Saturday, 20 August 2016

Bad Housekeeping

There are far fewer lasting monuments to Thatcherism than is widely supposed.

But one such is the doubling in the last 10 years of the Housing Benefit paid to private landlords.

This is what has replaced the council housing that was sold off, and never replaced with any new housing.

Of All The Things

Remember all the carry on over Sadiq Khan's erstwhile clients as a solicitor? Well, who has the dodgy connections now, Owen Smith?

Meanwhile, the few right-wing media outlets that still allow comments below the line are being confronted with the fact that their readers support a candidate for President of the United States whose view on NATO and on relations with Russia is the unfiltered version of Jeremy Corbyn's.

Those who have, for now, rallied to Smith are truly mind-boggling. Of all the things that the Attlee Government did, the only ones that they wish to preserve, never mind restore, are NATO membership and nuclear weapons.

No, He Khan't

All of the Labour MPs who were trying to become the London Mayoral candidate nominated Jeremy Corbyn last year.

That candidate would probably have won, anyway. But the enormity of Sadiq Khan's victory was a clear expression of the Corbyn Surge.

So yes, I stand by my support for George Galloway, and I believe that he would have come third in the first preference votes, making his second preferences decisive, if he had been given a fair press.

He predicted that Khan would do precisely what he has now done.

Respect has voluntarily deregistered itself as a political party. What will it become? An online magazine? A network of activists across parties and campaigns? Watch that space.

Labour ought to permit members of other parties to become affiliated or registered supporters, although obviously not members, provided that those parties did not contest elections to the House of Commons, or to the constituency rather than to the list seats in the devolved bodies.

Friday, 19 August 2016

Bulk Data, Indeed

At least until it became led by the man who, as Home Secretary, had started the great assault on civil liberties, the Conservative Party was strong and admirable in its opposition to New Labour's continuation of Michael Howard's programme.

That mantle then passed to the Lib Dems, to most of the smaller parties most of the time, and to valiant bands of Conservative and Labour backbenchers, always including Jeremy Corbyn.

The Coalition meant that the Lib Dems' holding of the line also became confined to rebellious backbenchers. 

Theresa May's time as Home Secretary was a nightmare period for civil liberties. Her appointment of David Davis to the Cabinet has removed him from the ramparts.

And now, bang on cue, this.

Going Postal

The impending Post Office strike serves as a reminder of the demented separation of the Post Office from the Royal Mail, in order to privatise the latter, and doubtless the former in due season.

That has led to staff at adjacent desks whose respective employers are renting those desks from each other.

And yet it is Jeremy Corbyn who is said to be mad.

A Clear Choice

Which is worse, Putin's Russia or the Islamic State? Very distilled, that is the geopolitical question of the present moment.

Owen Smith has given one answer, Jeremy Corbyn the other. Therefore, there is now a clear choice to be made between the two.

Of course Corbyn is not turning up to show "hustings" organised by and for his enemies.

RT, Press TV, teleSUR, the Morning Star, Counterfire and The Canary ought to organise hustings, and see if Smith turned up.

Moderated by Paul Mason. Follow that link. It is sublime.

Care Quality, Indeed

Of course the facilities of Marie Stopes International are centres of disregard for safety, and for the rights of underage girls. 

Consumption is at its highest where birthrates are at their lowest. As is bound to be the case, when you think about it. A culture of self-indulgence.

Likewise, it is anything but counterintuitive that there is the most abortion where there is the most contraception.

But the anti-natal answer to every question is always, “There are too many proles and darkies, and we should be allowed to have completely consequence-free sex with every woman on earth.” 

Ever faithful to Marie Stopes, author of extravagant, versified love letters to Hitler.

Marie Stopes, who disowned her own son because he married a woman who wore glasses.

Marie Stopes, who campaigned for the compulsory sterilisation of “the C3 population”, of “half-castes” and of “revolutionaries”, among numerous others.

Marie Stopes, who opened dozens of clinics in working-class areas to reduce the number of “undesirables” by persuasion if force were politically impossible.

Yet those clinics now retain the right to “counsel” women considering the abortions that they have a gigantic financial and an immeasurable ideological interest in ensuring go ahead.

They still carry the name of Marie Stopes. Our televisions now carry their adverts. Our 50p stamps have recently carried her image.

And we all carry the shame.

As they do across the Atlantic, where tax dollars fund the heirs of Margaret Sanger, whose stated primary objective was always to prevent black babies from being born, the objective still pursued above all others by her successors, so that “Planned Parenthood” would more accurately be called “Planned Genocide”. 

The womb, the streets and the battlefield are the locations of the triple genocide to which the American black male, in particular, is now subject.

The Unholy Trinity is completed by Helen Brook, who in February 1980 wrote in The Times that, “From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions – objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child.” 

In 1995, this deranged creature was given the CBE. The Conservative Party was not at that time in coalition with the Liberal Democrats or anyone else.

Femaleness has been classified as in itself a medicable condition by means of the contraceptive pill, which is simply not a medicine at all.

It is, in point of fact, a poison, designed precisely to stop healthy body parts from performing their natural functions, and accordingly attended by all manner of horrific side effects, for no reason except to make women permanently available for the sexual gratification of men, and despite the unrivalled effectiveness of Natural Family Planning if it is taught and practised properly, a practice only possible by a faithful married couple.

The Pill, in turn, has wrought havoc by filling our water supply with synthetic oestrogens.

If that is not both a social justice and an environmental concern, then I cannot imagine what could be, or what it is instead.

Following logically, maleness itself has also been so classified, leading to the heavy medication of boys purely for being boys, by means of Ritalin and other powerful “treatments” for largely or entirely invented conditions.

The impact of antidepressants on the rise of violent mental illness, especially among young men and teenage boys, also calls for the most unflinching examination.

As, while, we are about it, does the impact of cannabis on the rise of schizophrenia, and by extension also on lung cancer, mouth cancer, throat cancer, brain tumours, serial miscarriage, low birth weight, male and female infertility, impotence, and a huge number of other conditions.

We need an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

Climate change is supposed to be anthropogenic. The human race makes the weather.

The burning of carbon is the foundation of the working class, the foundation of the Left, the foundation of human progress (problematic though that term is), the foundation of civilisation.

We need a celebration of the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

The problem with the world is not that it has people in it. Which people, exactly? We all know the answer to that.

Rather, people produce wealth, material and otherwise. People are wealth, material and otherwise.