Sunday 17 August 2014

Probing

We all know who this is.

Despite the pronounced scepticism of Lord Carrington and of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (since they saw it as nothing to do with Britain, and as likely to offend key allies and trading partners), Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine allocated Crown property for a National Holocaust Memorial within a few hundred yards of the Cenotaph.

Britain's main contribution to the Holocaust had been Churchill's refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz, a refusal which much later moved Menachem Begin to inform Margaret Thatcher that her country and her hero had caused the deaths of two million Jews.

He himself had armed Argentina during the Falklands War, only months before the controversy over this proposed monument ostensibly to one thing but really to another.

However, the promise of it had been made to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, in those days a hopeless bunch of zealots, and to the Zealot-in-Chief, the then Labour MP, Greville Janner.

Janner, the second generation MP for the same seat as well as a second generation President of the Board of Deputies, spent many decades screeching "Anti-Semitism! Anti-Semitism! Nazi! Nazi!" at anyone who dared to question, for example, how he had made his own considerable pots of money.

Janner was still active in the House of Lords until the very recent Police raids on his office there and on his home, investigating You Know What. Now, apparently, he has dementia.

In a way, haven't we all?

For there is no memorial, anywhere on the face of the earth, to those who fell in and for the Palestine that was a country on the map, with the Union Flag in the corner of its own and with red postboxes bearing the crowned letters GR. The answer to the supposedly rhetorical question, "Who was the last King of Palestine?" is "George VI."

That British country was bombed out of existence by the founders of modern terrorism. For example, Menachem Begin.

His successors' utter lack of regret about even the most extreme anti-British violence has no mainstream political parallel outside Zimbabwe.

It is a wonder that there is not a statue of him in London. Give it time. Probably not very much more time.

Israel is the only country in the world that could have attacked an American naval vessel, killed 34 of her 294 crew members, and injured a further 174, all without the slightest consequence.

The Iranian and Israeli Embassies in London are both in South Kensington. On the former's property, but visible from the street, a memorial to the USS Liberty might usefully be erected.

An annual wreath-laying ceremony would be broadcast on RT, Al Jazeera and Press TV, and on Channel 4 News on a good day. But do not hold your breath for even the slightest coverage anywhere else.

Scandalously, the same would be true of the urgently needed National Memorial to British Palestine. Ideally, one yard closer to Janner's erection.

Or possibly in place of it, should it have to go the way of the extravagant headstone of Jimmy Savile.

In 1997, who succeeded Janner as the MP for Leicester West? Why, none other than Patricia Hewitt.

In its opposition to what became the Protection of Children Act 1978, the National Council for Civil Liberties, under Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, was opposing the Labour Government of the day.

It had been taken up and given Government time, but it had begun as a Private Member's Bill, introduced by a Conservative MP who was to go on to become one of the Thatcher Government's most dedicated critics.

There was really no dividing line whatever between the strongly anti-worker, or at any rate anti-working-class, New Left and the "libertarian" New Right, so that the New Left's eventual capture of the Labour Party after the death of John Smith wholly predictably entailed a full capitulation to the Thatcherism that the New Right had defined, although the New Left had named it.

Patricia Hewitt is a key figure in that whole story. She it was who told speakers at Labour Conferences, "Do not use the word "equality"; the preferred term is "fairness"."

She it was, a mere Press Officer, who, in a sign of things to come, was not told where to get off for having presumed so to instruct her betters.

She went on to help found the Institute for Public Policy Research, and then, soon after Tony Blair became Leader, to become Head of Research at Andersen Consulting, a position for which she had no apparent qualification beyond her closeness to the Prime Minister in Waiting.

In 1997, she entered Parliament, he entered Downing Street, the Labour commitment to regulate such companies was dropped, and so was the previous Conservative Government's absolute ban on all work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud.

Andersen paid just over £21 million of the £200 million that Thatcher and Major had demanded, barely covering the Government's legal costs.

It went on to write, among other things, a report claiming that the Private Finance Initiative was good value for money, the only report on the subject that the Blair Government ever cited, since the only one to say that ridiculous thing.

As Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Hewitt tried to give auditors limited liability. It took the Conservative Opposition and the Bush Administration to see her off.

But ignore the attempts to drag Bryan Gould into the PIE business. It had framed itself in terms of equalisation of the age of consent (he cannot have been expected to have been familiar with the P word, which was barely used in those days), but he still managed to fob off its approach with "don't call me".

Magpie, in which Hewitt's and Harman's NCCL advertised underneath sexualised pictures of young boys and alongside advice to buy The Brownie Annual for the photographs, was not even a subscription-only publication. In London, at least, it was sold in newsagents.

Those were the times. As politely as he could have done in those times, Bryan said no to the PIE. He deserves every credit for that. But the people who went on to become New Labour did not, and do not.

Herewith, his commendation of my Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, which was published in February 2012, and in which appears, among many other things, the story of Hewitt, Harman, and the Paedophile Information Exchange:

"Current orthodoxy – both in economic policy and right across the board – has so manifestly failed us that we desperately need some fresh thinking and a different way of looking at our problems. That is precisely what David Lindsay provides in this stimulating book."

Bryan is now the International Patron of the One Nation Society.

Patricia Hewitt, also returned to the Antipodes, is not.

2 comments:

  1. Your knowledge and analysis are both without equal. All of your posts yesterday were hugely important. The people who deprived the parliamentary process of your voice committed a kind of treason. What happened to the bloke they preferred? He is not in Parliament or a candidate for next year but he must be nearly 40.

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