Tag Archives: bigot

Observer/Jeremy Corbyn/EHRC/antisemitism footnote: article author’s ill grace

Facepalm: And quit right -what will Jeremy Corbyn (and his supporters) have to put up with next?

The author of the Observer article I criticised so roundly earlier this week has commented after (apparently) a few corrections were made to the online version.

I can only agree with Aaron Bastani:

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

And I found plenty more errors. Are they going to stay uncorrected?


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The Tories are lurching into far-right politics to keep their voter base – racists and bigots

Border Force: immigration is likely to become an even more pressing public issue in the future, despite Rishi Sunak’s plan to strengthen the UK’s ability to foil illegal channel crossings. Is this because the Tories see it as a way back to power after losing the next general election?

A poll reproduced on the Mainly Macro blog shows that 56 per cent of the UK’s population now believe Brexit was a bad idea, compared with only 32 per cent who support it.

Why is the Conservative government still slavishly pushing the falsehood that Brexit was ever going to do us some good, then?

The answer should be obvious: it was a huge fantasy for right-wing, racist flag-shaggers who wanted to get rid of Johnny and Janey Foreigner and thought that saying we would all be better-off was a great way of getting it.

When the Brexit-supporting political parties started cropping up – most notably Nigel Farage’s UKIP – they drained off support that the Tories wanted to keep for themselves.

The only answer they saw was to support leaving the EU and hope that this would draw the headbangers back into the fold.

And it did – albeit with the help of the strongest Brexiteer party in the 2019 elections, that withdrew its candidates from standing in constituencies where the Conservatives had safe seats. Remember that?

But support for Boris Johnson’s ‘hard’ Brexit deal is now becoming an electoral liability for the Tories. Public opinion is shifting away from supporting Brexit, and from fearing the consequences if it is modified.

The costs of Brexit have become so obvious that the broadcast media now feel compelled to start talking about them and the message is that Brexit has reduced living standards and held the economy back.

This means that support for Brexit will be associated with a party that wants to keep the UK poorer.

And that’s a huge relief for This Writer, because I have been saying the same for years!

According to Mainly Macro, it is unlikely that public opinion will have changed enough for a Brexit-opposing party to take power – which is why Labour still supports the policy at the moment.

But this is likely to change during the time that Labour is in office (as still seems a certainty after the next general election).

Where does this leave the Tories?

According to Mainly Macro (again), it leaves them to take a hard line on immigration.

It is the most potent issue among potential Conservative voters, therefore newspaper stories about immigration or asylum-seekers are likely to proliferate in the Tory press under a Labour government.

This Writer is led to guess that this is the reason Rishi Sunak and his ministers have been announcing a series of unpopular and probably ineffective policies to tackle illegal immigration; by attacking the symptom and not the cause, they ensure that the problem remains when a Labour government takes over – and Labour may then be attacked over it.

This in turn may create an obstacle to any return to the EU Customs Union or the Single Market that Labour may plan.

The flag-shaggers, racists and bigots who support Brexit (remember them?) would see the Tories doing all they could to prevent a return to what they consider the bad old days of EU membership – with free movement of working people between countries, remember – and would commit their support to the Conservatives to ensure that it doesn’t happen.

… In theory.

So we see that current Tory policy on immigration is less likely to be about stopping foreigners from coming to the UK illegally, and more likely to be a grubby bid to find a pathway back to power.

Source: mainly macro: The implications of a tipping point in public support for Brexit

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Piers Morgan should try living with the pain of a disability before inciting hate against those who do

Piers Morgan and Jameela Jamil: they both look fine but one of them has a serioius disability. Yes, Piers Morgan is hopelessly bigoted.

When This Writer learned that a person with one of the so-called “invisible” disabilities was being victimised by Piers Morgan, I made a remark to a friend about what should happen to it and forgot about it.

But here’s the thing: this comes in a week when we’ve learned that the Department for Work and Pensions is deliberately hiding evidence that it has been victimising people with disabilities – some of them to their death.

Ministers have been seen smirking about it during debates.

And of course we’re living under a government that has actively “othered” people with disabilities, demonising them to the point where people think it is acceptable to mock, humiliate, and even attack them.

Considering all of the above, I think it would be appropriate for Mr Morgan to spend some time living with the pain of a hidden disability.

Perhaps somebody at ITV should apply a jubilee clip to Mr Morgan’s reproductive organs prior to the airing of Good Morning Britain one day, and we can all see how far he gets before the pain becomes too much.

I reckon that would constitute a fair approximation of a hidden disability.

I don’t think he’d last very long. I would like to think it might instil in him a little respect for people who have to deal with that level of pain, all over their bodies, every single day of their lives.

But that’s probably a forlorn hope, isn’t it?

Piers Morgan has been ‘inciting hate‘ against sick and disabled people after he attacked a disabled actress. Morgan claimed she was making her illnesses up.

Jameela Jamil is an actress, model, and presenter. She’s chronically ill, having had three cancer scares in recent years, several car accidents, seizures, and a nut allergy.

But her main illness is one which is still under-recognised and misunderstood. Jamil lives with one of the Ehlers-Danlos syndromes (EDS).

Recently, Jamil has been the target of abuse from Morgan on Twitter… trying to claim that Jamil’s been making her illnesses up.

Source: Piers Morgan is now ‘inciting hate’ against disabled people | The Canary

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Bullying bigots tried to stop book launch. When will they be arrested?

Chris Williamson speaking to a crowd in Brighton on August 8. He had to carry out his talk in the open air after bigots falsely claiming he was an anti-Semite intimidated staff at two hotels.

Brighton was the venue for shameful scenes when a gang of bullying bigots managed to get an event at a local bookshop cancelled with a campaign of intimidation. When it was moved to another venue, they launched another campaign of hatred against that.

Why did these bigots intimidate staff at Waterstones Brighton – and try to shut down the rescheduled event at the Rialto Theatre?

Simple. It was the launch of a book by academics examining the “anti-Semitism” crisis in the Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader – and the bigots opposing it are dedicated to shutting down any discourse on this subject that doesn’t support their own position.

You see, these are people who claim to speak for the UK’s Jewish community – but don’t. It is a role they have assumed for their own political ends.

They claim that the people they are trying to silence are peddling hate – but the only hatred on display comes from them.

Consider the book whose launch they were trying to stop: Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief by Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Schlosberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller.

Publishers Pluto Press describe it as “a ground breaking study revealing how accusations of antisemitism damaged the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.”

Its promotional copy states: “During the summer of 2018, numerous members of the Labour Party were accused of anti-Semitic behaviour by their detractors. The controversy reached fever pitch amid claims that the Labour Party had become ‘institutionally racist’ under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and that the prospect of a Corbyn-led government posed an ‘existential threat’ to Jewish life in Britain.

“This book clears the confusion by drawing on deep and original research on public beliefs and media representation of antisemitism and the Labour Party, revealing shocking findings of misinformation spread by the press, including the supposedly impartial BBC, and the liberal Guardian.

“Bringing in discussions around the IHRA definition, anti-Zionism and Israel/Palestine, as well as including a clear chronology of events, this book is a must for anyone wanting to find out the reality behind the headlines.”

The event at Waterstones was set to feature a discussion of the book by its authors, joined by film director Ken Loach.

And who were the authors? From the hatred directed at them, they must be a disreputable gang of anti-Semites – right?

Greg Philo is Professor of Communications and Social Change at the University of Glasgow, and Director of the Glasgow University Media Unit. Mike Berry is a lecturer in the Journalism School at Cardiff University. Justin Schlosberg is a media activist, researcher and lecturer in Journalism and Media at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a former Chair of the Media Reform Coalition and Edmund J Safra Network Fellow at Harvard University. Antony Lerman is Senior Fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna and Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at Southampton University. He has written on multiculturalism, racism, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine for the Guardian, Independent, New York Times, Haaretz, Prospect, Jewish Chronicle and London Review of Books. And David Miller is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol. He is a founder director of Public Interest Investigations and a director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies.

So: No – not anti-Semites. Academics.

Still, the campaigners against their book managed to get the Waterstones event shut down, as Skwawkbox elaborated yesterday:

“An event this evening near Labour’s conference in Brighton, to launch a book by five academics that examines the wider context of antisemitism allegations against the Labour Party, has been cancelled by bookseller Waterstones after a ‘vicious’ and threatening campaign by the party’s opponents.

“The event was scheduled to start at 7.30pm and would have featured a panel discussion including the authors and world-famous film director Ken Loach. An organiser of the launch described the campaign as ‘vicious, large-scale and threatening’.

“Brighton was also the scene of threats – including in person – that forced two venues to cancel a recent event involving suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson. Staff were so traumatised by the sinister campaign that at least one was unable to resume work.”

Pluto Press put the cancellation as mildly as it could – but it was still clear that the “external pressure” put on the store was intimidation.

Then the Rialto Theatre, which has hosted other Labour conference fringe events, stepped in:

And the campaign of intimidation and accusation started again – on the social media as much as anywhere else. This is quite handy, really – as it means we can put names to the bigots:

https://twitter.com/NobodyNorman/status/1176171499667017728

https://twitter.com/IanMackintosh04/status/1176160362657472512

I would like to see all of the above interviewed by the police, in relation to the threats suffered by staff at Waterstones and the Rialto. Such behaviour is illegal and must not be tolerated.

It is especially abhorrent when it is being carried out by people who are claiming the moral high ground, accusing their victims of anti-Semitism and threatening violence to prevent those victims from presenting a case that could exonerate them.

I was particularly interested in the tweet by Gary Spedding, highlighted here by Jackie Walker – another innocent victim of the bigots’ smear campaign. Mr Spedding co-wrote a particularly virulent online article, falsely accusing me of anti-Semitism.  When I wrote to him, pointing out the errors and asking him to take it down, he and his co-author refused, flinging a few personal insults at me along the way.

I am pleased that he has implicated himself in this hate campaign and hope that Sussex Police contact him at their earliest possible opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong – I have maintained, from the moment I first started writing about it, that anti-Semitism does exist, in the Labour Party and throughout UK society.

But it doesn’t exist in the book that these bigots have been attacking, and it doesn’t exist in the academics who wrote it. I’m unfamiliar with staff at Waterstones Brighton or the Rialto, but I’ll hazard a guess that they don’t spend their days consumed with hatred for Jews either.

On the other hand, I’m willing to bet that the authors of the hate-filled tweets you’ve just read do spend their days consumed with hatred – and vent that hatred on anyone they can shoehorn into their enormously wide definition of anti-Semitism.

It simply isn’t acceptable.

These aren’t campaigners fighting prejudice against Jews.

They are vicious, hate-filled bigots.

And they need to be stopped before they seriously harm somebody.

One more thing – they did get an aspect of their campaign right: the slogan “Don’t host hate”. That’s a good slogan, and it can very clearly be applied to these bigots.

So I’m having it. If you see these people, or anyone else pushing their message, then flag it up with #DontHostHate

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As Rosa Parks is celebrated in TV drama, real life shows we have slid backwards

Iconic figures: Rosa Parks (Vinette Robinson) meets the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) – at just the right time to shine a light on rising real-world racism.

As an iconic TV drama celebrated a black woman who changed the world by sitting down on a bus, RyanAir dragged our entire culture backwards by throwing a black person out of their plane seat, on the insistence of a racist.

The BBC broadcast one of its most powerful and moving episodes of Doctor Who in years on the evening of Sunday, October 21. Entitled Rosa, it was about the moment when a black woman took a seat in a whites-only section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested for it. This led to the Montgomery bus boycott, in which black people refused to use the service – and to the capitulation of the bus company to their demand (to be able to sit wherever they wanted) around one year later. From there, the American civil rights movement grew and attitudes changed radically.

The TV drama made perfectly clear the reasons for change. As iNews put it in its review, “Last week… the Doctor and her team had to survive on a ‘cruel’ planet full of monsters. And yet that alien setting could never match the reality of deep south America; of the shock of Ryan [Tosin Cole] being slapped by a white man in the street and threatened with lynching; of the tension of seeing Ryan and Yaz [Mandip Gill] do something as banal as sit in a restaurant; of the danger suggested by the camera lingering on the holster of a cop’s gun; of the thematically bold spectacle of the Doctor sitting in the white section of a segregated bus, while Ryan has to sit at the back.”

For This Writer, a crucial scene took place beyind a trash bin, where Ryan and Yaz discuss the need to do nothing to provoke the racists – because you never know who will react with violence.

That sentiment was proved by the racism of a passenger on RyanAir flight FR015 from Barcelona to London Stansted on Friday (October 19).

The bigoted white man unleashed a furious, foul-mouthed racist rant at a disabled black woman that shocked other passengers.

But rather than put the racist in his place, RyanAir staff removed the victim of his vicious attack from hers.

It seems the tirade began when the lady was unable to move out of the racist’s way fast enough, to let him sit down in his window seat.

I was going to quote some of the confrontation – but why encourage others reading this to do the same? The racists came out in force to support Sajid Javid after the Vox Political article about his racist tweet a couple of days ago, after all.

RyanAir has said the perpetrator has been reported to the police. He should have been removed from the plane before it took off.

Making matters worse, it seems the 77-year-old victim was a member of the Windrush generation who had been returning from a holiday abroad that marked the first anniversary of her husband’s death.

The Windrush generation are – as has been well-documented, here and elsewhere – victims of institutional racism by the UK’s Conservative government, which destroyed papers conferring on them their British citizenship and right to all the benefits it provides – and then tried to deport thousands of people on the grounds that they could not prove their right to stay in the UK.

Was this incident yet another indication that culture is backsliding into racism, bigotry and prejudice?

If so, then the Doctor Who episode could not have been broadcast at a better time.

It shone a spotlight on the primitive attitudes of the racists and made it clear that the only place for attitudes like theirs is the history books.

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Woman with heart defect abused by ignoramus who thought she looked too fit to be disabled

Proof: Jackie Logan with her blue badge.

It is government attitudes to disability that are encouraging gammons like the man in this story to inflict their ignorance on the vulnerable.

Under the Tories it is Department for Work and Pensions policy to try to tell disabled people that they aren’t ill at all.

That has filtered down to the general public and we end up with a man verbally attacking a disabled woman for doing something that is well within her rights.

This story tells me that there should be a legal punishment for people like this man, who waste the authorities’ time with their bigotry.

This ignoramus could cause serious harm to a vulnerable person with his belligerent bullying – and he should be made to pay for it.

A woman who suffers from a serious heart defect was verbally abused in the street for using a disabled parking bay.

Jackie Logan, 29, has three leaking valves and atrial fibrillation in her heart, resulting in increased, irregular heartbeats and as a result she is often left breathless.

She has also suffered from arthritis since the age of just two and has the condition lymphoedema, which results in her legs swelling up and causes her problems walking.

Jackie has a blue badge which allows her to park next to her place of employment in Halfway.

However… she was aggressively approached by a man who criticised her for parking there.

“He told me I wasn’t disabled, that I was breaking the law and that he would be reporting me. He kept saying that I looked awfully fit to be disabled and wouldn’t listen about my blue badge.

“He was there for about 10 minutes, just arguing with me. It was a really upsetting thing to happen and it’s quite intimidating when a man suddenly approaches you out of the blue and starts having a go.”

Source: “You look awfully fit to be disabled” – Cambuslang woman who has heart defect tells of distress at being verbally abused in the street – Daily Record

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Terrorist Thomas Mair jailed for life for killing Jo Cox. Why did he do it?

Murderer and terrorist: Thomas Mair [Image: PA].

Murderer and terrorist: Thomas Mair [Image: PA].

This was a terrorist attack by a right-wing extremist – and just the first sign of a wave of aggression, around the world.

People like Thomas Mair saw the anti-immigration rhetoric that fuelled the vote to leave the European Union as an endorsement of racist, nationalist views.

And the proliferation of hate crimes suggests those views appear to be on the rise in the United States of America, after the election of Donald Trump as President, and in continental Europe.

People are committing these crimes because they think they can. They think that, somehow, atrocities against their fellow human being are now permissible – or at least that the authorities will turn a blind eye.

But what makes them believe their racism, homophobia, sexism, sectarianism, anti-Semitism or whatever is justified, anyway?

Have we, as a culture, failed to address these issues?

This Writer finds that hard to believe. I’ve been brought up in the same culture as everybody else and my compassion for another person has never been conditional on the colour of their skin or the compatibility of their religious beliefs.

Yet these crimes have happened and are continuing to happen. Thomas Mair murdered Jo Cox on the basis of a falsehood – for a lie.

Why?

I know many Vox Political readers have been waiting to air their opinions on this very subject; now is your chance.

What on Earth do you think has been motivating this?

Thomas Mair has been jailed for life after being found guilty of the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox.

The 53-year-old shot and stabbed to death the mother-of-two in Birstall, West Yorkshire, on 16 June, a week before the EU referendum vote.

Mair shouted “Britain First” in the attack, but the judge said the true “patriot” was Mrs Cox, not Mair.

Prosecutors said Mair was motivated by hate and his crimes were “nothing less than acts of terrorism”.

Mair was also found guilty of having a firearm with intent, causing grievous bodily harm with intent to 78-year-old Bernard Kenny, who tried to help the MP, and having an offensive weapon, namely a dagger.

Source: Jo Cox: Man jailed for ‘terrorist’ murder of MP – BBC News

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UKIP backlash gains momentum with Farage radio interview

Friends in right-wing places: Nigel Farage with (among others) US right-wingers Ron Paul and James Beeland Rogers Jr. [Image swiped from Pride's Purge.]

Friends in right-wing places: Nigel Farage with (among others) US right-wingers Ron Paul and James Beeland Rogers Jr. [Image swiped from Pride’s Purge.]

LBC radio interviewer James O’Brien’s encounter with Nigel Farage has been gaining attention and approval up and down the UK, after it became clear that the charismatic UKIP leader wasn’t just defeated on many issues – he was routed.

Considering Farage’s own win against Nick Clegg in the televised debates earlier this year, it seems we’ve come to a lamentable situation in this country, where politicians can lose a battle of wits with anyone who has taken the time to do a little research.

That being said, if anyone were to ask who you would prefer to have running the country, it’s unlikely that either profession would figure in the top two.

The interviewer confirmed the findings of many social media bloggers over the past few days, starting with reference to two more UKIP members who had shown their true homophobic and hypocritical colours.

He quoted former UKIP council candidate John Lyndon Sullivan, who tweeted: “I rather often wonder, if we shot one poofter, whether the next 99 would decide on balance that they weren’t after all. We might then conclude that it’s not a matter of genetics but rather more a matter of education.”

And UKIP’s small business spokesman has employed seven illegal immigrants in the last year, said Mr O’Brien.

Farage employed the usual UKIP tactic, which is to demand that the questioner find out “what’s going on in the other parties”. O’Brien put him straight by pointing out that the other parties weren’t the issue at hand.

Later in the interview, he added: “The reason it doesn’t possess the same urgency as the UKIP conversation does is – (a) – the question of quantity; there is simply not the avalanche of bigotry emerging from other parties that emerges from yours, and – (b) – … the opinion polls do not report significant swathes of the country who are fearful that your party represents deeply divisive and racist ideas.”

He was saying it is possible that UKIP is influencing people into adopting those anti-immigrant and racist ideas themselves – and this theory has been borne out by some of the pro-UKIP comments on the Vox Political Facebook page (but you have to catch them quickly, before the perpetrators realise they’ve erred and remove them).

Regarding JL Sullivan, Farage said he wasn’t a councillor but a council candidate, then contradicted himself by saying he had not heard of that gentleman’s name. If that were true, how would Farage know whether he was a councillor or a candidate?

Farage’s assertion that he would face a disciplinary charge on whether he had brought the party into disrepute was punctured by the revelation that his tweet was made in February.

On the illegal immigrants, Farage’s defence was holed by the revelation that his small business spokesman resigned as a company director three days after the immigration raid.

A conversation about Farage’s discomfort, sitting in a train carriage in which nobody else spoke English, was surreal. When I was a student I had the unique pleasure of sharing a carriage with a crowd of French schoolchildren. That was uncomfortable too, but I didn’t attach any unreasonable baggage to it – it wasn’t an indication that French kids were overrunning Britain and it didn’t show that the French were all loud and overexcitable. It was one train carriage and Farage should have more of a sense of proportion.

O’Brien put his finger on the nerve and pressed hard: “The point you’re making is that schools in the East End are filled with children who cannot speak English. .. That’s not true… Children who are typified as speaking English as a second language would include your own daughters… Perhaps [if we checked] we would realise that most bilingual children in this country are children like yours?”

He continued, highlighting accusations of bigotry and hypocrisy: “What the caller asked you was why so many people think you’re racist… and… you talk about children who can’t speak English as a first language without mentioning it includes your own children.”

There was an implication that Farage, who has banned former members of the BNP from joining UKIP in an effort to protect the party from adverse publicity, has himself associated with the far-right organisation; and a question over the far-right parties with which UKIP sits in the European Parliament. Farage said UKIP would not sit with people who didn’t have a reasonable point of view but O’Brien flagged up a member of the group who had said the ideas of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, Islamophobe, Anti-Semite and anti-feminist, were “in defence of Western civilisation”.

Farage’s paper-thin defence was that the European political discourse was very different to the UK, (again) an admission that his party had encountered problems with “one or two members”, and a reference to problems in other parties (the Conservatives, on this occasion)

O’Brien leapt on this: “Your defence so far is that you’re no different from any other political party and yet your unique selling point … is that you are different.” In addition, he pointed out that Farage refers to “members of the political class and their friends in the media”, while writing columns for the Independent and Express newspapers every week and appearing on the BBC’s Question Time more often than anyone apart from David Dimbleby.

Farage should count himself lucky he was not also asked about his connections with American right-wingers, including Ron Paul (Godfather of the Tea Party) and James Beeland Rogers Jr who, together with George Soros, engineered the British economic crash of 1992.

Farage tried to defend his way of equating Romanians with criminality by saying that Roma people in other countries have been forced into a situation where crime is their only option – and then was forced into a corner when O’Brien mentioned UKIP’s fearmongering poster, that claims millions of potential immigrants are after the jobs of British people. Wasn’t he demonising foreigners by saying they will take all the jobs and push crime up?

“I’m not demonising anyone,” said Farage, then contradicted himself: “I’m demonising a political class that has allowed us to have an open door that allowed things like this to happen.”

“So when I say Romanian and you start talking about people traffickers, why don’t you say people are perfectly entitled to feel uncomfortable about living next door to people traffickers, wherever they’re from?” asked Mr O’Brien. “Why do you say ‘Romanians’?”

Get ready for another contradiction: “I didn’t say Romanians; I was asked… if a group of Romanian men moved in next door to you, would you be concerned, and if you lived in London I think you would be.”

It was while Farage was being questioned on his expenses that Patrick O’Flynn, UKIP’s director of communications and former Daily Express political commentator, stepped in (claiming that O’Brien was over-running, 19 minutes into a 20-minute interview). Mr O’Brien’s response: “Is this a friend in the media or a member of the political class?”

Homophobia, racism, hypocrisy, and an incitement for others to display the same characteristics.

Does this country really need that kind of alternative to mainstream politics?

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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UK Coalition revealed as comic-book villains.

The enemy within: Superhero comic Daredevil dishes out a warning that we, in Britain, need to heed - beware the 'friend' telling us what we want to hear in order to set us against each other. A Conservative friend? A Liberal Democrat friend?

The enemy within: Superhero comic Daredevil dishes out a warning that we, in Britain, need to heed – beware the ‘friend’ telling us what we want to hear in order to set us against each other. A Conservative friend? A Liberal Democrat friend?

Tell me this doesn’t describe the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government:

“A group of ideologically-motivated power-seekers has infiltrated society, hiding inside the political system and behind ambiguous words to increase their fellow citizens’ bigotry and hatred against each other and thereby increase their own power and influence while everybody else is looking the other way.”

If you agree that it does, well, you’re mistaken. It’s actually about a group of villains in the superhero comic Daredevil, released by US publisher Marvel.

In the latest issue, a friend of the eponymous hero broadcasts to the city of New York, warning the population to beware of the infiltrators who say they are friends but are in fact the worst kind of enemy. Her words (by scriptwriter Mark Waid) are chillingly relevant to today’s United Kingdom. Here’s what she has to say:

“If we… are going to take our home back from a band of manipulative bigots, we have to rise above our anger.

“They want you angry at the world.

They need us all to feel like victims. [bolding mine]

“And it’s an easy get, because times suck. Every day is a battle. We all feel like we’re on the wrong end of the wrecking ball.

“We feel at the mercy of forces beyond our control, and that makes us scared. And that’s rocket fuel for S.O.B.s like [these].

“They prey on us when we’re frightened. They tell us our enemies are the immigrants down the street, or the food [bank] family next door.

“They encourage us to turn our fear into rage, and we fall for it because it’s ’empowering’.

“Except it’s not.

“We don’t become ’empowered’. We become weaponised.

So that while we lash out at one another, they can take from all of us.”

In America, it seems, they can see what’s happening here and turn it into part of their artistic culture.

In Britain, it should be on the news.

Why isn’t it?

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The government’s plan to smash workers’ rights

You may not be aware of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill.

It is the Coalition’s latest legislation against ordinary working people, currently moving through the Parliamentary process. Today (October 17) was the second day of the debate on its second reading.

The Bill contains some horrendous proposals that could seriously damage workers’ rights. Here’s the letter I wrote to my MP, pointing them out:

Dear Roger Williams,

I am writing with regard to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill which, as I understand it, is likely to cause serious harm to the relationship between workers and (certain) employers if it ever becomes law.

Please do not support this Bill. I know this request puts you in a difficult position as a member of the Coalition, but if you cannot bring yourself to vote against it, at least don’t vote in favour of it.

If the Bill becomes law, it will diminish the rights of all employees in this country. The proposals it contains would reduce the amount of compensation payable to unfairly dismissed workers – and this comes after the time an employee is required to be employed before they are able to claim for unfair dismissal was raised from one year to two.

I understand the Bill also proposes to reduce protections for whistleblowers at work. This is completely wrong-headed as it protects abuses and attacks those who seek justice.

If the Bill is passed, it will allow employers to make minimal offers to workers to leave, then gag the same workers from even mentioning this at employment tribunal, even if they reject the offer.

It will leave thousands in fear for their jobs at a time when the government should be making it easier for firms to hire.

Not content with that, whoever drafted the Bill has included the abolition of the Human Rights Commission’s duty to promote a society free of discrimination. Why? Is that not something we should all be striving towards?

Is the government sending a message that it intends to promote intolerance against minorites – or, to give it its proper title, bigotry?

Do you want to be a member of a government of bigots?

The product of these complex clauses in the Bill, combined with the fact the Government are also going to start charging fees for employment tribunals, has been termed ‘Beecroft Lite’, as it virtually amounts to Adrian Beecroft’s call for ‘compensated no-fault dismissal’.

Many people will agree to a poorly-compensated ‘settlement agreement’ as, for many, accessing justice will seem too complicated and too expensive.

We already have millions of people out of work – this Bill will make it easier to fire people.

The working people of Brecon and Radnorshire rely on their rights at work to give security for them and for their family.

Please consult your conscience before voting on this Bill.

I will be very interested to see if he paid any attention to me. As he is a Liberal Democrat, and therefore a member of the Coalition, my hopes are not high.