the school is far better than it is”.

The inspection team gave the school the lowest grade, of “inadequate”, in three of four categories, for pupil achievement, quality of teaching, leadership and management. “Too many pupils are in danger of leaving the school without being able to read and write properly,” inspectors concluded. “Unless this is put right quickly, pupils are unlikely to flourish in their secondary schools and future lives.”

To borrow from the Tories’ lexicon of smears, I could say that “some free schools are poor, therefore all free schools are poor”. But unlike Dan,  I’m not that petty.

Totalitarianism and celebrating the death of Thatcher

The Lollipop Guild from The Wizard of Oz

Predictably, the scenes of celebration that greeted the news of Margaret Thatcher’s death on Monday were met with shouts of hurt and anguish by the Conservatives and their allies in the right-wing press. “It’s hateful”, “it’s disrespectful”, “Have some bloody decorum”,  cried the genuflecting faithful of the cult of St Margaret of Grantham.

But it wasn’t just the Tories who complained about the celebrations: members of the Labour party, too, urged restraint. Restraint? On an occasion like this? I think not.  To make a philosophical point: we’ll never get another chance to celebrate the death of the authoritarian-libertarian Thatcher again. This was a woman whose international friends included the ‘friendly’ dictator (according to The Daily Mail), Augusto Pinochet and the butcher of Indonesia, Suharto. A life like this should not be celebrated. On the contrary, this is the occasion to burn effigies.

Those who were the victims of Thatcher’s government – ordinary workers, the poor, the disabled, gays, lesbians, travellers, the list goes on – have every right to celebrate her demise. A safety valve has been inadvertently provided for us to let off some steam. For all those who wrongly believe that Thatcher’s death has been the only instance in history of mass celebration of the death of a public figure, let me just say that there is nothing new in this: we can see these celebrations as a form of carnivalesque that goes back to mediaeval times.  The carnival had its own rules and during these mass celebrations, the participants were subject only to the laws of the carnival. Church-led celebrations of the middle ages demanded formality, deference and obeisance to the objects of veneration. In other words, they were boring.

We don’t know if mediaeval folk celebrated the deaths of tyrannical rulers, because no record of their culture exists. We only have the official version of this period of history and it’s usually mediated to us by the likes of David Starkey.

We do not celebrate the life of Thatcher, that is the job of hagiographers, the dewy-eyed panegyrists and the chinless lickpittles in the media. We rejoice in the death of one who visited pain and suffering on many communities. This is our right as citizens. It is also the nature of carnival.

For all their meaningless rhetoric about liberty, the Conservatives are really authoritarians who are in denial.  In those totalitarian countries that they purported to have historically positioned themselves against; those in which the people aren’t even permitted to utter curses and oaths (not of fealty) to the corpse and memory of a much-hated dictator, the Tories seem to  think that anyone who does so in this country should be silenced. Such is their weakness of spirit and intellect. Such is their desire for the total control of discourse that they are actually trying to rewrite history before our very eyes! “She saved Britain”, “She ended the Cold War” are just two of the more popular myths being substituted for the materialism of history.

It’s been pointed out elsewhere that the Right didn’t hold back in celebrating the death of former Labour leader, Michael Foot. Their jubilation was no less effusive when Hugo Chavez provided a similar opportunity for them a month or so ago. Unable to fathom how much Thatcher was hated, some Tories will only concede that she was “divisive” and then, in the next breath, they will ascribe superhuman qualities to what was supposedly a human being. Breathtaking stuff. Anyone would have thought that cults of personalities are the sort of things that authoritarian leaders of totalitarian countries do, not self-described ‘free’ countries. Surely not in democratic Britain?

It’s worth noting that the death in 2006 of Thatcher’s close pal, Pinochet, was also celebrated by his opponents.  There are other examples in history where the death of a hated public figure has been greeted with celebration. For example, Thatcher’s friends should count themselves lucky they didn’t live in 12th century Constantinople.  The Late Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Andronicus I Comnenus’s two-year reign was marked by harsh and brutal laws (he had also married the 12 year old Agnes of France). Andronicus became increasingly paranoid and created a terror state in which his opponents (and anyone else) were summarily imprisoned, tortured, mutilated and executed. He also attempted to move against aristocracy, thus incurring their wrath.

In 1185,  Andronicus  was away from Constantinople on a military expedition. His loyal lieutenant, Stephen Hagiochristophorites (who actually had questionable loyalties), moved to arrest Isaac Angelos, who had previously been involved in an uprising in Nicaea. Isaac killed Hagiochristophorites and took refuge in the Hagia Sophia, from there he appealed to the masses to rise up against Andronicus. When the latter returned, he discovered that he’d been overthrown and Isaac had been proclaimed emperor. Andronicus was arrested while trying to escape and Isaac, now Isaac II Angelos, handed him over to the mob. He was tied to a post and beaten, mutilated and burned for three days before being strung up between two pillars by his ankles. Legend has it that two Latin soldiers took turns stabbing him to see who could plunge their sword the deepest into his body. He died a few days later.  Grisly stuff. By the way, Isaac was later blinded and imprisoned by his elder brother, Alexios, who was proclaimed Alexios III Angelos, who would in turn be overthrown by his nephew and so on…

So it amuses me when I see the likes of Louise Mensch whining on Twitter about people celebrating the death of Thatcher. It amuses me even more that the Right is making themselves look foolish and weak because they cannot deal with any criticism of their idol. It amuses me when I see arsekisser-in-chief, Charles Moore, claim on television that Thatcher was “Dorothy” to the Warsaw Pact’s “Wicked Witch of the East” in response to Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead rising up the download charts. It amuses me that they have no sense of humour and are only capable of laughing at those weaker than themselves – which isn’t funny. It amuses me when Thatcher’s boot-licking worshippers buy downloads of the Not Sensibles’ song, I’m In Love With Margaret Thatcher, and misread the lyrics so badly. They just don’t get satire.

Tories: they may be rich but they aren’t very bright.

Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian article is well worth a read.

Reference

Bakhtin, M., Iswolsky, H. (trans) (1984). Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Remembering the other 9/11

Smoke billows from La Moneda after being bombed by the Chilean Air Force on the orders of General Pinochet

The purpose of this blog is not to denigrate the memories of those who perished in the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 9, 2001. Nor is this an attempt to offer conspiracy theories about the so-called ‘truth’ behind 9/11. This is a blog about the other 9/11. This is the one that doesn’t get mentioned on television news or anywhere else. It’s almost as if there was a concerted effort on the part of the news media to keep others from knowing the truth behind the Chilean Miracle.

In 1970, the Marxist Salavador Allende was elected president of Chile. Allende was at the head of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), a coalition of left parties that included the Socialist Party, the Chilean Communist Party, the Radical Party, MAPU (Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario or Movement of United Popular Action)  and the Christian Left, who joined in 1971.

From the very beginning there were clandestine efforts to prevent Allende from taking office. The Chilean Right shared the paranoia of the US and called on Richard Nixon to support their cause. The commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army,  René Schneider was a constitutionalist and was opposed to any attempt to overthrow Allende. He was therefore seen by the Chilean Right as an obstacle and there was a botched attempt to assassinate him on 16 October 1970. The plotters got a second chance 6 days later when Schneider’s car was ambushed by coup-plotters loyal to General Roberto Viaux. Schneider was shot several times at point blank range and died from his wounds days later. The incumbent, Eduardo Frei immediately replaced the dead commander with General Carlos Prats, who would also later be killed by the DINA in Buenos Aires in 1974.

In 1972, a series of strikes were called by  Confederación Nacional del Transporte, which at the time was  led by Leon Valarin, who was the leader of the neo-fascist Patria y Libertad. The strikes had the full support of Richard Nixon, who sent considerable sums of money to assist the cause.

Here’s a programme that was shown on the BBC called The Other 9/11

Here’s another video that gives a bit more background to the reactionary forces operating in Chile.

Here’s the second part

Here’s Christopher Hitchens presenting his case for the prosecution against Henry Kissinger, who played an active and important role in Pinochet’s rise to power.

Finally, here’s the The Clash’s Washington Bullets.

Postscript

I found this interesting article on Alan Walters, Pinochet and the Chicago Boys. Here’s a taster.

Nevertheless, Walters thought he had to be discreet about his Santiago trips. During the 1970s, his job at the World Bank gave him a cover (“I got away with murder!”). During the 1980s, when he was working for Thatcher, his visits were “private”. In Britain even then, a decade after the coup, Walters felt, “Everyone hated Chile – except Margaret.  I’d probably talked to her about it for the first time some time in the 1970s. She knew I’d been there, and she asked me about it … She admired Pinochet for putting Allende out of office.” From then on, “I let her know if I was going. She said, ‘Keep quiet about it. Don’t advertise it.’ ”

Life on Hannan World (Part 4) or the victimhood of the British right

The right loves to play the victim. If they aren’t complaining that the BBC is “left-wing” then they’re moaning and bitching that they can’t get their own way (which is odd given the fact they’re in power). They groan about Britain’s comedians being “left-wing” and often get their knickers in a twist about the Question Time audiences. Is there no pleasing  these people? Oh, I know what would please them… the imposition of a right-wing dictatorship run by Dan and his wibertarian chums. Or perhaps our Danny would rather a wibertarian nation ruled by some semi-fascist man-of-steel like Augusto Pinochet Ugarte?

Today, Dissembling Dan Hannan has produced this blog in which he whines,

The Australian version of BBC Question Time is called Q&A. As you can see from the above clip, filmed when I was in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, the two shows are remarkably similar in format and furniture. There are, though, two differences. First, Q&A is live, which allows for real-time interaction with electronic media. I’m not sure why QT doesn’t do the same: one of the reasons it has avoided the slide in audience share that other current affairs programmes have suffered is that it was quick to understand the importance of Twitter; the hiatus before the broadcast drains much of the drama from the online debate.

This is the UK, Danny, not Australia.

While the Australian show’s viewers are perhaps a touch more liberal and metropolitan than the general population, they don’t exhibit anything like the Left-wing militancy of their British counterparts. This is true both of the studio audience (the Australian producers invite political parties and organisations to distribute places, rather than asking applicants to state their affiliation on a form); and, far more strikingly, of those following online.

“Left-wing militancy”? He’s lost the plot. He continues,

The Internet is never a place to go for subtle and nuanced debate, of course, but something about the #bbcqt Twitter tag attracts trolls and sociopaths. It’s especially noticeable if there is a Right-of-Centre woman on the panel. When Nadine Dorries was on recently, or Emma Boon from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, they hadn’t opened their mouths before a torrent of puerile, vicious, semi-pornographic abuse began. Here’s something one doesn’t expect to write very often: we should try to be as decorous and restrained as the Australians.

Aw, diddums. The Lyin’ King doesn’t like the #bbcqt Twitter feeds. Listen, Danny Boy, if you don’t like them, then don’t read them. There is a such a thing as agency or is that word too left-wing for you? I love the way he tells us that #bbcqt “attracts trolls and sociopaths”. Let me tell you something, my little capitalist cupcake, most of the trolls and sociopaths are in your own party. Some of them take umbrage at the slightest thing. In fact, many of them are too politically correct for their own good.

These “left-wing” QT audiences are something of a myth. Perhaps he missed all those editions of QT in the shire counties? Or perhaps the mood of the country is such that it can no longer tolerate whingeing, lying Tories? I think that’s it.

Perhaps Hannan would like the QT audience to be vetted by him and some of his hand-picked supporters. Can you imagine what sort of questions he’d include on the application form?

1. Do you own a Che Guevara T-Shirt?
2. Have you now or ever been a member of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party or any party that has the word “socialist” in the title?
3. Do you support unbridled capitalism?
4. Are you selfish?

If you answered “yes” to questions 1 and 2, Hannan’s goons will take you out back, shoot you in the head and bury you in a lime-filled pit. If you answered “yes” to questions 3 and 4, you will be allowed to take part. You may even get to meet The Lyin’ King himself.

I’ve always thought that wibertarians weren’t particularly mature and this latest outburst from Hannan serves to underline my point. Hannan will only be  happy if this country became a one-party state where the left (or what remains of it) is imprisoned, disappeared or thrown out of a helicopter or plane that has been hired by a private hit squad (it’s a free market, don’t you know?).

If you were ever in any doubt about how The Lyin’ King feels about Pinochet, then doubt no more. He managed to squeeze something about Pinochet into this blog about  Tzipi Livni, the current leader of Israel’s Kadima party.

Pinochet arrived in Britain as an ally who had supported us during the Falklands War. Koussa came as a foeman, implicated in the Lockerbie atrocity and accused of arming the IRA. Guess which one was arrested.

The Tories never tire of telling us how Pinochet was our “ally” and “friend”. Yet, they’re rather fond of telling us how socialism has killed “millions”. It’s a pissing contest and Tories love pissing contests. Point out to them the millions killed by their favourite dictators and watch them foam at the mouth and swivel their eyes a full 360 degrees.

Not wanting to be seen as an admirer of the General, Hannan says,

Never mind Pinochet: ally or not, he was a harsh and corrupt autocrat.

Was he? Well, knock me down with a feather! That didn’t stop your idol Thatcher from cosying up to him – Falklands War or no Falklands War. In fact, Hannan’s party has previous form when it comes to supporting dictators… until the dictator in question develops a mind of their own. Saddam Hussein, anyone?

So when Hannan and his buddies tell you that the QT audience is too left-wing or that the BBC is “left-wing”, you know what they’re really saying and it has nothing at all to do with ‘balance’.

POSTSCRIPT

One thing that our right-wing friends have deliberately, nay, wilfully ignored is the fact that when Labour was in power, the QT audience routinely rounded on them.  Yet I didn’t hear a single Labour MP or MEP claim that the QT audience was composed of “right-wing militants” or that the programme showed bias. Grow up.

Chile, neoliberalism and discontent

Chile is the birthplace of neoliberalism. It is the country where this damaging economic system was first imposed. In the years since the departure of Augusto Pinochet from La Moneda Palace, the ‘reforms’ that he forced onto the Chilean people remain almost completely intact. None of the successive left-ish governments had the courage or the decency to truly change things beyond the piecemeal. Granted, while Pinochet was still alive, he remained a threat and a rallying point for his followers and could call on his old friends in the military to intervene should these governments swing too far to the left. He also made himself Senator-for-life, a role that he was forced to relinquish after he’d  returned to Santiago after his house arrest in Surrey pending charges of human rights abuses in Spain.

But the chickens have come home to roost in this Freidmanite free market paradise. Three months ago, classroom boycotts by students and pupils led to mass student protests that have morphed into general protests against the right wing (some would say pale Pinochetista) government of Sebastian Piñera. A general strike was called for this week.

Today, during the second day of strikes and demonstrations, a 16 year old boy was shot dead by the police and nearly 1400 people have been arrested. Scores of people have been injured.

The Guardian says,

President Sebastian Pinera’s ministers played down the significance of the protests. Police estimated Santiago’s crowds at just 50,000 and said only 14% of government employees stayed off work.

Union leaders claimed 600,000 people joined demonstrations nationwide. Raul de la Puente, president of the government employees union, said 80% of his members joined the strike, at the cost of two days’ pay.

Pinera said the strike was unjustified, claiming Chile‘s economy was growing strong and providing more opportunities. He said he remained open to those seeking dialogue, although his administration has refused to discuss some student and union demands, arguing the real work of reform must be done in Congress.

Does any of this look familiar? It should. Lord Snooty said, when public sector workers went on strike over pensions in June, that the strikes were “unjustified”. Here’s what The Economist says,

The students want education, which in Chile relies heavily on private funding, to be turned into a non-profit, state-dominated, system. The unions want the mostly private pension system to be supplemented with more state provision. They also want changes in labour laws and an increase in business taxes to pay for more social spending. And they are demanding a new constitution. Like many of the things the protesters want changed, the constitution dates from the 1980s and the dictatorship of General Pinochet (although many of its clauses have since been amended).

Remember, this is Chile. Yet the Tory-led government want to pursue exactly the same course. People can read the riots in this country as purely criminal acts of looting and violence. In a society where conspicuous consumption is idealized and wages have stagnated and the cost of living has spiralled, those riots can be seen as economic rebellions. This is what is currently taking place in Chile.

Oddly enough, there is no mention of the protests in Chile on the Daily Telegraph website. I have checked its Chile section and there is nothing.

Piñera’s government is in denial. The Financial Times tells us that,

Rodrigo Ubilla, interior ministry undersecretary, said it had turned out to be “a big failure” with low turnout and most of the country working normally.

But Chile is not working normally. Three months of protests by university students demanding free education have exposed festering social sores.

Further down the article, Sebastian Aguilera of the Economist Intelligence Unit said,

the Pinochet-era foundations for healthcare, pensions and education “were experiments, back in the day. Some go right and some go wrong. I wouldn’t say the education system is a failure, far from it. But it certainly is not fair”.

The FT article also notes

Mr Piñera has two other problems. One is the renewed spectre of Pinochet. That was always going to be a problem – his is the first government of the right in more than half a century and although Mr Piñera himself is more to the centre-right, some in his entourage have been saying very dictatorship-era sounding things lately.

I reported in this blog how Piñera had appointed some former Chicago Boys to his cabinet.

The left-ish Concertación electoral bloc isn’t faring too well either. Like the Labour Party in opposition here, it has failed to take the lead. Indeed, it followed the post-Pinochet governance formula. Labour, under Blair, stuck to the neoliberal formula of the Thatcher and Major governments. It is in a similar moral and political bind under the leadership of Ed Miliband.

Here’s a Euronews report

Institute of Directors – Our solution for growth: end collective bargaining

When I saw this story from the BBC, I thought that I had gone to sleep for a year and woke up thousands of miles away in Chile. The Institute of Directors have today called for an end to collective bargaining for public sector workers,

The IoD has put forward 24 “freebie” proposals, which it says would cost the government nothing but would benefit growth, particularly in the private sector.

Among the most controversial would be the call to curb trade union negotiating power in large public sector bodies, said BBC business correspondent Joe Lynam.

The IoD also suggests that workers should pay a deposit of £500 when taking their employers to industrial tribunals to deter what it describes as “vexatious claims”.

Who says the IoD is not out of touch when they make proposals such as these? What this Tory-led government and its partners in the IoD and Taxpayers Alliance want is for this country to adopt the Chinese economic model with a bit of Chile on top. In essence this is the laziest of lazy thinking: stimulate growth by denying workers their human rights in what is supposed to be a ‘liberal democracy’.  There is nothing democratic about the IoD or its proposals.

A spokesman for the Trades Union Congress said the IoD’s real aim was to make life easy for directors at the expense of their workforce and to lower pay and conditions in the NHS.

Brendan Barber the General Secretary of the TUC said,

“Our economy is not struggling because of the relatively modest platform of rights people have at work,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“Taking these away and taking away collective bargaining from the NHS, that would do nothing to generate growth.

“We need decent fair pay systems, and collective bargaining is the way to deliver that.”

Naturally, the Treasury responded to IoD’s proposals with enthusiasm,

“We are glad the IoD has agreed that our deficit reduction strategy is central to growth.

“We have been clear that the Budget will build on work we have done already as we move towards a new model of economic growth.”

A “new model for economic growth”? This can only mean one thing: a new kind of economic slavery. Hayek argued against centralization in his book The Road to Serfdom. The title says it all.  However in order to fully pursue a Hayekian economic order, civil liberties have to be suppressed and workers are forced to work for peanuts and for longer hours while the rich get richer at the expense of those who work for them. Nothing must interfere with profit.  Ironically, the very things that Hayek argued have the potential to create a new form of serfdom. But Hayek didn’t notice this because, like a spurned lover,  he was too busy formulating an extreme antithesis – a poison penned letter –  to Keynesianism. But Hayek wasn’t really thinking about ordinary workers when he wrote his book, he was thinking about the wealthy.

These people won’t stop until many of us are working 14 to 16 hours a day in workplaces that are surrounded by razor wire and security guards with dogs.

Run them out!

Hannan’s cosy take on the Freedom Association

Norris McWhirter: the world was so much better in black and white

David Baddiel has put Dan Hannan’s nose out of joint by announcing on a programme on BBC Radio 5 that The Freedom Association (Dan is a member of the council, though he doesn’t mention this in his blog) is kind of “sub-BNP”. Our Dan isn’t happy. He says,

If I complained about every instance of BBC Leftism, I’d never blog anything else. Although the Beeb has tried to address the overt partisanship in its news department, many of its drama, comedy and consumer affairs programmes remain as jejune as ever. (All Rightists are evil, every Tory is one step away from Hitler, won’t it be hilarious when Thatcher dies etc.)

Hmmm, he clearly hasn’t paid much attention to the BBC’s news output since the Tory-led government took power. The BBC has practically bent over backwards to please the government. Its coverage of anything that occurs outside the faux left-right axis of Parliamentary politics has been woeful. That aside, Hannan’s take on both The Freedom Association and the McWhirter brothers is informed wholly by his membership of the organisation. You could say, that in a Bourdieusian sense at least, that he’s brought both his political and cultural capital to bear on this blog. Let’s read on,

Norris, whom I got to know as a teenager, was a kind, generous and modest man: a man of real and deep friendships, who had the gift of kindling enthusiasm in others.

Good for you. Presumably this happened while you were at Marlborough or did he pop out to Peru to hang out on your parent’s ranch? He continues,

This shouldn’t need saying, but since Mr Davies is throwing Mosleyite slanders around (they were, incidentally, blackshirts, not brownshirts), it’s worth recording that Norris played his part in the war against Hitler, serving in the Royal Navy. He was, above all, a lover of freedom: he could see that the corporatist Heath-Wilson state was deleterious to personal liberty as well as to economic prosperity. Nowadays, most of us can see that, but in the 1970s his was a brave and lonely voice.

What Dan overlooks from the lofty height of his ivory tower is that The Freedom Association is a very right-wing organisation that supported the apartheid regime in South Africa which it described as a “free country” that was part of the “free world” (sic). TFA also supported the English cricket tour of  South Africa in the early 1980’s. TFA’s reason for doing this had nothing at all to do with freedom, it was an expression of solidarity with a vile right wing regime whose idea of freedom was relative to a person’s skin colour. It can therefore be argued that Hendrik Verwoed loved freedom too.

Dan provides us with a link to Thomas Cranmer’s (not the very dead archbishop) website. Cranmer says,

But during the Radio 5 interview is an appalling misrepresentation by Baddiel of The Freedom Association, which Norris established in 1975 with his twin brother Ross and Viscount De L’Isle. The Association is at the forefront of campaigning in defence of personal and political freedom.

The TFA do what? That’s funny, I thought they actively supported regimes that offered no personal or political freedoms – especially if you’re poor or working class. Countries like Pinochet’s Chile were considered worthy of their support. That’s not just glaringly obvious hypocrisy, it’s a perversion of the English language. TFA does not stand for freedom  –  at least not the kind of freedom that is accessible to all.

Indeed, the TFA make every effort to stifle people’s freedoms. During the Grunwick dispute, TFA was involved in John Gouriet’s strike-breaking efforts (Gouriet was a founding member of TFA). TFA are against people’s right to join a trade union, which means that they are against free association…unless you happen to be a member of TFA or any other right wing group of course.

TFA was involved in the March for Free Expression in 2006. The subject of their ire wasn’t the fact that someone had accused the McWhirter brothers of being fascist (their political views were quite clearly very close to fascism) but the fact that they wanted to “express solidarity with the right-wing Danish paper Jyllands-Posten” over its decision to print racist and anti-Muslim cartoons.

One of the official sponsors of the “March for Free Expression” was the Freedom Association, whose campaign director Mark Wallace was a platform speaker at the Trafalgar Square rally. This organisation gained notoriety in the 1970s for its energetic defence of the “freedom” of Grunwicks to oppress and exploit its employees without interference from the trade unions. Equally energetically, it has defended the right of racists to promote hostility towards minority ethnic communities.

While I am not a fan of David Baddiel, he does have a perfectly valid point about TFA and the McWhirter brothers.  The only defence that Hannan can muster in support of McWhirter is,

…it’s worth recording that Norris played his part in the war against Hitler, serving in the Royal Navy.

That proves nothing. In fact, some of the most rabid fascists in this country “fought against Hitler”. Colin Jordan who founded the National Socialist Movement was in the army with the Royal Army Educational Corps during WWII. He ostensibly ‘fought against Hitler’.

Meanwhile on TFA’s website, they’re calling for Baddiel to be sued for slander. Seriously! I kid you not. So concerned are TFA with this notion of freedom of speech that they’re trying to silence someone from expressing their views. Over-sensitive to the point of the absurd and demonstrably against anything that doesn’t conform to their notion of freedom, TFA actively seeks to curb the freedoms of others. In their exhortation to their members they say,

TFA is built on core values of promoting individual freedoms and civil liberties for all, which is why we are so shocked that Baddiel chose to compare us to the British National Party (BNP). The views of the BNP are the ideological opposite to those of The Freedom Association.

TFA promotes ‘freedom’ – which is why it works to break strikes and smash unions. TFA are probably closer to the BNP than they realize (the BNP supported apartheid-era South Africa too). In fact, under the Nazis, trade unions were banned.  That’s a historical fact that has passed Hannan by and he’s got a degree from Oxford in…wait for it…history.  I suspect that the phrase “historical materialism” is one that never passes his lips.

While TFA claim to be advocates of freedom, the ultimate expression of their ideas would be an authoritarian state ruled by some caudillo who would look after the interests of capital, while suppressing dissent and enslaving those who literally cannot pay for their freedom.

This sudden jerky movement from TFA should only be seen one way: as an attempt to control discourse.

UPDATE: 22/1/11 @ 1044

This blog has been linked to a TFA blog about an article written by Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail. The article contains one noticeable factual error

He also suggested that his libertarian organisation, The Freedom Foundation, was akin to the BNP.

Letts is supposed to be a professional  journalist and here he is getting the name wrong! The Freedom Foundation is an alcohol and drug dependency charity. Duh.