Beware what you wish for! Neither Jeremy Hunt nor Herr Stürmer will be an improvement
As readers of this blog can confirm, I have always supported the underdog and there is no dog who is more under attack at the moment than Boris Johnson. To forestall the inevitable complaints from dog lovers I apologise in advance for the insult to dogs!
I can also see people shaking their heads and saying that I have finally lost it. Defending Boris Johnson of all people. However I have always had a sneaking respect for those willing to defy the law and no one has been more carefree in this respect than Johnson.
Of course when it suited them the Establishment was happy to turn a blind eye to Johnson’s willingness to take out a contract on a fellow journalist. Securing £126K for his mistress Jennifer Arcuri when he was Mayor of London was also brushed under the carpet.
At a time when Jeremy Corbyn was being attacked as an anti-Semite for every misplaced comma going back years, the mainstream media somehow failed to unearth Johnson’s 2004 novel 72 Virgins which was replete with anti-Semitic ‘tropes’.
The Jewish Chronicle did publish these quotes, but on December 10 2019, just 2 days before the General Election. Comments such as:
Maybe there was some kind of fiddling of the figures by the oligarchs who ran the TV stations (and who were mainly, as some lost no time in pointing out, of Jewish origin)
or describing a Jewish character called Sammy Katz, as having a “proud nose and curly hair.” Johnson described Katz as someone who “relied on immigrant labour” and visits the red light district in search of “a bit of black”.
Johnson also described the Jewish character as having the eyes of an “unblinking snake” and someone who sends his son “pathetic presents, every five years, of low-denomination bills”.
Johnson also described Kosovan Muslims as having “hook noses” and introduced other characters as “pikeys”, a slur for Travellers.
I can’t recall David ‘Blackface’ Baddiel complaining about Johnson. He was, after all, too concerned that Corbyn had mispronounced a Jewish name!
Imagine if it had been poor old Corbyn giving utterance to these phrases. The Daily Hate Mail would have been besides itself. But then anyone who isn’t brain dead will have already realised that the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations in the Labour Party were about Israel and Zionism not anti-Semitism.
And so to Partygate which has been one long story testifying to the hypocrisy of the British Establishment. I have to confess that if I’d been in London at the time and known of the goings on at No. 10 I’d have done my best to get an invite to one of those Wine Time Fridays! It sounds as if Downing Street was at the very centre of social life during the lockdown!
Of course Johnson is a loathsome amoral sociopath, but he has at least one redeeming feature that his opponents, including Labour’s apology for a human being, Sir Sturmer doesn’t have. Honesty.
Johnson doesn’t hide his contempt for the working class, Black people and anyone who hasn’t been to a public school. Johnson has never pretended that he is a ‘one nation’ Tory. He has always been open in his distaste for the lower classes.
When Johnson described the children of single mothers as “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate” and suggested that
‘if having a baby out of wedlock meant sure-fire destitution on a Victorian scale, young girls might indeed think twice about having a baby’
was he saying anything that Ian Duncan-Smith, with his removal of benefits from anyone who has more than 2 children actually did?
How is Johnson different from Rachel Reeves with her statement that Labour doesn’t represent claimants?
It was New Labour’s ardent feminist Hatty Harman who, when she removed single parent benefit (does anyone even remember that benefit?) put into practice what Johnson only fantasised about. Hatty of course would not have described the children of single parents in those terms because she is ‘woke’ but she enacted Johnson’s agenda before he was even heard of.
Of course Johnson is an open racist with his comments about Muslim women who wear the veil looking like ‘letter boxes’ or Black people having ‘water melon smiles’ and being ‘picanninies’.
Was Theresa May any better for sending Home Office vans around London telling Black people to ‘go home’ or New Labour for its role in extraordinarily kidnapping and rendering Muslims for torture? Blair, Miliband and Alan Johnson were up to their eyes in allowing US flights to rendered people using British bases and airspace.
Of course Theresa May didn’t call her victims names. She simply wanted to send asylum seekers back to their torturers, whilst being polite about it. Was that really worse than Johnson?
It wasn’t Johnson who was responsible for the Windrush Scandal that sent Black British people who had been here for generations to the West Indies illegally but Theresa May who refused to apologise for her ‘hostile environment’ policy.
In fact the origins of the hostile environment policy lay, as do so many evils, with New Labour and its Home Secretary Alan Johnson. It was under New Labour that the decision to destroy landing cards, which proved when someone entered Britain, was taken. It was Alan not Boris Johnson who coined the term ‘hostile environment’.
What Johnson and his senior civil servants at 10 Downing Street did with their non-stop partying was to demonstrate their contempt for ordinary people. Those who made the rules could also break the rules. But was this any different from David Cameron and his use of offshore trusts to avoid tax? Or Blair, who has become an adviser to every dictator and human rights abuser under the sun?
Research by investigative journalist Matt Kennard showed how Starmer met up with MI5 chief Jonathan Evans in 2013 for ‘drinks’ in his time as DPP. Kennard suggested that a topic of that meeting may have been about the prosecution of MI5, which was accused of playing a part in a torture case. That case concerned Binyamin Mohamed, who was kidnapped, renditioned, and tortured by the CIA with complicity in his interrogation by an MI5 officer, known simply as ‘Witness B’. [see below]
According to the Rendition Project:
“Flight data and associated documentation demonstrate that Mohamed [was] transferred on board the CIA-owned Gulfstream V jet with registration number N379P” and renditioned from Pakistan to Morocco.
As part of his torture, Binyamin Mohammed had cuts made to his penis in Morroco. Later that year Starmer decided not to prosecute MI5 and Evans commented:
I am delighted that after a thorough police investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service has concluded that Witness B has no case to answer in respect of his interviewing of Mr Binyam Mohammed.
For anyone who wants to know exactly what this torture, which went on for years, consisted of, I suggest you read Binyam’s account of his ordeal. The wonder is that he survived it long enough to obtain some form of legal redress.
The United States’s asserted ‘state secrets privilege’ to avoid litigation. But it should demonstrate that when the United States says it is concerned with ‘democracy’ today in Ukraine that this is just one big lie. See here for the torture of Binyam Mohammed. As blogger Andy Worthington observed:
Lord Neuberger apparently indicated that he did not believe that he [the MI5 officer] was acting alone and that he believed that his conduct was “characteristic of the service as a whole,” and also noted that MI5’s culture of suppression “penetrates the service to such a degree” that, as the Guardian explained, “it undermines any government assurance based upon information that comes from MI5 itself.”
In response to Starmer’s decision, Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith commented:
the main focus of all this should not be the rank and file, but those who were signing off the torture policy at the top. In that sense, there remain very real questions for Tony Blair, Jack Straw, and David Miliband, who were in power when these dreadful abuses took place.
See The Canary’s Keir Starmer’s links with an intelligence chief add to his controversies as DPP
Let us not forget that both Cameron and Johnson were members of the Bullingdon Club in their university days. A club which took pride in their contempt for workers and the poor.
But is that different from Keir Starmer who did his best to protect murdering policemen on the streets of London?
In 2010 Starmer initially refused to prosecute police officer Simon Harwood, who at a G20 demonstration in London struck 47-year old Ian Tomlinson, who was not part of the protest but simply heading home. In 2011, an inquest ruled that Tomlinson had been killed unlawfully. Harwood was later acquitted of manslaughter but dismissed from the force.
Starmer also refused to prosecute police officers involved in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by police marksmen on a train at Stockwell Tube Station, in a case of mistaken identity.
The CPS further refused to prosecute UK government bodies (including MI6 and MI5) for their part in the abduction, rendition, and torture of three Libyan dissidents, despite incriminating evidence.
Starmer also supported the rapid prosecution of ‘rioters‘ involved in street protests. Not forgetting that Starmer brought in new guidelines that meant ‘benefit cheats’ could end up with 10 years imprisonment for fraud. What is incomprehensible is that Jeremy Corbyn placed Starmer in his Shadow Cabinet as Brexit Shadow despite Starmer having been part of the chicken coup.
The real tragedy is that the British working class was so depoliticised and demoralised that millions of them were taken in by Johnson’s lies about Brexit and migrants taking their jobs.
One can forgive the ruling class for being pompous and entitled. That is what a ruling class does. But workers who vote against their own interests because they are persuaded that others who are even worse off than them are to blame are entitled to pity and contempt.
It is increasingly likely that Johnson is going to go, if not now then soon. He has served his purpose, winning the election and is now a busted flush. He was always a liar but that was an advantage to that section of the ruling class which wished for Brexit.
Quite simply he is now damaged goods. He has lost his shine and is bringing the Establishment itself into contempt along with a ‘justice’ system that has openly bent the law to accommodate him.
But our real contempt should be reserved for Starmer and Rayner. I listened to Rayner in the debate on Sue Grey’s Report. Rayner wittered on about the door of No. 10 and what it represented and how it had been betrayed by Johnson.
No doubt Starmer’s Labour will be dancing the night away next weekend as they celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. 70 years of robbing us blind.
No. 10 is the door behind which all manner of crimes were committed in the British Empire. Of course they were committed with a stiff utter lip and not by a ruling class clown but what difference does that make?
It is true that Johnson and his fellows in No. 10 had utter contempt for ordinary people. But what they displayed openly, their fellow Tories agree with as they vote for his anti-democratic programme. Their only quibble with Johnson is that he isn’t good at hiding his contempt for the masses.
And it’s not only Johnson who is dishonest but Starmer, Rayner and the bulk of Labour’s MPs. It is probably too much to hope that the Police do their duty for once and issue fines to them both.
But is Starmer any more honest when he stands on 10 Pledges which he then betrays? Or when he professes concern about ‘anti-Semitism’ and then goes ahead and expels anti-racist and anti-Zionist Jews from the Labour Party at 5 times the rate of non-Jews?
In 2004 Tom Watson was the campaign organiser for Liam Byrne in the Hodshrove by-election. Labour issued a leaflet with the slogan ‘Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers.’ In the 2010 General Election in Oldham North, Phil Woolas, the previous Immigration Minister and one of the most contemptible creatures ever to have crawled out of New Labour’s gutter, ran a campaign that demonised Muslims as violent jihadists.
In the course of a campaign which lied about his Lib Dem opponent, Woolas ran a campaign whose aim was to ‘make the white folk angry’. So blatant were Woolas’s lies that an Electoral Court removed him from Parliament.
What was Tom Watson’s reaction to the ejection of Woolas from Parliament? Remember this is the man who, under Corbyn, proclaimed that he wanted to rid Labour of every anti-Semite. In Labour Uncut Watson confessed that:
I’ve lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas and his leaflets…. it feels like a piano has been dropped on my head
Unfortunately a piano wasn’t dropped on his head. Things might have turned out better if they had!
We know that Starmer presided over the Assange case and at one time berated the Swedes when they wanted to abandon the false charges of rape. ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet’ one email said. Clearly the CPS under Starmer had an investment in the extradition of Assange that went far beyond the ostensible reasons for the extradition.
Starmer has no concern about racism. For him Black Lives Matter was a ‘moment’. His concern about ‘anti-Semitism’ is just a disguise for wanting to protect the Apartheid State of Israel as part of Western imperialism’s reliance on Israel as a strategic watchdog.
So the moral of Partygate for me is that it’s better to have someone who is an honest hypocrite in No. 10 rather than someone who is a dishonest hypocrite. At least Boris Johnson is open in his contempt for ordinary people. His replacement is unlikely to be an improvement.
Tony Greenstein
