Tag Archives: Beastrabban

Government Wastes £440 Million Trying to Overturn Disability Benefit Claims | Beastrabban\’s Weblog

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

This is a classic rant from my brother The Beast – and so full of facts that not only do you need to read it, but you should send it to all your friends as well:

The Tories and Blairites – ’cause it was Blair who introduced the vile Work Capability Tests – are convinced and would like you to believe that a large portion of claims for disability benefit are fraudulent.

Thanks to right-wing rags like the Heil, the British public believes that 25% of all disability claims are fake. In fact… the overwhelming number of claims for disability benefits are genuine. Only a vanishingly small number, less than 1 per cent, are attempts to defraud the benefits system.

But obviously, this detracts from the Tory desire to punish the poor for not working or being able to work, while they could be gainfully exploited by all the rich industrialists they want to give massive tax cuts to.

And so we have suffered 40-odd years of Thatcherite cuts to the benefits system while Tory and Blairite mouthpieces have told us that such cuts are ‘self-help’, encouraging self-reliance, going to revive proper Christian charity and private initiative without the safety net of the state.

The principle of less eligibility – how the whole process of claiming state support was to be as unpleasant as possible in order to deter people from doing so – was one of [Thatcher’s] ‘Victorian Values’ that she wished to reintroduce into the welfare system.

So did Blair, who created the Work Capability Tests because of pseudoscientific, discredited research on behalf of US insurance fraudster Unum. This assumed that most disability claims were fake, and that getting people back into work would do them good.

The assumption that a certain percentage of all disability claims were fake has led, according to whistleblowers, to the imposition of quotas… which demand that a set percentage of disability claims should be turned down.

This has led to severely ill, even terminally so patients, being judged fit for work. It has led to moronic … clerks asking amputees when their absent limbs are expected to grow back. And it has led to hundreds, if not thousands of genuinely sick and disabled people dying from poverty and hunger because they were denied an income.

This included people with serious mental health problems and conditions like diabetes, who were found starved to death.

It’s been denounced by disability activists as a genocide. Harsh words, but this is mass murder by governments who know exactly what the consequences of these sanctions are. They just don’t want you to know.

Source: Government Wastes £440 Million Trying to Overturn Disability Benefit Claims | Beastrabban\’s Weblog

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Private Eye bashed over anti-Semitism coverage by accused historian

Private Eye: The Beast certainly seems to have a point when he suggests the Eye’s coverage of anti-Semitism is one-sided.

Fair play – at least Private Eye had the guts to publish this letter from my brother the Beast, in full, without trying to justify itself in any way.

The scan is a bit faint and I know some of you won’t be able to read it, so here are the salient parts:

“I have followed with interest your coverage of the mass accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party and the purges of those accused. I regret to say that I have found this coverage to be almost wholly one-sided.

“You have given little opportunity for the victims of what can only be described as a witch-hunt to speak for themselves.

“Worse, you seem to have blindly followed the media groupthink and automatically assumed that the Labour Party did have a severe antisemitism problem, that Jeremy Corbyn was an antisemite, and that those accused were indeed guilty.

“This left me somewhat perplexed, as your magazine has a strong tradition of criticising Israel and standing up for those who have been falsely accused. I am offering you the opportunity to correct this bias.

“Yesterday I received a message from the Labour Party Complaints Team informing me that I was being investigated for antisemitism based on an article I had published on my blog.

“In this I agreed with another blogger, Tony Greenstein, a proud Jewish critic of Zionism, that Zionism was an internalised Jewish version of antisemitism and that Israel is indeed a racist, colonialist state.

“The argument is supported by solid historical scholarship, quoting reputable historians and the major figures in Zionist history themselves.

“I am not an antisemite, a form of racism that I find particularly abhorrent, and have published very many pieces on my blog attacking it and other forms of racism, as well as its political expressions, Fascism and Nazism.

“I am determined to fight these false accusations and this attempt to suppress reasonable criticism of Israel by automatically equating it with genuine despicable hatred of Jews.

“DAVID SIVIER

“BA (Hons) History, MA History PhD Archaeology”

Please don’t get sidetracked into speculation that my brother is a modern version of Indiana Jones. The relevance of his qualifications is that, when he discusses Israel, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Fascism and Nazism, he knows exactly what he is discussing.

So it will be very interesting to see if his missive receives any responses in subsequent Eye letter columns – and to examine, with the Beast himself, the quality of those responses.

We all know – don’t we? – that none of the arguments matter. Labour has accused Dr Dave and the fact that he knows far more about this subject than his accusers won’t stop them from expelling him from the party as soon as they get the chance.

They’re utterly ignorant, but they have a quota to meet, or masters to obey, or whatever excuse it is today.

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Inside the campaign to support Jeremy Corbyn

Undaunted: He’sonce again, he’s got a sheer wall to climb but that has not stopped Jeremy Corbyn in the past.

One would imagine the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn were all rabid anti-Semites and extremists, judging from the behaviour of some Establishment stooges who should know better (including members of the current Labour leadership).

This could not be further from the truth, as a report on an online rally in support of Corbyn demonstrates. This Writer’s good brother, Beastrabban, attended (if that’s the right word for an online experience) the event and heard speakers including Diane Abbott, Jess Barnard, Howard Beckett, Sonali Bhattacharyya, Rivkah Brown, Richard Burgon, Deborah Hermanns, John McDonnell, Roger McKenzie, Barnaby Raine, Chardine Taylor Stone, and Jon Trickett.

Some of the speakers had personally experienced the racism of which Corbyn and his supporters are accused:

Jon Trickett is Jewish through his mother’s side, and suffered anti-Semitic abuse recently from a real Nazi.

But it is important to record that

they acknowledged that there was a problem with racism and anti-Semitism in the Labour party and society, and felt that it was growing, and needed to be fought.

This tallies with other information that has been revealed recently. It seems that, with increasing numbers of Jews relocating to Israel, anti-Jewish sentiment is rising in the European countries they are vacating, including the UK. Is this because there are fewer actual Jews around to provide tangible examples of the falsehood of the anti-Semites’ propaganda?

In the Labour leadership, of course, the anti-Corbyn sentiment was said to be motivated, not by a reaction against anti-Semitism, but against socialism – the very reason the Labour Party was formed:

Some speakers made it extremely clear that the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn weren’t actually motivated by any concern about real Jew hatred, but were instead an attempt to stop the emergence of a genuine socialist Labour party. This was shown in a Torygraph article that day calling for Starmer to purge the party completely of Corbynism.

They made the point that what frightens the Tories and their supporters is that Labour has a membership of 500,000. The Labour party isn’t the leadership, it isn’t MPs, it’s the members.

They also pointed out that Corbyn’s problem was that no socialist could become a Labour MP during Blair and Brown’s tenure of power, and so the parliamentary MPs from this time, who have only been MPs for a few years, are naturally opposed to the [former] Labour leader.

That was clear from the moment Corbyn put his name on the Labour leadership election ballot. It opened a class divide within the Labour Party – something that should have been unthinkable in a party where everybody should be equal. Corbyn was considered to be a lower-class upstart with delusions of grandeur just for thinking that he could ever be admitted to the top table.

The result of that election, and the subsequent attempted coup in 2016, showed the elitists in the Parliamentary Labour Party that they had misjudged the membership – so it should be no surprise that, now they are back in control, they want to change party democracy to deny the majority of members any opportunity to elect leaders who actually want to bring about the changes for which the Labour Party was originally created.

People like Keir Starmer enjoy their power over the “little” people and want to keep it. They don’t want to give ordinary working people any more power over their own lives. Remember that, those Labour members who are left after the recent exodus, next time you take part in internal party elections.

There’s a link to a video of the event in the Beastrabban article (see below) so you can watch the whole event yourself.

I recommend that you do; it may dispel any disinformation that you have heard about Corbyn, his supporters and their beliefs.

Source: Momentum’s Stand With Corbyn Rally | Beastrabban\’s Weblog

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Nick Ferrari Panics When Mike Not Holocaust Denier, Demands Respect | Beastrabban\’s Weblog

I know the Beast is my brother, but it’s always good to get another person’s perspective on something you’ve been in.

The point that Nick Ferrari had pre-judged me as a Holocaust denier is a good one. Like the newspapers that claimed the same of me, he clearly hadn’t done his homework.

That’s quite surprising, as I had been contacted by his producer via Twitter on Sunday, where I had been spending most of the day defending myself. This gentleman must have seen what I was saying and therefore he must have known what I was likely to say – don’t you think?

Here are a few of the Beast’s observations. Visit his site for the rest.

Mike spoke calmly and politely throughout. But what he said clearly rattled Ferrari, who obviously neither expected it nor wanted it.

In fact, it’s clear that Ferrari had already decided that Mike was guilty. He introduced Mike as ‘Mike Sivier, the Holocaust denier’. That should have stopped the conversation right there, as Mike could have jumped in immediately and stated very firmly that he isn’t. Mike says on his account that several times at the beginning of the programme he said something wasn’t true, but this was either drowned out or not broadcast.

Ferrari asked him how many Jews he thought died in the Holocaust. Mike replied ‘Six million’. A slight pause from Ferrari, presumably while the hack tried to get his head round the fact that Mike wasn’t the Holocaust denier he’d introduced him as, and he’d given him the opportunity to show that he wasn’t.

[Ferrari would] ask a question, and then go on to ask another one, talking over Mike. Mike was giving him very full, comprehensive answers, and Ferrari clearly didn’t like it. G. Milward, one of the great commenters on Mike’s site, noticed this, and compared it to the tactic of Dimblebore on Question Time. When Mike carried on speaking, answering the question he’d first been asked, Ferrari got flustered and said that Mike ‘should respect him, as I’ve only got a few minutes’. I heard no disrespect in anything Mike said. He did not insult Ferrari, condescend to him or sneer at him. He just carried on politely putting his point across. But this was obviously too much for the hack’s fragile ego, and so Ferrari panicked.

it’s very clear that Ferrari was expecting Mike to be a real anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. That was how he introduced Mike, and it shows that he’d already made up his mind from the very start. Then Mike came on to show comprehensively that he wasn’t. I think Ferrari really wanted to hold a media show trial, in which he could show up this Corbynite Nazi, for the benefit of his baying right-wing audience.

It looks to me like he was frightened when he found out that Mike wasn’t a Nazi, and that he had just given him a platform on his show to prove that he wasn’t. Hence the panicked demands for ‘respect’. Like a petulant teenager having a row with their parents.

In fact, Mike has said that far from deliberately trying to ‘dis’ Ferrari, the simple fact was that he couldn’t hear him. Mike came down with a cold, and all he could hear of Ferrari was a low rumble. It was only listening to the clip that he was fully aware of the hatchet job Ferrari had tried on him.

Source: Nick Ferrari Panics When Mike Not Holocaust Denier, Demands Respect | Beastrabban\’s Weblog


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Vox Political’s Personal Tribute To Terry Pratchett – Beastrabban\’s Weblog

You’re probably sick of reading about Terry by now – but the Beast has come up with some laugh-out-loud recollections that are well worth sharing. Like this one:

He was also very used to the kind of weirdness that might have other people running for the hills. At one of the Cheltenham festivals he talked about how he encountered a group of Viking re-enactors while out walking with his small daughter. As they were going through the countryside, they noticed a group of young men in chain mail running up and down and hitting each other with swords. One of them came running up to him, and asked him if he could lend them a cup. They’d been fighting for a little while, and were now thirsty. Terry said, yes, and got out his daughter’s Asterix the Gaul lunchbox, and gave them the cup from her Obelix flask. The Viking warrior thanked them, went off to a nearby standpipe, and he and the other Norsemen duly quaffed deep of the water before returning the cup to Terry and his daughter.

Later that day, Pratchett met them in the pub. They were curious about him. Most people, they said, took one look at them when they were out fighting, and fled in the opposite direction. But he hadn’t been at all bothered. Why? Well, said Terry, it was because he reasoned that anyone mad enough to do what they were doing was obviously far too mad actually to harm anyone. He went on ‘Nobody ever says when they find a serial killer, ‘Oh, we knew he was a bad ‘un, because he had a wardrobe full of uniforms and last week he went to a convention. No! They always say, ‘He was a quiet one. And then they find the load of human skulls in the sink.’

Read the rest on Beastrabban\’s Weblog. You’ll notice he differs in his recollection of our first meeting with the great man; well, it was a long time ago and there’s room for both to be true.

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13% of UKIP voters less likely to vote for a party with a Jewish leader – Pride’s Purge

Ed Miliband: Jewish heritage.

Ed Miliband: Jewish heritage.

As many as 18% of UKIP supporters think “Jews have too much influence” in Britain, writes Tom Pride.

And 13% of UKIP voters are less likely to vote for a party such as Labour – simply because it has a Jewish leader.

These interesting statistics come from research by Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, who is writing a book on the recent history of the Labour Party.

To be perfectly honest, I’m a little surprised this kind of prejudice still exists in Britain today.

The full article is on Pride’s Purge but it’s worth adding Beastrabban’s comment on it: “This is quite astonishing, considering that Britain has already had one Jewish prime minister, at least by heritage, in Benjamin Disraeli [it seems likely that Ed Miliband would also claim he is Jewish by heritage, as he is described as an atheist]. Back in the 1990s the Tory party was led by Michael Howard, who was also Jewish. For a very long time the oldest MP in the House of Commons was the venerable Manny Shinwell. In the context of the extreme racism and highly reactionary nature of UKIP as a whole, this is extremely worrying. It’s too much like the cry of the French rightists just before the Second World War, when they campaigned against the Socialist ministry of Leon Blum, who was also Jewish. Their slogan was ‘Better Hitler than Blum!'”

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A Russian Joke about Jeremy Clarkson – Beastrabban\’s Weblog

Jeremy Clarkson

Earlier this evening, in my post about Mike’s article asking that we all look out for and care for those, who will be alone, disabled, depressed and vulnerable this Christmas, I told an old Russian joke about the propagandistic nature of the Soviet press, writes The Beast.

The joke’s a pun on the names of the two major Soviet papers, Izvestia, ‘News’, and Pravda, ‘Truth’. The joke ran, ‘There’s no truth in the ‘News’, and no news in the ‘Truth”. I remarked that the situation was actually reversing, and that despite the considerable restrictions on the press in Putin’s Russia, the Russian press seemed to want to present a far more objective picture of the suffering of Britain’s poor than our own, supposedly unbiased, ‘free’ press.

Well, Communism has fallen, but Russian journalists were swift to point out that, at least when it came to the road infrastructure, capitalism still suffered from glaring contradictions as per Marxist ideology. The Russian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, succinctly summarised this with a joke about Jeremy Clarkson.

Read it on Beastrabban\’s Weblog – if you think Clarkson’s a joke anyway, this will make you laugh.

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Social Darwinism in the 19th Century and in Cameron’s Britain – Beastrabban\’s weblog

Very many bloggers and political commenters… have made the point that the Tories are Social Darwinists, writes the Beast.

This is the ideology, founded in the 19th century by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, that demanded total laissez-faire capitalism and promoted the ‘survival of the economic fittest’.

Just as Darwin’s theory of evolution by Natural Selection was held to prove that in nature, evolution proceeded through the survival of the fittest in a state of competition and conflict between individuals and species, so Social Darwinists believed that human social and biological evolution should be promoted through unrestrained economic competition, which should allow people of superior talents to rise to the top of society and keep the less talented masses in their place.

For the rest, read the article on Beastrabban\’s weblog.

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BBC’s Tricky Nick Robinson’s Misreporting of Alex Salmond on Scottish Independence – Beastrabban\’s weblog

Let’s keep up the pressure on the BBC’s Tory Reporter – sorry, that’s Political Editor – Nick Robinson and his misreporting of Alex Salmond. Here’s Beastrabban on the subject:

The debates over Scottish independence, leading up to the referendum last Thursday, threw the BBC’s pro-government bias into sharp relief. The Corporation’s reporter, Nick Robinson, selectively edited and then completely falsified his report on a question he asked Scotland’s then-First Minister about the possible damage independence might have to the nation’s finances.

As you might expect, Scottish Nationalists are massively unimpressed with this blatant falsification by the BBC, and there are several videos about it on Youtube. Here are some I found that make the case particularly well.

This video, The BBC Is Killing Democracy, gives footage of what really happened when Robinson asked his question. It then gives Robinson’s own highly selective report, pointing out how it has been altered and edited to present the answer Robinson wanted, rather than the one he got. It then moves on to Robinson’s final report, where he lies and states that Salmond didn’t answer the question. It then concludes with a brief resume of Robinson’s and Salmond’s careers, pointing out that Robinson was first head of the Young Conservatives in Macclesfield, and then national head of the organisation.

There were protests against the BBC’s biased reporting of the independence campaign outside the BBC’s headquarters in Scotland on the 1st and 29th June 2014. This video below, Protest Against BBC Scotland Referendum Bias shows pro-independence Scots discussing the Beeb’s bias, and their disillusionment with the Corporation.

.

One of the women speaking is actually an English person living in Scotland. She states that she is voting for independence for Scotland because she is worried about the Westminster establishment’s destruction of the NHS and tuition fees. She states her daughter will not be able to afford to go to uni, and the only people that will, will be the elite.

Robinson’s deliberate falsification of Salmond’s answer is important far beyond the immediate debate about Scots independence. Regardless of one’s personal opinion of that particular issue, it should concern everyone worried about the Beeb’s pro-establishment bias. It’s clear and undeniable evidence that the Corporation has blatantly lied in order to serve the interests of the Tory Westminster elite. It also shows how Tricky Nick Robinson really is little more than a Corporation apparatchik spouting propaganda, and that the BBC is now well and truly the establishment’s equivalent of Pravda and TASS, the state news agency in the Soviet Union or the various state-controlled newspapers and broadcasters in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

There’s more video in the Beast’s article.

Notice that the Beast singles out the Tory Westminster elite. The Tories were pulling out all the stops to make sure they could salvage something from the referendum, if only by fouling the reputation of the BBC, which they hate.

In this context, it is also easy to believe they tried to foul Labour’s good name north of the border by putting Labour representatives up as the faces of the ‘No’ campaign and then stabbing them in the back. For example, fears voiced by the ‘No’ campaign on pensions were torpedoed by the Coalition government – an organisation which was not only supposed to be part of the ‘No’ camp but should also have been, reasonably, expected to provide correct information to that group’s other representatives on any particular subject.

What a stitch-up.

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Trench poetry collection cements comics’ dedication to WW1 authenticity

The reality of war: This forthcoming collection, adapting World War One poetry into comics form, might teach Michael Gove a thing or two about factual accuracy.

The reality of war: This forthcoming collection, adapting World War One poetry into comics form, might teach Michael Gove a thing or two about factual accuracy.

Michael Gove won’t like what follows.

But then, he probably thinks that comics are a waste of everybody’s time; children should be too busy reciting their times tables and adults should be sweating on the fracking site or slaving at the workfarehouse. Right?

Too bad. Following on from yesterday’s Beastrabban article about the forthcoming graphic story collection To End All Wars, I got in touch with top writer Pat Mills, and he told me about a couple more World War One-related comics projects that are likely to have Mr Gove boiling in his propaganda pit.

Above the Dreamless Dead from First Second [publisher] … features graphic adaptions of WW1 poems, including my 10-page adaption with David Hitchcock of Dead Man’s Dump [by Isaac Rosenberg],” Mr Mills told me. “Amazing art!”

You can see some of the art above – albeit only the book’s cover. The other poems are:

All the Hills and Vales Along, by Charles Sorley; adapted by Kevin Huizenga

Ancient History, by Siegfried Sassoon; adapted by Liesbeth De Stercke

At the Time of “The Breaking of the Nations,” by Thomas Hardy; adapted by Anders Nilsen

Break of Day in the Trenches, by Isaac Rosenberg; adapted by Sarah Glidden

Channel Firing, by Thomas Hardy; adapted by Luke Pearson

The Dancers, by Wilfred Wilson Gibson; adapted by Lilli Carre

Dulce et decorum est, Greater Love Hath No Man and Soldier’s Dream, by Wilfred Owen; adapted by George Pratt

The End, by Wilfred Owen; adapted by Danica Novgorodoff

Everyone Sang, by Siegfried Sassoon, and Therefore is the Name of It Called Babel, by Osbert Sitwell; adapted by Isabel Greenberg

The General, by Siegfried Sasson; adapted by Garth Ennis and Phil Winslade

Selections from The Great Push, by Patrick MacGill; adapted by Eddie Campbell

I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier, Sing Me to Sleep Where Bullets Fall and When This Bloody War Is Over; soldiers’ songs adapted by Hunt Emerson

I looked up from my work, by Thomas Hardy; adapted by Kathryn Immonen and Stuart Immonen

The Immortals by Isaac Rosenberg; adapted by Peter Kuper

Lamentations: The Coward, by Rudyard Kipling; adapted by Stephen R. Bissette

Next War, by Osbert Sitwell; adapted by Simon Gane

Peace, by Rupert Brooke; adapted by Simon Gane

A Private, by Edward Thomas, and The Question, by Wilfred Wilson Gibson; adapted by Hannah Berry

Repression of War Experience, by Siegfried Sassoon; adapted by James Lloyd

Two Fusiliers, by Robert Graves; adapted by Carol Tyler

War, by Francis Edward Ledwidge; adapted by Sammy Harkham.

Above the Dreamless Dead will be released on September 23, almost exactly 100 years after the outbreak of the hostilities that inspired its authors. First Second books can be found on the web here.

That’s not all. Pat Mills told me of another project that could leave Mr Gove frothing with jingoistic fury.

The Beast mentioned in his article yesterday that Mr Mills produced, with the late Joe Colquhoun providing the art, what’s been hailed as probably the best British war comic ever: Charley’s War. This meticulously-researched, dedicatedly pacifist story ran from 1979 to 1985 in the British weekly Battle and has now been adapted into a series of collections from Titan Books.

Now, the writer has a new project – “in Charley’s War genre” – entitled Brothers in Arms. Illustrated by his Above the Dreamless Dead collaborator David Hitchcock, the piece is currently in search of a publisher. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait too long for it to find a home.

Comics. They might be fun for kids – but they’ll also teach Michael Gove not to mess with history.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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