Since Labour romped home last month with a massive 165 seat overall majority, on a shade under 34.0% of the vote, few days go by without rumblings from our new Lords and Masters about novel and interesting measures which they’ve dreamt up to amuse the electorate.
I cite a few of these below, as abstracted from the Labour Party Manifesto, my constant bedtime reading, and a guaranteed remedy for insomnia:
‘The party aims to enhance the representation of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) individuals across public services, including the NHS and police force. Additionally, Labour proposes mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting and measures to address career progression disparities and employment opportunities for Black, Asian and Minority ethnic people.’
‘Proposals to address racial disparities in policing, sentencing, and incarceration rates are necessary and welcome. Targeted interventions to reduce the disproportionate detention rates of Black individuals under the Mental Health Act are also essential. However, the challenge lies in their implementation.’
There’s lots more of this stuff from a chap called David Weaver, Chair of ‘Operation Black Vote’, which sounds like the title of an action movie starring Tom Cruise, or, more likely, Denzel Washington.
Needless to say, Mr Weaver believes… ‘this manifesto has potential but falls short of what is required to address the systemic issues of racism in the UK.’, which pretty much tells you where he’s coming from, and where he knows this Government will be going.
There’s lots more stuff in this document, and this paragraph should raise a few alarm bells:
‘The 60th anniversary of the 1965 Race Relations Act in 2025 presents a unique opportunity for Labour to demonstrate its commitment to racial equality. This landmark legislation was the first to address racial discrimination in the UK. However, in the decades since, racial inequality has persisted, and in many areas, worsened. Next years’ anniversary should be more than a commemoration; it should be a catalyst for substantial and systemic change.’……
Are you a little worried? I rather think that you should be.
As if we didn’t have enough material in the Labour Party Manifesto to cause a few sleepless nights which, I’m afraid, contradicts my earlier assertion, we have Ophelia Balls apparently ‘winging it’, or freelancing, on likely revisions to the 2023 Online Safety Act, and probably a few additions which weren’t planned.
Ms Cooper-Balls has just announced that ‘extreme’ behaviour, and writing which is published, especially on social media is her new target. She began this sortie by referring to ‘extreme misogyny’, a subject which I imagine is as close to her heart as are her knees – very close.
One is bound to ask whether the UK is as cursed by, and riven with, ‘systemic’ misogyny as it is with ‘systemic’ racism and which of the two ghastly sins is the worse? Tricky question.
It’s clear that Ms Cooper-Balls will be going for both targets in the form of a slew of new legislation, and amendments to existing legislation between now and the early part of next year.
I’d guess that Ms Cooper-Balls and 2TKS positively relish the prospect of tearing up the existing conventions, laws and freedoms of this country in their ‘sacred mission’ to reshape Britain in their preferred socialist/Marxist image.
For a variety of reasons, not least swift convictions and draconian sentencing of the protestors/rioters, I have the distinct impression that they have decided that the protest and riots last month was their ‘January 6th’ moment and they’re going to milk this for all it’s worth.
As we witnessed in the US, this gave the Democrats all the excuses they needed to arrest about 1,000 people and convict and sentence over 200 to lengthy terms in jail, not all of whom were actually present at The Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The ‘agent provocateur’, Ray Epps, who appears in several videos remains a free man. References to the ‘armed’ assault on The Capitol made it onto the floor of the DNC in Chicago this last week. The fact that not one of the protestors was armed, and that the only fatality was shot dead by a Capitol Police Officer has been excised from the narrative by the Democrats and a compliant mainstream media.
When you hear socialists bleating about right wing threats to democracy it’s always a good idea to stand back and work out where such threats are most likely to emanate from – cui bono? As a general rule, this is projection on the part of the left, and the actual threats to free speech and democracy by jailing and/or obstructing political opponents come, mostly, from the left, and they sell this to gullible voters as ‘protecting democracy’.
A notable example of ‘protecting democracy’ occurred in the US in October 2020, some three weeks before the Presidential Election in which Trump was running against Biden, when the New York Post published damning extracts from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Some 51 people from the ‘intelligence community’, FBI, and CIA, including actual currently contracted CIA staff, swiftly colluded with a chap called Anthony Blinken, to produce a letter stating that the laptop was a Russian hoax. The entire social media network, notably Twitter and Facebook, connived to ban the New York Post and any reference to the story whatsoever on their networks. This was also justified as protecting democracy.
By blatantly interfering in the Presidential Election in this way, the Democrat Party machine and its social media oligarchs, and almost all the mainstream media collaborated to deprive some160.0 million US voters of the right to see information prejudicial to the Democrat candidate.
It’s supremely ironic that content from the same laptop was produced by prosecutors from the Department of Justice in the Delaware court in evidence against Hunter Biden only two months ago. So, the laptop wasn’t a fake Russian ‘kompromat’ after all? Who knew? The FBI had possession of the laptop since December 2019, so it's reasonable to assume that they knew it was authentic, which leaves some serious questions about political impartiality in the Department of Justice.
In another reference to comparisons with the US, I should draw attention to a senior member of staff in the Department of Justice called Tony West:
‘If Kamala Harris wins the White House, her brother-in-law, Tony West, who is married to her sister Maya, is poised to claim the crooked crown. Like Hunter, West learned his craft in the Obama years. Then head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, he invented a new form of what 19th-early 20th centuries Tammany boss George Washington Plunkett famously called “Honest Graft”.
I’m indebted to The New York Post and, ironically, The New York Times, for the story:
‘…… in late 2010, after a Supreme Court victory, DOJ lawyers were on the cusp of winning a decade-long fight against discrimination claims by 91 Hispanic and female farmers.
That’s when West intervened and, as The New York Times put it, “engineered a stunning turnabout.”
DOJ agreed to a $1.33 billion settlement which included thousands of farmers who had never claimed bias.
The deal was made over the “vehement objections” of the department’s career lawyers.
The Times’s investigative report described West’s settlement as a “runaway train, driven by racial politics . . . and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees.”
The projected settlement size ballooned to over $4.4 billion as additional plaintiffs were added, including Native American farmers.
The government’s statistical expert was appalled: “‘If they had gone to trial, the government would have prevailed . . . It was just a joke. . . . I was so disgusted. It was simply buying the support of the Native Americans.’”
This dirty deal also inflated the number of claimants, creating a $60 million windfall for the plaintiff’s lead lawyer, a member of the Obama/Biden transition team’…hmm…
It does remind us of who’s eventually paying all the bills for the lawyers, and the fake claimants. Sound familiar?
At this point, an historical note is required. The Congress Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees’ report on the impeachment inquiry against the President was released last week. Republicans on the committees are accusing Biden of two offenses they argue meet the bar for impeachable conduct: abuse of power and obstruction.
This is historical as Biden Family Inc. was operating in full force from 2008 when Joe Biden started his time as Obama’s Vice President. It’s estimated that the ‘10% for the Big Guy’, quote from Hunter Biden’s emails, amounted to somewhere north of $30.0 million, and probably nearer $50.0 million.
It's noticeable that the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media, press and broadcast, have given little space to either story. The Biden Family Inc. corruption/influence peddling story has been common knowledge amongst the political and media hierarchy since, at least, the first time that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop became public in October 2020. A wider audience was possible during the Congressional hearings, although this remained scantly reported by the bulk of the media.
The issue here is that form of censorship which the Fourth Estate cheerfully complies with when its leaders/owners and journalists are wholly beholden to, or otherwise compromised by a commitment to the ideology of the ruling party.
If this sounds familiar, you may be thinking about the peculiar manner in which almost all our press and broadcast media have aligned completely with the Government during, and after, the protests and riots a couple of weeks ago.
Also in the UK, I note that 460 UK academics, so far, have protested against the Government’s unwise/ideological decision to suspend the last government’s bill to protect free speech in universities. It is regrettable that such an act of Parliament was required, but the censorious manner in which both faculty and student activists have damaged people’s careers and blighted the free exchange of views on contentious matters made this essential to maintain the academic integrity and freedom which has always characterised our universities.
The universities, all 163 of them, are having financial problems. This reneging by HMG isn’t going to help them recover positive images in the eyes of potential undergraduates.
By cancelling this rare example of useful Tory government legislation, 2TKS and the appalling Jacqui Smith, of dubious expenses fame, have signalled that nobody in government gives a pinch of ‘piping-hot pelican poo’ for the safety and tenure of academics who argue against the woke theology which pervades too many universities.
The splenetic attacks on Elon Musk’s X by both the European Commission, and politicians in the UK with calls for this to be censored, fined, or even banned should alarm us. This represents a foretaste of what we can expect from 2TKS and Ms Cooper-Balls in the ‘revised’ Online Safety Act. Musk released Twitter from the grip of the lib/left Washington woke orthodoxy. It’s still a bit of a cesspool, but it’s less of a marxist/woke cesspool.
We had another useful indicator of how HMG, whichever political party is in power, enjoys the opportunity to abrogate the freedoms of citizens during the Covid pandemic. I say ‘enjoys’ knowing that some politicians were extremely reluctant to take those steps, but few were brave enough to challenge any aspect of the draconian measures which were enforced to the extent of censoring any, and all, criticisms of those measures. They also effectively censored any, and all, valid scientific challenges to the WHO and HMG sanctioned measures, notably suppressing the Great Barrington Declaration which the BBC marginalized to the point of virtually dismissing this.
Sir Keir Starmer, as we know, was aligned with the disgraced First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, who wanted everything ‘longer and harder’. Odd, under the circs.
We need to watch closely and listen very carefully to what is being said by the Prime Minister and his ministers when they pronounce on matters concerning ‘right wing’ groups organising riots, and ‘extremist’ behaviour, and expressions of this, as defined by them, whether in print, verbally, or on social media.
They mean what they say, and they’re just itching to justify repressive legislation embodying censorship, coupled with more excessive punishments, just as soon as they can free up some more space in the prisons by releasing hundreds of convicts who have served only 40% of their time. Censoring reports of any recidivist crimes committed by those released looks like the next two-tier matter which will be under-reported.
We are being warned.
Our press and broadcast media, for the most part, appear to be in lockstep with HMG these days so we can expect little interest, much less opposition, from those quarters.
There are few politicians, and fewer media outlets inclined to investigate the concerns which I describe. Apart from Reform UK, and GB News, neither of whom have a great deal of power, I’d guess that we may, absurdly, have to look to Sky News Australia and Fox News in the US, as well as freespeachbacklash.com, and a select few at The Spectator for useful and objective reporting.
It’s looking pretty grim.