The Tories have called a general parliamentary debate on anti-Semitism, for 17th April. Great! It means that in the next 17 days we can expose the fact that the real problem with anti-Semitism, and racism in general, resides within the Tory Party, and other parts of the ruling class, not in the Labour Party. It means that the half million members of the Labour Party, can now use the next 17 days to trawl through all of the social media activity, and other comments from Tory MP's, Councillors, and party members, to expose the extent of racism, xenophobia and bigotry within the Tory Party and ruling class. It means we can expose the hypocrisy not only of the Tories themselves, but also of the Tory media, and all those within the right-wing of the Labour Party, and within the right-wing misleadership of the Jewish community that have cyncially made common cause with them for no other purpose than to make a vicious attack on Jeremy Corbyn.
As with many countries across Europe, anti-Semitism in Britain goes back centuries, and long before any other form of racism or xenophobia, it became a central element of the ideology of the British ruling class. The Tories as the party that reflects the ideas of the ruling class of previous ages, of the landed aristocracy, are the bearers of those bigotries of bygone ages into the current world. The Tories would undoubtedly point to the example of Disraeli as evidence against such anti-Semitism, but the truth is, of course, that Disraeli's family had discarded Judaism, and converted to Christianity, when Disraeli was 12. Had Disraeli's family not converted to Christianity it is impossible that he would have become Prime Minister, because until 1858, MPs were required to take the oath of allegiance "on the true faith of a Christian", necessitating at least nominal conversion.
By the end of the 19th century, increased Jewish immigration to Britain led to rising anti-immigrant feelings, and anti-Semitism, and as the party of nationalism, and protectionism, the Tories were the normal vehicle for it to be carried forward. As I pointed out in posts recently, it was in response to this growing immigration of Jews that the British Brothers League was established as a right-wing paramilitary force, attached to right-wing, anti-Semitic Tory MP's, such as MP Major Evans-Gordon, and Howard Vincent MP.
In the 1920's, the rise of Mussolini in Italy was warmly welcomed by the British ruling class and its representatives in the Tory Party and Tory media. Its reflected in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”.
As I set out recently, Tory press barons like Lord Rothermere ran front page stories hailing the coming to power of the blackshirts, and that support ran over to Mussolini's imitators in Britain, like Oswald Mosley. And, the same enthusiasm for fascists carried over to Hitler when he took power in Germany. The racist and anti-Semitic ideas of these fascists was of no concern to the Tories and Tory press barons of the time, because they not only were they more concerned with the ability of the fascists to beat down the communists, socialists and trades unionists, as they are today, but the anti-Semitic and xenophobic ideas of the fascists accorded perfectly well with the idea of the British ruling class itself, and of its Tory representatives. Churchill himself was a well known anti-Semite, and racist bigot. That history has, like a lot of history, been re-written in recent times, but back in the 1960's, I remember having to summarise a Readers Digest article about Churchill's anti-Semitic views. Franklin Roosevelt considered him a gin soaked colonialist, and Churchill's rancid colonialism chimed perfectly well with his xenophobic, and anti-Semitic views.
Churchill as an MP, arguing for further British expansionism, wrote that,
"the Aryan stock is bound to triumph".
When 14,000 black Africans died in British concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War, he wrote only
“of his "irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men" .
Churchill sent the army to machine gun striking miners in Tonypandy in Wales, and sent the Black and Tan thugs to attack Irish men, women and children. When the Kurds rebelled against British domination he wrote,
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes...[It] would spread a lively terror."
I'm sure that Vladimir Putin, Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein would have been great admirers of Churchill the strong and stable Tory Leader! No wonder today, Liam Fox can speak of the Tories shared values with the murderous dictator Duterte.
Churchill argued that a couple of hundred of Gandhi's supporters should be stood against a wall and machine gunned to send out a message. And his solution to Gandhi was, that he
"ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back."
The economist Amartya Sen has shown that it was British policy that led to a terrible famine in India in 1943, which led to 3 million Bengalis starving to death. British officials begged Churchill to send food supplies to the area, but reminiscent of Tory policy in Ireland during the potato famine, Churchill refused. He said,
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”
He complained that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits", and also said the plague was "merrily" culling the population.
When dying desperate people dragged themselves into the cities, Churchill responded with jeers. This hero of the Tory Party was a truly vile man, fitting of the party who's hero and representative he is.
But, Churchill was only emblematic of the Tory Party, and of the British Establishment, including its Royal Family, whose own Nazi sympathies were well known. Had Edward VIII not been a member of the Royal Family, he would have been shot as a traitor, for the role he played in handing over secrets to the Nazis about British troop movements in France, and allied plans for the defence of Belgium. Even after that, and when he was moved to the Bahamas and made Governor, he continued to speak out in support of Nazism. His own racist ideology was manifest in his attitude to all non-whites, and to the Bahamans. He said of the Editor of the Nassau Daily News, Étienne Dupuch,
“It must be remembered that Dupuch is more than half Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this Race, they seem unable to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium."
When civil unrest broke out over low wages in Nassau in 1942, he blamed the trouble on "mischief makers – communists" and "men of Central European Jewish descent, who had secured jobs as a pretext for obtaining a deferment of draft".
Churchill didn't oppose Hitler because he was a Nazi or racist; he opposed German imperialism not Nazism; he opposed the attempt of German imperialism to supplant British imperialism. Churchill did nothing to oppose Hitler and Mussolini supporting Franco, and did nothing to oppose the atrocities against Jews being undertaken throughout the 1930's. Why would he, they were no different to the atrocities he himself had supported.
Typical of the British aristocracy's love affair with fascism is the Mitford Sisters. With Diana Mitford marrying Oswald Mosley, whilst Unity was part of the inner circle at Hitler's court. It does not take a great deal of research to uncover the family and social connections of this brood of fascists going back over a century, into today's parasitic establishment figures, and their more than extensive representation in today's Tory Party hierarchy.
So, it should be no surprise that when David Cameron, and his Eton chums too back control of the Tory Party, one of their first acts was to ditch the Tory Party's previous alliance with centre-right parties in the European Parliament, and to throw their lot in with the various rag-bag of European neo-fascists, bigots, racists and anti-Semites. Surprisingly, however, as Jewish Voice for Labour and other left-wing Jewish groups have pointed out, the right-wing Tory representatives of the British Board of Jewish Deputies, and the Jewish leadership Council, have had little or nothing whatsoever to say about these overt links between the Tory Party, and outright fascists and anti-Semites! Instead the right-wing and Tory misleaders of those organisations have preferred to attack Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong fighter against oppression and bigotry.
Nor is their anything new in that either. Some of the founders of the state of Israel themselves declared, themselves in favour of establishing a state based upon nationalist and totalitarian principles. As Wikipedia outlines,
"Lehi split from the Irgun militant group in 1940 in order to continue fighting the British during World War II. Lehi initially sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, offering to fight alongside them against the British in return for the transfer of all Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine. Believing that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis. During World War II, it declared that it would establish a Jewish state based upon "nationalist and totalitarian principles"
Unite have produced a useful dossier on some of the more recent instances of anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism by Tories.
If we go a bit further back we can examine the role of Thatcher in her support for the fascist butcher Pinochet who came to power via a brutal coup in Chile leading to Blair's labelling of the Tory Party as the Party of Pinochet, in 1999.
Already, in the current local elections, the Tories found that they simply cannot help themselves when it comes to putting out official racist literature, because it is ingrained in their DNA. Boris Johnson, fresh from his alliance with the racists of UKIP, during the EU Referendum campaign, and its ridiculous racist claims that Britain was about to be overrun by millions of Turks, occupied pride of place in Romford, as the Tories opened their campaign to “Keep Havering Safe”, from the threat of thousands of Muslims and other “undesirable” elements invading the area, as a result of new housing development proposed by Labour councillors.
“The campaign went on to distribute leaflets claiming that a Labour victory would result in the borough becoming increasingly like an inner-city area with a “massive population” rise and a “crime wave” arriving from central London.”
Meanwhile, the Tories friends in Leave.EU have argued that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is down to Labour being afraid of losing 3 million Muslim votes.
It spoke of “Britain's exploding Muslim population” the choice of description no doubt not accidental. The tweet has been defended by Leave.EU, and its propagandists such as Raheem Kassam, a former Ukip leadership candidate and adviser to Nigel Farage, suggesting the message was “flushing a lot of pseudo conservatives out” and claimed critics were “chuntering their disgust while failing to acknowledge core demographic facts”. Kassan has also been associated with Breitbart News, the right-wing media outfit once headed by Steve Bannon, who also headed up Cambridge Analytica, with its own connections to Harris Media, used to run the campaign in Kenya against Odinga, and also the PR company of choice for Trump, Netanyahu and other right-wing Bonapartists.
The racist campaign being run by the Tories for the local elections is typical of the racism and xenophobia that is ingrained in their DNA, and that of sections of the old British ruling class. It is what they resort to instinctively when they are on the ropes, as was shown by the campaign run for London Mayor by Zak Goldsmith.
The Tories have done us a great favour in scheduling this parliamentary debate. Now let us make sure that we repay them adequately, by giving them both barrels of the truth about the cess-pit of a party they swim in.
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