On June 1, 1381, thousands of English rural laborers descended on the capital of London, the first martial event in what would come to be known as the Peasants Revolt. Over 650 years later, a somewhat less bloody rebellion showed itself in the same city, these latter-day peasants facing similar fiscal provocation to their 14th-century forerunners. Tens of thousands of small farmers descended on London to protest the latest in a series of government policies seemingly designed to destroy the farming industry in Britain, at least in its current form.
The rally was at Westminster, home of government, mother of all parliaments. It was snowing, which would have depleted attendance had this been a pro-Palestine march, but these people are farmers. Being outside in bad weather is what they do. Their plight has attracted a well-known celebrity to their cause — a modern sine qua non for the protesting classes — in Jeremy Clarkson, for many years the presenter of a hugely popular TV motoring show, Top Gear. Clarkson himself bought a farm, and although he acknowledges his relative financial independence compared with the average farmer, he is popular, articulate and conservative. There is a very English rebellion afoot.
As with the Peasants Revolt, the farmers are rebelling over taxation. But whereas Richard II was trying to raise money to fight France, Sir Keir Starmer wishes to wage war on his own people, the people he was elected to serve less than five months ago (albeit it with only 20% of the electorate voting for his party). The PM’s method of raising the royal revenue is much the same as Richard’s but, not having any serfs to subjugate, he is sending his tax-gatherers after the small farmer. Well, at least he will avoid the Hitler comparisons that bedevil President-elect Donald Trump. Even Hitler looked after the small farmer.
In its recent budget, the government announced that a 20 percent inheritance tax would be levied on all UK farm property worth over £1m, as of April 1, 2026. Those incurring the tax would have a decade to pay it off. Now, a million is chump change in most sectors of the UK property market, but in terms of farm land it will hit two-thirds of the total of the roughly 209,000 British farms, and it won’t be the quaint old farmhouse that pushes up the value of the property. The average UK farm is worth a little over £2m, and farm land is a treasure trove to property developers, who are financially equipped to market aggressively. Farms which have been in families for generations will now be left financially underwater, and therefore easy and rich pickings for hawkish developers.
A case can be made that farming hasn’t changed essentially since British land workers operated under the feudal system at the time of the Peasants Revolt. But while the methods of this primary, extractive industry have remained largely unchanged, the land farmed has not. “Buy land”, suggested Mark Twain. “They’ve stopped making it”. Indeed, but they haven’t stopped ascribing value to it, value which may and does change over time. To a farmer, a hundred acres is his equivalent of the fixed plant of a factory. He grows crops on the land and he sells what the cattle don’t eat. That’s farming, it’s what the land is for. But for the property consortiums even now roaming the length and breadth of the land, assessing and auditing and circling round farmsteads like vultures, a hundred acres is a big block of flats and a supermarket.
Farm land in the UK has proved a good, stable investment in the past 20 years. In 2004, it was worth £3,000 per acre, rising to £7,000 in 2014 to £9-10,000 today. But that is its value as farm land. Business consortiums will have long been planning a land-grab of British farms, with the full backing of government, and they will be in a financial position to operate outside market parameters and make a lot of farmers an offer they can’t refuse. This is a government-assisted buyers’ market for the new land barons as they buy out what remains of the old ones.
In fact, this whole legislative instrument is designed to impact farmers’ finances negatively. Supposing 10% of small farmers decide to sell up in the wake of the new tax, a scenario quite possible and even probable. Not only does the value of farm land drop concomitantly in a saturated market, but even the price of plant and other chattel assets would drop, as one in ten small British farmers all try to sell their tractors at once. A tractor costs around a quarter of a million pounds, a combine-harvester half a million. This is not selling off the office furniture in a fire sale.
It should not be suggested, however, that the current British government has no money available to invest in farming, or that it is failing to invest that money. Why, it has just signed off £536m as an aid package to help farmers grow food for consumption in the UK. It’s just that the farms happen to be in Africa, Asia, and South America, including recipients in Brazil, the world’s eleventh richest country. Some of the money is said to be going towards “carbon capture” farming, so the dispossessed, last generation of farmers in the UK have got that going for them.
The satirical image the British have of farmers is rooted in a past of class war, when the landed gentry had money. But the upper-middle class, gentleman farmer, in his new Range Rover and expensive Barbour jacket, doesn’t really exist outside of situation comedy. Farming is as tough and visceral as it ever was, and as for wealth creation, that is not what farming seems to most UK farmers. It is estimated that small farms make 1–2% of their value annually as profit, and the average farmer earns a shade under £40,000, around £5,000 more than the national average. Given the variables factored into farming, that is not much of a slush fund should one become necessary. Nor is it much of a financial reward, despite the vestigial, reflex class response of the metropolitan Leftist elite who run contemporary British politics and its provisional wing in the media.
The Left are acting as contrarily as ever over the farmers’ plight. Where once the media and the Party would have got behind the working man as a default position, the temperament of the Labour Left has changed in recent decades, led as this revolution was by the Blair government. Farmers now are subsumed under the category “white working class”, and so despised on two fronts by Labour. They are also an easy target as they represent White industrial secession. You just don’t get Black or Muslim farmers, so there is no problem with the ethnics as far as Labour and their acolytes are concerned. If there were Black or Muslim tillers of the soil in significant numbers, farming would be the best protected, most lavishly funded industry in Great Britain.
This synchronizes, as ever, with the response of the media complex. Ex-Labour spin-doctor John McTernan, a man who made a living under Tony Blair altering and manipulating facts and figures to make them fit for consumption by the public, gives a flavor of the metropolitan attitude to the plight of the farmers. He suggested Starmer do to the farmers what Thatcher did to the miners (Starmer disowned him, but that means nothing). That is, in the popular mind, decimate the industry and force men out of the pit, perhaps getting your enforcers to rough them up a bit while you’re there. He suggests that farming is an industry we can do without, but that’s not what he means. He means it’s an industry in the wrong hands.
Whose hands would be the right ones, for our globalist overlords? Veteran maverick politician George Galloway was one of many emphatically not on the political Right to suggest that the UK is due to be sold off to BlackRock, Bill Gates, and other financial super-predators. Gates has bought up a lot of American land, and allegedly has land here in Costa Rica. As Kissinger said, control the food, control the people. And if Britain really is on the market, then the British Left thoroughly approve.
Veteran Left-wing journalist Will Hutton, writing inevitably in The Guardian, does not see farmers as the stewards of the countryside they so clearly are, but is of the opinion that they “have hoarded land for too long”, as though small farmers were sick old misers gloating over a casket of jewels. In fact, farmers are fighting so that they can pass on the land, and its stewardship, to a new generation — the very opposite of miserliness. There is more than a whiff of revenge for the Brexit vote from the Left, as farmers are widely perceived to have typically voted to leave the EU.
This attack on farmers also dovetails neatly with a wider assault on the British countryside. For the past few years, regular pieces have appeared in the mainstream press claiming that “the countryside is racist”. A new piece of spurious research will show that Blacks and Muslims are under-represented o’er hill and dale, the courtier press will dutifully report it, and debates will creak into action on chat shows once again. It’s the familiar, gormless, post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy it always is, they even have their own warped syllogism:
A sector of society without a sufficient number of Black people is therefore racist.
The countryside does not feature a sufficient number of Black people.
Therefore, the countryside is racist.
I discount the fact that, for the vast majority of White folk enjoying the countryside, the absence of Blacks is a much-desired feature, not a glitch. The “racist countryside” trope reveals two key aspects, two ascriptions, which feature in all these faux-exclusionist charades. Firstly, Whites are always and already guilty of this bucolic apartheid. Secondly, the absence of Blacks in the countryside can only be because of racism, and not due to the moral agency, or decision-making abilities, of Blacks. Liberals do not believe in such things. In the parched and perverted landscape of the Leftist mindset, that is the sole reason there are almost no Black farmers. It is not that Blacks are culturally unsuited to farming due to their hunter-gatherer genetic predisposition, or even that they choose not to pursue that career path. It is because Britain is irredeemably racist. It is irredeemably racist, as a matter of fact, just not in the way the Leftist believes. Anti-Whiteness is at the core of the Labour strategy to defarm Britain.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is, we are constantly reminded, the first woman to hold the post. She is also alleged to have falsified her CV to get on in her chosen career, claiming that she was an economist for a major bank during a period when she was actually a teller for a lesser banking concern. This kind if deception is, it seems, an entry-level requirement for today’s political class. On the subject of inheritance tax and farms, however, she treated the viewing public to a rare and candid event. This took the form of an explanation, on camera, by a British Chancellor, of exactly why a new tax is being levied, and what will happen to the tax weal generated. The money raised from the farmers, Reeves said, as though explaining arithmetic to the problem child in a fourth-grade class, will be used to help pay for the NHS. The implication here is that farmers should be grateful for “free” healthcare, and should be made to pay for it, despite the fact that everyone already pours income tax into this fiscal black hole, farmers included.
Calculators flickered across the internet, and it was soon established that the likely revenue from inheritance tax on farms, expressed annually, would pay for 25 hours of NHS provision. The farming industry is dealt a blow that might finish it, but at least we get a day’s worth of paying diversity officers.
And what would be the ultimate fate of the land? Is it simply required for housing, with some estimating that the country needs to build a house every two minutes just to keep pace with rising demand? What else could it be used for? There are rumors. In fact, the political scene in the UK at present is positively Elizabethan — the first Elizabeth, not her recently departed successor — and the court, as they say, is awash with rumor. And the loudest whisper is that of “new towns”. These were first tried in the 1960s and 70s as a way of rationalizing the overspill from the cities, a never-expanding suburbia that was packaged rather than allowed to sprawl. But these new towns were for the White, indigenous citizens of the UK — that was an unspoken guarantee. This was long before the present day, in which everything down to and including urban planning is geared to operate in opposition to the wants and needs of native Whites. If one rumor in particular is anywhere near the truth, that farm land is required for building new estates for immigrants, then the UK’s cold civil war may be about to turn hot.
This Labour Party is governing like it’s the 1970s. They don’t grasp that if the government makes announcements that are gross distortions of reality, it no longer takes a couple of intrepid gumshoe reporters burning the midnight oil to expose it six months later. The real facts and figures will be all over YouTube by noon, and this is the main reason Labour is going after big tech. Thus, when Reeves dismissed the inheritance tax as affecting only about 500 farms — and implying that these would be the richest holdings — it didn’t take long before the actual figures of farms affected was going viral. The truth is that roughly two-thirds of Britain’s farms will be crippled by this new tax, brought in just when arable food supply chains have been so adversely affected by the Russian incursion into Ukraine. Does Starmer think he can get away with this, considering he has already risked the nation’s ire by removing winter heating payments from the elderly? Yes, he does, and for a simple reason.
This has all the makings of a one-term administration. The question is simple; is it intended that way as just another globalist chess move? Tory politician Rab Butler famously said that a week is a long time in politics, but in four years and with a comfortable bilateral mandate, Labour can achieve a great deal more ruinous policy before the next general election, which might be a perfect one to lose, particularly for Starmer. The Labour Party can be real wreckers, not the ones invented by Stalin. Then they can all just walk away and write their memoirs.
Sir Keir Starmer has been compared to Stalin for reasons other than the mere similarity of their names. “Stalin” means “man of steel”, but it is difficult to see just which alloy Starmer is formed of. On the level of personality, the British PM’s lack of any discernible charisma whatsoever is fascinating in itself. There is something subtly sinister about a man who, when asked what his favorite book or poem was, looks surprised at the question and says he has neither. He answers questions as though quoting from old NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) text-books. This is Tourette’s Syndrome as government policy.
But the British farmers are not kulaks, at least not yet, and the Peasant’s Revolt 2.0 involves polling rather than pitchforks. The popularity of both the Labour Party in power and Sir Keir Starmer personally have plummeted to record depths. On November 23, a petition was started on the official UK Government website asking for a second General Election. These petitions are theoretically considered for debate in the House of Commons if they reach 100,000 signatories, although this rarely if ever happens. It is a sort of virtual democracy, like a video game rather than the real thing, there but not there, like an online Speaker’s Corner where you can get it all off your chest but affect nothing. 24 hours later, the number of signatures approached a million, and after 48 hours it had passed the two million mark and is still rising at the time of writing. This may not be the men of Kent storming the City of London in 1381 and putting heads on pikes, but these exercises are a good litmus test of national sentiment, and if the polls and the punditry continue to pile up against Starmer and his fragile-looking government, they may wake up to find, once again, that the peasants are revolting.
There was, in retrospect, no chance that BBC and its Talks and News output would ever be anything other than left-wing, pro-Jewish and anti-fascist. Since before it began to broadcast opinion pieces and news, the BBC was populated by “fanatics” like Charles Siepmann and Hilda Matheson who posited the myth of the “ultra-conservatism of the culture” and the “old Conservative clique” as needing redress by their own “progressive policies” and “subversive theory of balance”. Such people never willingly yield institutions of which they have taken control, and instead of facing any threat of being turfed out, they were then and are now confronted only by flaccid or traitorous Tories. The BBC, as Tom Mills says, “is part of a cluster of powerful and largely unaccountable institutions which dominate British society—not just ‘a mouthpiece for the Establishment’ as Owen Jones suggests, but an integral part of it.” Neither Mills nor Jones, though, would acknowledge that the Establishment was already by the early 1930s partly, and the BBC almost entirely, controlled by socialists, communists, globalists, homosexuals and Jews. Reith and Chamberlain headed the broadcaster and the government but did not prevent their ‘crusading’ subordinates having their own way. While communists and fellow travellers staffed the Corporation and amplified themselves and their comrades, not only were fascists or nationalists entirely excluded, but even the views of those who supported Chamberlain and peace were barely heard.
The BBC, the Bloomsbury Group, the Comintern and the NKVD in the 1930s
After its first five years in operation, the British Broadcasting Company became the wholly state-controlled British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927. John Reith, the first chief executive, wrote in 1924 of his “high conception of the inherent possibilities of the service” and later asserted that “‘the brute force of monopoly’ was a necessity in British broadcasting.”1 As a preponderance of politicians and civil servants as well as the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association agreed, the grant of the BBC’s first Royal Charter in 1927 and Reith’s ascent to the position of Director-General were virtually unchallenged. The brute force would fare better than the higher conception.
The Company, originally a cartel of radio set manufacturers, had been lucrative for its directors, but the Post Office had sanctioned their privileges for questionable reasons, and after the agreed period of royalties and having established the state enforcement of the licence fee, and under a government less obliging to Marconi and GEC, the Company was reformed into a ‘public corporation’. Reith himself was the leading advocate of the novel concept which, as with David Sarnoff and RCA in the USA, happened to provide him with a personal fief of immense influence. Reith’s “higher conception” consisted in a belief in “democratic aim, not in democratic method”, not aiming to give the public what they wanted, and still less any choice, but rather what he thought best for them.2 The BBC licence fee, originally a device to compel listeners to deliver royalties to the manufacturers’ cartel, served after the BBC’s incorporation to compel them to fund the state broadcaster while all other would-be broadcasters were prohibited.
The Public Corporation
The BBC’s official history describes Reith as desiring an organisation “independent” of the market and of governments.3 This has only ever been the case in the formal sense that the corporation depends directly on the crown instead, but the powers of the crown have for centuries been exercised by the government anyway. As Tom Mills describes, “renewals of the Royal Charter, as well as the appointment of BBC governors and trustees, have formally been made by an Order of the Privy Council” using “the residential powers of the absolutist state which have never been subject to democratic controls” and which are, “in essence, absolutist decrees of the central government, signed-off by the monarch of the day.”4 The government also grants the corporation its licence fee increases.5 The BBC could be deprived of funding or closed by any government that wished to do so, but none ever has; the idea of public corporations was initially embraced by leftists, but the Conservative Party exists to consolidate the gains of their faux-opponents.6
Reith’s BBC consciously strove to present itself as a kind of conglomerated person with whom the public would identify and whom they would trust. In Asa Briggs’ words, early BBC staff wanted “to ensure that people felt—without thinking—that the BBC was theirs.”7 Announcers were soon, by some listeners, “thought of as the BBC, for it was they who mediated between the listeners and the programmes.”8 Announcers were deemed the best placed of all BBC employees “to build up in the public mind a sense of the BBC’s collective personality.” They would represent “[t]he BBC itself” and its own “policy and ideals”.9 An article in the Spectator in 1936 said that “The BBC has a personality of its own, pervasive and unmistakable, and it affects its reactions to public events, to education, to entertainment, and to the arts: it is the foundation of its policy.”10 The Corporation was and is, as with any media organisation, unavoidably biased in whom it recruits, what its editors select to report and omit and how it allocates programme time. However, it developed the ability to appear objective to many viewers while expressing approval or disapproval by the variation of announcers’, presenters’ and newsreaders’ tones of voice and, in documentaries, the use of background music and lighting.11 The more trusting or unthinking elements of the public are subliminally persuaded by such methods.
Reith was chosen by the BBC’s first board of directors, but as they receded in importance, he grew, and standard histories of the corporation speak of ‘Reithianism’ as its founding ideology. This blurs the reality, but Reith was certainly a formative factor. He was a Presbyterian who served in and supported the Great War.12 His diary and memoirs show that he opposed unionisation at the BBC and in his previous job, had “no particular feelings about Communism”, privately sympathised with Adolf Hitler at times and made occasional favourable remarks about Benito Mussolini. Yet in 1939 he described himself as a “Gladstonian liberal”.13 He wrote in October 1942 that Winston Churchill was a “bloody swine” and “the greatest menace we’ve ever had” with “country and Empire sacrificed to his megalomania, to his monstrous obstinacy and wrongheadedness.”14 His insistence on formality, elocution and a privileged position for Christianity are commonly said to characterise the BBC during and long after his tenure, but his own political and cultural views do not appear to have become those of the organisation.
John Reith
Crusading
Reith appears to have concerned himself primarily with broadcasting per se; he did not attempt to control all the BBC’s output or those he began to disagree with in the 1930s—people he had also hired and had come to rely upon. As Asa Briggs says, “The BBC’s philosophy owed an immense amount to one man: the BBC’s programmes were the work of many men of extremely varied experience and outlook.”15 He describes them as “men and women who ‘believed in broadcasting’ almost as a social and cultural crusade.”16 They also, more or less frankly, saw broadcasting as a means of indoctrination and intended to use it as such. As early as 1925, the leading Fabian Beatrice Webb had written that wireless had “a stupendous influence… over the lives of the people” and “might become… a terrible engine of compulsory conformity … in opinion and culture” but asserted that the BBC’s use of its influence was “eminently right”. Hilda Matheson, after six years at the Corporation, wrote in 1933 that “Broadcasting is a huge agency of standardization, the most powerful the world has ever seen.”17 Labour politician Herbert Morrison, later Home Secretary under Winston Churchill, had from the BBC’s earliest days “demanded that broadcasting … should be publicly owned and controlled.”18 In 1946, Morrison described broadcasting as “at least as powerful a vehicle of ideas as the printing press” and acknowledged that “the body which decides what goes into a broadcasting programme has an enormous power for good and evil over the minds of the nation” and averred that “that power must not fall into the wrong hands”, out of the right ones.19
After it began to be allowed to broadcast ‘controversial’ programmes from 1927 and as it became involved in education, nearly all the department heads and editors Reith’s BBC hired ensured that the political and cultural output was routinely leftist.20 An early producer of ‘controversial’ programming, Lionel Fielden, wrote that “[w]e really believed that broadcasting could revolutionize human opinion.”21 Charles Siepmann, the second Head of Talks, was in his own words “fanatically devoted”; he believed that
“broadcasting was the greatest miracle in human history… everything that any man had ever written down on paper, every note of music that had ever been composed was now universally available. This was what you might call ‘the new age of cultural communism’. And I believed that.”
Charles Siepmann
Siepmann referred to his own “progressive outlook” and “the progressive policies that both Hilda and I were pushing very hard indeed”. He lamented that Reith agonised too earnestly over balance and didn’t share Siepmann’s “very, very sensitive social conscience”. Siepmann remarked that his own “sense of balance” was “to redress the ultra-conservatism of the culture of that time… my theory of balance ‘was subversive in the sense that it was disruptive of the old Conservative clique” and the “Conservative Mind”.22
BBC Education and Talks
The BBC founded several publications, of which Radio Times continues today. Its first and formative editor from 1927 was Eric Maschwitz, son of a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, whose career, like many BBC employees, included spells in broadcasting, the movie and music industries, the intelligence services, and wartime sabotage and terrorism under the Special Operations Executive. The Listener, founded in 1929, was an “educational periodical”, a printer of BBC Talks and a vehicle for the Corporation’s ‘cultural mission’. “By 1935 its circulation had reached 52,000, more than that of the New Statesman and the Spectator combined.”23 Richard Lambert was the first editor, having previously been, with Siepmann, the BBC’s representative on the Council for Adult Education, which the BBC funded to promote socialists including G D H Cole, John Sankey, William Temple and Harold Laski.24 Lambert employed Janet Adam Smith, later of the Fabian New Statesman, and the homosexual Joe Ackerley as assistant editors; his team’s use of The Listener to promote homosexual and communist poets like Cecil Day-Lewis, Wystan Auden, John Lehmann, Stephen Spender and Herbert Read provoked complaints from readers.25 Christopher Isherwood, another favourite poet, was a close associate of the Berlin-based pro-transgender, anti-nationalist activist Magnus Hirschfeld.26
Auden, Isherwood and Spender
Talks were originally a sub-division of BBC Education (which also included religion and early news operations), but “…in January 1927 the Control Board decided that a separate “Talks Section’ should be formed, quite distinct from education, news, and religion, with Miss Matheson in charge. She remained there until January 1932, leaving a very powerful imprint on the BBC.”27 Matheson was hired personally by Reith, first as an assistant in Education, then as the first Director of Talks in 1927. The BBC’s news operations began at the same time, initially merely repeating press agency reports. According to Kate Murphy, Matheson was “part of London’s cultural and intellectual elite” and “[her] approach to Talks reflected her liberal and progressive viewpoint.”28 She was also a feminist, a lesbian and a Soviet sympathiser who used her position to promote the views of her friends, lovers and comrades, especially members of the subversive Bloomsbury group and the socialist Fabian Society.29 Lionel Fielden was her main producer, also homosexual, anti-imperial and a supporter of Mohandas Gandhi, whom he promoted on BBC radio in India.
According to Asa Briggs, “[t]he early members of the Talks Department introduced to broadcasting some of its most brilliant performers—Harold Nicolson, Vernon Bartlett, Ernest Newman, Stephen King-Hall, Raymond Gram Swing, and John Hilton.”30 Simon Potter adds that “Matheson invited influential and pugnacious figures from the world of politics to speak on air, including Winston Churchill and Harold Nicolson, as well as cultural figures like HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw.”31 John Hilton was “an ardent trade unionist” admired by communists including Guy Burgess with whom he later collaborated at the BBC; both were recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).32 Nicolson, King-Hall, Bartlett and Churchill were all vociferous proponents of an anti-German foreign policy.33 Socialists were consultants as well as guests. “‘I remember best the trinity of EM Forster, Desmond McCarthy and HG Wells,’ Lionel Fielden has written, ‘who all gave us freely of their time and wise counsels, and would sit round our gas fires at Savoy Hill, talking of the problems and possibilities of broadcasting.’” 34 Nicolson was not only a guest but the husband of Matheson’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. Beatrice and Sidney Webb were central members of the Fabian Society and apologists for the Soviet Union during its most tyrannical period. George Bernard Shaw, also a Fabian socialist and Soviet sympathiser, was a proponent of racial mixing who cursed and derided ‘anti-Semites’ with the same canards used by The Times in 1882: “Anti-Semitism is the hatred of the lazy, ignorant, fat-headed Gentile for the pertinacious Jew who, schooled by adversity to use his brains to the utmost, outdoes him in business.”35 HG Wells, another defender of the Soviets, was given BBC airtime by Matheson to advocate for a world state and the end of nations.36 Matheson’s “pugnacious figures” also included the Marxist and Zionist Harold Laski, the Soviet agent EF Wise, the ‘Red Countess’ of Warwick, the Quaker and socialist Philip Noel-Baker, Ernest Bevin, the militant feminist Viscountess Rhondda and the pro-Soviet ‘pacifist’ and Focus member Norman Angell, as well as John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, EM Forster and others of the Bloomsbury circle. William Beveridge, a Liberal by party though a Fabian socialist in deed, “gave six talks on unemployment in 1931, following on a general series on the same subject.”37
Hilda Matheson
Asa Briggs writes that “[u]nder Hilda Matheson the BBC employed speakers of every persuasion, but this did not save it from charges of ‘leftwing bias’.”38 Briggs, a pro-BBC historian, was perhaps merely re-wording Matheson’s own statement in 1933 that “[a]n impression of left-wing bias is always liable to be created by any agency which voices unfamiliar views. … It does not always follow that the ideas themselves are of the left. In practice, they usually hail from every point of the compass.”39 As Ronald Coase said in 1950, “The fact that the Corporation has been criticised by the Right and the Left hardly proves, as many of its supporters contend, that it is impartial; of itself it merely shows that the Corporation has not been consistently at one of the extremes.”40 The Corporation leaned strongly to the left as soon as it began to broadcast opinionated content and was merely occasionally told to cancel one talk or disinvite a particularly aggravating speaker. I find no record of any nationalist or fascist being invited to give talks, and there were not even many Tories. All figures ‘of the right’ invited to speak on the BBC appear to have been anti-German.41 Ian McIntyre refers to Churchill as one of the “mavericks of the right”, a true if understated description in the sense that Churchill’s affectations and associations were vaguely right-wing but his deeds and legacy were the opposite.42 Lord Lloyd, first head of the British Council, an anti-fascist cultural propaganda body spun out of the Foreign Office, who spent the latter half of the 1930s agitating for war against Germany, was regarded within the BBC as of the “extreme right”.43 The BBC ‘balanced’ anti-German Soviet sympathisers with anti-German Soviet collaborators. The war, or the wars, against Germany, both of which Lloyd and Churchill supported, did more than any other events in history to empower the left and socialism, as Neville Chamberlain had predicted and striven to avoid.
Marxists and communists
Matheson’s contumacy toward Reith, especially in regard to criticism from the Daily Mail of her promotion of her comrades, resulted in her resignation. The New Statesman predictably blamed “official and orthodox pressure” which kept out “the expression of new ideas”, though “paid a tribute to the BBC as a whole” which, after all, was still a state monopoly and thus a castle to be held.44 Matheson was succeeded as Director of Talks by another leftist, the “like-minded” Charles Siepmann, of whose spell Briggs writes that “the same charges” of left-wing bias “were frequently repeated, and the Corporation found it desirable to seek ‘rightwing speakers’ who would offset criticism.”45 The dearth of such speakers actually broadcasting suggests that the Corporation went no further than ‘finding them desirable’. Instead, the socialist JB Priestley was given space for a “personal comment”, Winston Churchill warned about the ‘threat’ of Germany, and “An excellent series called Whither Britain? … was broadcast in 1934 (with Wells, Bevin, Shaw, and Lloyd George among the speakers) and this was followed later in the year by a series on The Causes of War (with, among others, Lord Beaverbrook, Norman Angell, Major Douglas—of Social Credit fame—and Aldous Huxley).”46
Eventually Siepmann, like Matheson, was, as Kate Murphy describes, “censured for being too radical”, i.e., “transferred to the role of Director of Regional Relations” in 1935.47 Hilda Matheson objected in the Observer, seeing him as her continuation.48 In Siepmann’s new remit, the largest of the BBC’s regions was BBC North, for which the Programme Director, EAF Harding, on his appointment in 1933, had “raided the Manchester Guardian” for its journalists “and with the full co-operation of WP Crozier, the editor” had drawn upon “the services of a number of the Guardian’s leaderwriters and reporters as North Regional broadcasters.”49 The strongly left-wing Guardian is the newspaper most read at the BBC today, vastly out of proportion to its sales to the public, and the BBC long sought to recruit to the greatest extent possible from among Guardian readers. Under Siepmann, John Coatman had been “deliberately brought in” by Reith for the role of the BBC’s Chief News Editor “as ‘right wing offset’ to ‘balance’ the direction of talks and news” but “showed no sign of doing so”; Coatman “insisted on his own independence as a maker of policy”.50 Richard Maconachie, “a man of conservative views” became Head of Talks in 1936, formally senior to the Director of Talks. According to Ben Harker, “His Director of Talks, Norman Luker, was by contrast a liberal intrigued by the far left” who “was keen to create a platform for a Marxist analysis of the issue” of class and wanted to reorient talks to appeal to the same audience as the anti-fascist Picture Post, edited by Istvan Reich, a Jewish political exile from Hungary, and the Left Book Club run by the Jewish communist publisher Victor Gollancz. Luker was a long-standing friend of the Cambridge Apostle, homosexual, Soviet spy and producer at the BBC, Guy Burgess. The robustness of the “right-wing offset” was evident in the rejection of Luker’s preferred Marxist lecturer, the Cambridge communist don Maurice Dobb; instead Luker had to settle for Arthur Horner, a member of the Communist Party’s central committee and a trade unionist. Dobb had, at any rate, already appeared “periodically” on the BBC earlier in the decade. Horner, in his broadcast in November 1938,
ranged freely from Marx’s theory of class struggle as the engine of history, through to an explication of the Communist Party’s line on fascism, to a description of the Spanish Civil War as militarized class struggle, and into a justification of the Moscow Trials as revolutionary justice against counter-revolution. His talk, which was published unedited in the BBC’s in-house magazine The Listener, concluded with a familiar Popular Front appeal for what he called ‘the cultural, clerical and professional classes’ – generally the assumed audience for National Programme Talks – to come over to the working class in the struggle against capital and fascism”51
BBC North
The BBC also issued Marxist propaganda via other avenues. As Ben Harker describes, communists coveted the BBC’s “growing cultural and political influence in the 1930s” which drew upon “its increasing significance in the construction of British identity, notably in its power to fashion the national narrative.”52 Fortunately for them, when the Corporation began to establish regional divisions in 1933, BBC North, the largest, became a “cauldron of Marxist and left-wing mischief” under its first Programme Director, the avowed Marxist EAF Harding.53 The producer Olive Shapley, the folk singer AL Lloyd, the thespian and director Joan Littlewood and her husband the singer and actor Ewan McColl (born Jimmie Miller) were central figures and all were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. According to Shapley, Harding was also a “comrade”.54 The North producer Geoffrey Bridson was merely a close friend and a sympathiser who didn’t join the party but was introduced to Harding by the Comintern propagandist Claud Cockburn, inventor of the myth of the Cliveden Set.55 Shapley, though she left the party after university (as did Guy Burgess), continued as an agent of the cause, moved to New York in 1941, and interviewed guests like the subversive Eleanor Roosevelt and the singer Paul Robeson, later winner of the Stalin Prize, for the BBC’s Children’s Hour. According to Harker, “It was Harding’s view that all radio was propaganda: broadcasts which failed to give voice to the working class silenced it, those which failed to address structural inequalities shored up the status quo.”56 Harding broadcast propaganda without subtlety. Documentaries like May Day by Bridson simply issued a communist reading of history, one which led inexorably toward The Revolution.57 The North team produced programmes about Chartism that coaxed the listener toward the same conclusion: working Britons had not yet completed their revolution. The Classic Soil, proudly memorialised by the BBC today, was an overt vindication of the 19th-century writings of Friedrich Engels, co-author of the Communist Manifesto and Capital, read by Ernst Hoffman, an anti-fascist immigrant from Germany.58 Shapley, the producer, later described her own work as “probably the most unfair and biased programme ever put out by the BBC”.59
Olive Shapley and Eleanor Roosevelt on Children’s Hour
Soviet espionage
From its founding in 1917, the Soviet Union had engaged in ceaseless attempts to dissolve and undermine Britain and the empire, using the Comintern, espionage, front groups and the assistance of sympathisers.60 As John Costello says, referring to the late 1920s and early 1930s, “Stalin’s lust for obtaining secret intelligence endowed [the] OGPU and its “organs” with unrivaled power, and he stepped up the pressure to expand the penetration of foreign governments. The primary target was Britain—the main adversary, in Stalin’s eyes[.]”61 The OGPU was the successor of the Cheka and predecessor of the NKVD and KGB. The Soviet penetration strategy came to centre upon upper-class students at Cambridge and Oxford who were best-placed to enter the civil service; the infamous ‘Cambridge Five’ and others better concealed, were thus recruited. With some awareness of the threat, the most conservative elements at the Security Service (MI5) held meetings with the BBC in 1935 which “set in motion a system of political vetting” to cover new BBC employees which was “formalised with a written agreement in 1937.”62 The vetting was insufficient; in any case, MI5 itself had employed subversives like Hilda Matheson during the Great War and since.63 The Soviet spy Guy Burgess was appointed as a producer of BBC Talks in June 1936 and was recruited to work for MI6 during his time there.
The intelligence services contained genuine opponents of the left, but the social worlds of their agents, Foreign Office employees and other civil servants, Cambridge Apostles, overt and covert communists, the Bloomsbury group, and upper class homosexuals all appear to have blended together, as is exemplified by Burgess himself. Burgess later made Anthony Blunt, a fellow Apostle, homosexual and Soviet spy, a frequent guest on the BBC, and elevated the already-high status of the bisexual anti-fascist Harold Nicolson at the corporation. Jews were prominent in the same circles. Burgess met the philosophers AJ Ayer and Isaiah Berlin, both later to work in MI6, at a dinner party hosted by Felix Frankfurter.64 Victor Rothschild, the third Baron Rothschild, was another Apostle; according to Victor’s sister Miriam, Burgess was one of “the many people” whom her mother Rózsika, “assisted or supported by periodic and regular payments” for unclear reasons. Another was the Comintern agent Rudolph Katz.65 Victor Rothschild joined MI5 in 1939 (or before); the following year, Anthony Blunt was recruited on Rothschild’s recommendation.66
Victor Rothschild, the third Baron Rothschild
The suitability of Cambridge University as the prime location for Soviet recruitment owed much to the concentration of homosexuals among teaching staff and students. The Apostles, who included the amoralist philosopher GE Moore and others of the Bloomsbury group, had in earlier decades become “obsessed by homosexuality”, and several members “pursued what they called ‘the higher sodomy.’”67 “Higher” referred to their disdain for romantic love as well as their general sense of superiority. The Apostles were already a secret society, and homosexuality was actively prohibited in Britain until the 1960s. Some of those who practiced it formed “extensive underground ‘old boy networks’” which “reached out like a cobweb across the pinnacles of the British Establishment, with connections in Whitehall ministries, the universities, the foreign service, the church, and the armed services”; “several of the lines of this web of homosexual influence were spun by Apostles who, by the twenties, had anchored themselves firmly in the upper reaches of Whitehall” and “offered great opportunities to any blackmailer—or spy—who gained admission.” Jack Hewit, a lover of Burgess, first met him at a homosexual party in the War Office in 1936 at which Rudolph Katz was a guest.68 Burgess was extremely promiscuous and engaged in exchanges of love letters with ‘conquests’ to use as compromising material.
John Costello identifies Edward Marsh as “the leading behind-the-scenes string-puller in the interwar years” who “ascended the senior ranks of the civil service while pursuing his avocation as one of London’s leading literary impresarios”. Marsh
was always ready to pull strings and arrange favors for eligible Cambridge men of intellect, talent, and good looks. Successive generations of Apostles, including Blunt and later Guy Burgess, discovered this to their advantage. The Marsh network included bureaucrats, publishers, parliamentarians, and prominent members of London society. Marsh was longtime personal secretary to Winston Churchill, to whom ‘dear Eddie’ would attach himself like a faithful hound whenever Churchill had a ministry.69
Edward Marsh and Winston Churchill
Much of the same was true at Oxford University, where prominent dons like Maurice Bowra, aware of their closeness to Soviet intelligence agents, referred to themselves as being in the ‘homintern’; Bowra referred to Wadham, his college, as Sodom. During the Second World War he became a frequent guest on the BBC. Marxist members of the homosexual networks based in Cambridge, Oxford and London, including Roger Fulford and Kemball Johnston, attained positions in MI5 where they were able to influence their superiors in favour of members of the Communist Party.70
Popular Front
Though some communists may have been excluded from working at the BBC by MI5’s vetting, the corporation’s programmes were already used to support an effectively pro-Soviet foreign policy long before 1937. Winston Churchill is cited as one of a few right-wing speakers who disprove that the corporation was left-wing, but he exceeded the BBC in its fervour for the anti-German cause. In November 1934, Churchill was invited by the BBC to broadcast a speech in which he forebode the “destruction of the British Empire” and “Teutonic domination” of “our people” unless Britain sought allies to achieve “[p]eace… founded upon preponderance” by “mak[ing] ourselves at least the strongest Air Power in the European world.”71 This was, not by chance, the same demand as that of the civil service faction headed by Robert Vansittart and Warren Fisher that furtively supplied Churchill with false estimates of Britain and Germany’s military strengths.
The week after Churchill’s radio speech, the British arm of Samuel Untermyer’s Anti-Nazi Council was founded, and the following October it held a large demonstration in Hyde Park; the BBC broadcast the speeches by Eleanor Rathbone, Clement Attlee, Walter Citrine, JBS Haldane and Sylvia Pankhurst, all socialists or communists. There was no BBC Talk given by Oswald Mosley to ‘balance’ Churchill and no coverage of demonstrations against communism or hostility toward Germany. The BBC covered the events of the largest such demonstrations, those of the British Union of Fascists, by spotlighting the blackshirts’ eviction of hecklers and invaders. The BUF’s Olympia rally in 1934 occurred at the same time the BBC began to be allowed to create its own news reports. The ludicrous myth of the BUF intentionally causing violent disruption of its own events has endured.
Oswald Mosley and BUF members
From 1936, BBC Television broadcast selected newsreels from Gaumont and Movietone, the latter being a subsidiary of Wilhelm Fuchs’ Fox Corporation and the former owned by Isidore Ostrer. Ostrer was, according to Nicholas Pronay and Philip Taylor, “the most skilful and clear-minded manipulator of the propaganda potential of the newsreel”; as Gaumont also produced films and owned many cinemas, the effect of his skills was amplified greatly.72 Fuchs and Ostrer were both descended of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. The British film industry and cinemas were largely Jewish-owned through the 1920s and 30s.73 Burgess, before being hired by the BBC, was recruited to work for the Soviet NKVD probably by Arnold Deutsch, a cousin of Oscar Deutsch, the founder and owner of Odeon Cinemas and a referee for Arnold’s immigration application.74
The BBC, especially the North division, effectively joined the Popular Front, a Soviet anti-fascist initiative, and thereby aligned with the aims of the international Jewish alliance agitating for regime change in Germany and with organised Jewry in Britain, whose activists secured special privileges. According to Geoffrey Alderman, “An agreement … was reached with the BBC which undertook to submit” to the Board of Deputies of British Jews “the scripts of any programme “of Jewish interest” before the programme was broadcast.” The agreement was part of the Board of Deputies’ Defence Committee’s anti-fascist strategy which also included “intelligence-gathering, media-monitoring and co-operation with the Special Branch.”75 In the spring of 1938, recalling 1881, “a Mansion House Fund and innumerable appeals on behalf of refugees from Austria, Germany and Czecho-Slovakia were broadcast from the BBC and in the British Press.”76
According to William West, “The BBC and its staff… took an essentially Communist line” at the time of the Spanish Civil War which indicates how “the more sinister activities of Burgess and his circle remained unremarked.”77 During the Sudetenland crisis of September 1938, Burgess was the producer responsible for planned anti-German speeches by Harold Nicolson which were cancelled under pressure from the Cabinet Office, which was loyal to Neville Chamberlain, and the Foreign Office under Halifax who was still for peace with Germany at the time.78 Producing ostensibly non-political programmes about the countries of the Mediterranean, Burgess also collaborated with the Marxist academic EH Carr and tried to involve Winston Churchill, of whom he was “a keen supporter” though the latter withdrew in anger at being required to moderate his belligerence.79 According to West, “the line followed by Burgess and EH Carr in the BBC’s Mediterranean series was close to [Anthony] Eden’s…”.80 Eden “had broadcast to the world his welcome” of the Soviet Union to the League of Nations in 1934 and, alongside Churchill, was the most prominent Tory supporter of an alliance with the Soviets; Eden was particularly friendly to Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister, while Churchill liaised more with Ivan Maisky, the ambassador in London to whom he had been introduced by Vansittart.81 In contrast to its pro-Soviet slant, the BBC refused to broadcast or even acknowledge the impassioned radio speech from Verdun by the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated King Edward VIII, for peace between Britain, France and Germany in May 1939.82
Guy Burgess
Propaganda and black operations
As the BBC aligned with Jewish and Soviet policy, it applied its “power to fashion the national narrative” in accordance with the propaganda bodies of the British state, staffed and governed increasingly by anti-fascists, which were used to counter Italian and German (not Soviet) propaganda. The most overt, the British Council, was an initiative of Rex Leeper, head of the Foreign Office’s News Department and payee of the Soviet-aligned Czech government; he introduced Churchill to the Anti-Nazi Council, which Churchill renamed the Focus, in April 1936. The BBC’s Empire Service and foreign language broadcasting were launched to work to the same purpose as the Council. Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, but the propaganda war was underway at least two years earlier when the Focus member Lord Lloyd, another figure of the “extreme right” who sided with the extreme left in foreign policy, became chairman of the Council.83 Anti-fascism and sympathy for the Soviet Union were already embedded institutionally in Britain long before the Anschluss, ‘Munich’ or Kristallnacht.
Section D of MI6 was created in March or April of 1938 “to provide lines of communication for covert anti-Nazi propaganda in neutral countries”, to “organise and equip resistance units, support anti-Nazi groups” and enact “sabotage, covert operations, and subversive propaganda.” Guy Burgess was employed by Section D, the first of a chain of propaganda bodies established by the British state which presented Jewish emigrants from Central Europe as friends of and spokesmen for Britain. Vansittart, Claude Dansey of MI6, Churchill and the Focus had been using the same people for (often fabricated) intelligence and propaganda for some years. As Andrew Lownie describes, “Section D used a series of front organisations, such as the news agency United Correspondents, which produced innocuous but anti-Nazi articles for circulation to newspapers around the world, and Burgess worked with writers such as the Swiss journalist Eugen Lennhof and the Austrian writer Berthe Zuckerkandl-Szeps.”84 In Section D, John Costello says, “Burgess appears to have been the main fount of ideas and principal producer of clandestine programming. In compiling the careful assembly of propaganda talks, variety shows, and hit records, he was assisted by Paul Frischauer, an Austrian refugee, and his wife, who were members of an anti-Hitler group in London.”85 The “radio war” consisted initially of illegally broadcasting Chamberlain speeches into Germany on Radio Luxembourg, owned by Isidore Ostrer and run by Eva Siewert, a Jewish lesbian and Soviet sympathiser.86
The covert counterpart of the British Council and an adjunct of MI6 and the BBC was the Joint Broadcasting Committee, which operated in sufficient secrecy as to be unknown to MI5. According to Lownie, “The JBC was very much a BBC operation. It was run by Hilda Matheson… assisted by Isa Morley, the foreign director of the BBC from 1933 to 1937. Burgess was number three and represented Section D’s interests. In March 1939 Harold Nicolson joined the Board.” Angus Hambro, a Tory MP from an established Jewish banking family, was also a member. “JBC staff were authorised to use BBC studios”, and though “scripts were prepared by JBC staff, many were read by prominent exiles such as the writer Thomas Mann, or later by well-known actors such as Conrad Veidt”, both married to women of Jewish ancestry. Burgess also recruited John Bernal, a Jewish communist and a science don at Cambridge, as well as Edvard Benes, the former Czech Prime Minister and a friend and ally of Stalin, to record speeches for the JBC.87
Conclusion
There was, in retrospect, no chance that BBC and its Talks and News output would ever be anything other than left-wing, pro-Jewish and anti-fascist. Since before it began to broadcast opinion pieces and news, the BBC was populated by “fanatics” like Charles Siepmann and Hilda Matheson who posited the myth of the “ultra-conservatism of the culture” and the “old Conservative clique” as needing redress by their own “progressive policies” and “subversive theory of balance”. Such people never willingly yield institutions of which they have taken control, and instead of facing any threat of being turfed out, they were then and are now confronted only by flaccid or traitorous Tories. The BBC, as Tom Mills says, “is part of a cluster of powerful and largely unaccountable institutions which dominate British society – not just ‘a mouthpiece for the Establishment’ as Owen Jones suggests, but an integral part of it.” Neither Mills nor Jones, though, would acknowledge that the Establishment was already by the early 1930s partly, and the BBC almost entirely, controlled by socialists, communists, globalists, homosexuals and Jews. Reith and Chamberlain headed the broadcaster and the government but did not prevent their ‘crusading’ subordinates having their own way. While communists and fellow travellers staffed the Corporation and amplified themselves and their comrades, not only were fascists or nationalists entirely excluded, but even the views of those who supported Chamberlain and peace were barely heard. The weakest period for the anti-fascists was in 1938, as Chamberlain’s Cabinet Office actively subdued them; Guy Burgess resigned from the corporation in frustration. Yet after Lord Halifax joined the war party, Chamberlain was isolated in the Cabinet and Parliament and cornered into adopting anti-German policies. The ensuing war enabled Churchill to form not only a government in May 1940, but a new anti-fascist regime which has ever since imposed a false version of history via the BBC and the education system. The ‘maverick of the right’ was the best friend the left have ever had.
Horus is the pen name of a British historian. He posts his essays on Substack. Please subscribe.
The Birth of Broadcasting, Asa Briggs, 1961, p180-2. Reith sought to apply the “brute force of monopoly” beyond Britain, as British law alone could not prevent commercial stations broadcasting into Britain from transmitters abroad, which they did through the 1930s. The BBC lobbied via the International Broadcasting Union for the greatest possible restrictions on Radio Luxembourg, Radio Normandie and others, and did so with the support of the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, but Radio Luxembourg exceeded the BBC’s listening figures at times and only ceased operations when its facilities were effectively nationalised after Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939. Under Reith, the BBC had only broadcast for a few hours on Sundays and the content was mostly religious while Radio Luxembourg played more dance music. See The Golden Age of Wireless, Asa Briggs, 1965, p92, 360.
McIntyre, p99, 217, 250. ‘The Trumpet of the Night’: Interwar Communists on BBC Radio, Ben Harker, History Workshop Journal, Volume 75, Issue 1, Spring 2013, p82
Briggs, Golden Age, p13. One early element of the “social and cultural crusade” was to expose the public to subversive artists, writers and musicians. In music, as Asa Briggs describes, the BBC chose “the hazardous enterprise of introducing to the British listener Schönberg and Webern as well as Bartok and Stravinsky. In music it was always among the avant-garde…” Briggs, Golden Age, p171-2
Briggs, Golden Age, p124. “The place of adult education in the BBC’s central organization was never secure. In February 1931 it hived off from the Talks Department and became a separate department under the direction of Siepmann; in February 1932 it became a department of a new Talks Branch when Siepmann replaced Hilda Matheson as Director of Talks; in September 1934 it was fully merged in the Talks Branch, losing its departmental identity. Behind these vicissitudes there were not only personal differences but deeper uncertainties about what exactly was the relationship between Talks and organized adult education.” Briggs, Golden Age, p222
Harold Nicolson was the son of Arthur Nicolson, a diplomatic protégé of King Edward VII. Stephen King-Hall was a future Labour MP and publisher of the anti-German London Newsletter which shared an audience with publications of the Focus and the Comintern; he was “a frequent broadcaster”. Briggs, BBC, p119
Bernard Shaw, Michael Holroyd, 1998, chapter 2, 3. Shaw “was to define fascism as ‘State financed private enterprise’ or ‘Socialism for the benefit of exploiters’. From the 1930s onwards Shaw chose to call himself a communist: ‘that is, I advocate national control of land, capital, and industry for the benefit of us all. Fascists advocate it equally for the benefit of the landlords, capitalists and industrialists.’”
Briggs, Golden Age, p126-7. Wells speaking on BBC radio. The Listener praised Wells as a man “who can see the future”; presumably the producers who chose him were prescient too.
Briggs, Golden Age, p43. Matheson continued: “How is the inevitable fear they provoke to be reconciled with the spirit of open-minded enquiry which is inseparable from all education, from any search after truth?’”
Interview with Olive Shapley, 1984, p3-4 and Broadcasting a Life, Olive Shapley, 1996, p37. From the latter, referring to her first meeting with Harding where he asked her to stay behind: “‘When the room was empty apart from the two of us, he extended his hand and said, ‘Welcome, comrade.’ I was never a very devout communist, but I could tell that I was among friends.’”
Though they had small resources and were about to engage in war on several fronts, the Bolsheviks commenced espionage against Britain immediately after the coup. Chapter 5, ‘Exporting the Revolution’, of John Costello’s book The Mask of Treachery gives a summary. See also chapters 1-5 of Giles Udy, Labour and the Gulag.
Mills, p42. “The practice was maintained for fifty years, abandoned only in 1985 after being exposed by a team of investigative journalists. Much of what is known about political vetting, stems from the revelations at that time and the declassified BBC files that have become available since.”
Costello, p299-300. Costello suggests that Burgess worked for the Rothschilds’ own intelligence network as well as MI6 and the NKVD:
“Since private intelligence was an essential element of the Rothschild business operation, what better cover could they give their latest recruit in 1935 than to characterize Burgess as an investment counselor and dispatch him as their private spy to monitor the Anglo-German Fellowship? Information about threats to the House of Rothschild resulting from secret deals between British sympathizers and the Third Reich would more than justify the hundred guineas a month paid to Guy Burgess.
Victor Rothschild had implicit faith in his Cambridge friend because he, like Blunt, knew of Burgess’s true loyalties. But Burgess’s volatile enthusiasms would help persuade his right-wing friends that he had recanted his earlier Marxism. His homosexual appetite would prove an exploitable talent when it came to sharing the bed of a pro-German Tory well placed to pull strings and advance an ambitious young man’s career. Nor should it be forgotten that Rudolph Katz, with his own extensive network of homosexual and Comintern contacts, also contributed to Rothschild’s private intelligence network that, at the time, shared with Stalin a common enemy: Hitler.” Costello, p303-5
Winston Churchill – the Greatest Briton, Parliament Archives. Churchill – “After he had given his talk in the 1934 Causes of War series there were complaints that he had delivered a ‘gratuitous attack on Germany’, and one writer said that it was ‘in need of far more censorship than Professor Haldane’s’, a talk on the extreme left.’” Briggs, Golden Age, p146
Truth Betrayed, WJ West, 1989, p40. Burgess’ friend Kim Philby, who worked for MI6 and the NKVD simultaneously, was The Times’ correspondent during the civil war and MI6’s head of undercover operations in Spain and Portugal during the world war. Burgess and Philby both worked for MI6’s propaganda-focused Section D and, like Eric Maschwitz, the sabotage-focused Special Operations Executive in 1939 and 1940. In 1934 Philby had married Litzi Friedmann, a communist from Vienna and an associate of the Soviet spy Edith Tudor-Hart. By 1941, when Burgess rejoined BBC Talks, the corporation was under the control of Churchill’s government and hired Burgess precisely because he was pro-Soviet.
In November 1938, according to the ambassador to Italy, Eric Drummond, the 7th Earl of Perth, BBC presenters used tone of voice to mock Chamberlain and praise Anthony Eden. West also says that “There had been a number of concerted attacks on Chamberlain by the BBC, usually in the form of selective reporting of speeches and debates.” See West, p166, including note 101.
Alderman, New Directions, p165. See also West, p111. Reith had been the leading advocate of the International Broadcasting Union, in the violation of which the BBC now collaborated.
Lownie, chapter 13. The JBC had a “strong focus” on “securing British propaganda broadcasts on the American networks.” American networks also had their own plans. “The covert side, where Burgess largely worked, produced programmes for distribution in enemy countries, working with Electra House. Burgess was responsible for a variety of programmes that were recorded on large shellac discs and then smuggled in the diplomatic bag or by agents into Sweden, Liechtenstein and Germany, and broadcast as if they were part of regular transmissions from the German stations themselves.” The ‘Chaos of the Ether’ had gone from a myth to a tactic. About the JBC, see also Murphy, Behind the Wireless, chapter on Hilda Matheson, and West p118, 140.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Horushttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngHorus2024-11-25 07:12:052024-11-25 08:11:47The Engine of Compulsory Conformity: The BBC, the Bloomsbury Group, the Comintern and the NKVD in the 1930s
Although he was found guilty of lying, albeit by a manifestly biased parliamentary enquiry based on a report by a civil servant who went on to work for the Labour Party, there is an extent to which you know where you are with former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson. I’ve had a soft spot for him since 2003 when I submitted an article to The Spectator, which he edited. Rather than ignore it or send out a standard rejection letter, Boris took the trouble to the write back, explaining why he liked the piece but why it was not quite suitable for his magazine. For that is what Boris is about; the Shakespearian jester-type who makes other people feel good and who, through this comedy persona, is able to get away with things which would finish off ordinary politicians.
Charisma is often a response to profound sadness and it buoys up the charismatic as much as it does his audience. This is clear in Boris’ long-awaited brick of a memoir Unleashed, which, in my view, vies with John Major: The Autobiography as the most readable Prime Ministerial memoir ever penned. The key difference is that Major is extremely self-aware, sometimes disarmingly honest, and shares with us the many poignant moments from his early life that have made him who he is. Boris doesn’t dream of doing anything like that, and, let’s face it, you wouldn’t expect him to. There is nothing about his extremely unhappy and difficult childhood in which he was part deaf and lived in an isolated farm house with parents who violently despised each other. To the extent he looks at his childhood at all, it’s jolly memories of his brief time at a state primary school.
As I’ve said, the point is to take us on a jolly jape. Boris is particular good at this, due his comedic brilliance. The Supreme Court judge who tried to scupper Brexit, and who wore a silver spider-shaped brooch is referred to as “the curse of Spiderwoman,” while the UK’s anti-Brexit Establishment are “prune-lipped Pharisees.” Boris is self-aware enough to concede that he is “gaffe-prone,” but, then, he would concede this; it is part of his comic charm and of his cunning: Appear a tad helpless and people will love you. The women will want to mother you, the men won’t see you as a real threat and so will underestimate you, or they’ll believe that they can obtain true power with you as the comic frontman. And before you know it, you’re Conservative Mayor of London (a Labour city), and then Prime Minister, winning a large majority, including numerous seats in safe Labour areas, breaking the deadlock and finally bringing Brexit about.
Boris admits, though, that, secretly, he’s worked hard to get there, but even here there is comic camouflage and poetic skill: “Some people have a knack for being in the right place at the right time. They just happen to be under the tree when the apple plops into their lap. Some people have to bash and butt at the base of the tree for an awfully long time until the exhausted apple stalk can bear the weight no longer. I am definitely in the second category.” In many ways, these sentences encapsulate Boris’ rhetorical brilliance. There are so many layers to this. We are invited to imagine a genius – Isaac Newton – sitting beneath the apple tree, yet this is contrasted with the onomatopoeic “plop,” and the comedically scatological dimensions of this word. We then imagine someone like Newton, perhaps Boris in a late-seventeenth wig, bashing at the tree of UK politics and its apple of being the UK’s premier – with a self-deprecating nod to his being overweight – until it just gives up and, exhausted, says, “Okay, Boris, old bean, you can be Prime Minister.” It is this kind of skill with which he ascended so high and did so relatively quickly.
Boris also wants to transport us to an idealised old England in which he was our Shakespearian Fool leader. He achieves this, for example, by frequently quoting canonical poetry, such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” about dead peasants and the talents they wasted confined to a tiny village. Johnson, apparently deeply moved by this poem, uses it to explain why he wanted to “level up” the British education system, so he manages to boast about a supposed achievement of his premiership. But he’s managed to make it not seem like bragging, because he’s beguiled us into being in an idyllic English country churchyard with him in which he is a shaman, into which the spirit of Englishness has somehow entered; his recent Turkish ancestry not with-standing.
I could give many other examples of this skill, but it also means that we are intellectually disarmed. He justifies his ludicrous green policies on the basis of Pascal’s Wager. We should be fervent environmentalists just in case the climate change alarmists are correct. This is an absurd comparison. He is suggesting that we should make life less enjoyable, more expensive and more difficult just in case Woke fanatics are right. By the same “just in case” logic, Boris should have shut the borders the moment there was the slightest hint of Covid-19. By the same logic, there is evidence that multiculturalism leads to inter-group violence and the collapse of society, so it’s quite obvious what he should have done “just in case.” The problem is that he is so bumblingly likeable and persuasive that he makes you actively not want to seriously scrutinise him, which is part of his political genius. As I motorist, I cannot stand cyclists, yet he is an avid cyclist and he almost makes me sympathise with them with his Romantic portrayal of their vocation.
All of this, though, permits him to smuggle in the fact that, on many issues, he is secretly rather based, and he can do this because of the way he has charmed people. For example, in Chapter Two he dares to look at intelligence and the extent to which it is genetic. Politicians have been fired for saying as much. “As I close my eyes and wait for the judgment of the examiners on myself, I feel I am in the presence of some ineluctable biological-process. I have read somewhere that intelligence like other human qualities reverts to the mean (Was it H.J. Eysenck that gave me that idea? Eysenck it was.).” To those “in the know” he is making it clear that he understands the biological realities, he is scientifically literate and he is based. For the more purple-pilled, pathetic conservative reader, there is the pun to soften the blow and to permit Boris to pretend he was joking all along. He even explores, indirectly, the issue of Incels and their causes (women are more educated than men but want to marry hypergamously in terms of education), though Boris makes out that someone far cleverer than he has explained this to him and he is just blithely accepting it: “In his view, there are complex reasons for the drying up of social mobility, not least the habit of ‘assortative mating’, by which female graduates tend to only marry men who are themselves graduates. . . . The only way to break the cycle of assortative mating . . . is for more female graduates to be encouraged to marry hod-carriers and dustbin men . . .”
And he also traffics in some seriously interesting stuff, such as that the Queen did not die of “old age” but rather of bone cancer. She’d known she was dying for a year and, of course, it’s all been covered up. A friend of mine, a consultant geriatrician, told me at the time that the state of the Queen’s hands strongly implied treatment for some kind of cancer, so I am inclined to believe Boris on this one.
But the problem is, his rhetorical skill and charisma mean that I’m inclined to believe him on most things, even though I know, deep down, that I have been manipulated by this self-serving autobiography wherein he never displays genuine weakness and never looks honestly, or at all, at his painful and rogue-ish, womanising personal life. Instead, you sit down in a pub with him and have a laugh, forgetting that he needlessly closed those pubs for the best part of two years, backing down to shrill, manipulative voices opposing the very sensible policy of herd immunity. Such is Boris’ skill and charisma, on such evident display in 700-plus pages of Unleashed.
“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” That’s what the protagonist Winston Smith thinks in George Orwell’s dystopian satire Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Winston thinks that the proles — the oppressed and exploited workers — could shake off the tyranny of the ruling party like a “horse shaking off flies.” All they needed to do was become aware of the tyranny and of how it was oppressing them.
Reality is King
But Winston was wrong: they never would become aware and never would exert their strength. There was no hope in the proles. According to O’Brien, the high-IQ inquisitor who tortures Winston at the Ministry of Love, there is no hope at all. “The rule of the Party is for ever,” he tells Winston. Yet O’Brien too is wrong. The Party’s rule is based on the denial of objective reality and on the claim that “Nothing exists except through human consciousness.” But that claim isn’t right and sooner or later objective reality would intrude on the Party’s dreams of eternal omnipotence. In the final part of the novel, O’Brien scoffs at Winston’s belief that the stars are beyond the Party’s reach and control:
“What are the stars?” said O’Brien indifferently. “They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part Three, chapter 3)
In reply to that, Winston could simply have said: “Tunguska.” It’s the earth that goes round the sun. So do lots of other things, like the space-rocks that periodically strike the earth’s surface or explode in the earth’s atmosphere. A space-rock exploded like that over the Siberian region of Tunguska in 1908. It was a very large and very powerful explosion, but the only casualties were pine-trees and reindeer. If the same explosion had happened over Moscow or London or Paris, the city would have been destroyed, millions of people would have died, and history would have taken an entirely different course. Sooner or later, in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, another space-rock would have ended the rule of the Party. It might have done so by destroying the human race, of course, but the point remains the same: human consciousness does not control external reality.
Neo-clown lunacy threatens us all
But did the human race get lucky with Tunguska? Perhaps not. Perhaps we got unlucky. If Moscow or London or Paris had been destroyed by that space-rock, we would have had a very sharp lesson in how dangerous the solar system is. And we would have begun working to avert the dangers decades earlier and with much more energy. So we might have had bases on the moon and Mars by now, and a fully working SpaceGuard program to detect and destroy incoming disasteroids. As it is, we don’t have those things and the next big space-rock could arrive tomorrow and wipe out an entire country or continent. Or it could end the human race.
And what about the dangers of nuclear war? Neo-clown lunacy over Ukraine and Taiwan may end in missiles flying and mankind falling back into the abyss of barbarism with no off-earth bases to save us. But how many people in Western politics care about asteroid-strikes and nuclear war? Far too few. Countless politicians and bureaucrats in Westminster or Washington would be able to tell you all about George Floyd and systemic racism, but very few would be able to tell you anything about the Tunguska event or about Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, the two lowly Russian individuals who saved the world from nuclear armageddon. Among the few who know and care about such things is a man who may be the most interesting British political figure of the past century or more. He may be the most important figure in British politics too.
An evil genius loathed by leftists
Who is he? He’s called Dominic Cummings (born 1971) and he’s highly intelligent, highly competent, and highly knowledgeable about important things. To British leftists, he’s the evil genius behind Brexit. Leftists loathe him, which is a very good sign that he’s on the side of the angels. Reading him has suggested to me a variant on that failed formula above. Winston Smith was wrong when he looked at the workers and the tyranny of the Party, then thought: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” But I may be right when I look at Dominic Cummings and the tyranny of Clown World, then think: “If there is hope, it lies in the paladins.”
A paladin is literally a “knight of the palace,” that is, a paragon of martial virtue and valor. But you can use “paladins” in an extended sense to mean a group with superior intellects and insights, a genuine and deserving elite who can take on and defeat the undeserving and oppressive elite that currently rules the West. In that sense, Dominic Cummings is a paladin who wants to recruit other paladins for what he calls the Startup Party. He wants to destroy the Conservative and Labour uniparty and Make Albion Great Again. And also sane again. Cummings has a superior intellect and doesn’t draw his insights from Marx or Freud or Foucault or any of the other word-web-spinners who dominate the dreams and direct the deeds of Clown World. No, he draws his insights from science and mathematics and from genuine achievers like Otto Bismarck and George Mueller, the engineer who reformed NASA and was central to putting man on the moon. Clown World is run by insane adolescents, but Cummings is a sane adult.
That’s why he learned to have such contempt for the bureaucrats and systems he encountered when he worked in government under Boris Johnson and the education minister Michael Gove. He’s put it like this at his fascinating and insightful Substack account: “One of the most fundamental things I’ve learned in 24 years’ involvement [in politics] is that almost nobody has any interest in general principles underlying success and failure, nor interest in execution/management, and although political people read a lot of history books it’s hard to see any learning.”
In short, British government is designed to fail. What matters to politicians and bureaucrats is their own power and prestige, not the efficient and effective performance of their duties to the British people. Cummings has frequently excoriated “Whitehall” — the official government bureaucracy — at his Substack. He knows that British democracy is a farce, because the parties are “all so similar they can’t imagine a political world where taxpayers’ money is treated with respect.” Here’s another devastating line: “HMT [Her/His Majesty’s Treasury] officials are interested in their control over Whitehall — not saving taxpayers’ money.” And another: “Many officials across Whitehall care far more about not being CCd in to an email than they do about millions of pounds being wasted or thousands of people’s lives being inconvenienced — the former is an insult to their status, while the latter is normal daily life.”
Clown World ♥ Open Borders
The same officials also care far more about “systemic racism” and “transgender rights” than they do about performing their duties and saving taxpayers’ money. That’s all part of why an advanced First-World nation like Britain can’t stop low-IQ non-Whites from primitive Third-World nations pouring across the English Channel in small boats. But I need to correct myself: it isn’t “can’t stop” the boats but “won’t stop” the boats. Clown World doesn’t want to stop the Third World invading the First World, because Clowns like Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer prefer parasitic non-Whites to productive Whites. Parasitic non-Whites don’t threaten the power of Clown World. On the contrary, they enhance it.
Dominic Cummings is very careful to avoid the topic of race in his public statements, but there’s no doubt that he knows and recognizes racial reality. During his second stint in government, he recruited as one of his advisors a highly intelligent and insightful White male called Andrew Sabisky. Then it emerged that Sabisky is a thought-criminal. He holds “repulsive” and “totally unacceptable” views on race. For example, he thinks that “politicians should pay attention to ‘very real racial differences in intelligence’ when designing the immigration system.” Sabisky is right in all his views, of course, but that’s precisely why he was driven out of government by what the Guardiandescribed as “fierce criticism across [the] political spectrum.”
“The old system will go crazy with hate”
In fact, he was criticized only by leftists and their cuckservative allies. He certainly wasn’t criticized by Dominic Cummings, who wanted to keep him as an advisor and must have been fully aware of Sabisky’s heretical views on race. Indeed, Cummings must share them. He’s just been more discreet than Sabisky about expressing those views. But Cummings isn’t discreet about criticizing the Conservatives for betraying voters on immigration:
We promised to take back control of the borders and LOWER the insane legal + illegal immigration rate while we built infrastructure — then the Tories sided with the Confederation of British Sex Criminal Rentiers (formerly known as the CBI [Confederation of British Industry]), opened the floodgates and refused to change the complex of laws that stops us building infrastructure ’cos immigration = GrOwTh’. (“#4 The Startup Party: Time to Build from September [2024] and replace the Tories?,” Dominic Cummings’ Substack, 11th August 2023)
Having seen the farce of British politics from the inside, Cummings has decided that reform is impossible and replacement inevitable. That’s why he wants to start what he has provisionally called the Startup Party to replace the Conservatives and Labour. Instead of insane adolescents wrecking the country, he wants sane adults repairing the country. And he thinks that the insane adolescents will work for their own replacement:
Imagine a party that a) mobilises some of the most talented people in the country and b) takes the voters’ side against the old parties and other old power structures operating on principles roughly like the above.
The old system will go crazy with hate. Tory-Labour rivalries will be mostly forgotten. They will unite in attacking this appalling new force. Danny Finkelstein and Owen Jones will sing a similar song!
Owen Jones is a self-righteous woke homosexual who writes for the Guardian. “Danny Finkelstein” is the little-known but highly important Daniel Finkelstein, a Vice President of the Jewish Leadership Council. He’s one of the Jews who controlled the previous Conservative government and ensured that it betrayed White voters on immigration. Finkelstein’s sister, Tamara Finkelstein, is a high-flying bureaucrat who is the “Joint Senior Sponsor of the Civil Service Jewish Network,” has supported Black Lives Matter (BLM) on an official government Twitter account, and has issued a stirring call to “fight racism.”
Tammy Finkelstein is definitely woke; Danny Finkelstein is supposedly conservative. In reality, Danny is just as anti-White and anti-Western as Tammy. Dominic Cummings will criticize Daniel Finkelstein only by name, not by race, but he must know about the central role of Jews in Clown World. It’s just that he can’t mention Jews or Jewish power. Doing that would turn the Startup Party into the Stillborn Party.
Cummings may never achieve his admirable ambitions, of course, but he isn’t the only stale pale male who wants to end the reign of Clown World. Elon Musk is another highly intelligent and highly competent White man who shares Cummings’ ambitions and antipathies. Musk wants to put men on Mars; Clown World wants to put men in women’s bathrooms. If there is hope, it lies in the paladins like Cummings and Musk. Not only in the paladins, of course, but all sane adults who read Cummings’ substack should be energized and inspired by what they find there.
Appendix: More Demonic Crimethink from Dominic Cummings
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that officials often prefer a process involving months of meetings and a long implementation timetable as this provides easy, no-pressure work long into the future. […]
Further, nobody is incentivised to solve problems fast. Ministers acquire a reputation for ‘wisdom’ simply by saying about everything ‘sounds very risky let’s not do that’ or ‘let’s add another two years to the timetable’. This limits the chances of embarrassment for the civil service but also means the problem is not solved. Officials are adept at psychologically reinforcing this, by praising ministers as ‘very wise’ whenever they demand delays and ‘very brave’ whenever they demand an aggressive timetable. The cost of going quickly is harder work by, and potential embarrassment for, officials; the costs of going slowly fall on the public. Who do you think weighs more in decisions taken confidentially in Whitehall, without the tradeoffs ever having to be crassly articulated?
The fundamental reason for Whitehall’s failure is management, not a lack of bureaucrats or money. As Colonel Boyd [the American military strategist] used to shout, ‘People, ideas, machines — in that order!’ In the DfE [Department of Education], we cut the department’s headcount by more than a third and halved running costs. We more than halved the press office, and cut 95 percent of the communication budget. Performance improved rapidly. It would improve further if the DfE were halved again. The fact that the former head of the civil service could unintentionally reveal such deep misunderstandings about the problems with Whitehall and the nature of management shows how serious the problems are.
Whatever happens in the [2024 British general] election, 99.99% of the same people will stay running the country as now, Starmer will have the same attitude to the civil service actually running the country as Cameron and Sunak, and the situation since 2010 will largely continue: The government does not control the government, doesn’t want to, and couldn’t if it tried… Cf. Francis Crick’s plea as Whitehall wrecked Intelligence 1946: ‘It’s no use reorganising with just the same old gang’. He was ignored and he left for Cambridge.
I urge subscribers to ignore the election. It will be almost entirely clowns jabbering things not-even-wrong interpreted by hacks who’ve never built anything valuable in their lives and are anti-expert on how power works, how communication works, and how high performance organisations are created. Noise about noise. All the budget numbers will be fake because of the massive black budget horror shows and corruption of the MOD. Starmer will be given these on yellow paper soon after he goes to No10 and he and others will say to themselves ‘un-fucking-believable’. Then, probably, punt-and-classify like Brown, Cameron, May, Boris, Truss, and Sunak. I’ve been talking to various people about what should be built after the 2010-24 clown show is over and the new clown show begins. […]
Recruit Ministers from outside parliament. I’ve done market research since 2004 on this. It’s very popular and an open goal. It’s also unarguably necessary if you’re trying to recruit the best people who, by definition, are almost all outside Parliament. The old parties won’t do this because their MPs would go insane (as Boris said to me in summer 2020 when I said we should do this to replace Hancock et al).
Open up the civil service so appointments are open to outside candidates by default with almost zero exceptions. This is also unarguably necessary if you’re trying to recruit the best people who, by definition, are almost all outside Whitehall. The permanent closed caste civil service as it now works is one of our greatest sources of fragility and failure.
We believe in controlling the borders, we will stop the ludicrous boats, we will cut illegal immigration to a tiny and irrelevant problem, we will ensure we actually know who enters/leaves our country
The people who think of themselves as the smart people in SW1 [the postcode that covers central government in London] regard it as literally impossible to ‘stop the boats’. This is, obviously, laughable. Many countries including us have dealt with 1000X harder problems — Pompei [i.e., Pompey the Great] famously cleared the sea of pirates in weeks, over 2,000 years before radio! I am 100% confident that the British state could stop the boats and it wouldn’t even be a serious test for a serious government — the problem is none of the old parties want to and would rather lose every election than really try (as Sunak is demonstrating). And because everybody in SW1 shares the view ‘it’s basically intractable’ and no other player will show anybody else up, they’ve all felt safe in not taking it seriously.
This problem is going to get worse and worse as environmental and political problems send more and more people, especially young men, from Africa and Asia into Europe. The EU is already knackered in dealing with this issue. It can’t handle it legally, operationally or politically. It already has serious problems with extreme/fascist parties. This will grow and grow. (NB. As I’ve said many times this was one of the core reasons for doing the referendum.) The sooner we grip this problem, the less force and disruption the solution will need — which is best for everyone. If we continue with the Tory-Labour approach, we will have millions more immigrants, many illegal, and it will get harder and harder to deal with and require more force and disruption.
Even if the old parties did suddenly try to take it seriously they couldn’t actually control our borders because they all believe in the European Convention of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act. As Sunak has unwittingly demonstrated. He let himself be persuaded of nonsense on boats. He chose to ignore those who pointed out that even if the Courts accepted his Bill (his best case scenario), his Bill did not give him the powers to actually stop the boats. No10 remains deluded on this and those who know it won’t tell Sunak he’s bogged it.
If you have any trust in the old system, it seems amazing that a smart PM could repeat what Cameron, May and Boris did — simultaneously a) promise to solve a problem, b) sort of choose to believe rubbish, sort of deep down know it’s rubbish, c) raise the salience of an issue they can’t solve because of their own laws, lawyers and courts, d) when the whole thing inevitably fails and the public is angry, start spinning that really it was a clever strategy to ‘set the issue up for the next election’. But when you understand Tory world is rotten it’s all natural, not ‘amazing’. […]
If you don’t care about controlling the borders you can already vote Tory or Labour.
The market opportunity is for a party that does care and can credibly act. You can only be credible if you are prepared to repeal the HRA [Human Rights Act] and end the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court, [which together:]
Make tough surveillance of terrorists impossible. I’ve had personal experience of Kafka-esque meetings after a terrorist incident when the police and intelligence services admit they could not keep convicted terrorists (never mind suspects) under surveillance because of the ECHR [European Court of Human Rights] / HRA [Human Rights Act]. There are many, many ludicrous ways in which security is undermined. Most of these are classified in order to stop MPs and public knowing. Officials know some of these stories are so insane that publicity would undermine support for the ECHR/HRA.
Create such Kafka-esque absurdities we sometimes have special forces call in drone strikes to whack people instead of arresting them because it weirdly makes more legal ‘sense’, given legal advice. Such cases are, obviously, kept very quiet like many other ways the intelligence services are affected. There are some truly jaw dropping examples that Sunak should make public but won’t — those of you who read the yellow paper on terrorists bringing legal action in London while on the run from JSOC will know the sort of thing I mean. Good for some rich human rights lawyers (some of whom should be disbarred), humiliating for any serious country. […]
Starmer will be confronted with a symbol of this [nuclear rot] on his first day as PM when he talks to the deep state about the submarines and his letter. And the Cabinet Secretary will say something like: PM, not for now but we will have to discuss some important aspects of this subject soon… And Starmer will read (on yellow paper above Strap 3) the detail of these horrific budgets. And he will face the same choice Boris and Sunak faced: go public, blame his predecessor and face openly the vast financial (and other implications) or classify, punt and continue the charade that means the continuing cannibalising of the open budgets by the broken black budgets and their black holes. (An interesting question that will signal power will be: is Sue Gray [a powerful woke bureaucrat] allowed in the room for the submarine chat or not?)
The original VL [Vote Leave campaign for Brexit] plan to transform the Tory Party is kaput. It would have been a different story if Boris-Carrie [Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie] had enjoyed themselves smashing champagne bottles off boats while VL ran No10 and used the 80 seat majority to do the VL plan. The country and party would look profoundly different. No HS2 [High-Speed Rail Link], no £35B down the toilet this Parliament alone, and so many things happening instead. The argument would be about the winners and losers rather than ‘why bother with Brexit then change nothing?’. Starmer would have been smashed to bits. Many MPs would have ‘retired’, new MPs recruited, and CCHQ [Conservative Central Head-Quarters] closed with an effectively new party reopening in the Midlands with an edge-of-the-art political machine. Such a transformation — using four years occupying No10 with an 80 majority, changing facts on the ground and demonstrating things rather than arguing about things — is not possible in Opposition using the rotten old Tory institution. Dramatically cutting taxes for working people is extremely different to promising to cut taxes after 14 years of putting them up. So our old plan is kaput. And it was a once-in-decades opportunity — election victory on a the biggest issue in politics for decades, the biggest government crisis since 1945, clear mandate and need for huge change in economy and government, a team with a plan, a civil service willing to do a deal on massive change instead of fighting it, a PM with very strong personal incentives to change a lot (objectively speaking, but it turned out he disagreed!), opposition in chaos. This combination is highly unlikely to recur ‘naturally’ for many decades.
Fundamental to our politics is the shift of talented people out of politics/government and the asymmetrical effects on those who oppose the Left/‘progressivism’. There is a vicious circle across the west that keeps almost all the most able people out of politics/government/public service. But the ‘progressive’ Left attracts a lot of smart people who believe in more centralised state power and want to exercise this power over others. People with the same IQ who strongly disagree with them are much less inclined to spend their time navigating low quality political hierarchies to capture centralised institutions (per above).
The old parties focus on the old SW1 game and the old media but can’t even get to 1968-America levels of sophistication in handling TV (cf. The Selling of the President), never mind advanced technologies. They’re so addicted to the 24/7 cycle of chaos (‘news’) they can never focus on anything that isn’t leading the news therefore they cannot drive hard changes or communicate effectively. […] And they demonstrably have no interest in building a government that can maintain focus and build fast while the leader is inevitably focused to some extent on the news — when we started building such a machine in summer 2020 (including a new communication machine) the Tories freaked out and couldn’t discuss it intelligently (though parts of the deep state supported us).
The market opportunity is for a party that optimises for voters.
The lack of Tory interest in economic policy and the fundamental long-term stagnation of productivity is prima facie baffling given … they are politicians supposedly trying to win elections! What’s the explanation? It’s a product of a more general problem — their focus is always on today’s media and their position in Insider coalition networks, NOT winning. This more general issue also explains other otherwise baffling things, like their total lack of interest in the MOD for 14 years, their total lack of interest in actual border control and so on. They still call themselves ‘the party of business’ and ‘the party of the national interest’ and ‘the party of the armed forces’, echoing the 1980s, but they aren’t actually interested any more in any of these things.
Both Labour and Tory are locked into a media ecosystem and legal ecosystem that supports a combination of, to simplify crudely, *ESG + DEI + nutty green + nutty progressivism + technology hate*. Apart from the awful political and cultural effects, this combination is also a disaster for productivity growth and a market opportunity for TSP.
Contra-Insiders, ‘not normal politicians’: on the side of taxpayers against the old parties, with voters against unions and the CBI, the local against Whitehall, with mothers against the violent, for women’s safety against the men-pretending-to-be-women.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Tobias Langdonhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngTobias Langdon2024-10-16 07:14:472024-10-16 09:56:25The Demonic Crimethink of Dominic Cummings: Thoughts on the Most Interesting Man in British Politics
Mud, sand and sawdust. These simple things make excellent fuels for sophisticated modern engines. All reputable engineers will tell you so. Simply fill your tank and zoom away, enjoying vastly improved performance and mileage. There are just two conditions. First, you have to source the super-fuels in the Third World. It has to be Syrian mud or Moroccan sand or Pakistani sawdust. Second, you have to use the Third-World super-fuels in the First World. Strangely enough, if you try to run an engine on mud in Syria, your engine will stop working. But use the same mud in Germany and your engine will pulsate with power. Trust the experts!
Showered with gold
Well, I’ve just written utter nonsense, of course. No engineer has ever said that mud, sand or sawdust makes good fuel for any kind of engine. Engineers aren’t idiots. They deal in reality, not fantasy. No, the idiotic group that makes nonsensical claims about Third-World fuel isn’t engineers but economists. They’ve been claiming for decades that mass immigration from the Third World is absolutely vital for sophisticated modern economies in the First World. The stale pale frail West will collapse without the dynamism and vitality of youthful Syrians, Moroccans and Pakistanis. Strangely enough, those Third-Worlders don’t make the economies boom in their own homelands. But in the West, they will shower their lucky hosts with gold. Trust the experts!
That’s the message of economists. Their idiocy is matched only by their arrogance. In truth, if you fuel a Western economy with mud, you get blood, not gold. At the end of July 2024, Southport in England saw how readily Third-World mud turns into First-World blood. A Rwandan Black invaded a schoolgirls’ holiday club and began laboring with a large knife. The fruit of his labor was three dead little girls and more seriously injured. At the end of August 2024 Solingen in Germany saw mud and blood too. It was holding a Festival der Vielfalt, a festival of diversity. The highlight of the festival was provided by a Syrian Arab, who shouted “Allahu akbar!” and began laboring with another large knife. The fruit of his labor was uncannily similar: three dead adults and more seriously injured. The expert economists at the Financial Times (FT) reacted to the attack just as you would expect – with arrogance and idiocy. They zoomed in on what they regard as the real problem exposed by the slaughter in Solingen. Not stabby Syrians, but the evil and inbred far-right:
Germany’s real problem: not stabby Syrians, but wicked Whites on the far right (image from the Financial Times)
An expert called Henry Foy, the “FT’s Brussels Bureau Chief,” explained “Why Germany’s stabbing attack has rekindled EU’s far-right fears.” I’ll reproduce his words below. When you read them, note the blithe unconcern revealed by the sub-heading “Knife edge.” It’s a pun referring to the danger of Europe tipping over into xenophobia. Yes, the Financial Times is punning about the bloody and barbarous slaughter and wounding of ordinary German Whites. The paper’s editors and writers simply don’t care. The elite currently ruling with West regard the violent death of ordinary Whites as no problem at all. It’s the reaction to violent death that’s the problem. Here is Henry Foy’s article:
Why Germany’s stabbing attack has rekindled EU’s far-right fears
Today, I unpack what Germany’s response to a stabbing attack this weekend could mean for Europe. …
Knife edge
A fatal knife attack in Germany has convulsed the country’s politics ahead of regional elections this weekend — but is also worrying officials across the EU nervous about the rise of the far right and anti-immigration rhetoric.
Context: A Syrian man stabbed three people to death and injured eight more on Friday night in the west German city of Solingen. The attack has boosted already strong support for the far-right nationalist Alternative for Germany party ahead of elections in the states of Saxony and Thuringia this Sunday.
Yesterday, alongside promising to tighten Germany’s laws on weapons, Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to reduce the inflow of irregular migrants and increase deportations. That followed remarks by Björn Höcke, the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, who blamed the attack on what he called: “This multicultural experiment on our country.”
There are two major concerns for Brussels from the Solingen tragedy.
Short-term, it has rammed home the political dangers posed by a resurgent far right across Europe, just weeks after centrist parties celebrated what they saw as European election results that confirmed their dominance of the EU’s political stage.
Longer-term, many in Europe worry that a knee-jerk reaction in Germany — potentially including new border controls and possibly even checks on movement inside of the country — could prompt a rash of similar unilateral moves by other countries where anti-immigration politicians are popular.
That would undermine the core principles of the EU’s Schengen free movement area, and further strain a fundamental aspect of the bloc’s single market.
“We can’t react to this by slamming the door in the faces of people who are often themselves fleeing from Islamists,” said Kevin Kühnert, general secretary of Scholz’s Social Democrats party.
Three ordinary Whites have been bloodily slaughtered. Eight more have been wounded. Henry Foy glides past the deaths and woundings with a perfunctory reference to “tragedy.” He simply doesn’t care. When he speaks of “dangers,” he isn’t referring to stabby Syrians but to the “resurgent far right.” He’s also deeply concerned about a “knee-jerk reaction” in Germany that might “prompt a rash” of “unilateral moves” elsewhere in Europe. Note the medical marvel apparent in that mixed metaphor: a “knee-jerk” creates a “rash.” As George Orwell pointed out in his magisterial essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), mixed metaphors prove that writers are not thinking and not seeing reality. Instead, they’re using what Orwell had earlier called “duckspeak.” It’s not language “in the true sense” but “noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.”
Not idiots, but evil
Foy is a duckspeaker, someone who quacks out orthodox opinions without any concern for reality, only for ideology. In his case, it’s the ideology of open borders. That’s why he quotes with approval the duckspeak of another open-border enthusiast: Kevin Kühnert, general secretary of the Social Democrats party. Kühnert said: “We can’t react to this by slamming the door in the faces of people who are often themselves fleeing from Islamists.” He too isn’t concerned about the slaughter and suffering of ordinary German Whites. No, the important thing is keeping the borders open. Kühnert wants Germany to protect people “fleeing from Islamists” by allowing Islamists to accompany those people to Germany. Is he an idiot like Henry Foy and the other experts at the Financial Times? Well, no. In truth Foy, Kühnert and company are evil, not idiots. It’s not their intelligence that’s faulty, it’s their ethics.
Jews’ views
That’s why they demonize the “far right” for not welcoming the slaughter and sex-crimes committed by Third-World invaders. It’s also why they censor their own lies. Recall that the stabby Syrian in Solingen set to work at a “festival of diversity.” That’s ironic, isn’t it? One moment Solingen is celebrating diversity, the next moment diversity is slaughtering Solingeners. Well, the Guardian decided that the irony was too rich for the delicate palates of its readers. As Mark Steyn pointed out: “The original Guardian headline referred to three dead ‘at diversity festival’ …but it was quickly revised to three dead merely at a ‘festival’.”
Not that Steyn himself is honest about the disaster of Third-Worlders invading the West. As I’ve often pointed out at the Occidental Observer, he refuses to admit the central role played by Jews in the invasion. So there’s more irony in the legal battle Steyn has fought against Michael E. Mann, a leading advocate of global warming. Steyn has shattered his health and lost huge sums of money trying in vain to defeat his sly and slippery opponent. Guess what? It turns out that the mendacious Michael Mann is a Jew. You can be certain that Mann is just as firmly in favor of open borders as he is opposed to global warming. After all, those are Jews’ views: even as Jews praise the flood of mud, they order Whites to fight the sky.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Tobias Langdonhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngTobias Langdon2024-08-31 07:27:352024-08-31 07:27:35Mud and Blood: How to Super-Charge First-World Economies with Third-World Fuel
“The judge of today needs no such virtues. He is not the agent and exponent of justice, but its mere lackey.” L. Mencken
At time of writing, more than 1,000 people have been arrested in England for participation in riots sparked by the brutal murder of three children by an African. The riots have been described variously as “anti-migrant” or “anti-Muslim,” causing journalists and politicians on the Left to offer weak analyses of the disorder as being the irrational product of online misinformation and Islamophobic prejudice since the Southport murderer was born in the United Kingdom and was not, they insist, from a Muslim background. This is, however, a paradox of the Left’s own making since the riots are best understood as an expression of White working-class exasperation at the increasing pace of demographic change, at the increasing marginalisation and demonisation of the White working class in culture, and of White working-class suffering at the hands of non-White violence more generally. In every meaningful respect, these were race riots with a class subtext. In the English context, Islam and migration, especially in northern England, are merely useful and appropriate bywords for the broader category of racial displacement and for the undeniable sense of a native people under threat. The widespread unrest is a watershed not only because it marked the first major instance of White violence since the 2001 Oldham riots, but also because of how quickly it spread across England, even reaching Northern Ireland. The rapid spread of the riots illustrates that this was not an isolated reaction to an isolated incident, but a guttural nationwide release of anger and frustration that has been building for decades. No less important is the government and police response, ruthless and astonishingly efficient given the suffocating lethargy with which it usually responds to ethnic crime. If anything, the slick response to the riots has all the hallmarks of something long in preparation. Both the riots and the response to them have the feel of a turning point, for better or worse. For those on our side, what lessons can be learned?
Public Shaming and Show Trials
The instinctive, impulsive, reactive nature of the riots gave them an open character not seen in organised Leftist violence with its face coverings and Black Bloc. On the one hand, this was one of the factors leading to their successful and rapid spread. There was a contagious fearlessness to thousands of Whites erupting in rage without shame. Careful preparation for public disorder and civil disobedience, however, was almost non-existent, with the result that the vast majority of rioters were not wearing face coverings or nondescript clothing. Some, including a man wearing a St. George’s flag shirt, wore clothing that actually attracted attention and singled them out for identification. Coupled with a dedicated and fanatically persistent police investigation, which included the use of drones at riot locations, and the fact most of the violence occurred in broad daylight, easy identification thus facilitated a much higher than normal arrest count than would be expected for such chaotic events. While some rioters were arrested at the scene of disorder, a great many more were arrested days later following a process of identification.
One of the more remarkable features of the aftermath of the riots is the way in which police forces across Britain used these arrests for propaganda purposes. Shortly after the riots began to subside, police forces appeared to follow a pre-existing and coordinated playbook by issuing sinister warnings and slick, live-action arrest videos complete with dramatic music. Everywhere the message was the same: “We are coming for you, and your punishment will be severe.” Rotherham’s police chief announced, “If you were there, we are coming for you.” Sussex Police issued a statement saying “We will make you regret your actions.” The head of the Metropolitan police said “We will come after you.”
The most sinister aspect of this intimidation campaign was the universal messaging. This wasn’t a warning to criminals, but to everyone who had attended or even just observed the protests. In other words, the propaganda campaign was directed at every White person who felt moved to take to the streets in outrage. White anger itself was criminalised and stigmatised. Hundreds of mug shots were displayed by regional police forces across multiple social media platforms with gloating, threatening captions, often with the arrested persons street address included. Leftist accounts spammed the comments, gleefully hoping that the arrested persons would face violent retribution from non-White criminals in prison. The BBC offered a searchable “Faces of the Riots” database, containing the photo, name, and other information of almost every convicted rioter, ensuring that they have a stigma, if not a target, attached to them for life.
The sentencing of the rioters was also manifestly excessive, especially in light of the fact the British justice system has been notoriously soft on ethnic crime for decades, not least in the category of sex crimes. Without any sense of shame, the authorities bragged of imprisoning a man for almost two years for “shouting at a police dog” while on the other hand releasing rapists and child molestors to make room for White rioters in Britain’s overcrowded prison system. In the perverse value system of the new Britain, a product of Jewish-designed “race relations” laws produced in the 1960s and steadily evolving since then, White anger is the bigger threat and the more dangerous and devastating crime.
Legal Encroachment and Overreach
One development from the riots that has gained most attention is that Britain’s hate speech legislation seems to have entered a new phase of growth and expansion. No new laws have been passed, but the original legislation, especially the 1986 Public Order Act, was sufficiently vague that it has allowed for increasingly draconian interpretation as the culture evolves in a more anti-White direction and allows for stricter enforcement. Jonathan Bowden, speaking in the early 2000s, once said that speech was still relatively free in Britain provided that you didn’t use slurs and provided you didn’t advocate for anything criminal. And at the time he made these comments Bowden was broadly correct. It was perfectly possible to criticise immigration—and even races and racial characteristics—provided it was presented in an intellectual and reasonable manner. Convictions for hate speech were reserved either for movement figureheads such as John Tyndall or Nick Griffin, or else for skinhead groups printing provocative pamphlets.
The growth of social media, however, and its power in the realm of disseminating ideas, has made every White person a potential danger to the prevailing system. The response of the system has therefore been to regard every negative comment made by a White person as a dangerous act of “publishing,” therefore bringing that person under the 1986 Public Order Act which expressly targets anyone who “publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting” with the intent or likelihood of “stirring up” racial hatred. What exactly constitutes “threatening, abusive, or insulting” words is obviously open to interpretation, and as Western culture has moved in a direction in which ethnic populations are afforded more and more sympathy and special privileges and protections, the interpretation of judges has increasingly moved towards protecting them from all criticism. UK judges and prosecutors are also “trained” in part by the Council of Europe’s “HELP course on Combating Hate Speech,” originally developed in 2015. The course provides all the usual propaganda, stigmatising White self-affirmation as a fundamental danger to minority populations everywhere.
The cumulative result of these developments has been that many of those arrested and publicly shamed in Britain in the wake of the Southport atrocity did nothing more than make comments on social media or, still less, merely repost what someone else had written. One wonders if we are not all that far from being arrested in such a situation simply for “liking” an “illegal” status update. Special task forces were established specifically for the purpose of trawling social media for “illegal” posting. Aggressive police officers were banging on doors across England within days, with some social media posters rapidly receiving prison sentences of more than three years for calling for mass deportations and saying they didn’t want their money going to foreigners who “rape our kids and get priority.” Cheshire Constabulary boasted online of a 55-year-old woman arrested “in connection with an inaccurate social media post,” a move that drew the attention of Elon Musk.
Displaying a staggering degree of ethnic solipsism, Jewish Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, who once wrote a novel fantasising about the assassination of a Trump-like President, bleated hysterically that the riots were a re-run of anti-Jewish riots in 1144 following the murder of William of Norwich and demanded that Elon Musk be arrested and brought to trial by English authorities. Freedland worries that Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X has brought about a resurgence in the Right, fretting that “posts including “the word ‘Jew’ had increased fivefold since before the ownership transfer.” God forbid anyone should mention the Jews. Freedland’s solution is that “schools should be teaching information hygiene,” a descriptor equally banal and terrifying since the subtext is clearly a form of brainwashing. Freedland wants “online safety legislation with teeth … if that means toughening up laws so new they are yet to be fully implemented, so be it.” Jews, as always, remain at the forefront of censorship, and even the massive over-reach currently seen under Britain’s speech laws are clearly not enough to satisfy Jewish insecurity and paranoia.
The System Monopoly on ‘Safety and Security’
Another lesson from the riots is that the State will maintain its monopoly on ‘safety and security’ at all costs. Ostensibly the State is guarantor of the safety of its citizens, or at least this is the unstated agreement made in Western European states where citizens do not have gun rights and surrender certain of their capabilities of self-defence to the State in the expectation that the laws and law enforcement offered by the State are capable of substituting self-defense with adequate social protections. These social protections are assumed to be effective, so that police forces can be called upon in emergencies, the justice system will punish crime in an effective and fair manner, and, finally, that the State itself has some kind of notional integrity in the form of controlled borders.
The problem in Western Europe is that the State demands a monopoly on ‘safety and security’ but has utterly failed to fulfil its responsibilities in return. It has taken more and more freedoms, but catastrophically and even proudly neglects the basic safety of those whose freedoms it has taken. Whites everywhere have been robbed and betrayed by this bait and switch. Britons have lost much of their ability for self-defence, and thanks to Jewish-devised race legislation they are actively hindered from defending themselves. In fact, they can’t even speak openly about defending themselves. The British people have to endure compromised borders and constant ethnic violence. As a result, they get to experience a form of second-class citizenship in their own justice system. As events in Southport show, they can’t even send their children to a dance class. Just days after the riots, presented in the media as the pinnacle of moral failings, a White man was stabbed in the neck on camera by an African while a motley of other ethnics joked and laughed. No sooner had the blood been washed from the street than eight stabbings occurred at the Notting Hill Carnival, Britain’s biggest festival of multiculturalism. Neither of these latter incidents were presented as a form of civilizational crisis. Instead they are tacitly assumed to be the necessary cost of living in a “vibrant”, “diverse”, multicultural society. Anyone protesting or speaking negatively about vibrancy and diversity must therefore be a monster, and should be silenced, put in prison, and tarnished for life.
The recent riots were an angry, messy attempt by elements of the British working class to grasp at some semblance of safety and security. And, as has happened so often in multiethnic contexts, this involved an attempt at “cleansing” certain areas occupied by a rival ethnic group or groups. The riots, to the extent that some of the violence was directed against the police, were also a form of retribution by the White working class against authorities which had failed and betrayed them. Leftists made much fun of videos of Britons throwing bins and other objects at police, but these were not just random acts of chaotic violence but the expression of genuine hurt and rage at an overwhelmingly White police force that had betrayed its own kind and turned its back in every meaningful way. White safety isn’t a concern in modern, multicultural Britain, and Whites have no right to protest when their own children are butchered by the imported tools of our hidden elites.
The Class Element and the Incentivization of the Left
Another lesson from the riots is that the White population in Britain is diverging strongly along class lines, with trendy metropolitan middle classes and those largely safe in the suburbs unable and unwilling to empathise with their ethnic kin swamped by migrants in Britain’s larger towns and slums. A common theme in social media commentary on the riots was a sneering condescension displayed by liberal, university-educated types against a class of Whites they view as ignorant, tasteless, boorish, and uncultured. This is summed up in the coining of the word “Gammon,” an even more sneering slur than ‘cracker,’ to describe a typical person from the White working class—gammon referring not only to the pale-pink complexion of those being scorned, but also in the assumption that gammon is a cheap, bland, and fatty meat that a “better” sort of person wouldn’t go for. For this kind of White liberal, “racism” is the resort of beer-swilling Little Englanders who enjoy an artery-clogging diet and whose antipathy to migrants is assumed to be irrational, primitive, piggish, and animalistic. The liberal middle classes have the luxury of thinking of themselves as enlightened, superior moral beings because the foreigners they tend to live and work alongside are at the higher end of the IQ and cultural scale.
In England’s post-industrial north, however, entire towns that once hosted the mining, cotton and linen industries have fallen first into decrepitude and then into mass swamping by millions of Pakistanis and other South Asians. Areas that once thrived with an industrious English working-class culture are now displaced by often predatory Asian communities and their gangs. Whites in these areas are scorned by the immigrant populations, and also by those Whites higher in the socio-economic scale, turning to a life on social welfare benefits, television and a mongrelised pop culture, and the petty amusements of cheap alcohol and football. The White working class is thus a despised caste in Britain, which explains in large part why the mass grooming and rape of girls from this group by Muslims went on for so long without a reaction, and why the stabbing of children from this group of “gammons” was not permitted to be protested, or even for the anger resulting from it to be understood. It has become fashionable to loathe the White working class, even in the midst of its suffering and its grief.
Deportation Discourse
The picture painted thus far is a depressing one indeed. It would seem that only negative lessons, and causes for despair, can be found in the aftermath of the riots. And yet, despite the overwhelming cultural and legal force brought against the riots, I believe there are enough glowing embers in the ashes to give rise to some positivity. The harsh penalties given to the rioters, far out of proportion to the weak justice handed out to ethnic criminals, did not go unnoticed. The hashtag #TwoTierKier quickly went viral, a reference to the fact Britain under Keir Starmer now has a two-tier justice system in which the English are punished far more harshly than those of foreign background. While snuffed out on social media, and forced into more convoluted expressions, there is also a palpable underground discourse which is moving more radically to the Right. Halfway solutions and considerations of moderate approaches are increasingly being abandoned. There is a real sense that “no-one is coming to help us,” and that sense of desperation and abandonment is itself liberating. Just a few days ago, The Telegraph posted an article titled “Britain needs a shock and awe campaign of mass deportations to tackle the illegal migrant crisis,” something that would have been unheard of a year ago. The phrase “mass deportations” taps into a growing discourse in Britain in which limiting immigration is acknowledged as being insufficient to rescue the nation from destruction. Only “mass deportations,” the removal of many millions of people of foreign origin, will restore Britain to a position of relative peace, security, and prosperity.
In a sense, Britain could be described as in a pre-revolutionary state of the kind witnessed in former Soviet countries before the “fall of the wall.” There is a superficial culture in which everyone knows what they should say and think, and there is a nervousness with new acquaintances about how much one can say to the other until one is sure that they aren’t “politically correct.” These social rules remain endemic in the workplace, under the watchful eyes of “human resources” apparatchiks who are incentivised to teach and enforce their “diversity and inclusion” dogmas. But underneath all this is the real Britain—astute, aware, and angry. They can’t imprison everyone, and the Saxon is beginning to hate.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Marshall Yeatshttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngMarshall Yeats2024-08-29 08:43:502024-08-30 05:54:28Lessons from the English Riots
August is traditionally a quiet month in the United Kingdom. The British go on their summer holidays, perversely leaving the country during the hottest month of the year to seek sunshine in foreign climes. Parliament goes into recess, and so no new laws are passed. Even the media take a break, the lack of newsworthy stories earning the month the nickname “the silly season”, reflecting the inane stories the media have to find to fill their newspapers and TV news programs.
But the sleepy eighth month, named for Augustus Caesar, occasionally acts strangely on the English, a people once famed for their rather dull nature. In August 2011, rioting spread across the country after a Black man was shot dead by police in London. Somewhat earlier, in August 1641, the first battle of the English Civil War (three wars, technically, within a decade) was fought at Nottingham. Today, August 2024 can take its place in the British calendar of civil unrest. But where the mainstream media have concentrated on the visuals of the recent riots, it is the political back-story that needs watching. The question is a simple one; how has a tenderfoot British government made such fast and efficient use of the riots for authoritarian political ends?
The riots have been well-documented globally; they are a distraction from the real story, that of political manipulation and the use of civil disturbance to change the law of the land. And this Machiavellian program is aimed squarely at the White population. When British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer addressed the nation after Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, his tone was conciliatory and apologetic, praising what he claimed was the ongoing Black fight against racism. His speech after this month’s riots is markedly different, beginning as it does with the following;
“I utterly condemn the far-Right thuggery we’ve seen this weekend”.
The phrase “far Right” is Britain’s equivalent to the Biden administration’s use of “white supremacy”, a meaningless smear by association I wrote about here at The Occidental Observer over two years ago. The organization which has set itself up as the moral arbiter of supposed White racism is HOPE Not Hate (HNH), an equivalent to America’s Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League. It is HNH who have popularized the phrase “far Right”, one the government has run with. They are also agents provocateurs, groundlessly alleging that a Muslim woman had had acid thrown at her from a car in the town of Cleveland during the rioting, a claim the local police immediately debunked.
But the temptation is still to blame government ineptitude rather than malevolent design. Before the general election on July 4, it was assumed that as Labour had made no substantive policy announcements, they therefore had no policies. They seemed to be campaigning solely on the fact that they weren’t the Conservatives, and simply would not be equipped to govern. Now, that accusation of under-preparedness looks naïve.
There is a perception that Labour’s authoritarian response to the riots is a result of panic, that they getting tough in order to appear in command. But the government appearing to make policy on the hoof is a grand deception, and this sudden roll-out of zealous and ethnicity-specific strong-arm tactics was in place all along. The riots were engineered and the results both predicted and used in a pre-determined way. The White British working class have been goaded for decades with the effects of immigration and the plainly preferential treatment often given to undocumented men. As in Ireland, the government pushed them once too often, albeit deliberately so.
The initial rioting in Southport, a suburb of Liverpool, was sparked by the murder of three young girls at a dance party on July 29, but there had been something of a prequel in the Harehills city district of Leeds on July 18. The difference between the police response to the latter riot and that of the ensuing and far more serious violence shows patterns which are already beginning to define Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s fledgling government.
For once, the rumor on social media that the alleged killer was a newly arrived immigrant was genuine misinformation. The police withheld the attacker’s name for several days, by now a recognized signal that whoever the perpetrator was, he was not a white Englishman. The accused was in fact born in Wales — a fact endlessly repeated in the media — of Rwandan immigrant parents. But the fuse was lit, and a group which was composed of White Englishmen gathered outside a mosque in Southport, which they attacked. By Friday, riots had broken out in several major cities, and the weekend inevitably saw an escalation of hostilities. Then the police and the media came spectacularly to life in a way that had not accompanied the Harehills riot.
The Harehills disturbance began when an immigrant Romanian family became involved in a stand-off with social services officers who had come to take at least one of the family’s children into care. The ensuing riot attracted a crowd of mostly Muslim young men. The police have shown during pro-Palestine demonstrations that they are reluctant to police ethnic minorities, and when they finally arrived in Harehills, the crowd chased them out of the area. They did not return. When rioting subsequent to the Southport murders was instigated by White, English, working-class men, the style of policing changed completely. This represents a central pillar of what is already a new order; Two-tier policing.
The phrase “two-tier policing” was coined by ex-Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Her use of the phrase, in addition to using the term “invasion” to describe illegal immigration, led ultimately to her defenestration by her party. It used to require a sexual or financial scandal to end a politician’s career. Four words are sufficient today.
Two-tier policing is undeniably taking place in the UK, although that has not stopped governmental mouthpieces denying it. With the advent of citizen journalism, ordinary people whose media information used to come solely from the state-sanctioned, legacy press, are now able to watch the different policing styles employed against Muslims and the White working class. Starmer flatly denied that there is any two-tier policing, claiming that the British police act “without fear or favor”. This phrase was first used in 1829 by the founder of the British police, Sir Robert Peel, and in Starmer’s mouth it is demonstrably untrue. Tempers frayed when Sir Mark Rowley, Chief Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police Force, was asked by a reporter whether he would end two-tier policing. Rowley angrily snatched the microphone from the offending reporter’s hand.
Below is a 12-minute video by Mark Collett, of British political organization Patriotic Alternative (PA, who have been blocked from registering as an official party). It explains two-tier policing succinctly, and PA have been watched forensically for years, meaning that government lawyers will certainly have watched this short exposé. In other words, you know it’s true because if there was one slip-up, Collett would already be in jail. His message is simple; Whites are policed very differently from non-Whites.
And so, while the rioting itself dominates the media, political machinations are clicking into place behind the smokescreen. Labour are determined not to let this crisis go to waste, and they are using methods of control honed by the political class over the last quarter of a century, which links Tony Blair’s Labour government to Sir Keir Starmer’s.
The rioting has been extensive, but it is the damage done to the liberty of the citizenry that is significant. Prime Minister Starmer and his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have, to use a phrase beloved of the political class, “been absolutely clear about this”. The current troubles are the fault of White, “far-Right” thugs. Starmer put into place instant retribution for rioters, 24-hour courts to process them despite a normally sluggish judicial process in Britain, and staggering prison sentences of up to ten years for involvement in disturbances, including online incitement. This is not a flustered government grasping at ad hoc policy. This has been a long time in the planning.
Central to this aggressive policy-making are arrest and punishment, and the weaker and more vulnerable those arrested, the better the deterrent. A 55-year-old woman was arrested on August 8 for posting a name believed to be that of the Southport killer, but which was in fact incorrect. Here is what Chief Superintendent Alison Ross of Cheshire Police had to say about the arrest:
It’s a stark reminder of the dangers of posting information on social media platforms without checking the accuracy. It also acts as a warning that we are all accountable for our actions, whether that be online or in person. [Italics added].
It looks as though Ms. Ross is saying that we are all responsible for our actions, but she is not. You won’t hear any mouthpiece of the British Left (which is what the police are) saying such a thing because a belief in personal agency is not in the ideological DNA of the Left, at least not when groups with protected characteristics are being arrested. What she is impressing on the specifically White British is that they are accountable, they can be held to account, even for repeating an inaccuracy. This is reminiscent of a government advertising poster during World War II, on which a fierce-looking army officer barks out the following; “Treat rumours like mistakes. Don’t repeat ‘em”.
Britain’s people are learning a political lesson. If government cannot control the narrative, and therefore the behavior (both physical and mental) of its citizens, it will increase its powers of detention and prime the judicial system towards heavier sentencing for the ethnic bloc of which it disapproves most, which is the White working class. People are already going to jail for their part in the rioting, the usually sluggish judicial system suddenly being given the equivalent of a jab with a cattle prod. There are similarities between what is happening to rioters in the UK and the so-called “insurrectionists” of the infamous January 6 walkabout in the US. But it ought to be pointed out that the British rioters really were rioting, whereas the Americans who still languish in jail over January 6 were guilty of little more than aggravated tourism.
While everyone is being distracted by the main events of the rioting, plus the government’s pulpit-pounding response, it is the activity off-stage and behind the scenes which gives genuine cause for concern. Aside from the flurry of legislation the government is implementing, consider what else Labour have done in their first month in power.
A Parliamentary Bill intended to restore free speech to university campuses has been abandoned, and not in its formative stages. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 received Royal assent in May of last year, and was therefore effectively law. It even had cross-party support. The Bill was summed up in a governmental report of June 1, 2023 as follows:
[The Act] delivers on the Government’s commitment to strengthen academic freedom and free speech in higher education, helping to protect the reputation of our universities as centres of academic freedom.
On July 26 this year, after three weeks of a Labour government, the Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, wrote to colleagues to announce the new government’s intention to proceed no further with the Bill. Her report even allows the Bill to be repealed if constitutionally required for its annulment. The reason she gives, with reference to the academic freedom of speech the original Bill guaranteed, is that “I am aware that the Act would be burdensome on providers”.
In just over a year, in a nation that once led the world in higher education, academic freedom of speech has gone from being a championed priority to being a burden. And Labour are only just getting started.
Shortly before this eruption of dissidence, Starmer announced that there were “too many prisoners” in British jails, and began a program of early release. Once again, the line from Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange echoes. A British MP is discussing early release with a prison governor, and informs him that “soon we will be needing all our prison space for political prisoners”. Starmer had already announced that he will step up early release. But the British prison system has been described as on the brink of collapse in the media for as long as I can remember. Why the sudden desperate need for prison space?
Then there is legislation which was already draconian and which is now under review to increase the powers it grants government.
The Online Safety Bill (OSB) was controversial when it first passed into British law last year. It was marked by an almost total lack of a working definition for key operative phrases and terms such as “harm”, “hate speech”, “offence”, “racism”, and others. This lack of definition is a political tactic I called “usable ambiguity” in a piece on the Bill here. Lack of precise definition should be totally unacceptable where crime and punishment are concerned, but there are already moves to make rigid definition in the law a thing of the past, and we will see a lot more usable ambiguity as the truth is tinkered with. This is civil war at an epistemological level.
Now, the Muslim Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has stated that the OSB needs reviewing in the wake of the rioting specifically to address the confected problem of “misinformation”. Khan is an arrogant man but he has every right to be. As the highest-profile Muslim politician in the UK, he is relishing his new influence over the government. Keir Starmer has already made it clear that when Khan shouts “Jump!” Starmer merely needs to ask “how high?” Why else would a PM newly swept into power with a record-breaking mandate allow a bumptious London Mayor to inform big tech companies that, concerning online misinformation, “if they don’t sort their own house out, regulation is coming”.
Misinformation is what has exercised the Mayor, Elon Musk having taken a keen interest in the disturbances. Musk’s use of his platform, X, as a base from which to troll British politicians has incensed the political class. Musk has attacked Starmer from early in the rioting, and Starmer has responded rather bafflingly by having his Chief Commissioner of Police imply that Musk “will face the full force of the law” and possible subsequent arrest for his online comments. Whatever this government might lack, it is not braggadocio.
“England and Wales have long had very broad criminal offences that make it illegal to say something online that would often be legal offline,” says Michael Veale, associate professor in technology law at University College London. “Those communications offences are the tools that law enforcement usually reach for when dealing with specific cases like Musk’s, prosecuting thousands a year.” And some of those rules have been bolstered by the new Online Safety Act, which was passed into law in the last few months. But there’s a catch. “Even in the new act, these do not extend outside of the jurisdiction, meaning it would be hard to see how they could be used to target Musk,” says Veale. Independent
Before leading the Labour Party to victory, Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), a powerful figure in the estate of the British judiciary. Strange that he and his Chief of Police should neglect to inform Mr. Musk which law he has broken, and what extradition agreements are in place with whatever country the world’s richest man is in today. The exchange offers a clue to wider ideological concerns. For the Left, criticism of Left-wing ideology is increasingly becoming equivalent to breaking the law. And Starmer genuinely is a creature of the Left.
The only MSM journalist to have spoken about Starmer’s past as a Pabloite (a hard-Left branch of Trotskyism) is the veteran Peter Hitchens, whose late brother Christopher was probably better known in the USA. Hitchens may be a gloomy curmudgeon, but he holds onto stories tenaciously, and is a lone voice in the wilderness of the British media for forewarning an unheeding nation about Starmer’s hard-Left provenance. But we are not seeing the triumph of the Left, but that of the political class.
I recently reviewed Peter Oborne’s seminal book on modern British politics, The Triumph of the Political Class,here at The Occidental Observer. The book was written in 2007 and describes the formation of a separate political class acting in their own self-interest, and to the ultimate detriment of the citizenry. A key point Oborne makes is that, in 2007, the political class was still learning how to control the people in an age of mass communication. In the interim, it has got a lot better at it. Starmer and his party were famously seen as having no policies going into the general election, leading critics to claim Labour in power would be inventing policy as they went along, merely improvising government. This isn’t credible. Five weeks into their new government, the Labour Party certainly has got policies, and I suspect they had them long before their election victory, when they were deemed unpalatable for public consumption. Now, with a huge mandate and a five-year-plan, a Labour Party supposedly unprepared for government looks very prepared indeed.
So, if this government is coming across as panicky and unprepared for power, I suggest that is something of a psy-op. Gross incompetence leading to the exacerbation of a problem is often metaphorically referred to as “putting out the fire with gasoline”. But what if you weren’t trying to put the fire out? What if your intention all along was to make it blaze ever hotter, even if it burns the house down? If the UK is going to hell in a handcart, the handcart doesn’t need to be built from scratch. It was finished long ago.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Mark Gullickhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngMark Gullick2024-08-12 07:33:202024-08-12 07:33:20The Politics of the UK Riots
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