Douglas Murray: he’s near Gaza, waiting for the hammer of public opinion to fall on him.
Douglas Murray has brought the Israel/Gaza propaganda war to a new low by apparently comparing Gazans – not just Hamas – with the German soldiers who carried out the Nazi Holocaust against Jewish people.
Worse, the platform from which he launched this heinous claim was the Jewish Chronicle.
See for yourself:
It won't surprise anyone that Douglas Murray indulges in apologetics for the Waffen SS with even Holocaust denial being a sign of SS decency. What did surprise me, though maybe it shouldn't have, is that he gave the SS a good reference in the @JewishChronhttps://t.co/BixCwjh34Fpic.twitter.com/JpSCFBu6Ro
Watch this clip from around five minutes, 30 seconds in and you’ll hear Murray repeating his claim that German soldiers were ashamed of what the Nazis ordered them to do.
Isn’t this Holocaust revisionism which, as we are all taught, is one of the vilest kinds of anti-Semitism?
“The Nazis, as fundamentally evil as they were, believed that they were engaging in a necessary evil for an ultimate good; they still had a spark of humanity at their core”.
We are genuinely looking at utter insanity here. Nazi apologism to defend bombing civilians. https://t.co/YvYKr1JoJ1
He says the difference between the SS and the Gazans – not just Hamas, remember – is that the Gazans are proud of killing Jews.
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There is no readily-apparent excuse for this behaviour – either by Murray or the Jewish Chronicle. Saying the Germans who carried out the so-called “Final Solution” were “just following orders” – the “Nuremberg Defence” – was not good enough when they were brought to justice for their crimes and it isn’t good enough now.
And Holocaust revisionism is Holocaust denial.
Murray claims to be supporting Israel but in his words it seems clear that he is undermining the Jews. If German soldiers were ashamed of what they were doing, as he says, then with the removal of the Nazi government, the reason for a Jewish state would have also been removed; Jews would have been safe where they were.
This was clearly not believed to be the case, as we see from the decision to create Israel.
Taking the reasoning further, though, if there was no reason for creating a Jewish state, there would be no reason for that state to have stolen land and property from its neighbours, the Palestinians; to have driven them into enclaves (ghettoes) like Gaza; and to have murdered tens of thousands of them over a period of decades.
There would have been no reason for Hamas to have been founded in the first place; no reason for Palestinians to seek restitution against their oppressors; and no reason for Murray to be standing on land that was once Palestine, spouting his nonsense.
Sadly, it was deemed that a Jewish state was necessary. The reason for that is the failure of European people of the time – and others – to understand and/or respect cultural diversity. Ultimate responsibility for the situation in Gaza falls on our ancestors.
Most particularly, it falls on the Germans who Murray disgustingly tries to pedestalise above the ordinary citizens of Gaza – half of whom are children and all of whom he appears to deem to be as bad as Hamas, and deserving of the collective punishment Israel is meting out on them all.
And that – as we all should know – would be an attempt to justify a war crime.
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The Azov Battalion’s flag: it features a Wolfsangel and a Black Sun – two symbols associated with Nazism. Is the contribution of organisations like this to Ukraine’s war effort against Russia the reason support for Nazis is being normalised in countries like Canada?
There was an astonishing scene in the Canadian Parliament last week.
Members of that country’s legislature – a country that fought the Nazis in World War II – gave a standing ovation to a former SS officer, just because he said he defended Ukraine against the Russians in the 1940s.
Canadian parliament just gave a standing ovation to a 98 yr old SS Nazi. Why? Because he was a Nazi who *fought against Russia in Ukraine. Yaroslav Hunk fought for the 14th division of the Waffen SS.
Nazis like Yaroslav Hunk invaded Ukraine and committed atrocities against its people. Nobody should applaud that in the way the Canadian Parliament has.
And while it is true that the Russians turned out to be just another set of invaders, making Ukraine part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for almost half a century afterwards, it is false to claim – as the applause of the Canadian Parliament does – that what Russians are doing now is the same as what they did then:
27 million Russians died in the war against the Nazis. It was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz and Majdanek.
The Russian people were key to saving humanity from the the horror of Nazism. It must never be forgotten.
What we’re seeing here is a horrifying attempt to pull the wool over our eyes with a ‘false equivalence’ argument.
Is it because we know that Nazis have been fighting on the side of Ukraine, and that Ukrainian authorities have apparently supported Nazis (think of the Azov Battalion)?
Is this an attempt to rehabilitate Nazis in the eyes of the public – to make us accept the abominable just because it helps us achieve a political goal against a current enemy that hasn’t been our ally since the 1940s?
That would make us, now, just as bad as the Nazis were then.
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Targeted: this poster appeared in 2019 so the number of sick and disabled people who have died is likely to be far higher – especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. Papers like the Telegraph seem to be trying to make that number skyrocket.
What’s going on at the Daily Telegraph? First we find that the paper has been spreading falsehoods that the boss of a supermarket chain that keeps its groceries as cheap as possible and pays its workers more than most has blamed the minimum wage for inflation (he hasn’t); now this:
“It raises the question, just how much of our hard won salaries are spent on the benefits of those who do not work?”
It raises the question, just how much of a role does the media play in fuelling disability hate crimes? And what do early eugenic arguments look like? pic.twitter.com/btRfVRkU0j
And the website to which Samuel Miller links, here, pulls no punches – claiming the tool to calculate “how much of your salary bankrolls the welfare state” is “straight out of the Nazi handbook”:
British Newspaper Attacks Disability Benefits With 'Calculator' Straight Out of the Nazi Handbook | The Mary Sue https://t.co/yAVBD2auyP
The Telegraph article states: “Of the 5.2 million people claiming out-of-work benefits, roughly 3.7 million have been granted indefinite exemptions from finding a job, following a surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pain during the pandemic, it emerged last week.”
The Mary Sue piece responds [boldings mine]: “As a propaganda piece, it’s not subtle. “Roughly 3.7 million have been granted indefinite exemptions from finding a job” is a funny way of saying that 3.7 million disabled people, who cannot work due to their disabilities, have been awarded up to £515.40 a month (maybe going all the way up to £782.35 if they’re severely disabled) in order to keep them from starving to death on the streets.
“Putting this number down to “a surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pain during the pandemic” is derisive and clearly intended to diminish the reader’s perception of what are, in fact, disabling conditions to live with that, yes, actually were caused by the pandemic—either a result of infection with the virus itself or the psychological impacts of lockdown, mass death, and the other sociological effects of a global pandemic.”
The Torygraph continues: “On top of this, the controversial decision to maintain the state pension triple lock is estimated to cost taxpayers £1,000 each over the next four years, according to calculations by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a think tank.
“It raises the question, just how much of our hard-won salaries are spent on the benefits of those who do not work? With the calculator below, Telegraph Money can now reveal how much of your salary goes towards bankrolling the welfare state.”
In fact, none of our salaries are spent on benefits. The system doesn’t work that way. The government of the day sets its spending levels and then taxes us enough to keep that spending from pushing inflation too high (not accounting for interference from external influences like foreign wars and Brexit).
But let’s not allow trifles like the facts to get in the way of the Torygraph‘s argument.
Back to Mary Sue: “Note the emphasis on “do not work” and how it conflates the people who cannot work due to age or disability with the fantasy figure of the refusenik, who lounges around at home, wilfully choosing not to work, all on the government’s tab. It should be clear by now that the purpose of this article is to raise outrage against both the welfare system itself and the most vulnerable people who are dependent on it, but still, there’s more.”
The Torygraph states: “Despite Rishi Sunak’s insistence that he is a “low tax conservative” who wants to “bring people’s taxes down”, his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has implemented a combination of frozen thresholds, removed investment incentives, and increased corporation tax – all while keeping welfare spending close to £300bn a year.
“At the same time, welfare spending was the single biggest component of public sector expenditure in the financial year 2021-22, at £298.7bn out of a total of £952.3bn. For the typical taxpayer, this amounts to close to a third of their annual tax bill of £6,500 paid directly towards benefits.
“Using the latest public spending data, our analysis shows someone with the average UK salary of £33,000 sees £2,000 a year spent on welfare.”
Mary Sue responds: “The authors of the piece, Alex Clark and Tom Haynes, go on to object to the marginal and long overdue increase of corporation tax (even though the U.K. still has the joint highest uncapped headline rate of tax relief among G7 countries), the freeze on higher rate tax thresholds (meaning the wealthiest aren’t getting a tax cut), and the fact that this didn’t coincide with a lowering of government welfare spending, as if the former requires the latter as a form of penance.
“They seem outraged that most public sector spending goes toward the welfare state, with around a third of the average individual’s tax bill going toward it—this despite acknowledging that the percentage of public spending that goes toward welfare benefits has actually gone down while overall spending has gone up.”
The Torygraph: “Many high earners are now paying relatively more towards the welfare state because of the lowering of the 45p tax threshold in 2023-24, which now stands at £125,000, down from £150,000 before. Telegraph analysis shows 6pc of the average salary goes towards paying for benefits, compared to 13pc of a high earner’s salary.
“Someone earning £150,000, five times the average salary, contributes close to £19,000 towards the welfare state – more than nine times the contribution of someone on the average salary.”
Mary Sue: “But of course, the greatest outrage in this piece is reserved for the very wealthiest, who, due to earning significantly more than people in lower tax brackets, accordingly pay more tax and therefore contribute more to the welfare system. Leaning heavily on the fact that the highest tax bracket’s threshold was lowered from £150,000 pa to £125,140 this year, requiring the people in that gap to pay a whole 5% more on anything they earn above that limit, Clark and Haynes bemoan that a larger percentage of their tax bill goes towards maintaining the welfare system than lower earners. Someone earning five times the average U.K. salary pays up to nine times the amount towards the welfare system, we are told, as if this isn’t the entire point of staggered tax rates and how the system is supposed to work.”
Mary Sue then makes a hugely important point [boldings mine, again]: “It’s incredibly difficult to successfully apply for disability benefits of any kind in the U.K. According to a recent government study, the release of which is suspiciously close this particular Telegraph article’s publication, “the health assessment system for deciding if someone can claim disability benefits is grueling and often incorrect.” 90% of PIP (the most common benefit) claimants are denied on their first attempt with 89% of them denied again on their second round.
“While 3.7 million people considered too disabled to work may seem like a lot, when the total number of disabled people across the country is taken into consideration, 12.1 million, it suddenly seems a lot more reasonable. There aren’t too many people in receipt of benefits, or capable of working but given a pass not to—it’s the exact opposite, and the amount of money disabled people are awarded by the government is, in most cases, barely enough to live on.”
“Labelling them as “useless eaters,” people who required care and support while being unable to contribute to the state, the Nazis distributed a flurry of propaganda focused on presenting disabled people as a financial burden to everyone else—a burden that prevented “good Germans,” who worked and paid taxes, from being able to access the resources they needed. This propaganda was so ubiquitous that it even made its way into children’s maths books.
“How many steps is a calculator—designed to let you know exactly how much enabling disabled people’s continued survival costs you personally—removed from this? How far off is an article dedicated to decrying the expense of disabled lives as an undue burden, especially on the upper classes?”
Charitably, the author of the Mary Sue article doesn’t believe those who wrote the Torygraph piece were deliberately trying to stir up hatred: “it seems very likely that the authors have bought into the British right wing cultural obsessions of benefit frauds and disability fakers, a group of people that are vanishingly rare but which conservatives see as boogeymen around every corner. I’m sure they believe all those people now experiencing joint pain and mental health problems, as a result of a mass disabling event which caused those specific medical problems on a large scale, are just lying to get out of having to work.
“It’s a very convenient thing to believe if you want to pay lower taxes and are resentful of having to share even a fraction of your wealth with people less fortunate than yourself. It ties in very nicely with all the other conservative ideals that The Telegraph and its readers stand for, and that’s why it’s so dangerous: That’s exactly how and why it worked so well the last time.
“Painting a group of people as too expensive to keep alive is literally the first step to genocide, and given the political environment, in which hate speech against a number of groups as well as legislation targeting them has become normalized, in both the press and parliament, its very concerning that The Telegraph felt comfortable publishing an article that so openly expresses these sentiments.
“I wonder how many people’s disability benefits the coronation could have paid for instead. Funny how papers like The Telegraph didn’t have an issue with taxpayers funding that.”
In fact, some of us would suggest that the genocide has been happening, quietly, for more than a decade – since before the Conservatives came back into office in 2010, in fact.
Back in 2015, after This Writer (that’s me) forced the government to honour a Freedom of Information request I had submitted, we all learned that 2,400 people had died between dates in 2011 and 2014 – within two weeks of being denied the sickness benefit ESA on grounds of being “fit for work”.
Nobody knows how many have died over a longer period after being found “fit for work” because the Department for Work and Pensions has never bothered to check. But the newspapers have been full of stories telling how people have died of starvation, of ill-health due to their disabilities, or simply committed suicide in despair because of the cruelty of the system.
Changes to the way ESA is assessed – removing the admittedly-hated “Work Capability Assessment” in favour of the even-worse Personal Independence Payment assessment – are expected to deprive a million people of the benefits they need to survive.
And benefit sanctions – which have been proved to be useless in getting people with long-term illnesses and disabilities back to work – are to be stepped up, pushing more vulnerable people towards taking their own lives.
As This Writer has stated many times over more than a decade in which I’ve been writing about it, this is genocide by proxy. The government creates conditions that force sick and disabled people to die, and then claims to be totally innocent of causing the deaths.
And it is at a time when these changes are being introduced that bosses of a national, right-wing, newspaper decide to publish an article demonising the sick and disabled (together with other benefit claimants and pensioners).
Going back to Mary Sue‘s “Nazi” motif, everybody know by now (don’t they?) that before World War II the Daily Mail actually supported Hitler’s regime in its articles.
Now it seems to be the Telegraph that has taken up the baton of the fascists.
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Not socialists: Hitler just put that word into the name of his party and stole some innocuous policies in order to fool working-class voters – much as many people who, today, say Nazis were socialists are trying to do.
I see Peter Hitchens is pushing the falsehood that Hitler’s Nazis were left-wing:
This is a lie that rears its head periodically. I wrote an article about it a few years ago that provides the facts. If you want them, read on:
‘Nazi’ is the short name. The full name for the ‘Nazi’ party was the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (“Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” in German).
The fact that the far-right party contained ‘socialist’ in the name was a rebranding gambit to draw workers away from communism and into populist nationalism.
Despite this, the populist nationalists that support the likes of Donald Trump, regualarly take the oportunity to remind modern day liberal or left-leaning critics of white-supremacists and neo-nazis that ‘Socialism’ was included in the Nazi party name.
Hitler’s party positioned as a left-wing organisation based on his rhetoric, rather than his actions, espoused in the 1920s and 1930s to disenfranchised workers frustrated with what they perceived as a two-tier society.
Neither left or right wing want to be known as the side of the political spectrum that Hitler was on, and both sides would argue he was on the other, politically speaking.
The Italian Fascists sought, @stillgray, to expand & reclaim historically Italian lands (mirroring a large portion of the old Roman Empire). pic.twitter.com/2Rot3O9gZN
Hitler & his Deutcher Arbeiter Partei mates see this and decide that they need to steal support from actual socialists, @StillGray… pic.twitter.com/Fq9ylQcch7
After they succeeded, the Bolsheviks wanted to take the Revolution worldwide. Heard of 'Comintern'? No race, no nations, only socialism. pic.twitter.com/nmHUsh4Gsv
The above was from an article I published in 2017.
I wonder how long I’ll have to wait before publishing it again?
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Warmonger Starmer: this is a mock-up, of course – don’t expect him to climb into a uniform and get his own hands dirty. He’ll just talk about it.
Keir Starmer has visited Ukraine, where he made clear his desire for the war between that country and Russia to continue.
He prefaced a tweeted video of his comments with what I understand to be a fascist slogan associated with Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust:
This idiot is tweeting the slogan of Stepan Bandera's OUN-B. Nazi collaborators who were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the holocaust. https://t.co/GuBR7K9RiC
Notice that he actually said, on behalf of the Labour Party, that he was “showing our support for the conflict“.
I can only agree with Chris Williamson, below: the correct approach to a conflict between other nations is to offer to act as a mediator between the two and seem a negotiated end to hostilities through diplomacy.
It has been suggested that the two countries almost reached such a negotiated cessation of conflict – in April 2022 – until Boris Johnson flew to Ukraine and talked President Zelenskyy out of it. With Johnson out of power in the UK, it seems to me that renewed talks might bring about peace.
But it seems Starmer also wants the bloodshed to continue:
What Sir Keir Starmer means is that if a Labour govt is elected next year, he will continue to facilitate the slaughter of more Ukrainians and won't try to bring the war in #Ukraine to end through diplomacy.
So there you have it. The leader of the UK’s Labour Party mouths platitudes about the suffering of the Ukrainian people but supports ongoing war in that country and quotes Holocaust perpetrators for good (bad?) measure.
He is a dangerous warmonger and deserves nothing from you but contempt.
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As the blurb for this video states, “For a country that ISN”T overrun with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, Ukraine sure does seem to contain lots of folks sporting Nazi tattoos or patches on their clothing.
“The latest to be revealed is one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s bodyguards, who was spotted during a visit to the recently liberated eastern Ukrainian city of Izyum sporting a so-called Totenkopfverbande patch, celebrating the guards who ran Nazi concentration camps and later made up Hitler’s personal guards.”
And it gets worse. Here’s the clip:
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The bank holiday weekend may be over, but this article is being produced in the period before everybody goes back to work – so I’m still putting up material that has interested me – and I hope it interests you. Make of it what you will:
It’s an interesting discussion of support for Nazism in Ukraine.
My opinion? They could have been simply waving, but in a straight-armed, hand-up way.
Couldn’t they?
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The Azov Battalion’s flag: it features a Wolfsangel and a Black Sun – two symbols associated with Nazism.
It’s in the news all the time at the moment: the Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
The violence. The atrocities. The possibility of Putin using chemical and biological weapons.
But do you know why Mariupol is so important to the Russian president? It may have gone past you because the BBC (to name just one news provider) certainly doesn’t include it in its reports, even though it should. Withholding this one fact shows a shocking bias.
Mariupol is the home base of the Nazi Azov Battalion.
Putin has made it clear that he intends to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, whose president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has publicly taken offence to the suggestion.
But Zelenskyy has absorbed the Azov Battalion into his armed forces (it became part of the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014 and Zelenskyy has done nothing to remove it).
You can read a large amount of detail about these Nazis here. It includes details of the Azov Battalion’s many incursions into the Donbas region to attack separatists there who wish to secede from Ukraine – and of war crimes committed by its members.
No legitimate and responsible national government would ever allow creatures like this to act for it. But Zelenskyy has.
I’m not saying that Russia is right to invade Ukraine, and anyone making such a claim will get the response they deserve.
It would also be wrong to portray Ukraine as valiant heroes fighting a ruthless oppressor when Ukraine numbers these Nazis among its armed forces.
This conflict must not be seen in black and white, “heroes against villains”, terms.
In this matter, Putin has a very good point.
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Offensive gesture: when This Writer discussed Starmer’s speech with a non-political friend, the other person said this pose, struck by the Labour leader while mocking a heckler, deeply angered him.
This Writer was away at a (genuine) funeral so I missed the (metaphorical) funeral for Keir Starmer’s political career that some may call his first Labour conference speech as party leader.
I’ve been catching up on it later and my goodness, it was a stinker!
For once, the mainstream media’s vain attempts to whitewash this disaster weren’t the most astonishing part of the fiasco. And there’s a wide choice of other shockers from which to choose.
Top of my list is his referencing of a Nazi slogan – “beauty of work”. He tried to claim he was referring to words by W.H. Auden, but I’ve had a (quick, admittedly) look and can’t find that phrase connected with the great poet anywhere.
Our good friend, the Skwawkbox blog, has found a connection with Nazism, though: “‘Schönheit der Arbeit’ was the slogan of a propaganda department of the Nazi regime from 1934 to 1945… SdA aimed to keep the population in what its rulers considered their place.”
I am curious to see how his allies on the Board of Deputies of British Jews justify their support for a man who directly quotes Nazi propaganda.
Alternatively, we could discuss the part where Starmer said he spent the summer of 2010 helping to put terrorists behind bars while Boris Johnson was writing Telegraph articles defending his right not to wear a cycle helmet.
Maybe, as Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer did indeed help to keep terrorists behind bars in a supervisory way – the same supervisory way in which he had failed to put Jimmy Savile behind bars the previous year; he had not been directly involved.
After Savile died in 2013 and his offences against children became public knowledge, Starmer commissioned an investigation that criticised prosecutors and the police over their handling of allegations against the late broadcaster. Too little, too late.
The only incident in 2010 in which I can find direct involvement in anti-terrorist activity by Starmer is his ruling on the case of Binyam Mohamed, a terror suspect who had been arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and tortured under the supervision of four FBI officers. According to Novara Media,
Mohamed was kept in a 2m by 2.5m cell, beaten frequently with a leather strap and hung from the ceiling for an entire week. During this period, he was visited by MI5 agents who observed his punishment first-hand, and warned that if he did not answer their questions he would be sent to a country whose laws would permit the use of more extreme interrogation tactics. This is precisely what happened three months later. The CIA transferred him to a secret prison in Morocco, where his captors repeatedly slashed his penis and chest with razor blades, burnt him with hot liquid and forced him to stay awake for 48-hour periods while playing loud repetitive music. MI5 continued to oversee the operation from afar, providing Mohamed’s interrogators with specific questions about his contacts in the UK and discussing the timescale of his detention with them. After he was released without charge, Mohamed produced evidence of British involvement in his torture, and it fell to Starmer to decide whether the lead MI5 officer would be prosecuted. Starmer declared he would not. He later made the same ruling in relation to an MI6 officer accused of sanctioning the torture of detainees in Bagram Air Base.
Perhaps Starmer meant something else in his speech.
No wonder he was heckled to hell and back – despite having employed police to intimidate conference delegates…
The gang of officers posted themselves at the end of each of the rows of seats, and then walked through each line to stand at the side of the next block. This is intimidation. pic.twitter.com/UOtikPX1ls
— Bonnie #OrdinaryLeft #BlackLivesMatter #JoinAUnion (@BonnieCraven) September 29, 2021
… and, indeed, allegedly bussing in ‘day visitors’ to bolster his support in the hall:
There are loads of empty seats, and at least half of the people in the hall are NOT here as delegates but day visitors. They've shipped people in.
— Bonnie #OrdinaryLeft #BlackLivesMatter #JoinAUnion (@BonnieCraven) September 29, 2021
(And that hall was still riddled with empty seats, prompting comparisons with Jeremy Corbyn’s speeches – when queues to see him speak stretched around the conference venues and his words had to be broadcast to overflow rooms to meet demand – as Skwawkbox (again) reminds us.)
When Starmer said people turned to the Tories in 2019 “because they didn’t believe that our promises were credible,” someone shouted out: “It was your Brexit policy!” leaving the Labour leader rattled.
After another heckle he tried to save face by saying, “At this time on a Wednesday it’s normally the Tories who are heckling me. It doesn’t bother me then; it won’t bother me now.” But it should; these heckles were from people who would have been shouting in support of him if he had performed well in any way during the conference.
During a section of his speech on the value of work, former Big Brother contestant Carole Vincent shouted at length, starting, “They want to be paid properly!” The remainder of her oration was lost as Starmer responded “Shouting slogans or changing lives, conference!”
The trouble was, she wasn’t shouting slogans, as she explained later: “He had ignored…people who had been standing up and asking for him to guarantee the 15 per cent rise for the NHS; a £15 [per hour] minimum wage.” Fair points.
Sadly, the best video clip I could find to demonstrate these interruptions is from The Sun, so I present it with apologies for the lapse of standards. If anyone can find a more wholesome source, please get in touch so I can replace this:
The peroration – the conclusion of the speech and the part intended to inspire enthusiasm in the audience – seemed to be a demand for us all to knuckle under and obey our masters:
“This is a big moment that demands leadership. Leadership founded on the principles that have informed my life and with which I honour where I have come from.
“Work. Care. Equality. Security. I think of these values as British values. I think of them as the values that take you right to the heart of the British public. That is where this party must always be.
“And I think of these values as my heirloom. The word loom, from which that idea comes, is another word for tool.”
Funny that he should mention the word “tool” again in his speech. Previously, he had said, “”My dad was a tool maker in a factory. In a sense so was Boris Johnson’s dad.”
Well, it turns out that Starmer’s dad was a tool maker in exactly the same sense, because that’s exactly how Starmer himself came across here.
If these principles have informed Starmer’s life, why was he unable to demonstrate them to delegates at the Labour conference?
Security? He wouldn’t offer low-paid workers the security of a £15-per-hour minimum wage. His shadow minister for Employment Rights quit because of it.
Equality? He pushed through rule changes that enormously increased the power of Labour MPs while reducing that of the wider membership.
Care? He showed he couldn’t care less about the grassroots members who campaign for Labour when he ignored – completely – a campaigner for a Green New Deal.
Work? His leadership doesn’t.
And that Nazi reference is deeply worrying.
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