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This is the main reason why you should vote Labour today

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By Daniel Margrain

Image result for pics of boris johnson with saudis

Jeremy Corbyn’s landmark stated intention to tackle not just terrorism in isolation, but its causes, is the potential catalyst for a far wider transformation of society that is desperately needed in Britain and, indeed, the world. This is the reality a Labour victory under Corbyn could realistically usher in, in the years ahead.

In the event of a Labour win, the days in which successive UK governments – both Tory and Labour – have perpetuated endless war and counter-terrorism in order to sustain the profits of the arms and weapons companies and to ensure the privileges and concentration of power of the few at the expense of the many are maintained, will almost certainly begin to come to an end.

This is why the deep state, that includes the corporate media, under the said governments, have consistently, in the words of Media Lens, thwarted the attempt by the public “to shape a genuinely democratic choice out of the sham choices of corporate-owned politics.”

The corporate media’s framing of Syria is a case in point. Back in December 2015, the BBC reported on claims made by the Ministry of Defense that RAF Tornado and Typhoon warplanes had destroyed wellheads in the country….“thus cutting off the terrorists’ oil revenue at the very source”. The impression given to the public was that the UK government had actively engaged in degrading the infrastructural and financial capability of ISIS.

However, this was based on a deception. In reality, the target was the precise location that had been hit by Russian and US coalition forces six weeks earlier. This was confirmed by a report in the Express on October 23, 2015, that highlighted the obliteration by both Russian and US coalition forces of an ISIS oilfield and supply routes in the heart of Islamic State territory in Syria. The Express report, therefore, inadvertently contradicted the UK governments own propaganda.

The deception also underlined the subsequent revelation that ISIS had gained access to weapons exported by the UK to the Middle East in the wake of 2003 invasion of Iraq. The ability of ISIS to access weapons is only possible if they have money to purchase them. Tackling the flow and source of criminal money, is the most effective way to drain them of their ability to function. This is precisely the strategy Corbyn has proposed to undertake in order to tackle the causes of jihadist terrorism.

The reason why the establishment are opposed to the Labour leader is because they realize he cannot be bought off on their terms and hence if elected he is likely to potentially undermine their ability to be able to continue pulling the financial strings that determine the control, flow and maintaining of oil revenues.

Briefing

In September, 2014, in a briefing to the European Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee, EU Ambassador to Iraq Jana Hybaskova, conceded that some European countries have purchased crude from ISIS from the areas in northern Iraq and Syria they have captured. Accepting that the most effective way of countering ISIS is to attack the source of their funding rather than using bombs to kill civilians, appeared to be the rationale behind the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, Hilary Benn’s initial decision to oppose military intervention in Syria.

However, inexplicably, two weeks later, he voted in favour of bombing. Something happened in the two week period up to December 2, 2015, which influenced Benn’s decision to change his mind. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that war is good for boosting the profits of those connected to the military-industrial complex and that he had allegedly been lobbied by BAE Systems who stood to gain financially from any change of heart.

Sure enough, the depression in their share price in late October, 2015 on the back of Benn’s opposition to war, subsequently jumped after the announcement to bomb was made. Being in the pocket of the arms industry is concomitant to the notion of favouring war, which not only explains the BBCs pro-war stance (BBC Trust vice-chair, Roger Carr is chairman of UK arms manufacturer, BAE Systems), but clearly also explained Benn’s careful positioning in his attempt to usurp the anti-war Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership.

The attempt failed. Corbyn went on to secure a second mandate and Benn was sacked from his post as Shadow Foreign Secretary. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, major defense contractors Raytheon, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin assured investors that they stood to gain from the escalating conflicts in the Middle East. Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President Bruce Tanner said his company will see “indirect benefits” from the war in Syria, citing the Turkish military’s decision to shoot down a Russian warplane.

Tanner was far from being the only beneficiary of the war in Syria. A deal that authorized $607 billion in defense spending brokered by the U.S Congress, for example, was described as a “treat” for the industry. What better way to benefit from this “treat” than for the major powers to secure the “hydrocarbon potential” of Syria’s offshore resources with the aim of reducing European dependence on Russian gas and boosting the potential for an energy independence.

Broader strategy

The broader strategy to dismember Syria involves the annexation of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the 1967 war. This is being aided by one of the most concerted media propaganda offensives since the Iraq debacle. The main reason the Murdoch media, in particular, is pushing for regime change in Syria, is because Israel has granted oil exploration rights to the multinational corporation, Genie Energy. Murdoch is a major shareholder in the company. In a 2010 press release, Claude Pupkin, CEO of Genie Oil and Gas stated:

“Genie’s success will ultimately depend, in part, on access to the expertise of the oil and gas industry and to the financial markets. Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch are extremely well regarded by and connected to leaders in these sectors. Their guidance and participation will prove invaluable.”

Pupkin continued:

“I am grateful to Howard Jonas and IDT for the opportunity to invest in this important initiative….Rupert Murdoch’s extraordinary achievements speak for themselves and we are very pleased he has agreed to be our partner. Genie Energy is making good technological progress to tap the world’s substantial oil shale deposits which could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world.”

Other players involved in the plan to extract resources from the Golan, include the Israeli subsidiary, Afek Oil and Gas, American Shale, French Total and BP.  Thus there exists a broad and powerful nexus of US, British, French and Israeli interests, encompassing defense, security, energy and media sectors, at the forefront of pushing for the break-up of Syria and the control of what is believed to be potentially vast untapped oil and gas resources in the country. The plans, if successful, will also rein-in Russian and Iranian influence in the region.

The foreign and domestic policies of successive British governments have been integral to the perpetuation of this system of cronyism, war and corruption. A class system built on inequality, injustice and deference, depends on these factors for its continued existence. The election of Corbyn as Prime Minister would potentially scupper this unethical and corrupt system which is why the deep state (that includes the BBC and the rest corporate media), have done their utmost to ensure it doesn’t happen. Let’s prove them wrong today by turning out in large numbers and putting our crosses next to our respective Labour candidates..

The extent to which the corruption at the heart of the British establishment, emblematic of endless war, has been allowed to continue, is reflected by the unwillingness of successive governments’ to tackle the issue. This is probably best exemplified by the decision of the former business secretary, Sajid Javid, in July, 2015, to invite companies’ to comment on whether the “tough anti-corruption measures” contained within the governments 2010 Bribery Act are “a problem.”

Letters sent by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills invited industry leaders to comment on whether the act has had an impact on their attempts to export. Needless to say, letters inviting small businesses and employees to comment about regulations that prevent them from making more money at any cost to the environment and working conditions, were not forthcoming.

Corruption

On the August 3, 2015, edition of the BBC HARDtalk programme, host Stephen Sackur interviewed Nigeria’s Minister for Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola. During the interview Sackur repeatedly alluded that the Nigerian government was systematically corrupt. At one point Sackur related an ‘off mic’ incident in which former prime minister, David Cameron, was said to have berated Nigeria, after he described it as one of the two most corrupt countries in the world.

Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to either Sackur or Cameron that big business in the UK lobbied against the Bribery Act which was intended to undermine corruption – the implication being that corporations would rather be scraping around in the sewer if there was some money to be made among the filth. As far as the British establishment are concerned, corrupt practices are something restricted to what dark skinned people in far away countries engage in. By contrast, the former thinks of itself as occupying the moral high ground, despite the fact that the UK was one of the major players heavily implicated in the Panama Papers scandal.

In 2012, Cameron visited one of the most corrupt and authoritarian countries on the planet, Kazakhstan. The leader of that country showered him with gratitude and praise. Kazakhstan’s former police chief is linked to the ownership of £147m-worth of London properties which forms part of the UKs status as a safe haven for corrupt capital. Other corruption scandals to have hit the headlines around that time include the Straw and Rifkind affair, the MPs expenses scandal (ongoing) and the long-running PFI saga that’s crippling the NHS.

Simon Jenkins summarized the malaise and hypocrisy at the heart of the British establishment:

“The truth is that hypocrisy is the occupational disease of British leaders. They lecture Africans and Asians on the venality of their politics, while blatantly selling seats in their own parliament for cash. I hope some insulted autocrat one day asks a British leader how much his party has garnered from auctioning honours. The government suppresses any inquiry into corrupt arms contracts to the Middle East. And when does lobbying stop and corruption start? The Cameron government is the most susceptible to lobbying of any in history.”

In the nearly two years since Jenkins wrote his piece, nothing fundamentally has changed. If anything, corruption is arguably even more endemic under Theresa May than it was under Cameron. Indeed, unethical practices within the British establishment continue to be integral to the workings of the deep state. Take the ongoing seamless links between the Tory establishment, BBC, the intelligence services and HSBC as an example.

The connection between the former and latter go back a long way. David Cameron’s great, great grandfather was the head of HSBC in the UK when they were established in Hong Kong. In November, 2010, a critical report from the Office for Fair Trading (OFT) insisted that the bank refrain from making illegal charges that amounted to some £200m on its customers.

Vindicated

After a successful 13 year-long battle to prove HSBCs guilt, anti-corruption campaigner and whistle blower, Nicholas Wilson, has finally been vindicated. The bank was found guilty and fined a relatively paltry sum of £4m. The background to the case outlined by Wilson in a video on his blog, is a revelation.

During the time of the critical OFT report, the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, decided to make the then head of the bank, Stephen Green, a Lord and to bring him into government as a trade minister. The government state broadcaster, the BBC, buried the story.

But more significantly, HSBC director, Jonathan Evans (formerly head of MI5), supplied – through his company – customer data to every major government department – MI5, MI6, GCHQ, MOD, MOJ. Cameron proceeded to appoint Evans to head the BBC Trust in 2014. He was subsequently made a Lord and, like Green, brought into the government. Another Lord, Lord Janvrin, former chair of HSBC private bank, sits on the committee that oversees the security services.

Another government connection to HSBC concerns the appointment of the head of their Audit Committee, Rhona Fairhead, to the chair of the BBC Trust. According to Wilson, since Fairhead’s appointment at the BBC, there has been no reporting of HSBC criminality which continues to be numerous and has been documented by other journalists around the world as major incidents. This includes a HSBC and Russian- related drug money laundering story.

Wilson points out that journalist Peter Oborne resigned from the Telegraph over its lack of negative coverage of HSBC. In a public letter, Oborne described how the paper had spiked about six negative stories including one by its investigative team over a period of three months because HSBC are “the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend.”

Wilson has had his attempts to publish his expose of HSBC in the corporate media – Private Eye, the Times, BBC Panorama, Newsnight, Channel 4 News – scuppered by editors who have spiked his version of events. Prior to Cameron’s re-election in 2015, Sunday Times correspondent, Tom Harper, wrote a damning story on HSBC that implicated Cameron in his attempt to cover-up the Stephen Green scandal. But while Harper was investigating, Sunday Times editor, Camilla Cavendish, met with Cameron.

The story was subsequently spiked one day prior to its intended publication. Two months later, it was announced that Cavendish was working at Downing Street in the policy office of Cameron. When he resigned, he gave her a peerage. She is now Baroness Cavendish. That’s the extent of the corruption at the heart of the British establishment. In other words, one of the biggest corporate financial institutions in the UK that illegally stole money from its customers with minimal redress, is embedded within the high echelons of the corporate media and government establishment.

Given the connections HSBC has to many of the High Street chains, the nature of government-corporate corruption is likely to be far more extensive than many people realize. Then there is the extent to which these kinds of manifestations of the deep state are played out in terms of its relationship to the initiation of wars, terrorism and the perpetuation of the arms industry. I discuss these issues (in relation to Syria) here and here.

Jeremy Corbyn’s honest approach to tackling terrorism has brought the topic of corruption sharply into focus and in so doing has exposed the failed war on terror foreign policy strategy of his neoliberal opponents. The fact that Corbyn has wrong-footed the political establishment and the media that back them, is rattling both.

Sophisticated

An increasingly sophisticated electorate are aware that foreign military interventions and the selling of arms to tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia, increase the terrorist threat. Craig Murray has cited polls indicating that voters understand the correlation between wars fought abroad and domestic terrorism. Given the establishment themselves admit the connections, the media can no longer smear the left with the terrorist apologist epithet.

That partly explains why the Tories have not gained ground in the polls since Corbyn made his speech. So desperate have the establishment become, that the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, who was former director of two offshore tax avoidance asset management firms in the Bahamas, resorted to censoring Nicholas Wilson at a Hastings and Rye hustings. Rudd instructed the chair to disrupt his speech. Wilson, who is standing as an independent, had his microphone removed from him, after he commented on Rudd’s alleged political and financial links and actions in Saudi Arabia. The whole thing was captured on video here.

Given the inherent corrupt nature of the British state, the fact that the UK is widely perceived to be the world’s 14th least corrupt country in the world is perhaps a testament to the propaganda power of the corporate media. According to journalist Roberto Saviano, who spent more than a decade exposing the criminal dealings of the Italian Mafia, Britain is the most corrupt country in the world. He told an audience at Hay-on-Wye: “If I asked you what is the most corrupt place on Earth you might tell me well it’s Afghanistan, maybe Greece, Nigeria, the South of Italy and I will tell you it’s the UK.”

The disconnect between perception and reality is clearly indicative of the distorted way in which an organisation like the national state broadcaster under-report the subtle forms of ‘hidden’ systemic corruption that is embedded in the very fabric of the British state, camouflaged by legislation and cushioned by ‘gentlemen’s agreements’.

In bringing together a wide range of leading commentators and campaigners, David Whyte shows that it is no longer tenable to assume that corruption is something that happens elsewhere; corrupt practices are revealed across a wide range of venerated institutions, from local government to big business.

As Penny Green of Queen Mary University of London, contends, “the network of egregious state and corporate corruption in Britain rivals any in the developing world”. This is one reason why the electorate throughout the country in today’s contest, should consider very carefully who they give their vote to.

I rely on the generosity of my readers. I don’t make any money from my work and I’m not funded. If you’ve enjoyed reading this or another posting, please consider making a donation, no matter how small. You can help continue my research and write independently..… Thanks!


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Fraudulent democracy

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By Daniel Margrain

Image result for pics of corbyn and may together

In a genuine democracy, contrasting and conflicting ideas would be presented in the media in a fair and balanced way to allow the public to make informed choices at General Elections. But in reality, the media corporations who provide the electorate with ‘news’ are antithetical to the kind of democratic accountability they purport to espouse.

That the growth of democracy in the twentieth century has occurred alongside the growth of corporate propaganda, is concomitant to the lack of genuine democracy which prevents the public from being able to make the kinds of informed political choices described. In short, corporate media propaganda is used to protect corporate media power against genuine democratic forces.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than the media’s negative reaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to the position of Labour party leader which was secured through genuine grass-roots democratic forces. The well documented attacks against Corbyn which are largely ideological, will almost certainly increase in intensity as the General Election gets closer.

The leaking of Labour’s election manifesto pledges by the Tories accompanied by an obliging mass media were intended to form part of the strategy of attack. However, what they didn’t take into account was the extent to which the public were supportive of the proposals. Rather than proving to be unpopular, Corbyn’s plans that include “a series of [viable] proposals on investing in public services, taxing the wealthiest and scrapping tuition fees…are popular with millions of people” [1]. Indeed, the public overwhelmingly support Labour’s nationalization pledges across the board.

Concentration of power

If the election was to be hypothetically decided on the basis of Corbyn’s policies alone, the Labour leader would win it hands down. But the media conglomerates are guided by another agenda which is to ensure their privileges and concentration of power are maintained. As Corbyn potentially prevents them from sustaining this state of affairs, the public’s attention has to be diverted from the core issues, towards the emphasis on the Labour leader’s alleged personal traits.

All things being equal, it’s not the case that Corbyn hasn’t a realistic chance of winning the next General Election, rather, it’s more a case that the corporate political-media establishment will do everything in their power to ensure that he doesn’t. If that means it’s necessary for them to depict him unfairly as a bumbling idiot, then so be it.

The disconnect between the popularity of Corbyn’s policies, and his inaccurate portrayal by the media, is deliberate. The intention is to dis-associate him, as an individual, from his popular policies in the public’s collective mindset.

The strategy appears to have traction. Labour’s gap with the Tories in the polls is huge, albeit steadily closing. Yet, as previously highlighted, Corbyn’s policies on key issues are widely popular with voters. How else to explain this apparent dichotomy other than putting it down to the notion that the media’s demonization of Corbyn is working?

Isabella Stone provides some useful observations:

“It’s hardly difficult to discern how people might be being influenced to a negative view of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. I’ve just come back from my local Co-op where I had to stand in the checkout queue next to the newspaper stand. Virtually all the papers (except the Mirror) had negative headlines about Corbyn; the Mail, Sun and Express featuring unflattering photos of him and shrieking headlines about how much his policies are going to cost us all.

The Daily Telegraph even stooped to showing a photograph of Len McCluskey sprawled on some steps, having accidentally tripped. The implication of this last was that the man is a clumsy prat, rather than an unfortunate person who may have hurt himself in an accident. Even the Radio 4 Today programme presenters had a little giggle this morning over a joke about Mr McCluskey’s “clumsiness”. You don’t have to be remotely interested in politics to get the message.”

But it’s not just the typical right-wing press who are engaged in the smearing of Corbyn. The corporate media’s hostility towards the Labour leader crosses the traditional left-right divide (in truth, a close-knit ideological consensus of opinion). The “liberal-left” Guardian is no exception. This is despite the fact they are eager to portray themselves as being above the fray in terms of the promotion of the laughable idea their mission is to bring power to account:

“Here at the Guardian, ideas and opinions have the power to change the world for the better. Our independent journalism holds power to account across the globe and brings information that is suppressed into the public domain.”

Presumably, what the Guardian refer to as “holding power to account” includes their demonization of the leader of the opposition in terms professor James Curran described as “an enormously simplifying first draft of history.”

To my knowledge, not once has the Guardian challenged any of the Corbyn propaganda myths reproduced by their market competitors. They include the notion the Labour leader supports Hamas, is a cheerleader for anti-semites, has funded Holocaust deniers, has tolerated anti-semitism in the Labour party, has been on the payroll of state-funded Iranian media and is an apologist for the IRA.

While the media regularly bring up Corbyn’s connections with the latter, they have never mentioned Michael Fallon’s support for apartheid South Africa, his opposition to all international sanctions against the apartheid regime, in addition to British government interventions in individual cases of human rights abuse (see Craig Murray).

This kind of bias and media hypocrisy is consistent with academic research:

  • The London School of Economics and Political Science found strong media bias against Corbyn, claiming the press had turned into an “attack dog” against the opposition leader.
  • The UK’s public service broadcaster gave double the airtime to Corbyn’s critics than to his allies at the start of the 2016 Labour coup, according to content analysis from the Media Reform Coalition.
  • An LSE survey found that 74 per cent of newspaper articles ‘offered either no or a highly distorted account of Corbyn’s views and ideas’ and that only 9 per cent were ‘positive’ in tone.
  •  Research carried out at Birkbeck similarly found a strong bias in ‘mainstream media coverage’.

Battle lines

Given the evidence outlined above, it is clear that battle lines have been drawn, not between left and right competing political factions and policies, but rather what are regarded as the acceptable boundaries by which these contrasting narrative are allowed to be expressed and the lies and misinformation challenged.

What is rarely acknowledged is that the true nature of corporate power would be revealed if these forbidden lines were to be exceeded. But since they are not, the media’s:

“changing contours are seldom explored, its goals and targets seldom identified. This is counterfeit journalism because the surface of events is not disturbed. It is ironic that, while corruption among the system’s managers and subalterns is at times brilliantly exposed by a group of exceptional journalists, the wider corruption is unseen and unreported” [2].

The extent to which counterfeit journalism is able to continue functioning depends largely on its ability to manipulate the public through media propaganda by manufacturing their consent. This is largely achieved through coordinated political and corporate media mass campaigns that combine sophisticated public relations techniques. As Noam Chomsky explains:

“The primary function of the mass media…is to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector. The need for the dominant forces in society (a relatively concentrated network of corporations including media), to satisfy their interests, imposes some very sharp constraints on the political and ideological systems”.

The greater Jeremy Corbyn’s perceived threat to the corporate media’s attempts to manufacture the public’s consent, it correspondingly stands to reason the greater will be the media’s personal attacks against him. Under these circumstances, a fair and honest evaluation of Corbyn’s popular policies would, from their perspective, be counter-productive. Far better to undermine his credibility by drowning out his policies.

I rely on the generosity of my readers. I don’t make any money from my work and I’m not funded. If you’ve enjoyed reading this or another posting, please consider making a donation, no matter how small. You can help continue my research and write independently..… Thanks!


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What Kind of A Society Are We Prepared to Fight For?

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By Daniel Margrain

Pushing Earth of a cliff

In my February 21, 2017 article for Scisco Media I focused on the “conscious cruelty” inflicted by recent Labour and Tory governments’ on some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in our society. The piece proved to have been quite popular, reflecting a widespread hatred of a largely out-of-touch political class whose underlying set of principles are not much different to those that typified the rise of Nazism during the 1930s.

I pointed out that New Labour “feminist” ideologues like Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper were complicit in ensuring that Tory attacks against the sick and disabled would be implemented. The notion that both the Tories and Right factions within the Labour party consider Britain’s “low-lying fruit” as a drain on society to be eliminated, is not as far-fetched as some might believe.

This was certainly the view of Pat Hibernian McQueenie who commented:

“Good piece, it is time for JC and JMCD to remove the linen glove and put on the Iron Fist. If these two Politicians are removed from their posts the British Working Class will cease to exist. A new Class will be born or I should say reborn The British Slave Class will be implemented by the Right Wing.

Queuing at Work Premises I would use gates but there are not that many Left anyway all you who voted for the Tory be afraid be very very afraid. Death Camps will spring up in isolated places and I think you know the rest. All of You Should Have Watched “THE NAZIS A WARNING FROM HISTORY”

I hope whatever God if any You Worship Forgives You because I a disabled Human Being who worked all his Life from 9 until being struck down at the age of 59 WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU SELFISH SCUM SOCIETY You are the Worst Stupidest EVER.”

My piece also appeared to have struck a chord with Elizabeth Newport who wrote:

“Labour’s apathy since 2010 over the appalling benefit reforms upsets me more than the fact the tories have done it. I expect the tories to scapegoat and demean the vulnerable, that’s what they do, but I expected Labour to make their lives very difficult and for charities to be extremely vocal.

The truth is no one cares about the vulnerable, the electorate voted the tories in knowing what their plans were. Labour rolled over on the welfare reform bill. When we have all died from stress and poverty or killed ourselves they will find a new group to scapegoat. I can honestly say that as a mentally disabled person I have never felt so hopeless with regards to any political changes. I was a single parent in the early 1990’s when single parents were blamed and targeted. This is even worse.”

Elizabeth is partly right. The Tories did not mention who their intended target was for the cuts. Not one mainstream journalist leading up to the election pressed then DWP minister, Iain Duncan Smith, for clarification, and therefore, the Tories had no mandate with which to implement their stated programme of cuts.

Pathological

Although it could be reasonably argued that people rarely base their decision to vote for a party on a single issue, the notion that poor people vote in large numbers for the Tories who clearly have them in their sights, is only incomprehensible if one is of the opinion that such people are immune from directing similar forms of pathological hatred against those who are even poorer and weaker than they are.

Of course, the far-right tabloid media play a major part in fanning the flames of hate. But it’s insufficient to put the blame solely on them. Despite falling sales, Murdoch continues to shift millions of copies of the Sun on a daily basis and nobody is physically forcing working class people into the shops to buy it. It’s not just the Tories who pander to the whims of Murdoch either. New Labour under Blair and Brown, were only too eager to appease the racist demographic in the country.

Charity-industrial complex

A corrupt corporate media-political system dominated by power and money means that, literally, the government is getting away with murder. This injustice was articulated by Iam Klaatu in the comments section:

“I do not understand why this is allowed to continue? There are so many breaches of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially Articles 23 and 24, and even United Nations condemnation! And under Articles 2 & 4 of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, we have EVERY RIGHT, to see not just politicians and Lords, but EVERY SINGLE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBLE, from politicians, civil servants, job centre staff and managers, they can and WILL be made accountable for this crime against humanity!

The passive approach among what I refer to as the “charity-industrial complex” also play a complicit role. Klaatu continues:

“So why doesn’t Scope, MENCAP, MS, Cancer Research, etc etc etc , get off their backsides and unite, and stop this genocidal policy??? Or are they afraid of seeing their funding cut??? Their apathy is sickening!!! David Cameron, has even made patron of a charity, whose people are just one group of people that HIS government has hounded and starved to death!…It is an outrage!!!”

Eugenics

It’s my view that what we are witnessing in Britain today, is an early manifestation of a policy of eugenics which will become increasingly more obvious in the years ahead, particularly as robots begin to create a growing pool of idle ‘useless eaters’ among the existing white collar and blue collar workforce. Eventually, a critical-mass point will be reached in which the government of the day will be forced into making binary political choices.

Future governments will be faced with either funding a Universal Basic Income system or resist the necessity for change and, therefore, be prepared for mass civil disobedience on the streets of our towns and cities. As successive governments over the last 40 years have preferred the punitive ‘stick’ rather than the incentivising ‘carrot’ approach, the introduction of a UBI system is far from being a formality.

Of course, none of these potential policy proposals can be announced publicly by the government of the day, or by their media mouthpieces. Rather, the aim is to introduce them incrementally. It’s clear that the eugenics policy is one that is already well under way in Britain in 2017.

The latest in a series of appalling stories to have emerged, concerns Nicola Jeffery, a single parent from south east London. Nicola has fibromyalgia which causes chronic pain across the body. She is one of thousands of people with “invisible disabilities” whose benefits have been axed by the Tories as a result of new “reforms” to the personal independence payment (Pip) benefits system.

The “reforms” are part of a wider long-term strategy of welfare retrenchment, austerity and cuts to those most in need. The aim is the destruction of civilized society. All associated notions of civilization that people have come to take for granted – NHS, social care, fire service, education, public child care provision etc – are being whittled away and sold off for the benefit of private capital and shareholder’s, many of whom are working class people.

So we have to ask the question, what kind of a society do we want?

It’s no longer acceptable to solely blame the Tories for the problems we face. Many ordinary people who vote for right wing parties, including a corporate-corrupted Labour party dominated by a neoliberal core of war-monger’s, Friends of Israeli ethnic cleansing and austerity apologists, have to start looking in the mirror and begin educating themselves about what’s going on in their own communities; their own country; their own world.

Taking responsibility

Many of the problems stem from the fact that for far too long, too many people have not been prepared to take responsibility for their own actions, nor to evaluate how the individual decisions they make on a daily basis impact on society in general. The easy option in which people are prepared to look the other way for perceived short-term gain, can no longer be tolerated.

People who litter and fly-tip on our streets and fields, drive aggressively and at speed in built-up areas, in addition to engaging in other forms of anti-social behaviour, need to be politely confronted. We also need to minimize our individual carbon footprints the best we can, buy locally sourced and organic produce and reduce our consumption of meat.

The attitude for many seems to be that as long as they, as individuals, are not directly being affected by the travails going on around them, then they would sooner prefer to be oblivious to them, irrespective of their adverse impacts.

This lack of awareness and compassion for others, rooted in selfishness and crass individualism, is the bane of society and civilization. Although it might not be the case that the individual or close family member is seemingly unaffected, the nature of the direction of travel in society is such that in the absence of viable alternatives, it will nevertheless become the case further down the line.

Finite planet

Although it might not be the situation today, tomorrow or the day after that, the fragile nature of the planet humanity inhabits, means that the infinite grabbing of finite resources will eventually result in insurmountable negative repercussions in which even the super-rich will not be immune. After all, environmental degradation affects everybody and air pollution is democratic.

Never has Pastor Niemoller’s famous aphorism been more relevant. Climate change is altering the very fabric upon which the functioning of civilized society rests. What use can a depleted planet wrought by a system that prioritizes the accumulation of wealth for wealth’s sake, serve for an elite that continuously craves it? The answer, of course, is that such a planet is of no use to any living thing.

The time to save humanity from itself is fast running out which is why we need to act. However, political shifts at the ballot box alone won’t be enough. We need collectively to go beyond naval-gazing towards positive action. We need to start getting informed about the real issues that humanity faces going forward and start to begin to look for radical solutions.

But we can only do this if an informed public is in a position to be able to correctly identify the cause of our collective malaise. Instead of devoting our energies on attacking the Other for the problems we face, we need to identify and target the source of our oppression. This means we have to think Big.

The local-global nexus, has arguably never been as relevant as it is now. This is because unlike previous epochs, we are the potential authors of our own destruction. In the past, as we moved from one socioeconomic and political form of organisation to another, we confronted, head on, the challenges we faced.

From hunter-gatherer societies through to feudalism, humans were master’s of their own destiny and they survived and prospered along the way. But during the latest capitalist phase, we have seemingly failed to acknowledge our limits as a species.

We cannot reason that lack of knowledge is the cause for our downfall. At the crossroad point along the metaphorical super highway, we made the informed choice to turn rapidly right in the certain knowledge that at the end of the road was a cliff whose precipice we were fast approaching but decided to continue along it’s fatal path regardless. For a species that claims to be at the top of the intellectual food chain, we sure are dumb.

Falling off a cliff

The truth is, we’ve not only sped to the cliff’s edge akin to being passengers of an out-of-control juggernaut, but we are plunging, free fall, towards a giant burning cauldron. We possess parachutes that are, in theory, capable of saving us from the affects of free-fall, but are fast reaching the point where the only eventuality will be hitting the ground with a thud.

Currently, we are at a critical stage between an insurmountable fate and a precarious survival. One of the things that can save us from our mass hypnosis and passivity in the face of a self-inflicted untimely death, is mass collective action. But collective activity in the strict political sense of the term is not enough either.

We also have to start radically changing our behaviour as consumers. This means a dramatic shift in expectations. It’s no longer reasonable for people to expect to spend £2 on a tee-shirt that has been produced by sweated labour in Pakistan, or to feign ignorance in order to justify other forms of immoral decision-making. Crucially, we need to stop buying ‘things’ we don’t need with money we haven’t got.

Because consumption is effectively the oil that lubricates the capitalist system, alternative forms of collective action on a massive scale will naturally correspondingly alter the way the current set of consumption-production relations function. This can only be beneficial for humanity and the planet.

Like the impact of a stone that lands in a pond whose ripples gradually spread further afield, the individual choices we as consumers make, in conjunction with our political choices, can eventually begin to set us free. But we need to hurry up because time is fast running out.

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The Government’s Deliberate Destruction of Our NHS

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By Daniel Margrain

'Humanitarian crisis' in NHS hospitals, warns Red Cross (Getty) Royal Sussex County Hospital, UK (Photo by Universal Images Group via Getty Images)‘Humanitarian crisis’ in NHS hospitals, warns Red Cross (Getty) Royal Sussex County Hospital, UK (Photo by Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Pictures that emerged last week from the Royal Blackburn hospital that showed mothers and babies being held in corridors for 13 hours and 89 year old Iris Sibley spending more than six months in a hospital bed because a care home place could not be found for her, are the kinds of incidences that are now becoming the norm in the NHS. Figures from the BBC suggest that nine out of 10 hospitals have unsafe numbers on their wards.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s comment on Friday (February 10) that the treatment of some patients was “completely unacceptable” in response to the worst A&E waiting times on record, was uttered as if he was absolving himself of all responsibility for the chaos. The reason why he gives the impression that he has no intention to do anything about the unfolding crisis enveloping the NHS, is because the chaos is a by-product of government policy.

The government’s objective is to move more healthcare to people’s homes and the community which will involve the merging of NHS and social care budgets that largely have already been privatized. This will lead to contamination and the entry-point for patient charges and co-payments. Given that the overall framework for such a system within the NHS already exists, it’s just a matter of time before such payments and charges are put in place.

Health & Social Care Act

The stated referencing for NHS funding is a deception, as was the assurance in 2010 that there would be no top-down re-organization of the service. The 2012 Health and Social Care Act undermines this assurance since it removes the duty on the Secretary of State for Health to provide a comprehensive health service, while the act requires up to 49 percent of services can be tendered out to “any qualified provider”. Already between a quarter and a half of all community services are now run by Virgin Care.

Since the late 1980s during Margaret Thatcher’s third term in office, whole entities within the public sector have increasingly been outsourced, health and social care services privatized and competition and the business ethos introduced into public services. Following the advice of the then chief executive of Sainsbury’s, Sir Roy Griffiths in 1987, the Thatcher government set about removing the foundations upon which the welfare state had been built. One study suggests that “the privatisation of social care services is arguably the most extensive outsourcing of a public service yet undertaken in the UK”. 

The aim is to ensure the domination of the market by a small number of very powerful multinational corporations whose primary concern is not the welfare of the residents in care homes which they own or patients in hospitals, but rather with maximizing profits. In line with Noam Chomsky’s defunding notion, the strategy of successive governments’ over the last three decades has been to shrink the NHS and bring it to the point of collapse as the basis for then claiming the only solution is more privatization.

Britain’s Biggest Enterprise

The retreating from the principle of the universal provision of free at the point of delivery health care, can be pin-pointed to 1988 when Tory politician, Oliver Letwin, wrote a ‘blueprint’ document called ‘Britain’s Biggest Enterprise’ where he set out the stages governments’ would have to go through to achieve a US model of healthcare without the public noticing.

The New Labour government under Tony Blair adopted Letwin’s principles. But prior to the 1997 General Election, Blair had to disguise the strategy by using dissembling language in order to get elected. Once in office, he took several steps towards privatization – for example, breaking up the hospital network into foundation trusts which are essentially separate business entities. He also deliberately saddled hospitals with Private Finance Initiative (PFI) liabilities which involved the government borrowing £11 billion from private banks and financiers in order to justify the sale and breakdown of the NHS further down the line.

This culminated with the New Labour government introducing in 2009 what was termed the “unsustainable provider regime” which is a fake bankruptcy framework to justify closing hospitals. The £11 billion of public money Blair and Brown borrowed from the banks and financiers ostensibly to invest in the NHS through PFI (a sum that has soared to £80 billion which the NHS is duty bound to pay), helps further this eventuality in two ways.

Firstly, financing hospitals through PFI displaces the burden of debt from central government to NHS trusts and with it the responsibility for managing spending controls and planning services, thereby hindering a coherent national strategy. Secondly, the high cost of PFI schemes has presented NHS trusts with an affordability gap. The financing of these legally questionable PFI contracts, which has increased the public’s liability by a massive £69 billion, cannot be examined because they hide behind strict confidentiality rules.

Nevertheless, the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn appears to be reluctant to raise the issue surrounding the alleged inadmissibility of the contracts despite the high probability that best value and cost effectiveness criteria were unlikely to have been adhered to in this instance.

Simon Stevens

The most powerful and influential individual currently working in the NHS is former Labour councillor, Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England. After having served under the Blair government, Stevens went on to work for the US private health care provider, United Health, where he campaigned against Obama Care. Stevens then argued for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to be included within the UK health care remit. Those encouraged by the election of Jeremy Corbyn (myself included) are still waiting to hear something from the shadow health team about this troubling development.

The latest controversy to have emerged from NHS England led by Stevens is the proposed introduction of its ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plans’ which forms part of the annual 2016-17 HHS Planning Guidance. “Sustainability and transformation” is Orwellian-speak for the move towards the total reorganization of the NHS predicated on more privatizations and cuts. As Mike Sivier puts it:

“We’re told the project is about ‘strengthening local relationships’ and building on ‘local energy and enthusiasm’ to achieve ‘genuine and sustainable transformation in patient experience and health outcomes’. But in fact, the Guidance contains some very specific requirements that will test these new collaborations to the limits and usher in a new wave of privatisations and huge cuts.”

Last January, activist Dr Bob Gill from the Save Our NHS Campaign attended a meeting to get some insight into what the position of the Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Heidi Alexander, was in relation to the direction NHS England was moving in under Stevens. What he heard were narratives that fitted into the ongoing privatization agenda. According to Gill, Alexander expressed support for Simon Stevens, despite his appalling track record.

Concerning

This is deeply concerning for people who see in Corbyn somebody who might be willing to take a man who appears less committed to ethics and patient care than to ensuring medicine is a profit-based ‘conveyor belt’ service, to task. Unfortunately, there is no indication that he is the man who intends to do it. On the contrary, the narrative of the shadow health team appears to be one of support for both Simon Stevens and the existing regime of privatization that he is overseeing.

A year down the line since Dr Bob Gill’s revelation and with no action taken by Corbyn against Stevens, it’s now a matter of urgency that activists exert political pressure on Corbyn’s team to address the rightward direction Stevens, in conjunction with the Tories, is taking the NHS. Prior to the last election, David Cameron promised to “protect the NHS budget and continue to invest more.” This promise has been broken. According to the Nuffield Trust, “government spending on the English NHS is falling as a share of UK GDP – from 6.5 per cent of GDP at the end of the last decade to 6.2 per cent in 2015-16.”

Research by the Kings Fund indicates that the UK is ranked 13th out of 15 original EU members. In Orwellian fashion, health under-funding is portrayed in the media as “unprecedented levels of overspending by hospitals and NHS trusts.”Under-funding has inevitably impacted on staffing levels. The shortage of nurses within the NHS has reached dangerous levels in 90 per cent of UK hospitals, and the amount of doctors per capita is the second lowest among eleven European countries.

Overall, on six out of nine measures of varying sorts – five year survival rates for breast cancer; the same for prostate cancer; the number per capita of MRI scanners, CT scanners, angioplasty operations, hip replacements and knee replacements; waiting times to see a specialist and the OECD assessment of outcomes compared to money spent – Britain did worse than any other advanced country in the world. Under both Stevens and the Tories every aspect of the NHS is under attack.

At the time of writing, Virgin Care is in control of well in excess of 200 contracts across the UK while administration for the new NHS market alone, costs tax payers £1 in every £10 the NHS spends (4.5 billion). The carving open of the service for exploitation by private interests is proceeding at a pace and the government shows no indication of wanting to reverse the process. This is hardly surprising given that 70 MPs have financial links to private healthcare firms while hundreds of private healthcare corporations have donated to Tory coffers.

The erosion of the principle of a free at the point of delivery service also undermines what Sir Michael Marmont refers to  as “the optimal allocation of resources.” This, in part, explains why a country like the United States where the marketization of its health care system is long established, is ranked 44th in the world in 2014 in terms of efficiency compared to 10th for the UK. Given these figures, one might reasonably ask why the government appears to be insistent on dismantling something that, despite its faults, essentially works, and then restructuring it in the image of a system that doesn’t?

The US model we are moving towards

During his recent trip to America following Trump’s inauguration, it is likely that UK Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, took the opportunity to discuss with US financiers further moves to carve up the NHS in order to bring it closer to the US insurance-based model. The requirement of the US Affordable Care Act (which was signed into law in March 2010 but is actually unaffordable for large swaths of the US population), is that people are forced to buy private health care insurance if they fail to qualify for public health programmes, namely Medicare and Medicaid. However, the insurers have created plans that restrict the number of doctors in hospitals.

These “ultra narrow networks” have resulted in the reduction of at least 70 per cent of health facilities within communities throughout the US, thereby restricting access to care for people with serious health problems. This means that increasingly Americans are paying higher premiums but are not getting sufficient access to services they need. They are, therefore, having to find the money upfront, largely because their insurance policies do not provide adequate cover for their injuries or illnesses.

So America is still seeing high rates of people who are either delaying, avoiding getting access to the care they need, or are being confronted with medical debts. Research shows that tax-funded expenditures account for 64.3 percent of US health spending, with public spending exceeding total spending in most countries with universal care. Yet, 33 million people in the US do not have access to health insurance cover.

When Obama came into office in January 2009 there were approximately 15 per cent of American’s who had been uninsured for at least a year which meant that unless they had access to a significant amount of money, they could not go to a doctor when they or their children fell ill. During this period, surveys showed that two-thirds of all Americans favoured a single payer health plan (ie a publicly financed system of universal health care provision free at the point of delivery for all, similar to the NHS) but Obama rejected it outright. This was despite the fact that war veterans and senior citizens have a variation of publicly/privately delivered and funded arrangements already in place within the existing system.

These limited single payer systems have also proven to be cost effective with good outcomes. In addition, Obama was riding high on a wave of popular support following his election victory. Not only did the Democrats control the White House and Senate but they also commanded a majority in the House of Representatives. It would appear that the $20 million Obama received from private health care companies during his election campaign helped sway his decision not to introduce the single payer system across the board despite the fact that nearly 80 per cent of Democrat voters support the introduction of such a system.

Obama, in other words, had the democratic mandate to introduce the extremely popular single payer system universally but instead he turned his back on the people who elected him into power. The conflicting interests that American presidents like Obama face relates to the close relationship they have to members of Congress who need to get reelected. If Congress speak out against the interests who are funding their campaigns, they’re not going to get that funding. Commenting on a report from the National Journal, Ashlie Rodriguez wrote:

“Health care interests have given $46.6 million in campaign donations since 2005 to [the] 21 lawmakers” at the bipartisan healthcare summit, including Senator Max Baucus, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, and to the summit’s host, President Obama.”

And Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that:

“health professionals, political action committees, hospitals and nursing homes, pharmaceutical and health product companies, health services firms, HMOs and accident insurers have given heavily to all summit attendees.”

Dysfunctional

Tiny efforts to try and patch together what is clearly a dysfunctional system is further undermined in as much as that patchwork involves another obvious paradox. This is highlighted by the origin of the Obama Care Plan which has its roots in the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Think Tank, which came up with the model of forcing people to buy private insurance and to use public tax dollars to subsidize the purchase of this insurance. In other words, as a result of a process of publicly funded corporate welfare, billions of funds are shifted into the hands of private insurance companies.

Nevertheless, this was passed into law in Massachusetts under governor Mitt Romney who was Obama’s Republican opponent in the race for the White House. Almost exactly the same plan was passed by Obama at the national level. This led to the insane situation in which the Democrats were essentially championing a Republican plan in which the latter subsequently distanced themselves from. Instead, the Republican policy under Trump is for everybody to pay privately with no public provision and no safety net of any kind in place.

America’s health care costs are the highest per capita of any country in the world with some of the worst outcomes. Attempts to reform the US system are undermined by the insurance companies whose only function is to be middlemen between the patients and the health professionals.The U.S government’s treatment of health care as a commodity instead of a public good is out of sync with the rest of the developed world and illustrates the extent to which, more broadly, the giant corporations have usurped democracy in the United States.

As things currently stand, the US is the only industrialized nation on the planet that has used a market-based model for healthcare. Alarmingly, whether people want to admit it or not, this is the direction of travel both the Tories and NHS England under Simon Stevens are taking the system of UK healthcare provision. In other words, we are heading for a potential nightmare.

COPYRIGHT

All original material created for this site is ©Daniel Margrain. Posts may be shared, provided full attribution is given to Daniel Margrain and Road To Somewhere Else along with a link back to this site. Using any of my writing for a commercial purpose is not permitted without my express permission. Excerpts and links, including paraphrasing, may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Daniel Margrain and Road To Somewhere Else with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unless otherwise credited, all content is the site author’s. The right of Daniel Margrain to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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My Review of the opening episode of the BBC3 Comedy, ‘Fleabag’

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By Daniel Margrain

Photo: Amazon

There is likely to be nobody who detests the vast majority of what passes for BBC comedy output more than I do. From the unedifying spectacle of Mrs Brown’s Boys to the stupefying banality of Miranda, what the sheer dearth of quality output over the years highlights is the importance teams of writers are to the production of quality comedy. This explains why American comedy’s invariably hit the mark but on the whole, their British counterparts fail.

But once in a while, something extraordinary hits our television screens. I witnessed such a moment the other night thanks to a recommendation from Victor Lewis-Smith. As somebody who appreciates the quirky character-led observational and acerbic comedy canon, I knew I was going to be in for a treat from the opening sequence. One of the early scenes in which the boyfriend of Fleabag creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge left her due to her habit of masturbating to Barack Obama speeches, was genius. This was one of the many inventive and inspired tragic-comic sequences that punctuated the shows 26 minute duration.

Firmly set within the confessional territory of Bridget Jones, Waller-Bridge’s first person monologues to camera, which hint at its Edinburgh fringe origins, were repeated throughout the episode. While these sequences were not original – having been seen in Woody Allen films (most notably Annie Hall) – they were nevertheless brilliantly executed.

What we quickly learn is that Fleabag is the epitome of a woman constantly on the verge of having a hyperventilating nervous breakdown in what is an increasingly dysfunctional world. As she navigates an urban terrain of awkward men while struggling to bond with her sister, it soon becomes obvious that her nihilism and inability to deal with personal relationships is an expression of a melancholy that’s rooted in personal tragedy, money problems or both.

We soon learn that somebody close to her had suffered an untimely death and that she lied to her financially successful sister about her financial situation as a front in order to get her approval. Her father (Bill Paterson) appears as a distant and peripheral figure in her life while her stepmother (Olivia Coleman) who tells her how awful she looks, has the potential to be as venomous a character as Julia Davis’ in Nighty Night whose magnetic on-screen presence Waller-Bridge manages to equal, if not surpass.

As with Julia Davis’ character, Waller-Bridge pulls off a woman, whose ferocious self-loathing is out of control and whose life is in a state of perpetual chaos, with great aplomb and technical skill. But unlike Davis’ character, Fleabag’s method of dealing with these frailties is to not take anything seriously.

In contrast to the derivative and telegraphed pratfall farce of a sit-com like Miranda, the sense of pathos and melancholy in Fleabag is never far from the surface. After having watched the opening episode, I get the feeling that a number of tragedies will unfold as the series progresses in which underlying themes of alienation, loneliness and loss look set to be developed.

All the performances were first class, but particular congratulations go to Waller-Bridge whose front and centre role stole the show. I was never quite sure what she was about to do or when she was going to do it – real edge of the seat stuff. I was mezmerized by her which is a testament to the brilliant writing, inventive set pieces, casting and strong characters.

Those responsible for taking the decision to commission this brave and fresh work of art are to be commended for their risk-taking in bringing Fleabag to the small screen. We need more of it.

COPYRIGHT

All original material created for this site is ©Daniel Margrain. Posts may be shared, provided full attribution is given to Daniel Margrain and Road To Somewhere Else along with a link back to this site. Using any of my writing for a commercial purpose is not permitted without my express permission. Excerpts and links, including paraphrasing, may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Daniel Margrain and Road To Somewhere Else with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unless otherwise credited, all content is the site author’s. The right of Daniel Margrain to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Cajoling the Herd

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 Daniel Margrain

This herd of cattle was moved from the Shropshire Union Canal in Market Drayton

In 1938, in response to the alleged arrival to America of aliens from another planet, thousands of US citizens left their suburban homes in a state of panic and departed for the hills. An unsuspecting public did this because the authoritative and solemn tones of the radio announcer who imparted this ‘news’ was able to induce the requisite amount of fear in them.

It was only later that the people concerned had realized they had been duped. What was actually being broadcast was an adaptation of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds, and the announcer was none other than the renowned actor and film director, Orson Welles. The power of radio had convinced people to behave in an irrational manner in response to this ‘fake news’.

Almost eight decades after Welles made his fake radio broadcast, hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on Washington DC and many other cities across America and throughout the world. The stated aim of the protests was to demonstrate women’s rights in response to the revelation that Trump had boasted he had groped the genitals of a woman. But this soon morphed into a protest against Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States.

Censorship by omission

The issues the coverage of Trump’s alleged sexual assault raises is of course welcome. But the media coverage given to the incident which acted as the catalyst for the demonstrations also raises further questions in terms of what the media do and do not regard as a newsworthy story. Why, for example, hadn’t the media given equal coverage to the sexual depravities of Bill Clinton?

It should be noted that Hillary not only condoned Bill’s actions but has often slandered those who would dare speak out against them. The fact that the media have not managed to inculcate into the public consciousness the alleged crimes of Bill Clinton in the way they have in relation to Trump, almost certainly explains why, during Bill’s presidency and impeachment trial 20 years ago, no protests occurred.

So fake news is as much about the ability of the media to censor by omission as it is about the actual production of deliberately false information intended to deceive. In turn, it’s these distortions that provide the catalyst for the ideology of ‘post truth politics’ exemplified by the emergence of a discourse that appeals to emotion and where personal beliefs dominate. The media’s preoccupation with Trump’s seemingly sexist and misogynistic attitude to women intended to evoke an emotional response, was to be the starting point for what was to follow. The media’s anti-Trump agenda, in other words, had been cast.

Manichean logic & Red Baiting

The demonizing agenda was stepped-up a gear following the media’s relentless efforts to link Trump with Putin. With their application of Manichean logic, the intention of the political-media class is the deliberate conflation of media dissent with the notion that the dissenters uncritically support Russia and thus imply they are Trump apologists. In the establishment media’s eyes, the dissenters’ ‘crime’ is the acknowledgement that Trump’s stated aim to shift future US foreign policy from belligerence to cooperation with Russia, has validity.

The response of a corporate outlet like the Washington Post was to label anybody who proffers an alternative narrative to that pumped out by the mainstream as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The writer, Chris Hedges, who is on a list of 200 alternative websites condemned by the paper, describes the Post’s report as an “updated form of Red-Baiting.He added:

“This attack signals an open war on the independent press. Those who do not spew the official line will be increasingly demonized in corporate echo chambers such as the Post or CNN as useful idiots or fifth columnists.”

I, myself, was subject to this kind of ‘fifth-columnist’ irrational Red-Baiting on twitter earlier yesterday (Tuesday January, 31). The following tweet, for example, was in response to my factual assertion that Russia was invited by Syria to intervene in the country as a direct response to the arming, training and funding of Salfist terrorists by the US, UK, Saudi, Qatari and Turkish governments’:

: 4h4 hours ago

you sound like you might be a Trotskyist. Are you in the pay of a counter revolutionary organisation?

Paradox

As far as the political-media establishment is concerned, the Trump phenomenon represents a paradox, or as Charles Krauthammer put it, an “ideological realignment”. Trump’s non-conservative, idiosyncratic populism is the antithesis to the prevailing liberal political-media establishment orthodoxy, but is nevertheless welded to the capitalist order.

Under Obama, the media had it relatively easy because the nature of the mutual understanding between the two was understood. The snake oil salesman said the right things when required but was not particularly pro-active in policy terms unless it involved keeping the industrial-military complex ticking along by initiating wars.

Trump, on the other hand, not only says the wrong things, but has so far stuck to his word. This is very bad for the maintenance of the liberal consensus and a media elite that is used to having it’s snouts comfortably feeding from the gravy train trough on its own terms.

Public relations

This is not to suggest that the media is somehow separate from this state-corporate status quo. On the contrary, their role as public relations mediators for the state means they are intrinsic to the protection of corporate power against democratic forces. The unpredictability that arises from the ashes of Trump’s victory is akin to shaking one of those old children’s snow globe toys and waiting to see where the particles land. They have the potential to settle in a multitude of places. The strategies in response to the potential chaos unleashed by Trump, in other words, has the potential to take many forms, from that of the blinkered liberal to the revolutionary idealist and a multitude of possibilities in between.

Much to the undoubted relief of the political-media establishment, many of those who have been encouraged to take to the streets would appear to have been blinded by the media’s displacement activity which is essentially what their attacks on Trump are. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Clinton gang is pushing for war with Iran while the war criminal Jack Straw’s criticisms of Trump are clearly his attempts to steal the moral high ground. The kind of blinkered liberalism that focuses a disproportionate amount of criticism on Trump but ignores the underhand warmongering and war crimes of his opponents, is encapsulated by the following tweet:

Ashamed

To claim to feel more ashamed to be a citizen of a country represented by the actions of the latest in a long line of misogynistic presidents who followed through on a seven country visa ban policy mandate rather than the actions of his predecessor who attacked seven countries in eight years, is indicative of the propaganda power of the mass media.

The said media is currently facilitating an agenda by which the Trump ban is up for discussion, but prevents similar discussions in relation to restricting the ability of governments’ to wage wars. It is surely no coincidence that ‘feeling ashamed to be part of America for the first time in 32 years’ is related to the inability of the media to report on the numerous wars of aggression waged both overtly and covertly by successive US presidents.

The fact that the reason why Trump’s selective and temporary travel ban (not a Muslim Ban as reported) is considered to be an acceptable part of media discourse but the war machine championed by Obama and historically by numerous other presidents isn’t, is because critiques of the latter pose a potential threat to the underlying structure of media-state power.

L B C

I first heard about the ban on Maajid Nawaz’s L B C programme last Saturday morning (January 28). Unlike the other topics that have been featured on the show, a disproportionate amount of time was devoted to the Trump issue. The journalist Owen Jones who had just arrived in the UK from America was interviewed on the phone at some length by Nawaz and was given plenty of air time to promote the demonstration outside Downing Street that evening.

Meanwhile, a succession of callers phoned in to the programme, the vast majority of whom aired their disgust at the Trump policy. The calls were interspersed by a running commentary by Nawaz who repeatedly condemned Trump without referencing the fact that the seven country ban had already been put in place by Obama, or that the policy didn’t apply to British passport holding Muslim celebrities or politicians even though both were continually mentioned in a sensational way in order to illicit an emotional response from the listener.

Unlike Jones, Nawaz fell short of arguing for the banning of the planned state visit of Trump to the UK. Nevertheless, the tone throughout was one of hostility towards the visa ban policy and Trump himself. Throughout the show, Nawaz kept reminding his listeners about the growing number of signatures to the ‘Ban Trump’ on-line petition by providing them with a running commentary about the numbers who had signed up every few minutes. This was the standard approach taken throughout the media with all UK terrestrial TV news channels focusing their coverage on individuals at airports who were waiting for news of their loved ones that had been caught up in the confusion.

Meanwhile, it appeared to me that more coverage was devoted to the anti-Trump demonstrations throughout American and other cities than was given to the estimated 2 million people that thronged the streets of London protesting the decision of the UK government to go to war in Iraq. On Monday’s (January 30) the BBC Breakfast programme, a running total of signatures was displayed boldly on the screen as if it was money being raised for the Children In Need charity. All this passed for acceptable discourse in the corporate mass media.

Manipulating the public

It is an illustration of how corporations that now dominate much of the domestic and global economies recognize the need to manipulate the public through media propaganda by manufacturing their consent, largely achieved through coordinated mass campaigns of the kind described that combine sophisticated public relations techniques. These techniques involve the filtering out of all unwanted information by censoring it and amplifying all ‘useful’ information. The former explains why, for example, very few people remember the time when Theresa May as UK Home Secretary illegally deported 50,000 foreign students which consequently failed to generate the publicity required for a mass demonstration.

Although the issue is different, exactly the same principle can be applied to the lack of publicity the media have given to demonstrations against the government’s welfare reforms including cuts to disability benefits, reduced social care budgets and the introduction of the bedroom tax.

Make no mistake, the decision of Trump to ban people from seven majority Muslim countries on the false premise that it’s a security issue when those countries not on the banned list were the ones whose citizens were responsible for the attacks on 9-11, is illiberal, immoral and plain wrong.

But it is also wrong for the media to have perpetuated the myth that it was Trump who set the policy in motion and that his critics are somehow perturbed that he is fulfilling a pre-election democratic mandate. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that many people are actually shocked when politicians actually follow through on their campaign promises. In that sense, at least – for good or bad – Trump has put down a marker for elected leaders in the future to follow.

Conclusion

The media hype surrounding the reporting of Trump’s sexual assault allegations and particularly the travel ban is disproportionate and exaggerated. Where were the reports of NATO’s flattening of the Libyan town of Sirte that killed thousands of civilians and the changing of the law last year enabling the deportation from the UK of any refugee child?

Why are a series of war criminals and war apologists seen fit to be interviewed about their disparaging views on Trump and are allowed to pass comment unchallenged? Why were the public told that Western civilisation was under threat from Islamist terrorists from the same countries who the elites are now criticising Trump from wanted to put travel restrictions on? Could it be Trump is unknowingly exposing the lie to their own propaganda?

The fact that these questions are never asked of the powerful and that a mass of well-meaning liberal protesters uncritically fall into line like a herd of cattle, is a testament to the hold the media has on great swaths of the population.

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The CIA’s Absence of Conviction

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I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.

A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt.

As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.

The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.

I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:

“The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.
“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.
“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the KGB.

It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence free anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive.

In the UK, one single article sums up the total abnegation of all journalistic standards. The truly execrable Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian writes “Few credible sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was timed to cause maximum pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump.” Does he produce any evidence at all for this assertion? No, none whatsoever. What does a journalist mean by a “credible source”? Well, any journalist worth their salt in considering the credibility of a source will first consider access. Do they credibly have access to the information they claim to have?

Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling.

Contrast this to the “credible sources” Freedland relies on. What access do they have to the whistleblower? Zero. They have not the faintest idea who the whistleblower is. Otherwise they would have arrested them. What reputation do they have for truthfulness? It’s the Clinton gang and the US government, for goodness sake.

In fact, the sources any serious journalist would view as “credible” give the opposite answer to the one Freedland wants. But in what passes for Freedland’s mind, “credible” is 100% synonymous with “establishment”. When he says “credible sources” he means “establishment sources”. That is the truth of the “fake news” meme. You are not to read anything unless it is officially approved by the elite and their disgusting, crawling whores of stenographers like Freedland.

The worst thing about all this is that it is aimed at promoting further conflict with Russia. This puts everyone in danger for the sake of more profits for the arms and security industries – including of course bigger budgets for the CIA. As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on.

The above article was written by, and reproduced with, the permission of Craig Murray at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/12/cias-absence-conviction/  

The futility of greed

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By Daniel Margrain

Whenever I feel a little low and disillusioned with the world, I often re-read the following parable, the clarity of vision of which seems to put everything neatly into perspective.

The Mexican Fisherman and the Investment Banker (Author Unknown)

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while.”

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, and stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed. “I have an MBA from Harvard, and can help you,” he said. “You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, and eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middle-man, you could sell directly to the processor, eventually opening up your own cannery. You could control the product, processing, and distribution,” he said. “Of course, you would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, and eventually to New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “Oh, 15 to 20 years or so.”

“But what then?” asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The American said, “Then you could retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you could sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play guitar with your amigos.”

Gods & monsters

· 5 Comments ·

By Daniel Margrain

Brideoffrankenstein.jpg

During the dark pre-enlightenment days before science, the earth was widely perceived as a stable force at the centre of the universe overseen by a God who envisaged humanity as having a fixed set of roles within it. To step outside this framework of ‘stability and order’ was to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy that shaped society. By challenging the existence of God (and hence the nature of society) through science, Galileo and others paid the ultimate price with their lives.

For man to disobey God by tasting the fruit of the forbidden tree was deemed to have brought evil into the world. Thus theology and the clergy explained the existence of wrongdoing as a primordial human condition that had to be controlled by a deity for whom the wrongdoers were required to seek salvation. This salvation took root in a system of ideas that underpinned the philosophical writings of Aristotle who conceived a world in which everything had a purpose.

The purpose of individual beings, and the places they naturally occupy, all dovetailed together, according to Aristotle, to form the pattern of the universe in order to give everything its place in the world. Religion and Aristotlian philosophy are therefore mutually reinforcing concepts that helped maintain uneven relations of power, centred on order.

Although the enlightenment and the emergence of science was a great leap forward from the idea that the power of Kings was historically fixed predicated on a grand purpose and design ordained by God, it nevertheless remained tied to the concept of progress as being that of the development of the human mind and of human nature as unchanging. So just as the church regarded stability and order as a primordial human condition, the classical economists that arose out of the enlightenment treated private property also as a fixed primordial human condition.

The religious and political establishment continue to blind the masses with this propaganda today. Hierarchical structures are as rigid in class stratified modern Britain (where social mobility is actually in reverse) as they have ever been. The masses of ordinary people have been conditioned to know their place within an ‘unchanging’ society even though the great changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution prove that power had transferred from feudal landlords to corporate grandees.

The supplanting of the aristocracy of land with money in this way led to the reduction of the great estates to commodities in which almost everyone and everything became “objectified”. The worker devotes his life to producing objects which he does not own or control. The labour of the worker, according to Karl Marx, thus becomes a separate, external being:

“Man’s labour exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power, the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien.”

In the year of Marx’s birth in 1818, a young English author called Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published, in London, the first edition of the Gothic and Romantic science fiction novel, Frankenstein – the tale of a monster which turns against its creator. It’s the externalizing and uncontrollable force that provides the catalyst for change that Shelley describes in her masterpiece which draws parallels with the daily lot of workers. It’s these workers who continually produce what they cannot keep until eventually, as was the case with the Luddites, they rebel against the machines that churn out the fruits of their alienated labour by smashing them to pieces.

In dialectical terms, change in nature is reality. But as Marx understood, the dialectic also applies to the social world in which alienation is considered to be a material and social process. Since humans are an integral part of nature, they can not be excluded from the forces that govern it. The forces that determine changes in nature also, therefore, apply to the social world. At some point quantitative change results in fundamental qualitative change. An acorn, in becoming an oak, for example, will have ceased to be an acorn. Yet implicit within the acorn is the potential to become an oak. The economic system of capitalism, in potentially becoming something else, will similarly, cease to be.

The rise of Jeremy Corbyn is indicative of the kind of transformation from quantitative to qualitative change outlined. This explains why the establishment are doing their utmost to prevent it. Just as Dr Frankenstein couldn’t control the monster he created and the machines couldn’t ultimately control the impulses of workers in the factories wrought by the impacts of industrial capitalism, so it is the case that the establishment won’t be able to control the forces which Corbynism has unleashed.

What has typified the history of colonial and imperialist oppression thus far, has been the ability of the oppressors to suppress opposition to their rule using monsters as part of their strategy of divide and conquer based on the concept of “my enemies enemy is my friend”. However, what the oppressors rarely appear to factor in to their strategies, is the potential for both the monsters and ordinary people alike, to break free from their chains. The brainwashing techniques of the corporate media, as well as the Machiavellian politicians who sing to the tune of their paymasters, is not sustainable. Corbyn is leading a movement that potentially will be at the forefront of tearing the entire edifice down.

Not only are monsters able to break free from the oppressors who create and nurture them, but paradoxically they also create the conditions in which a greater number of other monsters emerge. This was, for example, the case in Afghanistan during the 1980s following president Carter’s 1979 authorization of a $500 million covert action programme in support of tribal groups known as the mujahedin.

The kinds of monsters which successive US governments help nurture have managed to either strain at the leash (as in the case of Israel), or completely break free from their masters grip (as was the case with the mujahedin in Afghanistan). In terms of the former, as a result of the law of unintended consequence, the US-dependent monster often bites the financial hand that feeds it. This is rooted in uncontrollable and unpredictable geopolitical forces.

However, there are other monsters which their creators manage to exert a tight control of. An example, is the extent to which the the US government have managed to maintain leverage over the terrorist fighters that continue to emerge from what was formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA). Since 1946, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen as well as torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists who, according to SOA Watch, have “ripped the continent apart.” Two-thirds of the El Salvador army who committed some of the worst atrocities in its civil war had been trained at the SOA.

Moreover, the school has been complicit in numerous other dirty wars – particularly throughout the 1980s – fought on behalf of the US as well as training various other dictators from all over central and south America. More recently, the school was almost certainly responsible for training the killers who were a component part of the brutal regime that overthrew the Honduran government headed by Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. Media Lens pointed out in early March this year, that those responsible for the coup d’etat – which was supported by successive U.S administrations – assassinated the leading grass-roots Honduran environmental activist, Berta Caceres.

These kinds of Faustian pacts with the devil have, largely by way of ‘blow back’, contributed significantly to the exponential spread of terrorism worldwide, as well as the destabilization of entire countries and even regions. This is evidenced by the emergence of Al-Qaeda in Iraq following the 2003 illegal US-led invasion, the chaos that is unfolding in Honduras and the spread of ISIS in Libya and beyond. The latter were spawned in the Wests favoured regional client, Saudi Arabia – the authoritarian religious extremist state that has been bombarding Yemen for the last 19 months using, as journalist Iona Craig has documented, weaponry sold to them by the UK-US governments’.

Given that the FBI defines terrorism as “violent acts …intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government”, it’s difficult to rationalize how violations of international law in this way, under the guise of illegal war, is not illustrative of anything other than the kinds of terrorism the Western powers accuse their official enemies of committing.

Famously, Peter Ustinov eloquently articulated the conflation of war with terrorism. “War”, he said, “is the terrorism of the rich and powerful, and terrorism is the war of the poor and powerless.” In other words, the wars initiated by the powerful represent the substantial terror. Under such circumstances, the greater monsters are closer to home than many of us would perhaps care to admit. If God does exist, maybe he will be at the gates of Heaven to pass judgement on our rulers.

In the meantime, ordinary people are trying to establish the number to the combination lock to the chain that binds them to the Gods and monsters created by imperial power. Jeremy Corbyn has the number to the combination in the jacket pocket of his unkempt suit.

The EU referendum: the case for ‘staying in’

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By Daniel Margrain

David Cameron’s (failed) attempts at diplomatic arm twisting of European leaders’ was made with a view to appeasing right wing Europhobe factions in order to strengthen the pro-EU position within his party and, by extension, satisfy others outside such as the Henry Jackson Society who lobby it. Any EU concessions offered to Cameron on economic or social policy in return for continued EU membership would undermine whatever vestiges of power the EU has in terms of protecting ordinary people from the rapaciousness of corporations.

Also, in terms of immigration policy, any concessions to Cameron by the other EU member states would play into the hands of neoconservatives and other far right figures like Douglas Murray, associate director of the Henry Jackson Society and the openly racist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), co-founder and former spokesman and leader of the fascist English Defence League (EDL). These figures, and similar within mainstream media circles like Melanie Phillips and Nick Cohen, deliberately conflate immigration with Islamist terrorism in order to pander to the prejudices among aspects of the electorate which Cameron responds to in kind. The implications, we are told, are clear: for as long as the country is part of the EU, “the swamping” of the indigenous British population by alien migrants from the other EU countries cannot be halted.

Unfortunately, this is the neoliberal context that is the dominant narrative shaping the British EU membership referendum campaign terrain. Politically, this is being marked out by the right wing eurosceptic Tories and by their outriders in the UK Independence Party (UKIP). The British electorate has been told in increasingly strident terms that British “national sovereignty” is at stake without informing them what the alternative to national sovereignty could potentially entail.

Everything that has been positive about the EU over the years appears to be in retreat while everything negative seems to be accelerating. Already the EU has ceded a great deal to corporations at the expense of people and this is a process that seems to be ongoing. It’s simply wrong and immoral, for example, that subsidies for the richest landowners in Europe continue to increase apace. It’s also wrong and immoral for the EU to have attempted to negotiate with the United States in secret the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which effectively represents the undemocratic transfer of power from parliaments to corporations.

Another unwelcome consequence of the direction the EU is moving in, is the way the most powerful countries within it, most notably Germany, have used their economic leverage to weaken the democratic will of the less powerful such as Greece and Portugal. There are many more compelling reasons – including environmental and ecological ones – that can be justifiably argued as to why Britain should pull out of the EU.and why it is not functioning in the way that many on the left think it should. But are these arguments sufficient enough reason for the UK to abandon the project altogether?

Campaigning for the broadest possible opposition to neoliberal EU austerity policies as well as a different, socialist Europe, seem to me to be perfectly compatible with voting in favour of continued EU membership. As John Palmer argued:

“Socialists will want to use the debate about Britain and the European Union to build the widest possible campaign to force a break with the prevailing austerity policies of the euro-area powers. They will want to defend parties on the left—such as Syriza in Greece and possibly Podemos in Spain later this year—from further strong-arm policies designed to undermine their democratic credentials. If the socialists, including Syriza and Podemos are to succeed in radically changing the direction of European Union policy, the left will need to develop much more integrated, supranational forms of political organisation at the European level. This will require profound changes to the almost exclusively national framework in which such parties have traditionally thought and acted. Big capital, for its part, ­certainly understands this.”

For the tide to shift in favour of a different kind of Europe requires a corresponding shift in the relations of political power throughout the countries of Europe that are sympathetic to the ideals of Podemos and Corbynism, both of which are gaining traction in Spain and Britain respectively. This will, in practical terms, mean that the left will have to win arguments on key issues such as the protection of EU social legislation and human rights. This is most likely to be achieved as the result of an organized Europe-wide movement in favour of the kind of workers’ rights and protections’ that the neoconservatives want to opt out of. There can be no doubt that if Britain leaves the EU many European regulations restricting working hours and other employment and social reforms will be scrapped.

The left will also have to argue against the attempts of the anti-EU right to roll back the powers of both the EU Court of Justice (ECJ) and—more urgently—of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The Tory establishment has objected to some of the humane rulings of the ECHR that, in particular, includes the protection of the human rights of immigrants at risk of being deported by the UK. The ECHR is itself outside the remit of the European Union. But the ECJ is bound by the overarching decisions of the ECHR when ruling on matters of specifically EU law. The Tories want a “British” convention on human rights to replace the European convention which if achieved, would further seriously undermine civil liberties and human rights in Britain.

Much of the Tory austerity drive has to do with the systemic and structural limitations associated with state power at the national level. The dual concepts of national sovereignty and the “pooling of sovereignty” are incongruous. The latter implies greater European integration and federalization which is the visionary concept of the EU envisaged by the former president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors. This is no bad thing. Pooling sovereignty that benefits a greater number of people than would otherwise be the case represents a move in the right direction. It seems to me that we need greater European integration, not less.

But this point of view is saddled by the argument – no matter how unfounded it is – that the case for greater European integration is undermined by the lackluster performance of the Euro. In truth, the national schadenfruede that exemplified the British government’s reaction to the problems associated with a currency union viz a vie the Euro was a red-herring. The problem is not currency union, but the lack of any fiscal union. The one is not feasible without the other. The economic argument for the alleged failure of the EU as an economic project, therefore, can not be made on the basis of the relative weakness of the Euro, but rather on the lack of any implementation of a fiscal union.

Despite it’s many faults, I principally view the European Union as an historically progressive project that can, through effective political organization within the EU, be re-orientated to benefit the many as opposed to the few. Any political derailment of the unification and integration process would likely lead to the ‘Balkanization’ of Europe. This would increase the risks to humanity in terms of conflict and war in the nuclear age which is arguably greater now than during any other epoch in history. On balance, the only rational and principled way for progressives on the left to vote in the forthcoming referendum is Yes to stay in.

 

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