Nadine Dorries is the Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire. She’s a corrupt liar. She’s one of the greatest threats to reproductive rights in the UK through her attempts to get parliament to reduce the term limit for abortion. And she also exploits the very real problem of stalking and abuse to try and avoid criticism – in fact she doesn’t like people looking into her activities as an elected representative one little bit.
Nadine has been in the news this week because of a public spat with blogger Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads. He and some others have been working to document the frequent lies she tells and her flagrant corruption. She has responded by accusing him of being a stalker, but also by admitting that what she writes on her own blog is “70% fiction.”
Nadine was criticised in a Commons report last week for using her blog to try and make it look as if she was living primarily in her constituency, and lying to her constituents about how much time she was spending locally. She had been under investigation for her expenses claims, because she was claiming for her home in Bedfordshire as a second home, meaning she got about £24 grand from the public purse for it. But she was cleared of wrongdoing because although she wasn’t staying mainly in London, she also wasn’t staying in Bedfordshire – she actually lives in the picturesque Cotswolds in Gloucestershire!
Defending her lies on her blog about where she was at any particular time, she said:
“My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.”
She has previously attacked the media for “bullying” MPs over the expenses scandal (God forbid that journalists would look into how they’re spending our money!), famously saying on her blog that MPs were all checking up on each other because “everyone was fearing a suicide” (a post she later deleted when she realised how bad it made her look.) She again developed this theme to account for her blog lying:
“In the light of the bullying onslaught of the Daily Telegraph I used my blog to its best effect in reassuring my constituents of my commitment to Mid Beds. My commitment is absolute and is always my first consideration regardless of where I sleep at night. However, I have always been aware that should my personal domestic arrangements become the knowledge of my political opponents, they would be able to exaggerate that to good effect. Hence the reason for my blog and my need to reassure my constituents.”
Reassure them by lying?
She also went on to claim that she had been lying about her whereabouts to conceal them from the aforementioned blogging “stalker” Tim Ireland. However, the lies on her blog date back to before Ireland had even taken any interest her, and yet again she is trying to make herself look like a victim when she has been uncovered doing wrong, in a desperate attempt to deflect attention.
The story of how she came to be targeting Ireland is a complicated one, that he explains in full on his blog. However, it dates back to some investigative journalism he did that exposed some of the extremely dodgy activities of a group of Tory MPs and their associates. In January last year, he uncovered that a man called Glen Jenvey, a professional associate of the Tory MP Patrick Mercer (who btw is chair of the Commons sub-Committee on Counter-Terrorism), was going round the internet pretending to be an Islamic extremist. His aim was to create tabloid headlines and whip up anti-Muslim racism, based on lies.
When Ireland exposed this, he made himself a target for the Tory lie machine, who got hold of his (ex-directory) home address and started publishing it around the internet claiming he was a convicted paedophile and in league with Islamic terrorists. They handed this information to people who they thought were hostile, including members of the BNP. When Ireland began contacting Tory MPs to demand this stopped, they began the story that he was an “electronic stalker” who was bombarding them with emails and phone calls. This is a real misrepresentation of what happened, and I know if I was in his shoes I would be going considerably more ape shit than he appears to have done. From this however emerged the allegation that he was stalking a number of MPs, including Nadine Dorries.
One of the main people responsible for the attacks, a man called Charlie Flowers, said he was acting on behalf of Nadine Dorries. When this was brought to her attention, she claimed she had taken action (another lie) and then claimed she had reported Ireland to the police for stalking.
Ireland has responded to the allegation by asking for any evidence of the abusive emails she claims he sent, or even any evidence she has spoken to the police, as he has had no contact from them. She can’t even produce a crime number for her supposed report because it’s bollocks. Since then the cabal of Tory liars of which she has part have also initiated false allegations against Ireland’s children that they were guilty of criminal damage.
When a constituent tried to challenge Nadine on her smearing of Tim Ireland, she went on to launch a venomous attack against her as well. The woman in question blogs and tweets as Humphrey Cushion, and also has arthritis meaning she has had to give up her job as a carer temporarily while she waits for a foot operation. She does not qualify for benefits for disability, however, Dorries and chums decided to go all out describing her as a “benefits cheat”.
“Do you know of anyone else who has Tweeted more than 35,000 times in less than six months? If so, email my office and let me know. Or, better still, if it’s someone you know is on benefits, contact the DWP . . .
Twitter all day, every day about claiming disability benefit in one tweet whist arranging a night out in the pub in the next. If you tweet about claiming six months rent from the social fund whilst tweeting how bad your hangover is . . . then don’t expect someone like me not to a) inform the authorities and b) tell you to get off your Twitter and get a job.”
The hand of hope - on Snopes and everything
All this bizarre behaviour shouldn’t surprise us given some of Nadine’s wackier political outbursts. She’s most well known for her attempts to lower the abortion term limit from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, based on totally made up science and yet more lies. In the last parliament she put a private member’s bill up, which was defeated. In the debate she lied that polls show that 75% of women back her position (the real figure is 15% and only when it’s fed to them as an option.)
She also repeated the ‘hand of hope’ hoax. This is a photo that was taken during surgery on a fetus that it was claimed showed it reaching out to hold the surgeon’s finger, proof, claim anti-abortionists, that fetuses are fully formed little people and killing them is murder. Except it’s bollocks, the surgeon says what happened is he accidentally pulled the hand out of the womb, after which he tucked it back in. It’s an anti-abortion urban legend – it’s on Snopes and everything. (She does back up her scientific credentials however by being one of the MPs that backs homeopathic hospitals becoming part of the NHS.)
She also campaigned against what she claimed was an attempt by unions to “ban high heels at work.” The origin of the story was that the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists had submitted a motion to the Trades Union Congress asking employers (many of whom force women to wear high heels as part of a dress code) to consider the serious ill health wearing them all day can cause to the feet, legs and back. No call to ban, but that didn’t stop Nadine from smearing this perfectly sensible appeal as political correctness gone mad.
It's political incorrectness (lying) gone MAAAD!
And then there’s Channel 4 documentary, Tower Block of Commons, in which MPs were invited to live for a couple of days with people on welfare. Nadine took part, and managed to alienate the women she was staying with so much they set up a Twitter page called ‘I hate MPs’. They claim that she’d hidden 50 quid in her bra to avoid the reality of living on their income, and that she offered them temazepam!
“South Acton hates Nadine Dorries. Get her off the estate . . . Nadine Dorries is a lying two-faced bitch. I know first-hand,” they wrote.
All in all, Nadine is a bit of a train wreck of an MP, and if she was under proper media scrutiny rather than individuals on the internet being left to expose her she would have been forced to resign. Apart from being comedic in how much she lies, it’s good to read up on her as a cautionary tale as what we are up against in the Tories. And when it comes to the investigation that sparked all the trouble for Tim Ireland, it’s yet another warning that if we want to counter the politics of the SDL/EDL and the BNP, we should understand that the lies they tell about Islam and Muslims don’t just originate with them, but as much with members of UKIP, Labour and the Tories as well. In this case, there was in fact direct collusion with the BNP to promote a shared agenda.
Blonde hair and blue eyes brings a smile to her chops
Over the weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of the youth wing of her Christian Democrat Union (CDU, kind of like the German Tories) party that multiculturalism had “failed, utterly failed” in Germany.
What this amounts to of course is a massive attack on the communities of immigrant descent in Germany, from the top of government.
Berlusconi and Gaddifi bonding over how much they both hate black people.
You may have noticed that the leader of Libya, Colonel Gaddafi, has been on a state visit to Italy over the past few days, where he has been generally making a nuisance of himself by trying to convert Italian women to Islam, and attempting to charge the EU five billion euros in exchange for preventing Africans from illegally immigrating to Europe.
In Gaddafi’s farewell speech, he told an audience in Rome:
Italy needs to convince her European allies to accept this Libyan proposal – five billion euro to Libya to stop illegal immigration.
Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration, it could turn into Africa. We need support from the European Union to stop this army trying to get across from Libya, which is their entry point.
At the moment there is a dangerous level of immigration from Africa into Europe and we don’t know what will happen. What will be the reaction of the white Christian Europeans to this mass of hungry, uneducated Africans?
We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and cohesive continent or if it will be destroyed by this barbarian invasion. We have to imagine that this could happen but before it does we need to work together.
Wowza. Offensive, right? But, unsurprisingly, Italian MPs are more angry about the fact that Gaddafi wants money in exchange for stopping immigrants, rather than his insanely racist rant – and the insanely racist social policies in Italy that make talking like this in an official capacity totally acceptable.
Colonel Gaddafi and Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi are two sides of the same disgusting racist coin.
As socialists, we believe that the world belongs all people, and we should all be free to travel, live and work wherever we choose. No one is illegal.
Police lines coming between fascists and anti-fascists
We’ve previously covered the run-up to last weekend’s English Defence League march in Bradford. Despite a successful campaign to have the government ban the march, it was always clear that the EDL would come anyway. The “official” anti-fascist movement made no plans to take direct action to try and stop the EDL from being able to take the streets, while a smaller number took action like we’ve done up here with the Scottish Anti-Fascist Alliance.
Daniel Randall is a member of Workers’ Liberty and a supporter of the Stop Racism & Fascism Network who has participated in mobilisations against the EDL in Bradford, Nottingham and London. The following is a guest post giving his impressions of what went on last Saturday in Bradford.
August 28 in Bradford will rightly be remembered by many of the activists involved as the day we defied the police, the local establishment, and, significantly, both poles of mainstream anti-fascism (and their supporters in the left and labour movement) to physically confront the EDL (which, as I’m sure SSYers will be pleased to know, resulted in the EDL getting a good kicking).
The background and build-up to the day is complex and is fundamentally a reflection of the political divisions within the anti-fascist movement in Britain (I understand the situation in Scotland is largely similar to ours in England).
The Hope Not Hate/Searchlight campaign, the anti-fascist formation of choice for large sections of the trade union bureaucracy, focused on collecting signatures for a petition calling on the (Tory) Home Secretary to ban the EDL’s march.
When such a ban was secured, HnH began organising “Be Bradford – Peaceful Together”, a “multicultural festival” (music, face-painting, bouncy castles… precisely the sort of stuff that were key weapons for the anti-fascist militias in Spain in 1936/7) at a location a couple of miles away from where the EDL (now reduced to a static protest) would be gathering. Their event secured the backing of various local religious institutions, the local trade union bureaucracy and indeed local government.
The SWP-run Unite Against Fascism, frequently politically indistinguishable from HnH (same “unite with anyone – and we mean anyone – against fascism” approach, same celebrity fetish, same slavish deference to trade union bureaucrats and religious leaders, same faith in the state to sort things out by banning fascist parties or organisations), called their own “We Are Bradford” event in the city centre, close to where the EDL would be amassed. The list of initial supporters for the event was a chemically-pure mini-popular front, including everyone from trade union leaders to Lib Dem MPs to religious zealots.
However, they were at great pains to ensure everyone that the event WASN’T a counter protest. Oh no. Nothing as radical or confrontational as that; just a “peaceful multicultural celebration of Bradford”. Undoubtedly the EDL were quaking in their boots.
Local supporters of the Stop Racism & Fascism Network called for a genuine counter-mobilisation to confront the EDL from the start.. SRFN doesn’t have a fraction of the resources that either HnH or UAF have so we were sanguine about our prospects. Nevertheless, SRFN supporters spent the build-up to the event leafleting local working-class estates, particularly in Asian areas, calling on people to mobilise on the day to confront the EDL rather than spending the day at HnH’s limp “festival” or at UAF’s non-protest. SRFN called on people to meet at separate location, Centenary Square, near to the EDL’s rally point.
The other key element in the picture, which would ultimately prove decisive, was local Muslim youth. Unfortunately the left has no real implantation amongst those communities and before the event it was unclear to us whether they would mobilise independently in any significant numbers or follow the advice of community “leaders” to either stay at home or attend the HnH or UAF events.
The experience of previous anti-EDL mobilisations told us that policing would be pretty tight, and we weren’t disappointed. On the day, the cops were out in force. SRFN supporters who attempted to remain outside of police cordons and leaflet members of the public were told to move on and disperse, under threat of arrest. However, in spite of almost every organised element in the equation militating against it, a crowd of several hundred of us managed to gather across the street from the EDL’s rally point, almost literally within spitting distance of the enormous pen the police had constructed to contain the racists. The crowd was made up of SRFN supporters and other independent anti-fascists along with hundreds of Muslim youth, and police soon mobilised to make sure we didn’t get any closer to the EDL.
I think a lot of us were preparing to dig in for a day of fairly typical anti-fascist activism; shouting at a group of nearby racists plus a bit of low-level scuffling with the cops as they try and push us back and we try and get a bit closer. Even if that had been the end-result, it would have represented a significant improvement on UAF or HnH’s strategy; at least the EDL would’ve encountered some visible, vocal opposition (even if it was from the other side of a fenced-off pen and a few lines of cops) rather than having every anti-fascist in town neatly swept off into either the UAF or HnH distractions where they were visible only to other anti-fascists and maybe a few passers-by who took the time to find out what was going on.
As it turned out, we were able to do rather more than just shout at the EDL. They were obviously just as agitated as we were about being held in one place and made several attempts to break out of their pen. At one point, a small group made it onto the pavement and lobbed a few bottles and rocks in our direction. Then, a few hours later, around a 100 EDLers managed to escape and headed off; we could only assume their intention was to cause a bit of (probably-violent) havoc in town. We figured that trying to head off and confront that group was a more useful thing for us to do than spending the rest of the day shouting ourselves hoarse and shoving the cops, so a group of maybe three hundred of us turned back up the street we were on and ran to find them.
We tracked the EDLers down to a roundabout by a retail park and managed to bloody a few noses before police stepped in to break us up and quickly herded the EDLers into Forster Square train station and out of town.
We shouldn’t overstate what we achieved; the EDLers we confronted represented maybe 1/8th of their entire forces on the day. We should also take care not to fall into a crude idealisation of physical-confrontation anti-fascism; it’s a form of activism that excludes those less-able to take part in it and is only one aspect of the anti-fascist strategy we need to develop.
But we did prove that with a bit of tactical dexterity, the EDL can be confronted. We challenged their right to bring their racist bile onto the streets of our cities without encountering any visible opposition. We challenged the pro-state, popular-frontist perspective of mainstream anti-fascism that asserts that calls for state bans or polite rallies are sufficient responses. A lot of us didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when we received reports that leading SWPers had led chants of “whose streets? Our streets!” from the platform of the UAF rally while we were actually doing the work of defending the streets from the EDL hundreds of yards away.
Darth Vader and pals move in
Beneath the practical unity built on the day between Muslim youth and independent anti-fascists, there are some politics that need unpicking; during the lulls between scraps with the cops, we chanted “unemployment and inflation are not caused by immigration; bullshit, come off the enemy is profit” while many of them chanted “Allahu akhbar!” Some of them also chanted “the EDL are faggots!” and hurled sexist abuse at women police officers.
The point is that practical unity in confronting fascist organisation is the best framework from within which to challenge the religious, homophobic and sexist politics that some Muslim youth hold. The left must break from the essentially racist assumption that working-class Muslims can only be related to on the basis of religious communalism and can only be engaged with through the religious establishment and community “leadership”. At one point the self-same community “leaders” who had backed the HnH and UAF events turned up on the frontlines of our confrontation with the police to plead with local kids to go home. Fortunately, their pleas were ignored.
The English Defence League promised us a summer of mass mobilisations intended to cause havoc in some of England’s key centres of Asian, and specifically Muslim, population. They crowed about mobilising up to 5,000 to come to Bradford. Those claims have come to nothing; they were not strong enough to meaningfully impose themselves on the streets of Bradford on August 28, and when a few of them did manage to defy the police they were sent packing by our hastily-convened anti-fascist rapid response unit.
Hopefully, the dismal and disgraceful role of HnH and UAF on the day will help break the stranglehold that these groups hold on anti-fascist politics in the organised workers’ movement. One battering isn’t going to make the EDL go away and the social problems leading many white working-class people into the arms of the EDL and, beyond them, the BNP haven’t gone away either.
We still need to build a national anti-fascist movement that combines a direct-action approach with ongoing campaigning on issues like jobs, homes and services so we can provide anti-capitalist, anti-racist answers to the legitimate grievances which the far-right attempts to exploit. Young working-class people from every community will be at the centre of that; the ruling-class figures and popular-frontist ideas that existing mainstream anti-fascism looks to will be no part of it at all.
Glenn Beck is someone we’ve written about here before. For those that haven’t been lucky enough to check him out on youtube, he is one of the most prominent figures of the American right media, with 3 hours of radio and 1 hour of telly EVERY DAY to push his extreme agenda on to the public in the US. Some of his views make the Daily Mail look like a left wing propaganda sheet.
He’s also a relentlessly self promoting narcissist, who has raked in millions of dollars from his shows and books. He frequently fakes crying on air to try and give some fake sincerity to his constant verbal diarrhea of incoherent threats and garbage. He’s a convert to Mormonism (dum dum dum dum dum), mainly, by his own admission, so he could have sex with the woman who is now his wife (who btw he constantly insults, mocks and belittles in his show.)
Beck’s latest money making scheme is another book, ‘The Plan’, which apparently will detail his “100 year plan to restore our great country,” along with the upcoming paperback edition of his previous hit ‘Arguing with Idiots’ (takes one to know one.)
To promote these books, he’d planned a massive launch in Washington DC. That was, until he came up with an even better idea -- get a charity to pay for it so it doesn’t cost him anything! Although the event this weekend was originally billed straight up as what it was, a book launch designed to generate more cash for the Beck empire, it’s now being described as the “Restoring Honour” rally. Quite what the message of this event will be is pretty hard to work out, apart from a vague focus on the American military being great.
The event is supposed to be raising money for the charity Special Operations Warrior Foundation. This group provides counselling and support to the families of those killed on US military Special Ops missions around the world, including college education scholarships for their children. Let’s leave aside for a minute that a lot of these dead soldiers weren’t “heroes” but in fact scumbags sent to other people’s countries to kill, kidnap and terrorise in the name of American imperialism; that’s not the fault of their families and so some support for them is probably OK.
But all the money raised for the charity will first have to go for paying for the rally, featuring keynote speakers Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. So, these two self-promoting far right lunatics are getting a gigantic national platform provided to them FOR FREE. The estimated $1 million cost of organising the event will be met entirely by SOWF, allowing Beck to get in all the news and sell a whole lot more books.
Because it’s organised by a charity, the event can’t be “political” according to tax rules. But what that specifically means is that the speakers can’t endorse a particular political party or candidate; apart from that, they can rant away about their far out views as much as they like. The fact that the rally is also being sponsored by groups like the National Rifle Association and FreedomWorks, a right wing organisation behind many of the Tea Party protests, shows how much of a joke the idea of the rally as “non political” is.
However, the promotional stuff that Beck has put out for the event is a bit toned down, which in fact makes it even harder to watch. At least when this guy is ranting like a crazy person he can be entertaining to watch, like a car crash. But I challenge you to watch either of these two ads and not feel your last meal start inexorably rising towards your mouth.
“You see, I learned something today.”
But it gets worse! It turns out the date that Beck has picked for a gigantic celebration of himself is in fact the 47th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington at which Dr Martin Luther King Jnr made his ‘I have a dream’ speech.
Given that the event is inextricably linked with the racist Tea Party movement, dedicated to a far right politics of attacking the working class and motivated by a hatred of the first black president, understandably the surviving members of the 60s civil rights movement are a bit pissed off about this. Glenn Beck’s reaction? To claim that he and his supporters are “the inheritors of the civil rights movement”!! You couldn’t make this shit up. Check out what he says in the clips below on the subject, along with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who was a close collaborator of King’s in the civil rights movement, slamming comeback.
Beck’s insulting claim to have any right to the legacy of the civil rights movement is based on pissing on the legacy of what he actually stood for. Beck claims that the left has lied about what King. He tries to claim that King was in fact an individualist or even a conservative. In hijacking the memory of the 1963 march on Washington he wants us to forget it was actually called the March for Jobs and Freedom, and was organised by Socialist and trade unionist A Phillip Randolph to demand federal investment in new jobs.
Martin Luther King might not have gone as far left in his politics as we in SSY do, but at root he was a left wing figure. Around him in the civil rights movement were a host of socialists and communists who saw the fight for racial equality and desegregation as inextricably linked from the fight against capitalism. King himself recognised that the battle against racism was in fact a battle against the socio-economic foundations of American society, saying:
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing’-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
As the 60s went on, King became more and more radicalised by events. Whereas before he had seen the way forward as appealing to the Democratic Party and the “moral conscience” of white liberals, after riots in Watts and seeing the horrors of the war in Vietnam, he increasingly saw the importance of appealing to the working class. In the last weeks before he was assassinated, he was in Memphis showing solidarity with striking black bin workers, some of the lowest paid in the US.
He also developed an uncompromising opposition to the war in Vietnam and US imperialism, denouncing the war as clearly linked with poverty and oppression at home. This drew the condemnation of many of his former liberal supporters, who found that messing with US geopolitical interests was a step too far.
Dr Martin Luther King wasn’t a full on socialist as we would understand it, but he was a social democrat who wanted to see an end to racism and imperialism, massive redistribution of wealth and huge government investment programme to provide decent, well paid jobs for the poor. He’d recognised the need to organise outside of the two-party system, and was preparing for the possibility of an independent run for President on a ticket of Peace and Justice.
For Glenn Beck to try and deny the legacy of King’s left wing ideas, and to claim that his racist mob of pro-capitalist crazies has any continuity with the civil rights movement would be hilarious if it wasn’t so insulting. His far right movement wants to undo everything achieved for the oppressed in the US during the revolutionary moment of the 60s, and he must be fought every step of the way.
“The dispossessed of this country — the poor, the white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. they must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.” Martin Luther King.
It's a damned impertenince that you unwashed socialist chaps should put a fellow of my standing on your website!
Lord Pearson of Rannoch, a man who talks like he’s a character in Jeeves and Wooster stories, has stood down as leader of UKIP. The main reason he’s given for doing this is his own raging poshboy incompetence.
The aristocratic Pearson, a would-be even-more-crap Oswald Mosley, took over from fellow toff Nigel Farrage last year. Since then he’s made a name for himself as a blundering idiot who makes a fool of himself on telly and doesn’t even know what’s in his own manifesto. His performances displayed all the arrogance of a traditional British aristocrat furious at being challenged by upstart journalists of no good breeding stock.
The video below has been doing the rounds today after his announcement, in which his performance was dubbed “the worst campaign interview ever” by his natural friends in the right wing press, who were forced to admit one of their own was a bit of an embarrassment.
To be fair to the old fool, he fully acknowledges that he’s a throwback to an era where the ruling class stayed in power in Britain by birth alone, and didn’t have to try and make themselves look good on telly. His resignation statement makes clear that he knows he’s “not much good at party politics.”
He says he’s going to concentrate on his other interests. Predictably enough for someone as upper class as he is, one of the main ones is slaughtering animals for his own pleasure, as he’s the chair of the deerstalking committee of the Countryside Alliance.
Although we're glad to see him go, Pearson's resignation may turn out to be bad news for Muslims and deer
He’s also going to be able to devote more time to his racism, a great hobby of his. As UKIP leader, Pearson famously invited rightwing anti Muslim racist politician Geert Wilders to the UK, which may turn out to have been one of the early stages of the growing alliance between the (largely working class) street thugs of the EDL and their aristocratic would-be leadership among the racist toffs of UKIP.
But now he’s resigned he can focus on “the [non existent fantasy] threat from Islamism.” Apparently one of his interests includes “the relationship between good and evil,” so we can probably expect him to be seen leading the crusade to save Britain from an imaginary threat over the coming years.
Although it’s always good to see the post-fascists of UKIP in trouble, we shouldn’t get too excited about today’s announcement. As UKIP themselves are quick to point out, the last election did see them increase their vote, and although they remain a fringe party staffed by lunatics (hi Kris!), their potential as the seedbed of a growing extreme right mainstream movement in the UK is worrying. The continued antics of UKIP just point to the need for anti-fascists and anti-racists to widen their understanding of the threat we face from the far right, to include post-fascists and official racists, both in UKIP and the mainstream parties of government.
Pearson: resigning to spend more time fighting fantasy evil that doesn't really exist
Who would have thought this man's party would ever have money problems?
UKIP, the acceptable face of far right politics in the UK, are possibly facing a financial disaster next month.
July is likely to see the judgement of the Supreme Court over the party’s refusal to forfeit over £350,000 of illegal donations. The Electoral Commission says it knows about at least 67 instances of the UKIP breaking the law on donations. Under electoral law, if a party is given over £200 it has to check if the donor is on the electoral register. UKIP failed to do this, despite loads of warnings from the commission.
The party got £367, 697 from these incidents. Most of the money came from a retired bookie and owner of a bathrobe company, Alan Brown, who was not on the register when he gave them several separate donations. In magistrates court, UKIP was ordered to pay back only part of the amount, but the electoral commission has escalated things to the Supreme Court in an attempt to get the full amount forfeited, in which case it would go to the treasury.
As well as this money itself, if UKIP loses the case then they would face millions in legal bills. It could effectively bankrupt the party.
Should we be happy about this? Absolutely we should, because UKIP are the hidden threat we face from the organised far right. Leftfield has reported before on UKIP as a potential seed from which an important party of the radical right could become a major force in British politics. The model for this would be far right racist, anti-Muslim Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has just gained a big result in the Dutch general election.
Alan Brown hands over an illegal donation
Wilders is the darling of the English and Scottish Defence Leagues, who admire him for his stances such as banning the hijab from all public institutions, calling for the Koran to be banned whilst comparing it to ‘Mein Kampf’, and for the construction of prison camps for Muslims in the Netherlands.
Alan Lake, the shady businessman who bankrolled the rise of the EDL, has said publicly that he’s backing away from his street army of football casuals to focus on finding them a voice in the mainstream political process. He’s doing that by working with UKIP.
Spot the difference: On the right, Frank McAveety and on the left, Frank McAvennie off of Only an Excuse
Scottish Labour have been again embarrassed as leading MSP Frank ‘the Wank’ McAveety was exposed as a pervy bastard.
McAveety was forced yesterday to resign as convenor of the Scottish Parliament Petitions committee and as Labour spokesman for sport. As if Labour hadn’t learned their lessons about microphones being left on already, he was overheard in the committee ogling a member of the public. You can hear what he had to say below:
This of course comes hard on the heels of Stephen Purcell, who like McAveety was leader of Glasgow City Council, being forced to flee the country after being exposed as a school closing, land grabbing, gangster tripping, corrupt coke hound.
McAveety has had a far from glittering career as a typical Labour careerist hack, working his way up the ranks by way of several spectacular acts of idiocy.
After Donald Dewar died, he dithered about whether to support Jack McConnell or Henry McLeish as his successor as Labour leader and First Minister. In the end, trusted by neither, he ended up without a job.
He got back into a minster’s seat in 2002, and in 2003 he was promoted to Minister for Culture, Tourism and Sport. Then came the infamous piegate.
"Just one more. I'll just tell them I was at some arty shit anyway."
When he was due to be answering questions in the chamber, he was nowhere to be seen. He eventually turned up really late, and told MSPs he’d been “unavoidably detained at the Scottish Arts Council Book Awards.”
This in fact turned out to be a load of bollocks. He had in fact been munching it up in the parliament canteen, where all the posh grub costs about a pound thanks to subsidies provided by you and me. Journalists had spotted him tucking into pie, beans and roast potatoes, and he was soon caught out as a liar who’d tried to cover up a leisurely lunch.
Funny as this was, it’s hardly the worst offence in the world, and we’re sure many readers can sympathise with someone bullshitting their way out of an extra long lunch at work. Of course, most won’t be on the £73 grand salary of McAveety at the time.
What was a worse error was when he tried to have a couple of anti-war protesters fitted up for “intimidating” him. By intimidating he meant “they said bad stuff I did and it hurt my feelings.”
While out canvassing he’d been challenged on his inaction to oppose Labour’s war mongering in Iraq, as well as the closure of the Govanhill pool. His response was to get the police involved and try to get the protesters thrown in jail. But the Sheriff laughed him out of court, saying surely politicians campaigning on the streets are “fair game” for people who want to voice their disagreement. Frank didn’t agree, saying that he’d “suffered the worst intimidation” he’d felt in his life.
The Sheriff responded that he “must have led a very sheltered life.” He added that Frank had “completely blown his credibility.”
He got his third (or is it fourth) shot at the big time in 2007, becoming Labour shadow minister for Sport and petitions committee convenor, a nice wee gig that will have boosted his salary again. Now that’s come crashing down around him as he’s been caught out perving.
Sheltered life: Protesters take on Frank the Softy
Probably a lot of people will say ‘So What?’ about this, but joking aside it is actually worth remarking on how the woman concerned must feel just now. Low level perving like Frank was engaged in is the thin edge of a spectrum that includes staring at women, shouting stuff in the street, all the way to groping or unwanted physical contact. It’s this kind of thing that means many women are made to feel really uncomfortable in public on a regular basis. For someone in a position of authority like him to do it legitimises this kind of behaviour in the eyes of other men, and will embolden some to go further.
Frank isn’t the first old pervy boy in the parliament. Let’s not forget former Presiding Officer David Steel, who when he saw SSP MSPs Carolyn Leckie and Rosie Kane coming up to vote was heard to declare “Well, the view has certainly got better in this parliament!”
There’s nothing wrong with finding a woman attractive. For a man who’s already in a long term relationship with kids to be sitting ogling a woman and pointing her out to a fellow parliamentarian is kind of not cool though. (Incidentally, is anyone able to identify who was sitting next to him and was on the receiving end of this chat? Because it’s also worth remarking that they did nothing to challenge him, a tacit acceptance that it’s OK to treat women as on display for MSPs’ entertainment.)
Then there’s the whole “dark and dusky” thing. Someone has to come right out and say it: Frank McAveety clearly has racialised fantasies. This is pure speculation (we like speculating on things we can’t prove!), but I would guess he’s probably got a lot of that from porn. Pornography, as well as promoting violence and degradation of women, is riven with racism and racialised views of what women from different parts of the world are “like” sexually. Women from the Philippines, who are clearly a group that gets Frank a bit hot and bothered, are some of the most abused and exploited people around the world, not just in the sex industry but also by employers of migrant workers in virtual slave conditions.
A Gauguin painting from Tahiti: One for Frank's wank bank
Frank also references the painter Paul Gauguin, just to prove how cultured he is (“there’s a wee bit of culture for you”). Gauguin is well known for ending his days in a Tahiti, a French colony that he regarded as a tropical paradise where he could shag natives to his heart’s content in between painting them. He’s a contradictory figure, as although he did argue with colonial authorities, his art is also responsible for helping develop exoticised, sexualised images of Polynesian women back in Europe.
Frank clearly isn’t the worst example of sexism and racism we could throw at you. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t a casual sexist or racist. How would you feel, subjected to his leering gaze? Or if you learned that he’d described you as “dark and dusky”, with clear undertones of “a horny exotic native type.”
What we can take away from the whole affair is that Labour produces a certain class of idiotic, careerist fuckwit, who can mess things up again and again but always end up with a cushy job with a salary higher than most of us will ever earn. For a man like Frank, being in the Labour Party provides you with a great career path to not working too hard, long lunches, and plenty of women to perv over in the public gallery. It’s high time we recognised these chancers for what they are: not defenders of the Scottish working class who vote them in, but parasites making a life for themselves on our backs.
You might’ve noticed the outpouring of facebook-rage/tabloid-hysteria that broke out a couple of weeks ago when it was reported that, apparently, England shirts are to BANNED during the World Cup. The rumours started from this article in The Sun, which claimed that police were advising pubs to prohibit the wearing of football shirts for reasons of safety during the tournament.
This obscure piece of police guidance on licensing was then taken massively out of context and portrayed as presumably just the latest development in the British state’s long standing war against the persecuted minority that is white, English men. Cue, seemingly hundreds of thousands of misinformed eejits jumping on a virtual bandwagon against the ‘fukin stupid ban, its PC gone mad!!1!11 I WONT REMOVE MY ENGERLAND SHIRT UNLESS THEY STOP BEIN ALLOWD TO WEAR TURBANS AND BURKAS’, and so on, before the whole thing had become an unstoppable juggernaut of the kind of nationalism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria that’s come to be exemplified by the English Defence League.
Faced with this, almost immediately the Metropolitan Police -- where the guidance originated -- issued a stringent denial that this was ever intended as a ban on England shirts, flags or other attire. Like, duh. But it didn’t stop there -- soon enough, nearly every police force in England, from Somerset & Avon to West Midlands was being forced to issue statements that they have no intentions to ban England shirts.
It’s become deeply worrying how prevalent this sort of casual racism has become. While the BNP, what was and still to a large extent is the united party of the far-right, appears to be falling apart, the same cannot be said of the ideas they represent in society. The EDL go from strength to strength, while UKIP veer ever further towards the radical right. 600,000 people are members of a facebook group entitled ‘Its funny how our flag offends you but our benefits dont!’. It’s a well-worn tabloid narrative that the ‘PC Brigade’ are determined to clamp down on ‘national pride’ -- to the extent that now The Sun only has to drop the merest hint that this is taking place before it sparks another outbreak of BAN OUTRAGE hysteria. And it’s endemic of the constant media-lies and scapegoating of Muslims that within hours, somehow ‘the Islamics’ were being blamed for this obscure piece of guidance, apparently written by one police officer, intended for licensed premises.
Now, however, it has emerged that there is more to the story than first meets the eye. A local newspaper in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, reports that someone has been going round, purporting to be a Police Community Support Office, and asking people to remove England shirts and take down flags. So who could this bogus police officer be? Surely our tabloid media would not stoop to that low in a shameless bid to generate some cheap headlines about ‘PC PCs’ being a bunch of killjoy England-haters? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve attempted such a stunt: a few years back it emerged that The Daily Mail was offering money to Polish people to drive Polish cars to Britain and then proceed to break UK traffic laws, with a Mail photographer conveniently in tow. Hmm… tabloid media stirring up racial tensions and scapegoating minorities? Who would have thought it.
ABOVE: exclusive footage Leftfield uncovered of a recent Sun editorial meeting
If you’re the kind of person who knows there’s a lot of problems in our society, and you’re looking for solutions for what to do about it, there’s a good chance you’ve found yourself here on our blog.
There’s also a good chance you might have come across something called the Zeitgeist Movement. If you have, and you’re attracted to the ideas they put forward, this article is our attempt to argue that Zeitgeist offers no real solutions to the economic and ecological crises that human civilisation is facing. In fact, quite the opposite: instead of explaining to people how we can change our society for the better, many of the ideas put forward in the Zeitgeist films have their origins in the far right and racist groups, and they’re ideas which are both crazy and useless.
The reason we’re doing this is because we know that Zeitgeist has been really influential on thousands of people who’ve seen it online, and because we think that is potentially really damaging to the attempts (which we’re part of) to build a mass movement capable of bringing fundamental change to the world. It deliberately tries to pitch itself as an appeal to people who have a basically left wing outlook, but the ideas it puts forward about our world as it is just now are not left wing at all.
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