Coming up roses: Jeremy Corbyn kept smiling both before and after the ‘egg’ attack at the Muslim Welfare Centre in Finsbury Park on March 3, 2019.
What a pleasure to be writing about a court case involving Rachel Riley, that doesn’t involve me as well!
The TV parlour game-player was in the High Court today, giving evidence in her libel case against Laura Murray, a former aide of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The details of the case are laid out clearly in the Yahoo News report, here:
Ms Murray had posted [a] tweet on March 3, 2019, after an egg was thrown at Mr Corbyn, who was then the Labour leader, by a Brexit supporter when he was visiting Finsbury Park Mosque, in north London.
She had been responding to a tweet posted by Ms Riley, Mr Justice Nicklin was told.
Ms Riley had initially retweeted a January 2019 tweet by Guardian columnist Owen Jones, about an attack on former British National Party leader Nick Griffin, in which Mr Jones had said: “I think sound life advice is, if you don’t want eggs thrown at you, don’t be a Nazi.”
She had added “Good advice”, with emojis of a red rose and an egg.
Later, Ms Murray had tweeted: “Today Jeremy Corbyn went to his local mosque for Visit My Mosque Day, and was attacked by a Brexiteer.
“Rachel Riley tweets that Corbyn deserves to be violently attacked because he is a Nazi.
“This woman is as dangerous as she is stupid. Nobody should engage with her. Ever.”
The article continues:
Ms Riley was questioned by Mr McCormick.
He suggested that Ms Riley’s tweet had generated a Twitter debate around whether or not she had called Mr Corbyn a Nazi.
Ms Riley accepted that she regarded Mr Corbyn as “anti-Semitic”.
But she said she had not called Mr Corbyn a Nazi and added: “I didn’t use the word Nazi.”
In fact, Mr Justice Nicklin had already made a ruling on the meaning of Ms Murray’s words that did not include any claim that Riley had called Corbyn a Nazi.
That being said, when he reviews the case, he will see that on the day Mr Corbyn was attacked with an egg, Riley published a tweet saying people who don’t want to be attacked with eggs should not be Nazis, adding the remark “Good advice”.
Riley might have meant any number of things when she published her tweet, and she can say whatever she likes about it now. We have no way of knowing whether any of her claims about it now are accurate. That’s why the judge has to rely on the tweet as published, in the context in which it was published at the time.
His job will be to decide, not whether Riley wanted to indicate that Corbyn is a Nazi, but whether a right-thinking member of the public was likely to draw that conclusion from what she had published.
Please don’t respond to this article with your own interpretation of the tweet’s meaning (at least, not until after the judge returns his verdict).
But feel free to consider for yourself what you think Riley’s tweet meant.
The case is continuing throughout the week and should be extremely interesting to all of us.
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RIP democracy: this image of Boris Johnson in a Hitler moustache was stuck to the door of the Conservative office in Beverley, near Hull.
This Site has been saying it for some time so I’m sure you can understand why I agree with Richard Murphy’s list of reasons why Boris Johnson is a fascist and so is his Tory government.
He has published an article on his Tax Research UK website that quotes Laurence W Britt’s 14-point list of the characteristics of fascist regimes.
They were:
Powerful and continuing nationalism
Disdain for human rights
Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
Supremacy of the military
Rampant sexism
Controlled mass media
Obsession with national security
Religion and government intertwined
Corporate power protected
Labour power suppressed
Disdain for intellectuals & the arts
Obsession with crime & punishment
Rampant cronyism & corruption
Fraudulent elections
Mr Murphy adds that an intertwining with religion is no longer of any popular relevance and, given recent announcements on defence spending and nuclear weapons he is not now sure that the supremacy of the military over other claims on the public purse can be dismissed any more.
He was challenged in his ‘comment’ column by people who claimed he had Googled (other search engines are available) the definition of fascism most likely to serve his purpose – but was then supported by others.
One reader provided another list – originally created by the author Umberto Eco, with examples of the way the Johnson/Tory regime fits it, as follows:
1. Cult of tradition – a defining characteristic of Conservatism.
2. Rejection of modernism – that is, rejection of Enlightenment values. You see this in the scorn for a “woke” liberal metropolitan elite in favour of the earthy values of an intolerant silent majority.
3. Cult of action – in essence, anti-intellectualism. We have had enough of experts.
4. Disagreement is treason – dissent is unpatriotic.
5. Fear of difference – institutionalised racism, and hostility to foreigners (including our attitude to our former friends in the EU) and immigrants.
6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class – the fear that Middle Englanders could find themselves excluded from any chance of joining the one percent but instead condemned to join the underclass they have demonised for so long.
7. Obsession with a plot – any number of threats, some real and some imagined. Russia, China, the EU, Islamic terrorism, BLM, women, “cultural Marxism”.
8. Enemies both too strong and too weak. Such as the EU, both abusing their power to make unfair impositions on the UK, but also too slow and inward looking, holding back buccaneering Britain from its rightful place of dominance on the world stage.
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy – one we are not quite meeting yet perhaps, although you could see the military adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria in this light.
10. Contempt for the weak – in spades. The old, the disabled, the poor. Anyone from a marginalised minority.
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero – again, not quite there perhaps, although poppy worship and clapping the NHS has some of this flavour.
12. Machismo – disdain for women and LGBTIQ+ people.
13. Selective populism – “Will of the People”. As announced and interpreted by our glorious blond Leader and his acolytes.
14. Newspeak – lies and propaganda. Speeches in front of flags. Words losing their meaning. Brexit means Brexit. They need us more than we need them. Teething problems. World beating test and trace.
So there it is.
If you are in the UK, you have a fascist government.
What are you going to do about it?
Nothing? Wait until the jackboots come through your front door?
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Travellers: this is a council-run traveller site, so it looks orderly enough. But a proposed law means that even here the police could confiscate travellers’ homes, if officers don’t like the look of them.
Roma (or Romani); travellers; gypsies; diddycai; tinkers if you like. There are plenty of words for these almost universally maligned people.
They have a bad reputation because some of them are trespassers who will camp on any land, whether it is privately-owned or common, some of them are dirty and will leave their campsites filthy with litter, and some of them are prone to criminal behaviour.
In 1930s Germany, Hitler ramped up already-existing anti-gypsy laws to establish the pre-supposition that they were a “nuisance”, that they were criminal by their nature (so it follows that the authorities were allowed to assume they were criminals without them actually having to commit a crime), and that they should be moved on from encampments that were considered to cause a disturbance to the rest of the German population (in Hitler’s Germany, they were moved on into concentration camps where they were murdered in a holocaust that was every bit as brutal as the attempted genocide of the Jews).
Boris Johnson has been stealing policies from Hitler, it seems. Just take a look at his plans for travellers, as written into the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that has just won its first major vote in the House of Commons. Here’s Ian Dunt to explain it to you:
Quick thread on an aspect of the policing bill which has been under-discussed: the provisions on trespass. This section targets Gypsies and Travellers.
Previously, police could take action against Gypsies and Travellers if they had done something wrong. They had to have "caused damage to the land or to property on the land or used threatening, abusive or insulting words".
And they do not need to have done anything at all. The police officer just needs to suspect that significant damage or disruption "is likely to be caused".
There. Police only need to assume that, because a traveller is there, they are likely to engage in criminal activity, and they can then treat that traveller as if they had been seen to commit such an act (even though they haven’t).
In other words: You do not actually need to have done anything. All that is required is that the police *suspect* you will do something.
It’s like “pre-crime”, as described in the movie Minority Report, which turns the law on its head, allowing people to be arrested on the basis of predictions that they will commit crime. In the film, these predictions were not necessarily accurate. In this law, there isn’t even a requirement to be.
So on the basis of a suspicion that a Gypsy or Traveller might in future insult someone, they can take away all their belongings.
To recap: on sight of a traveller, the police may confiscate everything they own. And what will happen to them then? An arrest for vagrancy?
Sure, they can challenge. They can get their day in court. But at that moment when the police officer arrives, they can take everything from them if they do not comply with their demand that they leave.
This bill is massive. Hundreds of pages. And everywhere you look you find draconian powers, handed to police, to do as they damn well please, targeting the most vulnerable and marginalised people in the country.
It sets innocent people up to be criminalised because of who they are, which is a well-recognised form of prejudice. Suppose Johnson targeted Jews. It would be an attack on these people because of who they are, not what they do. That is what we have here.
It isn’t quite racism, and it can’t be anti-Semitism, but the lesson of Hitler tells us it is just as bad.
Oh, and by the way, illegal traveller encampments could have been made a thing of the past if only local authorities had obeyed a 1968 law (the commenter below was adrift by a few years) that ordered them to provide standing sites for travellers to camp:
Back in the 1970's laws were passed where every council had to provide sites for travellers. This law was ignored by majority of Tory led councils – Petty Patel seems totally unaware of this law – the councils are the criminals for not providing the sites. https://t.co/gw6ImwL7Ly
The Caravan Sites Act of 1968 led to the creation of 400 sites, but was ignored by many local authorities. I recall Powys County Council dragging its heels over demands for such sites within the last 10 years.
By breaking the law, council leaders (many of whom, I have no doubt, are Conservatives) made it possible for the current Conservative government to create the current legislation that demands that they be treated as criminals for no reason at all.
The Bill is sponsored by Priti Patel, who is already running concentration camps for refugees from foreign countries.
Where do you think she’ll open her first concentration camp for travellers? And what will they do next?
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Terrifying: it’s not quite a Nazi salute but Boris Johnson’s policies come straight from the Adolf Hitler playbook – except Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons and Johnson does.
Warmongering UK prime minister Boris Johnson is reversing plans to reduce the UK’s arsenal of nuclear weapons after a review of foreign policy.
From what the news reports are telling me – and they are confused – it seems he wants to start a war with a country bordering on or within the Indian or Pacific Oceans and wants to set off a few nuclear weapons, to show how hard he is.
Well, he’s a blowhard, that’s for sure.
And a liar. We knew that already, but today’s reason for saying it can be summed up with the following tweet:
There's apparently no money for nurses to get a proper pay rise.
But there's billions available for even more nuclear weapons.
Yes – Johnson has said there is no money available to prevent nurses from receiving a real-terms pay cut, yet it seems he has plenty to spaff around on penis-substitutes that nobody in their right mind would ever take out of their box.
He’s going to halt a planned reduction of our nuclear stockpile to 180 warheads and instead increase it to 260 – a rise of around 45 per cent. Nobody’s saying what this will cost but we’re looking at many billions of pounds.
Already Johnson’s cheerleaders are making stupid suggestions that the UK will be invaded if Johnson doesn’t start piling on the kilotons. This is nonsense.
The 195 bombs we currently have possess a yield of 100 kilotons – nearly seven times as much as the Hiroshima bomb. Setting off even one of them would be devastating enough – and the only situation in which that could be envisaged is one in which other countries were threatening – or doing – the same.
If that happened, there wouldn’t be a UK to invade.
As a deterrent, 195 warheads is many more than enough. How many times do these damned fools think they can blow up the world?
The backlash has already started:
Let’s not bother with a ‘Children in Need’ day this year.
Let’s have a ‘Trident in Need’ day and give all of those nuclear billions to poor children instead.
Cap on Trident nuclear warhead stockpile to rise by more than 40% https://t.co/WeVrS7le47 Yet we're told that Covid has decimated the economy to such an extent, we can't afford to pay NHS & public sector workers a decent wage. Strange priorities !
Well, guess what: if Johnson gets his way – and with the majority UK voters gave him, he will – this is the only form of protest that his government will allow in the future. Silent protest.
People won’t be allowed to congregate in the streets with banners, and made speeches, or make any visible or audible show of protest because that will provide Priti Patel’s puppet police with the only excuse they need to wade in with their truncheons, break heads and make arrests.
As a result, most of the population – you know the type; the ones who are happy to be distracted with celebrity gossip and junk TV about buying houses – won’t even know there’s anything wrong.
That’s the reason the anti-protest law is being imposed, of course.
Remember when Hitler took power in Germany? He built a bunker in which to plan a massive war, built up his army and stockpiled weapons, while controlling the majority of his population with propaganda and persecuting any dissenters.
For decades, people said it could never happen here in the UK.
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Patel’s Nazi sympathies are becoming increasingly pronounced; consider her attack on travellers, only days ago.
And nobody in the Johnson government – or the wider Conservative Party – has lifted a finger in question.
Still, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.
The parallels between the Tories and Nazis are strong.
Just look at the way they treat people who have disabilities.
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After the Tories in the House of Commons voted en masse to break international law and turn the UK into a rogue state – with which nobody is likely to want to trade, did they show an ounce of remorse?
Not a bit of it!
They tweeted this:
🥀👎 Tonight Labour voted against the UK Internal Market Bill – which will guarantee seamless trade between the home nations of the UK.
💬 "Labour just followed their instinct to side with Brussels again. We'll always work to ensure the UK continues to thrive." – @AmandaMillingpic.twitter.com/frKSSVodOc
Individual Tories have been tweeting versions of this ever since – presumably in a vain effort to justify their own support for crime.
For the sake of accuracy:
Labour did not side with the EU in opposing the law-breaking Internal Market Bill.
Labour sided with the law.
Don’t let the Tories compound their offence by getting away with this lie.
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The graphic really is like the opening titles of Dad’s Army, but the message is perverse.
Behind graphics reminiscent of the old TV sit-com, that represented the UK’s older (and younger) citizens fending off the Nazi hordes, the Home Office comes across as having been taken over by the Nazis,
“We are working to remove” – take note of that language, remove. It means the Home Office is sending people back to the home countries they fled to seek asylum in the United Kingdom – “migrants with no right to remain in the UK”. Migrants like Mercy Baguma who, rather than being removed, was starved to death in her Glasgow home after the Home Office removed her right to remain but then did nothing, leaving her in limbo without any way of feeding herself?
“But current return regulations” to which the UK signed up “are rigid and open to abuse…” If they’re “rigid”, then it shouldn’t be possible to abuse them; they’d mean one thing only. Is it not more likely that the current regulations simply don’t allow the Home Office (as run by Priti Patel) to just kick people out willy-nilly?
“… Allowing activist lawyers” – activist? Activist? Apparently an “activist” is a person who campaigns to bring about political and social change. The use of the word suggests that this is a bad thing. But if the current regime is keen to expel innocent people to an uncertain future – on the basis of questionable information (what are the facts on which the Home Office seeks to deport these people, anyway?) then it seems to me that political and social change is not only desirable but demanded.
“… to delay and disrupt returns…” Good for them!
Then it starts to get really sinister: “Soon we will no longer be bound by EU laws and can negotiate our own return arrangements.” Doesn’t this suggest that the Tory-run Home Office, overseen by Priti Patel, is looking forward to the freedom to treat Johnny Foreigner with extreme prejudice? To treating migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers as people with no rights at all?
I fear for the future of anyone falling into the clutches of such a regime. Fascism comes very strongly to mind.
Of course, we are British – and the clip is already getting the treatment it deserves:
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The statue of Nancy Astor at Plymouth Hoe – that was only unveiled last year by Theresa May – has been sprayed with the word “Nazi”.
This Writer can’t understand why that word wasn’t included on the plaque.
I wrote about it when former prime minister Theresa May unveiled the statue, quoting from Joseph Kennedy and the Jews:
“Despite her anti-Catholicism, Nancy Astor was friends with US Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Their correspondence is reportedly filled with anti-Semitic language. Edward J. Renehan, Jr. notes:
“As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these “world problems” (Nancy’s phrase). … Kennedy replied that he expected the “Jew media” in the United States to become a problem, that “Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles” were already making noises contrived to “set a match to the fuse of the world”.
She may have been the UK’s first female MP but she was an anti-Semite and a supporter of Nazis.
And that makes Theresa May a supporter of Nazism by proxy, of course. She’s the second (current) Conservative Parliamentarian This Writer has had cause to describe as a Nazi – or worse – in 24 hours.
So when people do this…
A statue of Nancy Astor, the first female MP to take her seat in parliament, has become the latest monument to be targeted by vandals.
The word ‘Nazi’ has been spray painted on the plinth of the statue, along with an Antifascist Circle, a political symbol associated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the 1930s.
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The rally – which crossed the line into rioting very early in the proceedings – was held to oppose a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration planned for that day, but BLM organisers cancelled their event because they can recognise a gang of ugly, thugly racists when they see it.
It’s a shame the BBC can’t – especially as the Corporation’s child-facing arms have been so good at addressing the issue of racism for our younger citizens. Consider this, from the Blue Peter presenters…
And we can’t help but note that this behaviour is at odds with the Beeb’s treatment of left-wing protestors, or even the anti-racists of Black Lives Matter:
Media talk in the new normal:
Far-right fascists – Counter-protestors. #BlackLivesMatter protestors – hard-left extremist Marxist anarchist cop-smashing fundamentalists inspired by the bearded demon Corbyn and anyone that ever supported him.
What’s the matter, BBC news editors? Are you frightened of a few beer-bellied, tattooed twits?
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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?
How in the name of all that is holy is this the first time I have ever heard about this? I knew about the Welsh miners. I had no idea about this whatsoever. https://t.co/6iguOH2efz
— CrémantCommunarde#ActivistLawyer ⚖️ 😷 ✋ (@0Calamity) June 12, 2020
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.
I'm not allowed to say Churchill was responsible for the deaths of 3 million people in Bengal without mentioning his leadership in WW2, but I am allowed to mention his leadership in WW2 without mentioning the 3 million deaths he helped cause. Apparently.
— Jessie is so tired. (@TheJessieKirk) June 12, 2020
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.
My 92 year old father is an expert on Jewish history and anti-Semitism. He has never forgiven Winston Churchill for knowing about the Nazi death camps but failing to act on that knowledge. FDR and the Red Cross were similarly grossly negligent.
So it should be unsurprising that people of good conscience have reached the logical conclusions about Churchill:
The way Churchill is remembered in the UK has always been tied up with ideas of white superiority. Why do you think so many people of colour are critical of the way he's celebrated? The way the far-right are behaving today is terrifying but not surprising.
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:
British Establishment:
“People cannot just go around erasing British history if they don’t like it!”
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:
Johnson clearly anxious here that any possible future statue of himself not be immediately thrown in the sea. https://t.co/zX7iWjJRXj
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?
From ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration to Nazi salutes at the Cenotaph in four years flat. These goons are just a symptom. The disease begins with media & politicians.
The UK urgently needs to recognise what has been unleashed and normalised by Brexit because that is a vital context for what is happening today. Sure, EDL etc have been around for much longer, but the fact is that the far right has never been more emboldened.
— Prof Tanja Bueltmann (@cliodiaspora) June 13, 2020
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:
This exceptionalism is especially strong with regard to statues of slavers, racists and other oppressors who, we are told, made Britain “great”:
The statue obsession is another bit of English exceptionalism. We know all about Communist propaganda statues, about the Nazis – some even know about the history of the Conferederate statues in the US – but don’t see that ours are in any way the same.
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?
Right-wingers are doing Nazi salutes in front of the Cenotaph … yet the media want you to believe it's the left who don't respect British history!pic.twitter.com/wzqlDoY1vQ
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):
Far right thugs, emboldened by their pin up boy Boris Johnson, attacking police. This is what happens when you vote a man into office who has not only said many racist things, but who has declined any opportunity to apologise for them pic.twitter.com/MpLRj3SLDM
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:
I thought they loved the Police and wanted to protect them?
How are you defending Churchill’s statue on the basis that he defeated the Nazis and then doing Nazi salutes in front of his statue?!? The state of it all.
Just to make this clear #BLM in London was cancelled. So no one try to say the peaceful protests are in anyway connected to this 👇 at all. Ever. https://t.co/RDB9fnt22H
— Юридически привилегированный Londongrad (@LPrivileged) June 13, 2020
Bottles, cans and smoke bombs thrown in the last half hour at police and their horses in Parliament Square by football firms/far-right protesters. Anyone who is thought to be media is also being threatened. pic.twitter.com/m0nv91uAsO
Turns out it's the far-right who are the thugs after all. You'd think the opposite from Britain's media, especially of the last 5 years. https://t.co/QbucIzYWAd
A photographer has just had his nose broken at Parliament Square by far-right anti-BLM protestors. I’ll be waiting for the condemnation from the PM and the media.
Right-wing thugs on their anti-black protest in London have broken a journalist's nose. Others shout "wanker" at him and throw stuff as he moves to safety.
Wow the BBC have not reported the Nazi salutes at all and are even giving Paul Golding a quote….wtaf? They are promoting the far right+ still saying BLM are the violent group.
BBC News – Black Lives Matter: Police impose restrictions on London protests https://t.co/g2ilTL0lPf
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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