Why does Starmer keep insisting that the public are wrong?

Keir Starmer was elected as Labour leader on the back of 10 pledges, which promises party unity, the continuation of Corbynite policies, and a clear cut commitment to communal ownership of vital infrastructure and services like water, rail, and energy.

Starmer knew he couldn't win the Labour leadership without promising these things, because public ownership is not just overwhelmingly popular with the Labour Party members who were voting, they're popular policies across the entire British public.

Polling consistently demonstrates that overwhelming support for renationalisation of the energy sector, the water supply in England, and the railways.

In the two years after his election as Labour leader circumstances have handed Starmer a series of ideal opportunities to promote these overwhelmingly popular renationalisation policies.

Raw Sewage

In 2021 Johnson's Tory rabble triggered a massive public backlash when they voted to allow privatised water companies to keep artificially inflating their profits by dumping vast quantities of raw sewage into our waterways and coastal waters.

Starmer could easily have used this scandal to promote the popular policy of bringing England's privatised mess of water suppliers back under public ownership.

Instead he sent his subordinates out to argue that the profiteers must stay in charge of the water supply, in order to signal that Labour represents no threat to vested capitalist interests.

Energy Crisis

We've all seen the chaos of massively inflated energy bills, soaring energy producer profits, a sequence of energy suppliers going bust, and the government regulator forcing abandoned customers onto much more expensive tariffs.

Starmer could have highlighted the way the French government imposed a 4% cap on energy bill rises onto their publicly owned energy company (EdF), while the Tory government allowed EdF and other energy companies in the UK market to raise bills by an astonishing 54%.

He could have offered the public the renationalisation policies they want, but instead he decided to once again adopt the position that the public are wrong, and that the private profiteers must stay.

And Starmer didn't just spurn the opportunity to promote the energy renationalisation policies that the public want, and that he pledged in his leadership bid, he even publicly bragged that he lied in his leadership campaign, and insisted that he'd lie to people again to win more power!

Rail Strikes

Labour is supposed to be the party of working people (the clue is in the name), but Keir Starmer has decided to oppose the RMT rail strike against below-inflation pay offers and mandatory redundancies.

He's so vehemently opposed to the strikes that his minions are trying to force Labour MPs to apologise for showing solidarity with striking workers!

It's truly absurd to see Starmer's shadow cabinet team insisting that they won't support the strikes because they don't want to "pick a side".

It's capitalist profiteers and a profoundly malicious Tory transport secretary against ordinary low-paid rail workers (not train drivers).

If Labour won't even pick a side in this scenario, what the hell is the point in them.

And then the polling has come out to show that the British public are overwhelmingly on the side of the rail workers, meaning once again Starmer has positioned himself far to the right of public opinion.

Outflanking the public to the right

Despite pledging popular renationalisation policies in his leadership election, Keir Starmer has deliberately placed the Labour Party well to the right of the British public on water, energy, and now rail.

Instead of offering the public what they want, Starmer is siding with the capitalist profiteers and insisting that the public are wrong to want things to just be a bit better and fairer for British consumers and British workers.

Starmer's dedicated to the protection of vested capitalist interests, so he's going to keep Labour positioned well to the right of public opinion; offer a bland and uninspiring "more of the same" policy platform; and hope that he can win the next election purely by not being quite as repulsive and divisive as Johnson.

It looks a lot like a deliberate attempt to replay Ed Miliband's catastrophically uninspiring 2015 Tory-lite election campaign, in which Labour decided to pathetically imitate Tory austerity ruination, rather than opposing it and pledging to invest for the future instead.

It seems an absurdly inexplicable strategy to repeatedly chide the public that they're wrong to want things to be a bit better, and then expect them to vote for you regardless.

Unless of course Starmer considers the protection of capitalist profiteering to be so important that he'd risk driving millions of traditional Labour voters away, and throwing an election over it.

And if that's the case, what the hell is this absurd person doing as leader of the Labour Party?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

What the Mick Lynch phenomenon tells us about UK politics and the media

Not so long ago few people outside of the rail industry had even heard of Mick Lynch, but in the space of a week, the head of the RMT union has absolutely taken the UK media by storm by calmly stating the facts in the face of relentless provocation from members of Britain's depraved media class.

Lynch has been such a success that even liberal dweebs like Gary Lineker have been singing his praises, because in just a few days he's managed to do more to stand up for working people and hold this atrocious Tory government to account, than the Silent Knight Keir Starmer has done in two interminable years.

This fascination with Mick Lynch is easy to understand, because we live in a country where left-wing and working class voices are routinely marginalised. 

The media, politics, and the whole rotten establishment is absolutely stuffed with people from privileged backgrounds. And it's absolutely obvious that most of the tiny minority of working class people who did ever get anywhere near the top, knew that they needed to demonstrate conformity to the establishment ideology to get where they were.

And just look at the absolute state of the Labour Party, which was founded to represent the interests of ordinary working people in parliament, yet all but a few of its MPs are anti-socialist, "more of the same" liberal-capitalists from comfortably wealthy backgrounds, not real workers and real socialists from working class families.

For a few years Labour had a party leader who wanted to bring more local, working-class, and genuinely socialist people back into the PLP, but the liberal dweebs had a four and a half year tantrum aimed at keeping the Tories in power until Corbyn could be driven out and replaced by someone who would deliver what they wanted; marginalisation of the left and the relentless rigging of internal party elections and nomination processes to parachute in ever more of these turgid, uninspiring middle class yes men.

The liberal dweebs got exactly what they wanted, yet now they're looking at Mick Lynch's brand of passionate, informed, and authentic politics with envy, and wondering why the bland, unprincipled, triangulating liberal mess they've made of the Labour Party is so utterly incapable of generating the same kind of popular appeal!

Imagine how different things would be if the BBC actually committed to its so-called neutrality by balancing every politician from a posh background with a working class voice, and by balancing every capitalist mouthpiece with an alternative view (socialism, anarchism, trade-unionism, left-libertarianism, communism, anti-capitalism, syndicalism, green-left ...).

But we all know the BBC commitment to neutrality only extends to countering evidence based stuff like climate science with some slimy mercenary creep from an oil industry bankrolled radical-right think tank, and never to balanced class representation in the media; ensuring trade unionists get equal airtime to capitalists; or highlighting actual alternatives to the ruinous hard-right capitalist orthodoxy Britain's been trapped in since 1979.

It's in this context that Lynch has, in the space of a few days, made Kay Burley, Richard Madeley, and Piers Morgan look like the vapid hyper-partisan fools they are, which makes for incredibly viral content, but you'd have to be profoundly naive to not see that he's playing a very dangerous game.

There are an awful lot of people in Britain who absolutely hate to see uppity working class people making their social superiors look stupid and venal by calmly stating facts at them, not least Britain's depraved punditocracy themselves.

And the media class motivation to take Lynch down keeps on multiplying. There's their underlying hostility to left-wing and working class voices; the class solidarity amongst the pundit class is making them furious that he's repeatedly making their compatriots look foolish; and there's now the self-interested desire to go viral by being the first media figure to finally take this 'uppity pleb' down a peg or two.

They're behaving like a swarm of bees trying to eject an intruder from the hive, and they're doing it right in front of our faces.

This relentless bias against left-wing and working class voices means we've all just become normalised to the idea that it's generally only posh capitalists who participate in politics, or talk about politics in the media.

But in reality there are hundreds of thousands of educated, informed, genuinely left-wing, politically active working-class people like Mick Lynch in Britain, it's just that the establishment gatekeepers don't want people like us in the media, or anywhere near the corridors of power.

The fact that Lynch is being portrayed as some kind of strange and exciting novelty by all and sundry speaks volumes about the under-representation of working class voices in British political discourse.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Something's gone terribly wrong with Labour

Keir Starmer has once again demonstrated Labour's chaotic lurch to the right under his lamentable leadership, this time by forcing Wes Streeting to apologise for expressing a bit of solidarity with striking UK rail workers last week.

Let's not forget that Labour is supposed to be the party of the workers (the clue is in the name). 

It's supposed to defend ordinary people from the greed and exploitation of capitalists and landlords. 

If Labour founding-father Keir Hardie was alive
today, Starmer would no-doubt force him to
apologise for saying things like this

It was founded by socialists and trade unionists, and it's still almost entirely funded by socialists and trade unionists through their membership fees and union subs.

But Starmer sees it as his own personal fiefdom, which he rules over through relentless factionalism; petty diktats; depraved ideological purity tests; constant vote-rigging; forced apologies; and regular witch-hunts against those who refuse to bow down to his authoritarian hankerings.

Starmer started off by hastily driving anyone with a shred of decency out of his shadow cabinet by insisting that they abstain on a couple of truly vile pieces of Tory legislation designed to allow undercover cops to rape women with impunity, and to provide impunity to British soldiers who commit war crimes overseas.

These ideological purity tests did what they were designed to, and drove all of the genuinely left-wing and socially progressive figures out of his shadow cabinet, so he then set about demoting all the so-called "soft-left" figures too (like Dodds and Thomas-Symonds), replacing them with his right-wing allies.

Starmer and his bully-boy enforcer on the NEC David Evans have issued loads of diktats banning local party members from discussing certain subjects, or holding no confidence votes in Starmer or Evans, because if there's one thing that petty tyrants can't tolerate, it's open and free discussion amongst people they believe to be their inferiors.

Starmer forced Alex Sobel (hardly a radical leftist) to issue a grovelling apology for suggesting that he thought capitalism was to blame for climate change, then he cynically rigged the Labour leadership nomination process to make it almost impossible for his successor to be socialist, female, or a person of colour.

Then Starmer positioned himself miles to the right of Tony Blair by going after the anti-war group of Labour MPs, threatening to expel them from the party if they refused to bend to his will. 

Even though Iraq turned out to be an absolutely horrific disaster, meaning Blair really should have listened to the warnings of rebels like of Robin Cook, Tony Benn, Tam Dalyell, Jeremy Corbyn ... he still allowed them to dissent without threatening to expel them from the party like Starmer does to anyone with a different opinion to his own.

And now Starmer's humiliating Wes Streeting, and showing utter contempt for the trade union movement that pays the Labour Party's bills, by demanding Streeting issue a grovelling apology for his expression of sympathy towards striking rail workers!

If Starmer's punishing a right-wing lickspittle like Streeting for coming across as too left-wing, it's beyond obvious that something has gone catastrophically wrong with the Labour Party.

It's been usurped by the political right, and under Starmer's leadership it's being used as a battering ram to undermine, disempower, demoralise, and silence the left, instead of offering a better alternative to this cesspit of Tory incompetence, corruption, and degeneracy.

The workers' party has been taken over by people who favour greedy capitalists over exploited workers; selfish private landlords over suffering tenants; the power of the state over the power of the people; and property rights over people.

It's been taken over by a wannabe-tyrant who refuses to accept any opinion other than his own, and clearly considers the genuine left within his own party to be a much bigger problem than Johnson's malicious, corrupt, and incompetent ghouls in government, who he repeatedly refuses to properly oppose.

I would never have picked Starmer as Labour leader, but I could also never have imagined that things would have degraded so rapidly under his perpetual abstention of a leadership. 

He's more of a right-wing control freak than Blair; he's more obsessed with defending the neoliberal economic order than Brown; he's more other-worldly and unengaging than Miliband; and he's far worse at getting to the point and hammering home the political advantage than Corbyn was!

He's like some kind of Frankenstein's monster composed of all of the worst aspects of other Labour leaders, without any of the good bits. 

Without the charisma of Blair; without Brown's aura of decency; without Miliband's desire to make the Labour Party more democratic and accountable; and without Corbyn's popular policies.

What's more is how utterly dismal Starmer is on policy and strategy.

He seems to be convinced that his strategy of repeating the same mistakes of the past will prove successful this time. 

Attacking the left rather than properly holding the Tories to account delivered Neil Kinnock his absolute pratfall of an election in 1992, and in 2015 Ed Miliband's mistake of pathetically imitating Tory economic insanity rather than opposing it turned what should have been an absolute gimme of an election, into a humbling defeat.

Starmer's going to do both at the same time, as well as insisting that the public are wrong to want energy and water renationalisation, when the sewage scandal and the energy crisis had actually provided him absolutely golden opportunities to offer the public the renationalisations that they've repeatedly told pollsters that they want (and what he'd promised in his leadership election pledges to boot!).

Starmer's just as determined to lecture the public that they're wrong, as he is to ignore the lessons from Labour Party history!

It's absolutely mind-boggling that there are still people within the Labour ranks who insist on trying to gaslight the public into believing that this unlikeable, unengaging, unsympathetic, untrustworthy figure is actually brilliant, funny, charismatic, relatable, and honest, and that we're all at fault for not having noticed yet!

Starmer's been far worse than even his harshest critics could have imagined in 2019, and yet Labour seem determined not to get rid of him, and to go into the next general election with this absolute dud dictating, and foot-stamping, and micromanaging the party into another devastating electoral pratfall.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

13 things everyone should know about the ECHR

Priti Patel's Rwanda deportation flight was never actually intended to take off.

It was a £500,000 publicity stunt designed to ramp up the culture war against the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court that protects these rights and liberties.

The Tory ploy was to deliberately try to break the law, in order to claim that the nasty Europeans are preventing us from doing what we want to, and agitate for Britain to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR.

Given that the UK government is intent on whipping up culture war propaganda against it, here are 13 things that people should know about the ECHR:

It's got nothing to do with the EU

The ECHR has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. It's an independent institution established in 1950.

So all these far-right polemicists shouting "leave means leave" over the Rwanda situation are either thick as mince, or being deliberately misleading.

Churchill's finest legacy

Winston Churchill was a true enigma of a man. A right-wing racist who despised Indians and set soldiers on British workers, but a war leader in the fight against Nazism, and a man who promoted the idea of internationally accepted human rights to prevent the horrors of fascism from happening again.

The development of the ECHR was supported by both Churchill and Labour PM Clement Attlee, meaning anyone who wants to rip Britain out of of the ECHR is trashing the legacies of the favourite 20th Century Prime Ministers of both the right and the left!

Protection from fascism

The ECHR was designed to protect European citizens from fascism, and make sure nothing like the horrors of the Second World War could ever happen again. So you've really got to wonder about the true motivations of any government that wants to drag their country out of it.

The life's work of Johnson's own grandad

Boris Johnson's own grandfather James Fawcett was a member of the ECHR from 1962-1984, serving as its President from 1972-1982. He dedicated his life's work to human rights, and wrote books on international law, and the application of the ECHR.

It's not just an indication of the decline of Fawcett's family lineage that his own grandson is the radical-right philistine who is intent on wrecking his life's work, it's indicative of our national decline too.

For all of our many faults, Britain was once a great nation in some ways, stocked with decent, honest, earnest men like Fawcett who worked for the betterment of humanity.

These days we lift up and celebrate the absolute worst among us, like the bone-idle, incompetent, lying, philandering oaf who is intent on wrecking the life's work of his own grandfather, purely because he knows contemptuously undermining human rights and international law plays well to Britain's depraved hard-right capitalist media.

These days it's all about self-interest, not the betterment of others, and it's a crying shame that we've fallen so far as a nation in just a couple of generations.

Red meat for tabloid-addled reactionaries

It's hard to imagine the warped mindset of the kind of tabloid-addled reactionary who desperately wants to see their own human rights ripped up, purely because they're angry that their beloved Tory government couldn't unlawfully deport a few poor refugees, who they've never even met, and know nothing about.

But this kind of rabidly right-wing ultranationalist reactionary is Johnson's base. The Tories knew they couldn't win elections without attracting the millions who used to vote for UKIP and the BNP, so this policy of destroying our human rights is red meat, intended for their consumption.

ECHR protects British rights

We regularly hear about how the ECHR protects immigrants, by preventing the UK government from defying the law to deport them, but it also protects the rights of British citizens too.

It was thanks to the ECHR that the bans on homosexuality were lifted in Scotland and Northern Ireland; employers were prevented from discriminating against their workers on religious grounds; teachers were banned from brutalising children with corporal punishment; the ban on people in Gibraltar voting in general Elections was lifted; and the multiple rulings to protect the British public from police brutality.

A very British institution

The ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers, and British judges have always been major players in the institution, with three of Britain's eight ECHR judges having served as president of the court (Nicholas Bratza, Humphrey Waldock, A.D. McNair). 

Only France and Italy out of the other 46 member states have even had two presidents of the court, and many nations have never had a single one.

Leaving would be Putinesque

In all of Europe, only Belarus has never signed up to the ECHR. The only countries to have walked out of it are Greece, after they suffered a violent military coup in 1969 (then re-joined 1974), and then Putin's Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Do we really want to join the brutal Papadopoulos Junta and Vlad Putin's Russia as the only European regimes to have torn up their own citizens' European rights?

Crucial to the Irish Peace Process

Boris Johnson has already made his contempt for the Irish Peace Process absolutely clear by barefaced lying that his Brexit deal wasn't going to create a border down the Irish Sea, creating a border down the Irish Sea, and then defying international law with his efforts to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol after having told everyone it was a great deal, and signing us up to abide by it.

Britain can't quit the ECHR without ripping up the Good Friday Agreement, which stipulates that the UK have the ECHR enforceable in Northern Ireland.

This latest attack on the ECHR demonstrates that Johnson's contempt for the Irish Peace Process knows no bounds.

Internationally accepted rights, or a set of Tory allowances?

The Tories want to tear up the ECHR and replace it with a British "Bill of Rights" which will be drawn up by ministers from the billionaire-bankrolled Tory party!

What kind of idiot wants to have their internationally accepted rights lobbed in the bin, so that the radical-right ghouls Johnson has surrounded himself with can decide what rights and liberties they will and won't allow us to keep?

Know your rights

The first 18 Articles of the ECHR are the most fundamental. Most of the rest relate to technical details of how the court functions. Here are the rights that Boris Johnson and the Tories are seeking to rip up:

Why the British press hate it

Johnson is intent on attacking the ECHR because Britain's rabidly right-wing corporate media outlets hate it.

The main reason they hate it is because of Article 8, which guarantees British citizens the right to privacy, and prevents them from engaging in the phone-hacking and private surveillance scandals that led to the Levenson Inquiry.

They're still furious that they can't hack into our phones, private communications, medical records, etc ... to do stuff like leak gossip about celebrities and their families, smear left-wing and socially progressive figures, and release the private information of dead British soldiers.

Why the Tories hate it

The Tories hate the ECHR for a very similar reason to the right-wing capitalist media; it constrains their ability to make life worse for people.

• Whenever they want to deport immigrants (or black British citizens) they detest having to try to do it in a way that complies with the ECHR rules.

• When they defund the justice system and scrap entitlement to Legal Aid, they know that they're denying people the right to a free and fair trial.

• When they implement mandatory unpaid labour schemes for the unemployed, they know they're trampling over people's right not to be subjected to forced labour.

• When they bring in legislation to erase our ancient British right to participate in non-violent protest, they know they're attacking our rights to free expression, assembly, and association.

They hate the ECHR because it stands in the way of them being the vicious, malicious bastards that they really want to be.

Conclusion

I'm fairly certain that few could read all of this and still conclude that they want the Tories to trample all over Churchill's finest legacy by walking out of the ECHR, to join Belarus and Putin's Russia as Europe's only non-signatories.

You'd have to be the worst kind of simpleton to imagine that Johnson's billionaire-bankrolled Tories are better placed to decide what our fundamental rights and liberties should be, than a Europe-wide panel of human rights advocates and legal experts.

The big problem is that the kind of low-information voter this malicious anti-ECHR rabble-rousing is aimed at doesn't have the intellectual rigour to actually learn about the issue they're being programmed to froth about, or the patience/comprehension ability to read a detailed summary, if they were ever to somehow come across one.

it's bad enough that decades of failing education and exposure to radical-right capitalist media has created such an enormous demographic of reactionary low-information voters, but that the government actively panders to them like this is a national disgrace.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Britain never had a reckoning with the fascists in our midst

In the 1930s the British upper classes were absolutely riddled with fascists and antisemites.

There was Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, which boasted tens of thousands of members, and loads of high-profile supporters including the Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere (great-grandfather of the current owner), who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler.

There were fascist-sympathisers throughout the aristocracy and the royal family. We've all seen the pictures of Edward teaching the young future queen Elizabeth to do Nazi salutes in the gardens of Balmoral Castle (despite royalist efforts to censor them).

The Tory party was particularly infested with fascists, with loads of Tory MPs and lords signed up to secretive organisations aimed at promoting fascist and antisemitic ideologies.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was dedicated to fostering stronger relations with Nazi Germany. It boasted dozens of Tory party politicians amongst its membership, as well as Bank of England director Frank Cyril Tiarks (who was also a member of the British Union of Fascists), Bank of England governor Montagu Norman, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, and Geoffrey Dawson who was editor of The Times.

Tory members of the Anglo-German Fellowship included Peter Agnew, Lawrence Dundas, Ernest Bennett, Robert Bird, Robert Tatton Bower, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, Robert Vaughan Gower, Thomas "Loel" Guinness, Norman Hulbert, Archibald James, Alfred Knox, John Macnamara, Thomas Moore, Assheton Pownall, Frank Sanderson, Duncan Sandys, Murray Sueter, Charles Taylor, Ronald Tree, Lord Brocket, Lord Galloway, the Earl of Glasgow, Lord Mount Temple, Lord Londonderry, Lord Nuffield, Lord Redesdale, Lord Rennell, and the Duke of Wellington.

The Anglo-German Fellowship was supported by a propaganda operation called The Link, headed up by the traitor Barry Domville.

There was also the Imperial Fascist League which was led by the virulent antisemite Arnold Leese, who continued propagandising in favour of Nazi Germany deep into the Second World War from a series of hideouts.

Then there was the truly despicable Right Club which sought to drive Jewish people out of public life, founded by the Tory MP Archibald Ramsay.

The Right Club attracted a load of high profile establishment figures, including the 5th Duke of Wellington, Lord Redesdale, Lord Lymington, Arnold Leese, A. K. Chesterton, George Henry Drummond, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Tory MP John Hamilton Mackie, and William Joyce (who went on to become Lord Haw-Haw).

The Right Club finally collapsed in 1940 when they were discovered plotting to undermine the British war effort by stealing secret cables between Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, with the intention of leaking them.

And let's not forget that the widely-celebrated Tory MP Nancy Astor was one of the leaders of the fascist-sympathising Cliveden Set.

Tories, royals, capitalists, and establishment elitists adored Nazi Germany because the first thing Adolf Hitler did when he came to power was to send all the socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists, and other assorted leftists to the concentration camps.

They saw fascism as the perfect means of preserving their own wealth, power and privilege, through the ruthless persecution of the political left.

A small minority of the most egregiously pro-fascist figures like Barry Domville, Arnold Leese, Oswald Mosley, and Archibald Ramsay were interned as national security threats during the Second World War, and Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was captured and executed for treason in 1946.

However the vast majority of these establishment fascists were allowed to keep their positions of power and influence in the upper echelons of British society throughout the Second World War, and long into the post-war period.

Loads of these aristocratic fascists were even handed important promotions in the post-war period, and lavished with establishment honours like knighthoods and seats in the unelected House of Lords.

Is anyone really naïve enough to believe that all of these people simply gave up their extreme-right, antisemitic, and rabidly anti-left politics, despite having suffered absolutely no punishment whatever for holding such disgusting beliefs, even after our cities had been pounded to rubble by the people they'd been championing?

Of course they didn't. They just learned to hide their despicable extreme-right political views more carefully.

This abject post-war failure to stamp fascists out of public life is one of the big reasons why there's still a disturbing and powerful seam of fascist ideology within Britain's grotesque establishment class.

You look at the racism of the British tabloid press and their constant scapegoating of immigrants; the revocation of British rights from Commonwealth citizens in the 1970s; Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech; the anti-gay hysteria of the 1980s; the decades-long campaign of blacklisting of left-leaning journalists from the BBC; the rampant racism within institutions of state like the Metropolitan Police; the casual disregard for the millions of victims of Britain's imperialist war-mongering; the systematic demonisation of all left-wing political figures; the extreme-right ultranationalism that drove Brexit over the winning line; the fetishisation of nationalist symbolism and the military; the idolisation of disgustingly antisemitic Nazi-sympathisers like Nancy Astor; the massive blacklists of trade union activists across numerous industrial sectors; the ongoing systematic persecution of disabled people; Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" and the Windrush Scandal; the constant right-wing agitation for the destruction of our human rights; Boris Johnson's depraved "let the bodies pile high" attitude to the plight of vulnerable people during the pandemic; and Priti Patel's deportation of refugees to Rwanda ...

The reason the British establishment class is so rotten is that we never had a reckoning with the people who wanted Britain to emulate Nazi Germany.

Instead we let them keep their positions of power and influence, and quietly seep their disgusting fascist ideology into the fabric of British society.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Justin Welby's 'forgive Andrew' comments look even worse in light of his sordid past

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has made some extraordinary statements about Prince Andrew's sexual abuse case, claiming that Andrew is "seeking to make amends" and framing the rest of us as being at fault, because we apparently need to “learn to be a more open and forgiving society”!

In reality, one of the most important aspects of "making amends" is admitting what you did wrong, which Andrew has steadfastly refused to do by denying he ever even met his accuser (despite paying her £millions to drop her case against him, and despite that notorious photo at Ghislaine Maxwell's house).

Andrew hasn't even vaguely sought to "make amends". He's just used his family's immense wealth to buy his way out of trouble, and now he's hoping to ride the scandal out and return to public life as if nothing has happened.

And the head of the Church of England is publicly siding with him in this ambition, and making out that it's the rest of us who have the real problems if we object to it!

This is far from the first example of Welby's scandalous behaviour. 

Few could forget the way he tore up the political neutrality of the Church of England during the 2019 general election campaign, by vitriolically attack Jeremy Corbyn, in order to pressure people into voting for his fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson.

It was illustrative of how corrupted the Church of England has become to see the head of the  organisation wilfully rip up the institution's longstanding political neutrality to endorse a bigoted, lying, greed-worshipping philanderer for Prime Minister, because you could barely imagine a more unchristian character than Johnson could you?

This call to forgive Andrew isn't even the first time Welby has wheeled out this 'importance of forgiveness' narrative to defend his establishment chums either.

Just last year Welby used the same narrative to obfuscate the massive Tory coronavirus corruption scandal, when they cynically used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to tear up the anti-corruption procurement rules, and then fill their own pockets via secretive lobbying and dodgy untendered multi-million PPE contracts.

Then there's the fact that Welby is guilty of turning a blind eye to child sex abuse within the Church of England during his time as dean of Liverpool Cathedral.

When Welby was informed about child sex abuse allegations against Canon John Roberts in 2011, he didn't just decide not to inform the police or initiate internal disciplinary action against him, he actively sided with Roberts and banned his victim from the cathedral!

What makes it so much worse is that Welby knew at the time that Roberts had a 1989 conviction for child sex offences, and that he'd been allowed to continue working in the church. Despite knowing that Roberts had a history of abusing children, Welby chose to take his side, and take action against his accuser.

When Roberts was finally convicted of the abuse that Welby ignored, he issued a statement saying how much he regretted siding with the sex offender against his victim, but Welby's public statements in support of Andrew over his child sex abuse allegations just go to prove the absolute insincerity of the man.

And let's not forget Welby's personal involvement in sadistic abuse camps in the 1970s, that were set up to indoctrinate young Christians into a radically right-wing version of Christianity.

The church knew about the violent beatings at these Iwerne "bash camps" in the early 1980s and exiled the main perpetrator to Zimbabwe in 1982, but they kept the whole thing secret, allowing Iwerne members like Welby to rise up the ranks of the Church of England.

It's remarkable that the media have just left Welby alone on his personal involvement in this sadistic indoctrination cult, but that's just the way things work in Britain.

Establishment elitists benefit from a protective culture of impunity, which allows them to get away with all kinds of corruption and depravity that ordinary folk would be monstered for.

And whenever one of them appears to be in trouble, the rest close ranks to protect them.

Welby defending Andrew like this is just another example of one establishment sadist demanding impunity for another.

And the worst thing is that the Church of England is apparently happy to have such a sordid individual repeatedly portray their institution as a bunch of savagely right-wing child sex abuse apologists.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR