Tag Archives: cenotaph

Did Suella Braverman incite far-right occupation at the cenotaph?

Cenotaph scuffle: far-right groups clashed violently with police at the cenotaph in London.

A far-right crowd broke through a cordon around the cenotaph in London by fighting police.

The Mirror reported:

A huge crowd of people were seen waving St George’s flags and chanting “England till I die” as they walked through the Embankment. Police tried to block them from reaching Whitehall but the thugs managed to barge their way past. They could be heard shouting “let’s have them” and officers got out their batons. The group appears to have reached Whitehall where the Cenotaph is situated. Many more are pushing through, shouting “forward”.

The clashes took place just moments before members of the public took part in the Armistice Day two-minute silence, to mark the end of the First World War. Many of the demonstrators covered their faces in masks as they hurled bottles at the police.

One witness said: “Police have lost control. Far right thugs are swarming around Whitehall, climbing up on fencing and bollards. Sixteen minutes to 11am on Armistice Day. Absolute disgrace.”

Here’s a clip of these far-right thugs at the cenotaph, 15 minutes before 11am:

The comment on this clip is persuasive:

 

The invaders even performed Nazi salutes at the cenotaph – a monument to those who fought against Nazism:

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This was happening long before the march calling for peace in Palestine, which took place in a completely different part of London:

James O’Brien, speaking on LBC, put Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s role in a nutshell:

But still Braverman, whose words prompted the right-wingers to come out in large numbers, had support:

Of course, the claim that right-wingers were at the cenotaph because of the peace march is nonsense; the march did not go anywhere near the cenotaph, as was known well in advance.

Police also clashed with right-wingers in Chinatown:

Meanwhile – more than an hour after the right-wingers stormed the cenotaph for no reason at all, a peaceful demonstration calling for a ceasefire in Gaza took place elsewhere in London. Hundreds of thousands of people took part:

British Jews were well-represented:

Peace demonstrations also took place elsewhere in the UK, including Edinburgh:

Source: Tommy Robinson and masked far-right thugs fight police and break through Cenotaph cordon – Mirror Online

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Armistice Day pro-Palestine protest won’t go anywhere near the cenotaph

The Cenotaph: politicians and pundits have whipped up hysteria about a peace march that won’t go anywhere near it. Isn’t that irresponsible?

After all the fuss over the planned Armistice Day pro-Palestine protest in London, it turns out that there is no possibility that the cenotaph will suffer harm.

Here’s the reason:

But still we hear from loonies like this:

High-profile commentators on ‘X’ – this is your spokesman! I hope you’re proud.

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Meanwhile, Transport for London seems to have made arrangements to close down all Tube lines on November 11, with a consequent hit to the economy:

Did the government order this closure?

Will it be reimbursing London’s shops for their lost revenue? (I doubt it.)

May we conclude that saving a piece of rock from a nonexistent threat is more important to the Tory government than the UK’s economy?

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Rishi Sunak calls for police clampdown on Armistice Day anti-war ‘Million Man March’

So much for free speech in the UK, then.

Rishi Sunak has called for the Home Secretary and police to spit on everything the servicepeople commemorated on Remembrance Day died to defend.

He has been informed that, after 500,000 people marched in support of the innocent people of Gaza who are being murdered on a daily basis by Israeli war crimes last Saturday (October28), another march is being arranged, to take place on November 11, which it is hoped a million people will attend.

Here’s the poster for it:

And here’s Sunak’s response:

For those who can’t read images, he said:

“To plan protests on Armistice Day is provocative and disrespectful, and there is a clear and present risk that the Cenotaph and other war memorials could be desecrated, something that would be an affront to the British public and the values we stand for.

“The right to remember, in peace and dignity, those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice for those freedoms must be protected.

“I have asked the Home Secretary to support the Met Police in doing everything necessary to protect the sanctity of Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.”

What utter – insulting – twaddle.

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Sunak is disrespecting every single man or woman who died in war with those words, and here’s why:

Armistice Day and Remembrance Day commemorate people who died to protect our freedoms – including the freedom to protest against war.

The honoured dead who we remember on those days fought to end war, and prohibiting an event calling for the end of a war is the gravest insult to their memory that anybody could commit – especially a serving UK prime minister.

He suggests that the cenotaph and other war memorials may be desecrated, and that preventing the possibility of this should rank higher than permitting the British people to express their right to free speech. This alone contradicts the very reason those memorials exist; it denies their reason for existing in the first place.

If the safety of a piece of rock is more important to Sunak than the freedom – the right to free speech – of the British people, then he is spitting on the graves of everybody commemorated by that rock, who died to protect that freedom.

If their purpose has been forgotten – as he seems to have done – then perhaps they should be torn down altogether and replaced with something that makes the original purpose more clear – even to the likes of Sunak.

He mentions “those freedoms” for which “those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice” fought – but doesn’t even bother to admit what they are, because if he did, he would not be able to justify the draconian response he is planning.

I fear that he is being deliberately provocative. But if he wants a confrontation, it will only show that the UK’s leaders have lost their way and must be removed.

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Violence in London as NAZIS march in SUPPORT of CHURCHILL. The reasons may shock you

This story will be full of apparent contradictions. It is, in fact, about betrayal.

It features Nazis making stiff-armed salutes next to the Cenotaph, and claiming to be supporting Churchill.

The same people, who say they love the rule of law, have attacked police.

And while claiming to deplore violence at the Black Lives Matter demonstration in London last week, they flew to it within minutes of starting their own demonstration.

There is sense to it – although it’s hard to see because people in authority would prefer you to remain confused – and the mass media support them in that.

This story is best told from the response to the removal of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol last week – triggering a movement to remove other statues glorifying slavers and racists including calls for the removal of the statue to World War II prime minister Winston Churchill in London – and its actual defacement. In fact, the story started decades ago, as we will see.

The threat to Churchill’s effigy seems to have brought every far-right-wing lunatic in the United Kingdom out of the woodwork to demand action to protect a man they claim as an inspirational, ideological leader. Figureheads demanded that every “patriot” – take note of the language – should be in London to defend the statue during the next scheduled Black Lives Matter demonstration in London – on June 13 (today).

Black Lives Matter organisers weren’t having any of that; their demos are always intended to be peaceful and there was a clear threat of violence in the so-called “patriots”‘ call to action. They pulled out and left London to the lunatics.

Meanwhile, the authorities boarded up the statue, leaving nothing for the “patriots” to protect.

They went anyway – and caused scenes that have been branded in the mildest possible terms as a “national disgrace”.

To learn why the far right thought it necessary to scandalise the country – possibly the world – we need to go back many decades, to examine the career of their idol Churchill.

The claim is that they are protecting the legacy of the man whose leadership saved us from Nazism and the politics of Hitler. But the people saying that are the same people who, today, threw Nazi salutes at the cenotaph in an insult to everybody who died to protect us in the 1939-45 war.

These people are not celebrating a victory over fascism!

So what are they celebrating?

Churchill was a racist and an oppressor of his own countryfolk. That is the Churchill the far-right revere.

Look at the Tonypandy riots massacre in Wales in 1910. As Home Secretary, Churchill sent first Metropolitan police officers, then the 18th Hussars – who shot down the striking miners. It is widely believed that he ordered the use of live rounds, although he denied it.

Or shall we talk about his actions in Liverpool, the following year?

I’m sure there are other examples but let’s look at the racism:

According to his biographer, John Charmley, Churchill believed in a racial hierarchy and eugenics, and that at the top of this were White Protestant Christians.

He said it was ‘alarming and nauseating’ seeing Gandhi ‘striding half-naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace’ in India. He also said ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’. So it should be no surprise that he allowed three million people to die in the Bengal famine of 1943, in which Churchill refused to deploy food supplies.

The Bengalis starved because their grain had been sequestered as back up supplies to feed British troops. In the end they weren’t needed. Churchill also said that the famine was their fault for having too many children.

This racist also said that ‘Keep Britain White’ was a good slogan for the Tories to go into the 1951 general election.

Let’s look at his attitude to World War II. Boris Johnson has claimed that the former prime minister “saved this country and the whole of Europe from a barbaric fascist and racist tyranny, and our debt to him is incalculable”.

But according to historian of fascism Martin Pugh, Churchill wasn’t opposed to fascism in itself; he was simply concerned that Nazi Germany threatened British interests in the North Sea.

And Peter Hitchens has pointed out that Churchill wasn’t interested in saving the Jews; he was simply honouring treaties with Poland and France. He knew about the extermination camps but neither said nor did anything about them until they were liberated during the allied invasions of Germany and Poland.

So it should be unsurprising that people of good conscience have reached the logical conclusions about Churchill:

I have already mentioned Boris Johnson’s history-denying defence of Churchill as a fighter against fascism, when he was no such thing. Is it any surprise, then, that after he was told to “grow a pair” and defend the continuance of the statue (by people like the boxer Tyson Fury), he leapt to it?

“The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square is a permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country – and the whole of Europe – from a fascist and racist tyranny,” he wrote on Twitter yesterday.

“It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk of attack by violent protestors. Yes, he sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial.

“We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations.”

Sadly, here he is undermined by the UK government itself, which has indeed edited and censored the UK’s collective past:

The news story refers to the destruction of records detailing crimes committed by the British Empire in its colonies, during its final years. Apparently Mr Johnson thinks it is perfectly acceptable to edit and censor the past when it reveals inconvenient facts.

He has attracted appropriate criticism:

What conclusions may we draw so far? That far-right-wingers in the UK made an issue of defending Churchill’s statue because they are racists, just as he was? That they hoped to disrupt the planned Black Lives Matter demonstration in order to beat up black people? That they relied on Boris Johnson for support because he is a racist (“picaninnies with watermelon smiles”, remember. “Letterboxes” and “bank robbers”, remember)? That the Nazi salutes in London today were as much for Johnson as they were for Churchill?

That they were relying on a rise in racism in the UK caused and promoted by successive Conservative governments since 2010 – most especially around the UK’s membership of the European Union and Brexit?

We should also take note of another aspect of the far-right-wing malady: exceptionalism. They adopt what it suits them to adopt and ignore the inconvenient facts – such as the fact that their ally in support of Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson, also presided over the ejection of Churchill’s grandson from the Conservative Party:

https://twitter.com/cfinnecy/status/1271543052084097032

This exceptionalism is especially strong with regard to statues of slavers, racists and other oppressors who, we are told, made Britain “great”:

Even the arguments they use to support the retention of these offensive slabs of stone show exceptionalism:

See, Katarzyna b-m was saying anyone who is uncomfortable with the way people behave in their home (or indeed, home country) – such as their choice of decoration – is welcome to leave. The comment may be considered dog-whistle racism towards Ash, who is a person of colour. But Ash just batted it away with the pertinent observation that, when the British invaded other people’s homes in the time of Empire, they did the exact opposite; instead of leaving, the British changed those other nations and didn’t give a fig about the feelings of the natives.

With these statues, of course, it is native Britons who want rid, so the argument is nonsense. But that’s right-wing exceptionalism for you.

We’re getting close to the events in London today, but should first consider two more elements in this mix: the police and the press. Both have been put between a rock and a hard place.

The police, you see, were prompted into action last week against Black Lives Matter demonstrators – although members of Avon and Someset Constabulary wisely avoided a confrontation with those who pulled down Edward Colston’s statue, even though it was done illegally. The far-right extremists who planned to challenge any demonstration this weekend were claiming to be upholding the rule of law – but their subsequent actions made it clear that this was not true. What were the police supposed to do with them?

And the news media have been instrumental in supporting the rise of racism in the UK over the last few years – faithfully reporting the Tory governments’ claims that immigrants have been responsible for many of the nation’s ills, among other questionable practices. The extremist demonstration in London today was a logical result and progression of these reports – but what sort of treatment did reporters expect if they pointed their cameras at the violence that happened today?

So we come to the demonstration today.

It tells us that racism is still alive and well in the UK and that most of the people in this video clip are there to stick it to the blacks.

Next thing we knew, these people who claimed to be celebrating Churchill the man who led us to victory over the Nazis were performing Nazi salutes in front of the police (and also in front of the cenotaph in an insult to the people whose deaths that monument represents):

Interestingly, the Nazis doing the saluting were again contradicting themselves; they’re all for police brutality against black people (because they’re racists) – but if the cops turn a heavy hand to them, it’s a different story and they react with violence:

https://twitter.com/BenedictL_/status/1271772774126755841

https://twitter.com/BenedictL_/status/1271772778258186240

And when the press recorded this behaviour…

But on television…

Schizoid.

There’s only one conclusion to be had:

The United Kingdom remains a hopelessly racist nation.

It is racist because the history we learn reeks of it. Our monuments venerate it. Our government promotes it. And our (white) people take their cue from all three.

This situation will not change because our government – and the most powerful people in the UK – want to keep it the way it is.

It puts us at each others’ throats instead of at theirs.

And why is it about betrayal?

Simple. This overt racism is a betrayal of everyone who has been led to believe that Britain is better than that.

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Boris Johnson’s contempt for the Forces goes much further than laying a wreath wrongly

Yes, this is bad:

Contempt: Boris Johnson showed he holds our Armed Forces in contempt by laying a wreath at the Cenotaph upside-down.

Boris Johnson showed his disrespect for the UK’s Armed Forces this morning when he laid a wreath upside down at the Cenotaph during the Remembrance Day commemoration service.

This Writer doesn’t want to say it – because it has become a cliche – but, if Jeremy Corbyn had done the same, we would never hear the end of it. Remember the vilification he had at the first Remembrance Day he attended as Labour leader? He hadn’t done anything wrong!

This is much worse, though:

He was known only as George, he was 82 years old and he died of bronchial pneumonia after being evicted from a squat in Manchester – along with no fewer than 12 other ex-servicemen.

This is how the Conservatives treat our Armed Forces after their usefulness as cannon fodder is over – they throw them onto the streets.

George and his comrades were just 13 among more than 13,000 ex-servicepeople who the Conservatives have thrown onto our streets.

Many veterans, war heroes from the Falklands campaign through to conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, are reduced to sleeping in doorways, bus stops and parks, begging from passers-by.

Almost all are struggling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which often leads to other problems including addictions to drugs and alcohol.

None of them receive any help from the Conservative government. The Armed Forces Covenant – a promise to ensure that those who serve or who have served in the armed forces, and their families, are treated fairly, that was enshrined in law in 2011 – is a sick joke.

The only help they receive is from charities. Chris Barwood, chair of the Salford Armed Forces Veterans Network said, “We are turning our backs on our troops who have taken the Queen’s shilling, sworn the oath of allegiance and offered up their lives to keep us safe and yet in return we do nothing to ensure that they have a roof over their heads and food in their bellies for their remaining years.”

The crowning irony is that most members of the Armed Forces are ardent Conservatives.

I hope they reconsider that position.

Why should they vote for a party that throws them into pointless conflicts, then throws them onto the streets when they get PTSD, and whose leader shows nothing but contempt for those of their comrades who have died defending their country?

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Ignore the back-seat drivers; Corbyn was right in his behaviour – and his beliefs

Does anybody care that some former First Sea Lord might resign the Labour whip over Jeremy Corbyn’s views about nuclear weapons?

Who thinks Nigel Farage should have any kind of say over Mr Corbyn’s behaviour at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday?

What about The Sun, claiming Corbyn should have bowed more deeply after placing his wreath. What does an exaggerated piece of theatre have to do with respect for the dead?

It’s all rubbish, of course. Silly noises made by the chatterers to undermine someone they don’t like. Gossip.

Corbyn has a view on nuclear weapons, but we can see from his words about the Second World War that he has a view about fighting evil, too.

Perhaps – and I know it’s an unfashionable idea nowadays – it’s why he went into politics in the first place.

Lord West criticised the current chief of the defence staff, Gen Sir Nicholas Houghton, for comments he made on Sunday in which he said he was worried by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s statement that he would never use nuclear weapons.

West said: “We (military figures) tend to say things as we see rather than spinning them or being clever with our words.”

“He was trying to be careful but he got bluffed into saying a little bit more than he should have done.”

The peer said no action was needed against Houghton other than to advise him to “be careful”.

He claimed that Houghton had been naive in being walked into answering a question he should not have answered, but insisted the issue had been overblown.

Nigel Farage said Corbyn should have bowed more deeply at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.

The Sun newspaper also claimed Corbyn had insulted the war dead by failing to bow his head more deeply when he laid his wreath.

Corbyn turned up at the Cenotaph in a dark suit wearing a red poppy and stayed behind after the service to talk to former servicemen informally, rather than attending a formal lunch.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the paper’s former editor Charles Moore refused to join the criticism, saying: “There was nothing wrong with his slight bow, he wore unobjectionable clothes, a red poppy and a respectful expression.”

Corbyn’s views are close to pacifist, but he has defended the second world war as a fight against fascism.

Source: Trident: former first sea lord criticises armed forces chief for Corbyn remarks | UK news | The Guardian

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Tory disrespect stains WWI centenary commemoration

Disrespectful: The laminated messages that were attached to the wreaths. David Cameron was the only political leader allowed to write a personal message by the Conservative-run Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Disrespectful: The laminated messages that were attached to the wreaths. David Cameron was the only political leader allowed to write a personal message by the Conservative-run Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

This is a new low for the Conservative Party.

Leaders of British political organisations laid wreaths at Glasgow’s cenotaph to mark 100 years since the beginning of the First World War – but only David Cameron was allowed to write a personal message.

Worse than that, the Conservative Party and its allies then attacked leaders of the other parties – in particular Ed Miliband – for failing to do the same.

Former Tory MP Louise Mensch showed exactly why she deserves to be out of Parliament by tweeting: “Really we need to ask where we are as a society, when politicians are so casual as ‘hand me the wreath’ without asking to write on it.”

And Telegraph blogger Dan Hodges brought his paper into disrepute by tweeting, without checking the facts: “Just seen the wreath. Ed Miliband is becoming a parody of Ed Miliband.”

Asked to explain Mr Miliband’s actions, a Labour spokesman told the BBC that his wreath – with a card stating only “From the Leader of the Opposition” – was handed to him by a representative of organisers the Department of Culture, Media and Sport only seconds before it was laid.

“Ed Miliband was not given the opportunity to write a personal message on the wreath,” he said.

Perhaps an even worse indignity was that into which Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was forced. His read “From the Deputy Prime Minister” and a Liberal Democrat source said the gap between Mr Clegg being handed the wreath and laying it had been “a 10-second thing”.

The BBC checked with the manufacturers of the wreaths – Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory in Edinburgh, and was passed on to Poppy Scotland, whose spokeswoman said: “We were asked to send [the cards] to the DCMS and the wreaths were sent through to Glasgow in advance, but the blank cards to London.”

So what happened, in fact, was that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport – which is run by the Conservative Sajid Javid – decided that the Conservative Prime Minister should be the only person allowed to write a personalised tribute. Every other political leader – including those of Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland – had to lay wreaths with a laminated description of their job, so they could not even scribble something quickly in the few seconds available to them.

The tell-tale was the fact that all messages other than Cameron’s were written in the same handwriting.

Worse still is the fact that Cameron’s message wasn’t even appropriate. He had written “Your most enduring legacy is our liberty. We must never forget.” Very stirring, but it would be more appropriate to attribute that to those who died in the Second World War, rather than the First.

Also, as Thomas G Clark pointed out adroitly in his Another Angry Voice blog:  “I´m pretty sure that most would agree that the practice of remembrance is a much more tangible and enduring legacy than the general concept of “liberty“, especially given that Cameron and his rotten government have striven relentlessly to undermine “liberty” with grotesque totalitarian and anti-democratic legislation such as the “secret courts” bill, retroactive workfare sanctions, the “Gagging Law” and the “DRIP spooks charter“.”

Worst of all is the fact that the sacrifice of more than a million British lives, and the suffering caused to more than 1.5 million British people who were wounded, some so severely that they suffered the consequences for the rest of their lives, has been overshadowed by a petty squabble engineered by small-minded Tories who wanted to make themselves look better than everyone else.

It was a silly tactic, easily exposed. David Cameron’s only logical move was to apologise for what happened, for the insult to his fellow political leaders and for the upset it has undoubtedly caused to all those who lost loved ones in the war and wanted them commemorated respectfully.

True to form, he showed he had a yellow streak instead. Our gutless Prime Minister had nothing to say.

We should all send him the White Feather.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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