But host Forsyth says that in the past the “slip up” would have been treated in a more light-hearted way.
He told TalkSport: “You go back 25, 30, 40 years and there has always been a bit of humour about the whole thing.”
What the fuck is funny about using the word ‘paki’? Has there always been a bit of humour about using a racially derogative, demeaning term for, not just Pakistanis but pretty much the whole of south Asia*?
(*I’m on about in proper conversation, not within the context of a joke)
There may have been 40-odd years ago there may have been some mirth in the term for Mssrs Smith, Jones & Brown, but I doubt very much it would’ve been the same for Mssrs Singh, Kahn & Patel. Or are they the ones that need to lighten up?
Bruce goes on to equate a term used by the Americans for the British, ‘Limeys’, with it…
He added: “Americans used to call us ‘limeys’ which doesn’t sound very nice, but we used to laugh about it. Everybody has a nickname.”
‘Limeys’ is a nickname that arose because of what the British sailors used to do – eat lots of limes. It may not have been meant in an endearing way, but it hardly had the racially demeaning connatations of one nations oppression of another.
There have been a couple of posts on this blog recently, debating the policy of No Platform with regard to the BNP.
I am of the mind that not to be involved in the debates in various arenas along side the BNP and to challenge them as and when their bullshit is being spouted is to miss an opportunity to challenge their propaganda at the time of its seeding in the mind of the listener, at the best time to challenge it.
This view is challenged by the opposing thought that to go along with any appearance of the fascists is to give them credibility, a respectability that they do not deserve.
The two ideas are both, I think, valid. The No Platform policy does have some history to back it up, against the National Front, but I just cannot get my head round leaving those fuckers to bleat on about how we are under an invasion that is ethnically cleansing the indigenous population with out challenging it at the time. it feels a little like letting them get away with it.
I confess, I do not know what to do. Do I carry on with my attitude of trying to refute them, or go for the No Platform policy.*
Until now.
(*I have never been in a position where this decision has actually affected anyone or anything directly, but you never know what’s gonna happen in the future)
What the policy of challenging the BNP needs, is not just someone opposing them in debates, which I am sure there are many people who could rip them to shreds, but chairmen of those debates and interviewers that are willing and able to challenge them and let the anti-fascists challenge them and follow up the BNPs’ responses with something more robust than is currently happening.
Until the people challenging the fascists in these arenas are able to go at them harder, and deeper in to the fascists answers to expose the real truths behind what is being offered as real by the BNP, then the BNP are not just being given a platform, but are able to turn it into a form of propaganda.
It’s not going to happen though, is it? Getting real scrutiny of the fascists in debates and interviews? When you have stuff like this interview and supposedly intelligent people fucking up so royally, it’s gonna be interesting to see how Jack Straw, David Dimbleby and whoever else is going to appear on Question Time handle Fat Nick and his lies, but I fear it is just going to show how the media and such are just not up to the job.
The decision is made for me. No Platform it is then.
Lobbyists representing the commercial interests of those who are opposed to the introduction of public health insurance have spent a grand total of $380 million on advertising campaigns, lobbying and direct political contributions, whilst those supportive of the bill, such as the Pharmaceutical companies, have stumped up $150 million.
These methods of lobbying have been described as ‘morally suspect’, rather an understatement of the situation, and indeed cast yet another dark cloud over the mechanisms of democracy, and the brand of democracy that the US are attempting to export all over the world.
What this shows us, alongside yet another damnation of the current democratic system, is that the Capitalist system is so wasteful and incapable of satisfying even the most basic of human needs. Anne Kruger, a famous neoliberal and pro-capitalist academic, wrote about ‘rent seeking’ in the 1990’s, arguing that rent-seeking, defined as the quest for access to ‘super profits’ (profits gained over and above the profits one would expect to receive in a perfectly competitive market), is wasteful to the economy, as Firms compete for these super profits at the expense of investment. Kruegers’ original model was used to criticise certain countries in the Developing world for the non-market policies that they implemented. Supporters of the efficiency of the market would yet again hold up this model, and argue that the public medical insurance scheme proposed by Obama is government intervention is anti-market, which in a sense it is. The $430 million spent by the Firms in competing for the super profits could have been used more productively if it were invested.
So far so good, Ms Krueger, you almost have us convinced that Obamas’ proposed reforms have actually contributed to a reduction in the efficiency of the market. If you are arguing that this sum could have been invested in the public healthcare system, not made it’s way into the pockets of the already super -rich that inhabit Capital Hill, sorry, Capitol Hill, then that is very admirable of you.
However, this kind of argument is consistently used to hide that basic fact that the market is simply defunct as a system that can fulfill even the most basic of human needs. Another finding of Kruegers’ model is that the amount that Firms are willing to spend on competing for the super profits will eventually equal the amount of super profits available to them. As the legislation has not been passed yet, and we do not know how much more will be spent, what we can say is that there is at least $380 million in super profits up for grabs.
We can also say that without the proposed legislation, these $380 million worth of profits implicitly coexist, and rely on the fact that an estimated 46 million of the poorest Americans are excluded from the healthcare system as they are unable to afford either the private medical insurance or the fees. To put it bluntly, the ‘efficient’ market outcome trades off $380 million in profits against the healthcare needs of the poorest 15% of the US population. This is what ‘efficiency’ means in real terms, and is characteristic of the market outcomes that we see all over the world. It is one of the starkest examples of how the capitalist system places profit above human need.
From the latest BNP mailing list updating their members on the Equalities Commission court case about their membership rules…
A few weeks ago we received an anonymous letter, supposedly from a CEHR insider, telling us that one of their senior executives had called a tele-conference in which he asked various members of staff to find ‘sympathetic’ members of ethnic minorities who would agree to try to join the BNP. His idea was that this would provide fabricated evidence of our alleged membership discrimination. CEHR would then use taxpayers’ money to fund their legal actions against us and the individuals would be rewarded by getting damages from us.
Scarcely able to believe that even CEHR would be so cynical, corrupt and desperate, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to establish whether any of this is true. Last week we received our answer: Yes, it is! We have forced CEHR to confirm that they regard this as a very serious matter and have already launched an internal investigation. We will be given more details shortly. Once our lawyers have these, a whole new line of counter-attack will be open to us.
*bangs head on desk very fucking hard*
If this is true, then stupid fucking cunts. What the fuck are the Commission playing at?
If you gonna play the game like that you make sure it’s deniable, non-traceable. For fucks sake, take the cloak to the dry cleaners and polish up the dagger. If you’re gonna make such basic mistakes as this, why fucking bother in the first place.
I didn’t get to hear or see Gordons’ speech today and being a lazy sod I haven’t really gone looking for it, but from what I have picked up is from here…
• Provide 250,000 free childcare places for two-year-olds.
• Delay the introduction of compulsory ID cards for British citizens.
• Provide a network of supervised homes for 16- and 17-year-old parents.
• Create up to 10,000 green job placements.
• Protect the schools budget.
• Hold a referendum on the alternative vote electoral system after the election.
• Remove hereditary peers in the House of Lords “once and for all”, in the next parliament.
• Give constituents the right to remove corrupt MPs.
• Increase the role of post offices in providing financial services.
So, 250k free childcare places for two year olds. Very good that will help a great deal for some people, but surely wouldn’t it be better to make it so people didn’t need free nursery places, either by working towards a situation where couples do not need have both of them working or by making it so people can afford to pay for their own childcare.
Delay the introduction of compulsory ID cards. Not abandon the idea but delay. It’s still on the cards, as it were. It’ll still gonna happen. It’s just not so subtle as in 1997* when Blair said Labour wouldn’t introduce university top-up/tuition fees and then in 2001* said that that promise was just for the previous parliament.
(*I might be 4 years early with this and it happened in 2001 and 2005)
10,000 green job placements. The word ‘placements’ bothers me. If it was just jobs, fine, but ‘placements’ doesn’t sound very permanent. You used to get a work experience placement at school and then when you left school it was a YTS £40-a-week placement. Neither lasted long.
Protecting schools budgets. Everything else is going then.
Referendum on an alternative voting system. Good.
Remove hereditary peers. Wasn’t that in the 1997 election manifesto?
Brown promises 10,000 skilled internships. He wants young people ‘to embrace ambition and British enterprise’
Don’t interns work for nothing but expenses? Is that what Gordon’s promising? If it is, it’s setting the bar a bit low, isn’t it? He wants young people to embrace the ambition of getting a job that pays? Is that it?
I gather ‘change’ appeared a lot* in Gordons’ speech, but surely after twelve years of a government we should be at least on the right track (for the government) and not needing to change too much, otherwise what’s the last twelve years been spent doing?
Well, if it looks like a goose, and steps like a goose…
Mike Bell, the midlands BNP organiser took a delagation to Germany to a rock festival organised by the NPD.
Who are the NPD, I hear you ask. PoliticalhackUK has a the answer…
The NPD is the National Democratic Party of Germany and has been under constant investigation by the German government for being a threat to the constitution – these nutjobs worship Rudolf Hess as a martyr to the cause
…
They wished Obama well for his presidency, announcing that he was elected by a ‘Jewish-Negro alliance’ and was out to destroy the white identity of the US.
Germany still maintains very strict laws about displaying anything relating to the Nazis – not a great surprise, to be honest. So when one of their local leaders – Jurgen Rieger – wore a Nazi uniform to be driven around in a Nazi staff car bedecked with Nazi propaganda, he ended up being prosecuted for this minor transgression. Rieger is now out to try to create a museum to the Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ movement which extended Nazi Party control to leisure and travel in the pre-war years. He’s also been blocked from using a rural hotel to start a training camp for young wannabe Nazis – German police had to storm the building after gunshots were reported. Jurgen is reported to be a great admirer of Oswald Mosley.
I am writing because I have a friend who could do with some help.
I’m sure you remember the story about a Jewish hit-list that appeared on an Islamic internet forum and was reported by the Sun newspaper. The list featured prominent names such as Alan Sugar, Mark Ronson and David Milliband.
The story was provided to be the Sun by discredited freelance spy Glen Jenvey and subsequently, it has been proved to be a false story. The Sun has now apologised.
It was my friend, Tim Ireland, that proved the story was untrue. In the course of and as a result of his work, in his free time as he is not any sort of journalist, in getting to the bottom of this story he has had to endure a lot of stress and worry. This includes being smeared as a stalker, being mentally unstable and a peadophile. Tim has had his ex-directory phone number and his address published on the internet and also had veiled threats against his family.
Nearly all the threats and smears are as a result of the actions of Patrick Mercer MP (Conservative, Newark & Retford) or his staff.
If Patrick and his staff had behaved differently, the whole ordeal would’ve gone differently and the threats/smears would’nt have arisen or at the very least, Tim would’ve had to endure them for a shorter time.
How you can help, Dr Harris, is to take the time to read the two following articles by Tim that will explain things better than I could:
Maybe this is why proper, real journalists don’t do any investigating any more and only print what they’re told…
After all, if you were looking into a story and, like Tim Ireland, your reward was…
To be smeared, to have his mental health impugned, to be accused of being a paedophile, lied about, vilified, stalked, and finally his home address made public on the internet. He has had to involve the police.
…reach out to your local MP and find out what they think about this. No mobs, just a few quiet, well-informed questions to a few MPs.
A “polite letter-writing campaign,” if you will.
It doesn’t matter which party your MP is from, but you probably needn’t bother telling CCHQ or any relevant/senior members of David Cameron’s cabinet about this; they were informed days ago that all this was going on, and they haven’t said or done a damn thing about it.
Further to your recent FoI request please find attached reports on the
top ten sites visited by Vale employees during the months June – August
2009.
Unfortunately our software does not provide the functionality to report
on the number of minutes spent on each site, or to report on how many
times a particular website has been visited within a given period.
The Vale has 278 employees.
I hope this information is of assistance.
The results were sent in a .pdf format and are here, June, July and August.
I have been kindly invited to respond to a previous blog that argued the No Platform policy advocated by UAF is not the correct approach. Whilst I understand why many believe the way to stop the BNP is to share every platform with them, and enter into debates with them whenever they appear in the media arena, there are a number of difficulties with this tactic. I will try and make this response as short as possible.
Firstly, there is the question of historical evidence. If you are arguing that the BNP should be allowed to exist as a democratic political party, participate in elections, engage in debates alongside all the other political parties, and have their racist propaganda treated as a ‘view’, and that this is the best way to stop them, then the gaping hole in your argument is Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany. Hitler’s rise was through the democratic machinery of the state, starting out in a small extremist party, and ending up as a Fascist dictator. I need not spell out the details of the holocaust again, but the sheer scale of these horrific acts should serve as a warning to us all. The only thing that did work in the end was direct physical confrontation in the shape of one of the (if not the) bloodiest wars in human history. Democracy was no safeguard to these crimes, it enabled them. The BNP should not be given a platform. History shows us what can happen when Fascist parties are. By sharing a platform, you begin to create the legitimising conditions that can lead to the most extreme consequences imaginable.
But things are different now I hear you say. That would never happen here! Well, I imagine that the majority of the German population would never have thought that it could have happened there! If things are so different, why are we still having to deal with the threat of fascism and racism nearly 70 years on?
On the basis of evidence alone, the policy of sharing a platform and allowing Fascists to participate in democratic life must be discarded. If this was a scientific theory one was testing, it would be immediately negated, but there is a general reluctance to suggest that we should marginalise them and use direct action to prevent them being heard. This is Fascist itself isn’t it? People have a right to their own views?
The real issue at hand, and the one that places constraints on the choice of tactics that we should use, is the issue of free speech (I have argued previously on this blog site about this – please address it if you disagree). Allowing racist and Fascist parties to spout their propaganda, and defending it on the basis of freedom of speech is a complete misapplication of the notion of ‘freedom’ to ‘speech’. If we were in favour of freedom of choice, or freedom of action, we would not expect these ‘freedoms’ to include choosing to murder someone, or the freedom to rape someone. We understand freedom as bounded by some form of basic moral framework, and expressed within a social context.
Why then do we think that when applied to speech ‘freedom’ means saying whatever we want? We would not apply it in the same way to other ‘freedoms’. ‘Speech’ and ‘action’ are not isolated spheres. Saying whatever you want is not harmless, it does have consequences. Inciting and promoting racial hatred leads to physical acts of racial violence. Ask any victim of a racial crime, or the many people in this country that have to put up with racist abuse. Freedom of speech does not mean that you should have this right.
It is this misapplication that paralyses the current Government in allowing the party to exist, and also the many millions of opponents of the BNP who mistakenly believe that outlawing the party would somehow be anti-democratic. What actually happens is that a Fascist party, once in power, get’s rid of democracy and most freedoms.
Secondly, and following on from the point above, I also want to address the way that debate manifests itself, and to show the limited potential of engaging in debate with them. I watched the previously posted clip of the Nicky Campbell show. After 10 whole minutes of debate, I did not see the BNP being shown up hugely. There was the odd moment where Brons was not comfortable, and avoided the question, but this is behaviour we see from all politicians. The Reverend also brought in the notion of free speech I have previously addressed, and quickly the topic became derailed and muddled. By even having him on the show, Bron’s racist hatred has been presented as a ‘view’, and has not been treated with the contempt it deserves.
And if you are in any doubt about how giving Fascists a platform will not help show them up, then watch this clip of Andrew Marr interviewing Nick Griffin:
How brilliant was Marr at showing Griffin up?
Griffin may be many things, but he is not stupid. He knows what he can and can’t say, has been carefully rebranding the BNP, and will anticipate many of the questions that come his way. If he were to appear on question time, any audience questions would be made available upfront, giving him time to prepare. Sitting him alongside the leading members of the three main parties would confer status on him, without any guarantee that they would be able to show him up – we don’t trust them to do anything else right, so why this?
The only solution is to refuse to share a platform with them, and confronting them with direct action, whether that is trying to stop their festival of race hate, or standing up to the EDL in the streets of Birmingham or the Mosques of Luton.
To recap why:
Racism and Fascism is not a ‘view’ to be debated.
Sharing a platform legitimises these ‘views’.
There is a very limited potential for ‘showing up’ the BNP for what they are. Both mainstream TV programmes referred to above certainly do not show the BNP in a particularly bad light.
Allowing Fascist parties to participate in a democratic system was a contributing factor in creating the conditions in which Hitler rose to power.
We cannot risk making the same mistakes again.
There is much more that could be said on this matter, but there is hard evidence, from history and the present day, that shows the limitations of an approach to defeating the Fascists based on engaing them as a political opponent.
