Tag Archives: Mike Sivier

Craig Murray is the latest candidate to stand against the right-wing Tories, Labour and Lib Dems

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray, who was later jailed in a legal farce, has been selected by the Workers’ Party GB to stand as its candidate in Blackburn at the next general election.

Here’s Skwawkbox:

Murray, who has been targeted by UK security services for standing up for human rights in Palestine and against corruption in the UK and was removed by the government from his ambassador role for objecting to the use of intelligence obtained by torture, runs a well-known left-wing news site. Like party leader George Galloway, he is a Scot.

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He was jailed for eight months in 2021, serving half the sentence before release, after a farcical conviction in a Scottish court for supposed ‘jigsaw identification’, even though so-called ‘mainstream’ media had actually identified the person involved and Murray had not.

The Blackburn seat is currently held by Labour.

This Site will endeavour to keep you updated on this candidate, along with others for the Workers’ Party and standing as Independents.

Source: Craig Murray selected to stand for Workers Party in Blackburn – SKWAWKBOX


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Independent candidate update: Emma Dent Coad (Kensington & Chelsea)

Emma Dent Coad, as seen through the eyes of art.

Emma Dent Coad is an Independent Parliamentary candidate for Kensington & Chelsea – and she has a GoFundMe site where you can learn all about her work in the constituency and put some money toward her success.

She was the constituency’s MP at the time of the Grenfell Tower inferno, and worked hard to help the survivors of that tragedy.

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If you remember her good work, click on the link below to help; if you don’t, click on the link to find out about it and then help.


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A short Vox Political playlist on extremism

Michael Gove: the hard hat might be covering a hard-headed extremist.

One idea I’ve had for the new-look Vox Political – when it happens – is nicked from YouTube and the various music sites: playlists.

Basically, if you want to read everything This Site has published on a certain subject, you get to look up the playlist, with all the links you need.

It was inspired by the following ‘X’ posts, by Jill Darbyshire, who looked up a few posts on extremism after Michael Gove came out with his new definition.

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You can draw your own conclusions about what they mean for what he’s done:


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‘Flurry’ of no confidence letters in Rishi Sunak submitted, Tories say

Rishi Sunak: he might not get the chance to seek the public’s approval in a general election, meaning he’ll always be remembered as an unelected, third-choice prime minister.

Yahoo News is reporting that Tory MPs are submitting a “flurry” of “no confidence” letters in the leadership of Rishi Sunak as the party tries to weather a series of broadside blows:

A “FLURRY” of no confidence letters in Rishi Sunak have reportedly been submitted to the chairman of the Tory backbench 1922 committee.

The lack of a vote-winning policy in the Spring Budget is thought to have angered a number of MPs and Tory sources have told the i Paper this has caused some to submit letters in the last few days.

Sunak has come under pressure this week to return more than £10 million of donations from businessman Frank Hester who is reported to have said that looking at Diane Abbott, Britain’s first black female MP, made “you just want to hate all black women”.

Downing Street has finally called the comments “racist and wrong” after initially refusing to do so.

Sunak has also been dealing with the defection of Lee Anderson to Reform UK, something which has riled the right of the party.

There is no knowing how many letters have actually been sent but if a threshold of 53 – 15% of Tory MPs – was reached, [Graham] Brady would have to make an announcement.

Source: ‘Flurry’ of no confidence letters in Rishi Sunak submitted, Tories say

Privatisation of local government begins – and why it will cost us far too much

Michael Gove: he’s using the few months of government left to the Tories to do as much damage to public services as possible.

Michael Gove has taken another major Tory step towards making public services unaffordable – and his party unelectable.

He has transferred more than £14 million of Middlesbrough Council assets to the Middlesbrough Development Corporation, a private company chaired by Tory Lord Ben Houchen.

So it seems the bankrupting of local councils was a deliberate Tory policy, intended to force the sale or transfer of more public assets into private hands.

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This is problematic on at least three levels:

Firstly, the MDC’s parent organisation, the Tees Valley Combined Authority, is the subject of long-running allegations against it – as described in a report commissioned by the Tory government.

Next: loss of assets means loss of revenue. In local government, assets are property that are used to provide services – that sometimes come with a charge. If they aren’t available to local government any more, then it means less money will come to councils.

Finally: this means the public will be asked to pay more for public services – because the council will have to rent the assets it has lost, back from the new owner.

This is simply a way of passing public money over to the extremely rich, who don’t even have to pay for it. And we all know:

Here’s a quick TV clip in which Houchen was nailed by the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire, proving that he is a liar and his corporations can’t be trusted:

Here’s the bottom line:

Funnily enough, the process described above was discussed on This Site, only a week ago, after economist Gary Stevenson told us why privatisation puts up our taxes. I wrote:

Neoliberal governments since 1979 have sold off all the property they own, meaning that – in order to provide services – they have to rent property from the rich people to whom they sold it all.

This is, of course, a ridiculous proposition because renting property from rich people is much more expensive than owning it oneself. We can see this from the sale of council housing; now councils don’t have any low-cost, low-rent houses, more and more people are becoming homeless because they can’t pay the sky-high rents demanded by private landlords, or the sky-high mortgages demanded by lenders.

So ordinary working people are now having to pay enormous taxes in order to allow our governments to pay for these services at exorbitant prices, because they’ve given all the means of providing these services to the rich.

Gary’s answer is to tax the rich, so they have to sell off their ill-gotten government assets in order to make ends meet.

The problem is that Tories like Michael Gove want the rich to own public assets and charge the Earth for the use of them; it’s an opportunity to say public services are too expensive and close them down, hugely disadvantaging the poor and laying them open to exploitation – by the rich.

Now that Gary has exposed the strategy, we can all see it for what it is.


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Tory ministers told to come clean over threat of war in Rwanda after UN warning | Mirror Online

Did she know? When Priti Patel was Home Secretary, she announced a partnership between the UK and Rwanda that would allow us to send asylum-seekers arriving in the UK to that other country. Was she aware that tensions with its neighbour might make Rwanda unsafe, and did she hide it?

This is the country our Tory leaders are telling us is perfectly safe for asylum-seekers, many or all of whom are fleeing violence in their own land?

Clearly it isn’t true. We need to know why the Tories have been lying to us about Rwanda and what they are trying to get out of their grubby deal with the government there.

Ministers must come clean about the threat of war in Rwanda, campaigners have warned.

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The Foreign Office has repeatedly refused to release its assessments about tensions between the African nation and its neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It comes after the US told the two countries they must “must walk back from the brink of war” last month.

The Government’s silence has been branded “unacceptable” as Rishi Sunak tries to push through legislation declaring Rwanda a safe country. In recent weeks the US State Department has voiced its alarm over escalating violence in the DRC, while Rwanda told the UN Security Council its neighbour is trying to “cause regime change in Rwanda using force”.

Source: Tory ministers told to come clean over threat of war in Rwanda after UN warning – Mirror Online


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Are these the reasons Rishi Sunak won’t call an immediate general election?

Even if he has, he won’t.

Torsten Bell, of the Resolution Foundation, has it right – I think.

In his latest email he states, of the possibility that Rishi Sunak might call a general election, that “If you’re running the country you don’t call an early one after those kind of by-elections results, no matter how many squillions of pounds a racist might have given you for a campaign.”

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There may also be other reasons for waiting to call an election, as described below:

It’s all about greed with the Tories, isn’t it?

Whatever happened to public service.


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The ‘magic money tree’/’maxed-out national credit card’ LIES

Liars: both David Cameron and (now) Keir Starmer have voiced the falsehood that the UK has credit limits imposed elsewhere – it doesn’t. There IS a magic money tree, though – despite their claims to the contrary; it’s called the Bank of England. You won’t find this mentioned by the mainstream media, though – instead you have to come to Vox Political, Another Angry Voice, and Mainly Macro (among others).

Simon Wren-Lewis, over at Mainly Macro, has written a scathing critique of politicians like Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, who are copying the Tories by saying there is no “magic money tree” and that the government has “maxed-out the national credit cards”.

For clarity: there is a magic money tree. It’s called the Bank of England.

And it is impossible to max-out the national credit cards with the amount of debt the UK currently has.

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Professor Wren-Lewis explains:

Keir Starmer, in commenting on the recent Budget, said “Britain in recession, the national credit card maxed out, and despite the measures today, the highest tax burden for 70 years”. The analogy of maxing out the nation’s credit card has been repeated by other Shadow ministers. Rachel Reeves, Shadow Chancellor, has joined many Conservative ministers in saying there is no ‘magic money tree’.

Anyone who knows any macroeconomics understands that these analogies are false. The nation does not have a credit card with an externally imposed credit limit that it can ‘max out’, and the UK government does have a magic money tree because it can create money.

Imagine, for example, if we forced politicians to be more precise. Rather than claiming that the government had ‘run out of money’ and ‘maxed out its credit card’, they would instead have to say that the government had almost hit their self-imposed borrowing limits.

Rather than saying you couldn’t promise to spend this or reduce that tax because there is no magic money tree, politicians instead would need to say that the government could create more money or borrow more, but that would add to aggregate demand which would risk higher inflation and so force the Bank of England to raise interest rates.

Why do politicians say there is no money tree at their disposal? Because they don’t like telling the truth, which is that they don’t want to break their fiscal rule, or they don’t want the additional spending or tax cut adding to aggregate demand and leading the central bank to raise interest rates. That is a trade-off where many voters might take a different view, so it is much easier for them to say there is no money. It is a way of disguising a political choice, and not being honest about these choices.

So ‘there is no magic money tree’ is normally said by Chancellors or Prime Ministers who want an easy excuse for not spending money or cutting taxes. It is a straightforward deception to give politicians an easier life, and therefore it is difficult to defend its use.

The phrase ‘maxing out the nation’s credit card’ is more often used by politicians attacking the borrowing record of others. Yet it too suggests politicians have less choice than they actually have. In this case it perpetuates the idea that governments can only borrow so much, and that they are currently hitting that limit.

This is nonsense. There is a limit to how much UK governments can borrow, but it is way above levels of debt ever historically recorded. (Debt was 2.7 times GDP after WWII.) [1] But it sounds more dramatic to say a government has maxed out its credit card than to say it is leaving insufficient headroom to meet its own fiscal rules.

The use of these false analogies probably wouldn’t matter too much if we had an informed and informing media that was quick to correct these attempts to mislead. Unfortunately the complete opposite is the case. Because much of the media views macroeconomics as too complex and boring for its viewers, it laps up these incorrect attempts to relate fiscal policy to household budgets.

Sometimes this media environment gives politicians little choice but to follow. But that is not the case with phrases like ‘no magic money tree’ and ‘maxing out the nation’s credit card’. No one is forcing politicians to use these phrases. Instead it is their own choice to do so. If they know they are false analogies that just mislead the public they shouldn’t use them. If they don’t know that they are false, I’m afraid that is even worse.

So, when Keir Starmer said those words in response to Jeremy Hunt’s Budget, somebody in BBC/ITV/Sky News or the newspapers should have immediately called them out as lies.

But they didn’t.

This means the media are misinforming the electorate. This in turn means that most of the voting population, at the next general election, will be basing their decision on false information.

That is inexcusable. There should probably be a law against it. But there isn’t, because the law-makers benefit from the falsehoods.


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Labour’s ‘fresh start’ seems to keep a LOT of rotten Tory depravities

It seems some of us are not impressed with Labour’s “fresh start”:

That’ll be because Keir Starmer seems to be keeping an awfully large number of Tory policies.

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For those who can’t read images, they are:

The Bedroom Tax
The Rape Clause (in Child Benefit claims)
The two-child benefit cap
Starving school children
Asylum seekers on barges
Hard Brexit
NHS privatisation
Anti-trade union laws
Coalitions with Conservatives in Scottish councils
The unelected House of Lords
Anti-worker laws
Universal Credit
Children in poverty
Anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes

You might not agree with everything on the list. Feel free to add your own choices!


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Andy McDonald’s Labour suspension ends; when will Diane Abbott’s?

Andy McDonald: his Labour Party suspension is over. But why is it looking as though Diane Abbott will have to do a humiliating deal before her own suspension ends?

MP Andy McDonald’s suspension from the Labour Party has been ended after five months and a lengthy investigation which found that he did not break any party rules.

Mr McDonald’s party membership had been placed under “precautionary suspension” after he told a pro-Palestine rally, “We won’t rest until we have justice. Until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea, can live in peaceful liberty.”

Downing Street had said, just a few hours earlier, that the chant, “From the River to the Sea, [Palestine will be free]” was “deeply offensive” to many people. But, of course, that’s not what Mr McDonald had said, as discussed by This Site, here.

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The Guardian reports that a Labour spokesperson said:

“The chief whip has today restored the Labour whip to Andy McDonald MP. This follows a full investigation by the Labour party into complaints received about public remarks that he made in October 2023.

“The investigation concluded that he had not engaged in conduct that was against the party’s rulebook but reminded him of the importance of elected representatives being mindful not only of what they say in public but how their words may be interpreted, especially in reference to controversial or emotive issues.”

But questions remain to be answered here. A “precautionary suspension” is supposed to last just three months. Why did this one continue for five? The Graun also quotes a spokesperson for left-wing campaign group Momentum, who connected the case with that of Diane Abbott, who has also been without the Labour whip – for nearly a year – and who has been the subject of much discussion this week after comments by the Conservative Party’s biggest donor, Frank Hester:

“Why has it taken nearly five months to investigate a speech at a rally? Why has Diane Abbott – a black woman Keir Starmer rightly hails as a trailblazer – been suspended for an outrageous 11 months now, with no end in sight? And why do black and brown MPs like Diane, Apsana Begum and Kate Osamor feel they suffer worse treatment than their white male counterparts?”

Senior Labour figures from across the party have called for Abbott to have the Labour whip reinstated. Harriet Harman, Ed Balls, John McDonnell and Dawn Butler believe Abbott should be readmitted to the party.

McDonald’s readmission into the party will also raise questions on the future of Osamor, who was suspended by the party in January.

These are all left-wing Labour MPs – and party leader Keir Starmer is about as right-wing as one can get. It has been suggested that he is trying to find a way to change these suspensions into removal from Parliament altogether.

This speculation is fuelled by comments like the following:

It is true that, after the Equality and Human Rights Commission investigated Labour for alleged “institutional antisemitism” (and found none), Starmer said the party leader’s office would no longer have any influence over investigations into allegations against members – a criticism that had been levelled against previous leader Jeremy Corbyn.

If Starmer is the one making decisions about Ms Abbott’s future, then he was lying with that claim.

The following suggests that Abbott may be blackmailed into quitting Parliament at the next election in return for having the whip restored until then – with right-wing cronies of Starmer queuing up to take over from her.

If that were true, it would be yet another scandal, opening Starmer’s party to renewed accusations of racism and misogyny, and This Writer would certainly agree with James Foster’s suggestion, below:

Now this information – whether it is right or wrong – is in the public domain, Starmer’s best course of action would be to restore the whip at once, in order to prevent a possible – and highly damaging – backlash.

But he seems to think he is invincible, in spite of the small army of left-wing Independent candidates springing up to take his MPs’ constituencies away from them.

Watch this space to see what happens next.


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