The Real Lessons of the Tory
Victory
By Jonathan Cook
May 10, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
There’s much that could be
said about the Conservative party’s victory today in Britain’s election. Not
least David Cameron has emerged stronger: he now has a small but absolute
majority in parliament, compared to his last government, in which he had to
share power, a little of it anyway, with his minor coalition partners, the Lib
Dems.
According to the rules of the British system,
he has won a supposed mandate to carry out all his party’s policies, even though
the Tories gained the support of slightly less than 25% of the total electorate,
and little more than a third of those who actually voted. That in itself should
be enough to discredit the idea that Britain is a democracy in any meaningful
sense.
But I want to focus on two issues that this particular
election highlighted. Although this refers to the British election, the lessons
apply equally to US elections.
The first is a debate that gripped some on the far left after
Russell Brand interviewed Labour leader Ed Miliband and subsequently gave
Miliband his backing. This was quite a surprise – and disappointment – given
that Brand had shaken up British politics over the previous 18 months by arguing
that the whole political system was inherently flawed and undemocratic. He had
called on people not to vote as a way to show that the system had no popular
legitimacy, and invest their energies instead in a different kind of grassroots
politics. Britain’s two main parties, Brand and others argued, represented the
interests of the big corporations that now dominate Britain and much of the
globe.
The labels of Conservative and Labour are the misleading
vestiges of a time when there was some sort of class politics in Britain: the
Tories representing the unalloyed interests of the capitalist class, and Labour
the interests of organised labour. But the Tories under Margaret Thatcher long
ago destroyed the power of the trade unions. Labour became a shell of its former
self, its finances and ability to organise workers crumbled as the corporations
entrenched their power, assisted by the Tories.
Under a power-hungry Tony Blair, Labour allowed itself to be
captured by those same corporations, famously illustrated by his Faustian pact
with media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Labour sold what was left of its soul,
becoming a Tory-lite party, and winning the support of Murdoch and his media
empire as a result.
Brand seemed to understand this, arguing that what we needed
was to turn our back on sham elections every five years between two parties
representing the interests of the 1%. Instead the people needed to foment a
non-violent political revolution, and take back power. How did voting for
Miliband, a man who had largely adopted the Blair credo, make sense in the light
of Brand’s earlier claims?
Brand justified his change of mind using a familiar argument.
He admitted Miliband was far from perfect but was still the preferable choice
because he was prepared to listen to the people, unlike Cameron’s Conservatives.
He was the “lesser evil” choice.
The problem with his logic – aside from its faith-based
component – was that the same argument could have been used about any recent
British election. It was an excuse to avoid engaging in real politics.
Supporters of Tony Blair, even after he committed the supreme
war crime by invading Iraq, could have argued quite convincingly that the Tories
too would have invaded Iraq – plus they would have done worse things at home,
inflicting greater damage on the health and education systems. Thus, on the
lesser-evil argument, it was legitimate to vote for the war criminal Blair. A
man like Blair could destroy another nation, cause suffering on a scale
unimaginable to most of us, and yet still claim the moral high ground because
the alternative would be even worse.
The faulty logic of the lesser-evil argument is apparent the
moment we consider the Blair case. If there is no political cost for committing
the ultimate war crime, because the other guys are worse, what real leverage can
the electorate ever have on the political system. The “left” vote will always
gravitate to the slightly less nasty party of capital. No change is really
possible. In fact, over time the political centre of gravity is likely to shift
– as has in fact happened – ever more to the right, as the corporations accrete
ever greater power.
Further, where does Brand’s logic take us now that Miliband
has lost. If we were supposed to have faith that Miliband would have listened
had he achieved power, then why not extend that faith to his successor? If we
are satisfied by the lesser-evil argument, why not wait till the next election
to see if we can get another slightly less nasty candidate into Downing Street?
We can defer the choice to demand real change indefinitely.
The second point is that the programme of extreme austerity at
the heart of Cameron’s manifesto has been fully discredited by most economists
over the past few years. Not only does it penalise the overwhelming majority of
the population by redistributing wealth away from the working and middles
classes to the financial elite, but it also inflicts great damage on the long
term health of the economy. In other words, British voters look like supreme
masochists. They voted to seriously harm their own, and their country’s,
interests. Are Britons collectively insane?
Of course, not. So how can we explain their insane choice this
week? The answer is staring us in the face. In fact, Blair showed us what was
required to win a British election. A party hoping to win power needed first to
seduce the corporations, and their media divisions. Without most of the media on
your side, no party stands a chance of winning because the media subtly controls
the narrative of the election: what count as “the issues”, how the leaders and
their platforms are presented, what and who is considered credible.
Miliband’s failure was that, unlike Blair, he looked a little
half-hearted about his desire to be the 1%’s mouthpiece in parliament and
Downing Street. Maybe what seduced Brand about Miliband was the sliver of
humanity that was still just visible below the surface of the corporate employee
the Labour party had groomed their leader to become.
The revolution that we need in Britain and the US has to start
with a disengagement from the mainstream media’s representation of events. We
have to discard their narratives. Even more important than an overhauled
electoral system, one that fairly reflects the electorate’s preferences, we need
a grassroots media that is free of the control of fabulously wealthy proprietors
and major corporations, that does not depend on the massive subsidies of
corporations (in the form of advertising), and that does not rely, like the BBC,
on funding from government. We need independent journalists, and we need to
demand a new funding model for the media. And we need to do all this while the
mainstream media entirely control the narrative about what a free media is.
It is a huge challenge – and one that reflects the extent of
our own ideological confinement. Just like the political parties, we have been
captured by the 1%. We cannot imagine a different world, a different economic
system, a different media landscape, because our intellectual horizons have been
so totally restricted by the media conglomerates that control our newspapers,
our TV and radio stations, the films we watch, the video games we play, the
music we listen to. We are so imaginatively confined we cannot even see the
narrow walls within which our minds are allowed to wander.
As long as the media represent the span of interests of the 1%
– from the psychopathic Murdoch empire to the capitalism with a little heart of
the Guardian Media Group – our politicians will range from the Blue Tories of
the Conservative party to the Red Tories of the Labour party. And we will
remain enslaved.
Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of
the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/
"The Nineteenth century saw a great Springtime of Nations as the revolutions of 1848 saw new countries created the length and breadth of Europe. In our world today we are now seeing our own Spring Awakening with people and cultures that have long been dormant and subdued asserting their right to exist, their right to dream." Adam Price MP
Monday, 11 May 2015
Sunday, 10 May 2015
Human Rights are a Human Right!
SCOTLAND will be protected from Tory attempts to scrap the Human Rights Act in Westminster, the UK Government has conceded.
The move has been attacked by human rights groups, but the Scotland Office have said it would not apply north of the Border.
A Scotland Office spokesman confirmed that human rights legislation is devolved to the Scottish Parliament because it was “built into the 1998 Scotland Act [and] cannot be removed [by Westminster].”
• Tom Peterkin: Tories’ self-belief strains coalition
The SNP Scottish Government has made it clear it will not remove the Human Rights Act and raised concerns about its future in the independence referendum if Scotland voted No.
The move by Mr Cameron was aimed at stemming the flow of Tories defecting to Ukip.
In a tub thumping passage of his speech, Mr Cameron railed against the Human Rights Act and attempts to force the UK to give prisoners the votes.
He said: “Of course, it’s not just the European Union that needs sorting out - it’s the European Court of Human Rights.
“When that charter was written, in the aftermath of the Second World War, it set out the basic rights we should respect but since then, interpretations of that charter have led to a whole lot of things that are frankly wrong.
He lambasted “rulings to stop us deporting suspected terrorists”, then suggestion that “you’ve got to apply the human rights convention even on the battle-fields of Helmand” and attempts to give prisoners the vote.
He said: “I’m sorry, I just don’t agree. Our Parliament - the British Parliament - decided they shouldn’t have that right.
“This is the country that wrote Magna Carta, the country that time and again has stood up for human rights whether liberating Europe from fascism or leading the charge today against sexual violence in war.
• Bill Jamieson: Promises pale before gritty reality
“Let me put this very clearly: we do not require instruction on this from judges in Strasbourg.
“So at long last, with a Conservative government after the next election, this country will have a new British Bill of Rights to be passed in our Parliament, rooted in our values and as for Labour’s Human Rights Act? We will scrap it, once and for all.”
Criticising the proposal, Tim Hancock, the campaigns director of Amnesty UK, said: “Theresa May made much in her speech about how we must stand up and fight for human rights abroad, it makes absolutely no sense to denigrate those same rights at home.
“It’s exasperating to hear the Prime Minister vow to tear up the Human Rights Act again - so he can draft ‘his own’.
“Human rights are not in the gift of politicians to give. They must not be made a political plaything to be bestowed or scrapped on a whim.
“It’s time politicians accepted that they too have to follow the rules and that those rules include the civilising human rights standards Churchill championed.”
ALittle More Nationalism Might Be What The Welsh Need
By Ellie Mae O`Hagan
The Guardian
Let’s look at the facts. According to Save the Children, Wales has the highest child poverty rate in the UK, with one in three families living on an income that is 60% lower than the national average. In terms of the share of national income, the poorest region in northern Europe is in west Wales; the richest is London (incidentally, nine of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe are in the UK, so perhaps anyone living outside a 100-mile radius of London should be feeling pretty angry, too). Figures show that poverty is having serious effects on pupils’ attainment rates in schools, and Wales has the highest death rates for drug misuse in the UK. The country has also seen a 20% rise in food bank use in the past year, and Welsh people are being hit hardest by the bedroom tax, with more than one in five in rent arrears.
But people living in Wales don’t need facts to tell them the country is suffering the consequences of national neglect. They only need to visit the towns that have been abandoned by industry, walk the high streets where local businesses have been replaced by bookies and pawn shops, or wave off their children who are moving elsewhere to find work. Any Westminster politician who derides Plaid Cymru for running on an anti-austerity ticket needs to ask themselves why Plaid MPs are so convinced that opposing austerity might win them votes in the first place.
Scotland, another country that has suffered from England-centric Westminster politics, is finally finding its voice. The sight of the national media following politicians as they rushed to Glasgow to plead with the electorate in September was nothing short of remarkable. Wales must now have a similar political moment – not so Welsh people can indulge in some pro-independence flag-waving, but because being treated as a national irrelevance has tangible and disastrous effects. Forcing Wales up the political agenda is not a matter of ideology; it’s a matter of necessity.This doesn’t necessarily translate to support for Plaid Cymru. The party may have some way to go to persuade Welsh voters it is the right choice: support for independence is at a record low, and it’s no longer the official opposition in the Welsh assembly. Perhaps some voters have lingering suspicions that Plaid’s anti-austerity, social justice credentials are nothing more than a Trojan horse for independence.
But one thing is certain: if mainstream parties want to retain support in Wales, they will need to start talking about it. They will need to be advocates for its people. Surely it is only a matter of time before Welsh voters start to realise that Westminster isn’t working.
The Guardian
Let’s look at the facts. According to Save the Children, Wales has the highest child poverty rate in the UK, with one in three families living on an income that is 60% lower than the national average. In terms of the share of national income, the poorest region in northern Europe is in west Wales; the richest is London (incidentally, nine of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe are in the UK, so perhaps anyone living outside a 100-mile radius of London should be feeling pretty angry, too). Figures show that poverty is having serious effects on pupils’ attainment rates in schools, and Wales has the highest death rates for drug misuse in the UK. The country has also seen a 20% rise in food bank use in the past year, and Welsh people are being hit hardest by the bedroom tax, with more than one in five in rent arrears.
But people living in Wales don’t need facts to tell them the country is suffering the consequences of national neglect. They only need to visit the towns that have been abandoned by industry, walk the high streets where local businesses have been replaced by bookies and pawn shops, or wave off their children who are moving elsewhere to find work. Any Westminster politician who derides Plaid Cymru for running on an anti-austerity ticket needs to ask themselves why Plaid MPs are so convinced that opposing austerity might win them votes in the first place.
Scotland, another country that has suffered from England-centric Westminster politics, is finally finding its voice. The sight of the national media following politicians as they rushed to Glasgow to plead with the electorate in September was nothing short of remarkable. Wales must now have a similar political moment – not so Welsh people can indulge in some pro-independence flag-waving, but because being treated as a national irrelevance has tangible and disastrous effects. Forcing Wales up the political agenda is not a matter of ideology; it’s a matter of necessity.This doesn’t necessarily translate to support for Plaid Cymru. The party may have some way to go to persuade Welsh voters it is the right choice: support for independence is at a record low, and it’s no longer the official opposition in the Welsh assembly. Perhaps some voters have lingering suspicions that Plaid’s anti-austerity, social justice credentials are nothing more than a Trojan horse for independence.
But one thing is certain: if mainstream parties want to retain support in Wales, they will need to start talking about it. They will need to be advocates for its people. Surely it is only a matter of time before Welsh voters start to realise that Westminster isn’t working.
How Much Will It Take?
Time Bomb in Cameron
Government. A Future “Little Britain”, separated from Scotland, subservient to
America, outside the EU?
The Irreconcilable opposition of SNP to CFI lobby as well as Trident
By Anthony Bellchambers
May 10, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "GR" - A future Little Britain: separated from Scotland, subservient to America, outside the European Union and beholden to the conflicting agendas of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) lobby and the SNP is a frightening prospect.
The Irreconcilable opposition of SNP to CFI lobby as well as Trident
By Anthony Bellchambers
May 10, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "GR" - A future Little Britain: separated from Scotland, subservient to America, outside the European Union and beholden to the conflicting agendas of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) lobby and the SNP is a frightening prospect.
A government expenditure of £100 billion to replace the Trident
nuclear deterrent would be about as protective to Britain as writing a powerful
computer virus which if used would permanently damage our own entire
communications infrastructure leaving all state security systems disabled. The
Trident weapon of mass destruction has no legitimate purpose: its use would be
impossible as huge numbers of civilians, including millions of British citizens,
would be unavoidable victims.
The plain facts are that: ‘international terrorism, cyber-attacks and natural hazards as greater threats than nuclear war. The cost of replacing Trident would be enough to fully fund A&E services in UK for 40 years, employ 150,000 new nurses, build 1.5 million affordable homes, build 30,000 new primary schools, or cover tuition fees for 4 million students.’ The Trident so-called deterrent is for status reasons only. It should be scrapped and Britain’s defence infrastructure should be rebuilt without nuclear or chemical weapons of mass destruction and without any collaboration from Israeli-owned arms suppliers. Britain’s defence should not be compromised by the use of equipment sourced from outside the EU or NATO. To do so, potentially places us, in Britain, all in danger in the event of any future conflict. The Conservative government’s current defence policy is dangerously flawed and with an isolated Britain divorced from Scotland and outside the EU – would be an easy target for international terrorism. Copyright © Anthony Bellchambers, Global Research, 2015 |
Saturday, 9 May 2015
Election Truth from the "Information Clearing House"
UK: Election 2015: The Horror
By Matt Carr May 08, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - I didn’t stay up to watch the nightmare unfold last night. The exit polls filled me with such shock, outrage, and disgust that I knew my blood pressure wouldn’t be able to cope with it. After eleven o’clock there was no way I was going to spend any more time in the company of Michael Gove and Andrew Neil and the endlessly cheery and upbeat BBC journalists with their gimmicky nausea-inducing BBC graphics showing the House of Commons filled with virtual reality politicians. I have never been impressed by Miliband either before the campaign or during it, but the things that this government have done – and which it promises to do – have been so brutal, so dishonest and so horrendous, that I believed that even an electorate that too often seems all too willing to believe anything and accept anything could not give the Tories a mandate. Regardless of the coming Labour meltdown in Scotland, I thought there would be a close result overall, possibly a narrow Labour victory and most likely a hung parliament that would have stymied the Tories and forced Miliband into some kind of progressive, anti-austerity coalition. After all, you don’t need to be particularly radical to think that proposals like abolishing non-dom status or imposing an energy freeze might appeal even to people whose political passions are as lukewarm as the Labour Party leadership’s, especially when compared with the prospect of five more years of a government poised to introduce the most savage cuts to social welfare since the 1930s. But nope, even those little social democratic sweeties couldn’t bring the electorate round. Instead British – I mean English – voters chose to reward one of the most vicious rightwing governments in British history with a near majority. It’s a result that was made possible by a sheeplike, frightened and rancorous population that appears increasingly disposed to believe all the lies that it is told by its vile newspapers. It is an irrational, stupid and fearful vote by an electorate that doesn’t even recognize its own self-interest, let alone the interests of others, that has abandoned any commitment to even the most elementary principles of social justice; that didn’t couldn’t even see that Miliband’s tepid, focus-group-manufactured One Nation ‘fairness’ was still preferable to the dismal social cruelty that the government has already inflicted and which is certain to intensify in the next five years. In doing so the English have demonstrated extraordinary political cowardice. Lacking the gumption to challenge the powerful, they have preferred to elect a government that victimizes the powerless. This is a population that prefers to doff the cap than bite the hand that it thinks feeds; that expresses its digusts with politicians by voting in the worst of them; that drapes itself in the Union Jack and doffs its collective hat to its masters in the hope that it can be like them; that would rather blame the Scots who want to fight austerity than fight it themselves. I know that this vote doesn’t represent majority opinion either in England or in the UK as a whole; the British voting system ensures that few votes ever do. But the Tories have so far picked up some 30 percent of the vote share. Equally alarmingly, UKip have gained more than 3 million votes even though they have so far only won one seat, and they even managed to increase their vote share in Wales by ten percent. So we are witnessing an extraordinary disaster for the majority of the population that is not and never will be Conservative, and a catastrophe for the Labour Party in particular. Now as Ed Miliband prepares to depart, the Blairites are sharpening their knives, and there are rumours that David Miliband is flying back to the country. So Miliband will be replaced by Miliband, and they wonder why so few people were convinced by Labour. Miliband has said that his party was ‘overwhelmed’ by a ‘surge of nationalism’ in Scotland. This is rubbish. Labour could still have won even without the seats it lost to the SNP. Miliband’s pseudo-explanation doesn’t explain why that ‘surge’ took place, or what it was in the SNP’s ‘nationalism’ that led so many former Labour voters in Scotland came to regard Labour as ‘Red Tories.’ Even in Gordon Brown’s constituency, the SNP won with with a 10,000 swing. So much for the big clunking fist who ‘saved the union.’ Labour’s fate was clearly sealed in Scotland long before the election, through years of taking its electorate for granted and through its alliance with the Tories over the referendum campaign. But even during this campaign Nicola Sturgeon continually put forward the idea of a ‘progressive anti-austerity alliance’ on both sides of the border, which Miliband continually rejected. What a coward and what a fool. Instead he tried to convince the electorate that Labour was the party of social justice, even as he remained committed to an austerity programme of unspecified cuts that was essentially a ‘softer’ version of what the Tories were already planning. He tried to please all the people and ended up pleasing very few of them. He didn’t convince left-leaning voters that he would ‘change the way the country is run’ and he didn’t convince those who already believe in Tory economic ‘competence’ that he could run it more effeciently. In the end the head boy failed to become PM. He failed to offer a convincing, compelling and inspiring vision of the future to counter the Tories’ crude but effective choice between ‘stability’ and ‘chaos’ or the notion that Labour would damage the fledgling ‘recovery’ that is already faltering. This message was rammed relentlessly home by the rightwing press and even by the Independent, which declared itself in favour of Tory/Lib Dem ‘stability. The Cameron/Crosby team didn’t just convince a timid electorate that the status quo was better than the future that Labour was offering; they also appealed directly to English nationalism, with a ‘Vote Labour – Get Sturgeon/Salmond’ mantra that will always have traction in a country that always believes it is being unfairly treated and taken advantage of by foreigners of some kind or another, even if those ‘foreigners’ are Scots. Whatever you think of the SNP’s ability to deliver on its social democratic credentials, its appeal to the Scots electorate is clearly based on very different premises than the beligerent, rancorous, flagwaving, royal baby worshipping, foreigner-hating nativism that is driving English nationalism in its current manifestation. In Scotland, ‘nationalism’ produced a movement in which a 20-year-old student can overturn a Labour majority of 16,000 in Paisley and Renfrewshire South. In her victory speech Mhairi Black promised that she would fight to end austerity cuts that are hurting communities ‘ both north and south of the border.’ God only knows what might have happened if we had had more people of her age and with her passion and commitment down here in darkest England. Black, and the voters who elected her, have been inspired by a new and postive vision of Scotland’s collective future to take a gigantic leap into the political unknown. Here we have the rancid pseudo-rebellion of Ukip, and a population that is too terrified of its own shadow to abandon a spurious ‘stability’ which promises nothing but the demise of many of the things that it claims to hold dear. Ironically, voters who may have seen a Tory mandate as a vote for the Union may have helped to bring its demise closer, since it is difficult to imagine how a government like this can keep the Scots on board, when Cameron and his gang of millionaires set about imposing the next swathe of cuts in a country where they no longer hold any mandate at all. There were some consolations in this debacle; the well-deserved humiliation of the Lib Dems, whose opportunism and ambition for power did so much to make this outcome possible, by keeping in place a government that should never have made it out of 2010. There will hopefully, be the defeat of Nigel Farage in South Thanet. But these are small crumbs of schadenfreude that cannot compensate for the monumental disaster for progressive politics that took place yesterday. Maybe something positive will come from it. But right now I can’t think what it can be. And I feel ashamed of my country and disgusted with it. Matt Carr is a writer and journalist, living in Derbyshire England. http://infernalmachine.co.uk |
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
Tuesday, 5 May 2015
"Time" report on the rise of the SNP
This Woman Is Forecast to be the Biggest Winner of the U.K. Election
Nicola Sturgeon and her Scottish National Party are predicted to wipe out all opposition in Scotland and become the United Kingdom's third biggest party
“Oh my god, it’s Nicola Sturgeon,” a twenty-something woman in a wool beanie cries, sounding genuinely star struck, as she spots the rising star of U.K. politics in the middle of a scrum of journalists, photographers and selfie seekers. The Scottish National Party (SNP) leader and Scottish First Minister is on the campaign trail, visiting a street in South Queensferry, a town on the western outskirts of Edinburgh, and stopped at a promenade with the spectacular Forth bridges in the distance. With just days to go before the U.K.’s general election on May 7, “Sturgeon-mania” — as the British press has branded the politician’s sudden spike in popularity — is in full swing.Dressed smartly in a red suit and heels, Sturgeon stops to embrace voters, hold babies and snap selfies with the people crowding along the cobblestone street to meet her. Builders call out to her from nearby scaffolding and those working in the cafes and hair salons across the road line up along the street, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of her. Though she took the reins of her party less than eight months ago, Sturgeon has clearly achieved celebrity status in her home country.
“She’s more of a statesman than anyone else we’ve got,” says Sandy Thomson, a retired builder who lives down the road and came up to meet Sturgeon. He’s planning on voting SNP on May 7, after years of voting for either the Labour or Liberal Democrat parties. It’s a story repeated over and over by people in the crowd.
Half of Global Wealth Owned By The 1% Oxfam Report Finds
May 05, 2015 10:00 am
Sunday, 3 May 2015
A Shame on "Red" Ed
Furthermore, he said that he would rather the Tories formed the next government than do a deal with the SNP.
Saturday, 2 May 2015
Friday, 1 May 2015
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