It would seem that Labour would like to project the view that there is a bit of summer protesting that has got out of control going on in this country right now and that the age-old mantra of getting tough on crime will solve the problem.
That would not explain this little missive that turned up in the comments section of this blog overnight:
Kill yourself you old commie rat, traitors will get the rope too… you will pay for your crimes against the native European people. You filthy disgusting subhuman subversive communist freak.
The email account used was numbered. It will be untraceable, I am sure. And it will not change my behaviour, in the slightest.
But I think we should have no doubt that what we are looking at is not just a bit of summer rioting. An excuse has been found to release far-right racist violence, and it is ugly.
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I would suggest that the Security Services need to get to work on dismantling whatever is behind these riots, prosecuting those responsible and making public what they find.
I hope they are already at work with the same vigour with which they pursued and are pursuing progressive organizations.
Good god.
As noted on a post on another blog, the root cause is likely to be the impact over 44 years of neoliberalism & a UK quite clearly declining economically. “crimes against native European people” eh? My partner translated a Swedish book on genetic origins – a good chunk of the Swedish population comes from…. Syria – albeit in prehistoric times. Some of the memes this lot cook up are blathering bollocks, masking their own feelings of powerlessness and perhaps inadequacy. The powerlessness bit being a design feature of the current political system. I suspect they are too hyped up to recognise this.
Talking of “root causes” and the Swedish population I came across an argument the other day (“Viking Britain” by Thomas Williams) that during their “Viking” phase one of the reasons they attacked churches and monasteries in this country was because the first Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne mounted brutal Christian crusades against pagans in Northern Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne
The repression in this country led by the rich isn’t going to end well judging by the fascist/racist led riots breaking out.
Tommy Robinson has been accused of stoking far-right riots across the UK from outside the country while holed up in the £400-a-night Mediterranean hotel.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tommy-robinson-riots-edl-twitter-cyprus-holiday-b2591732.html
We urgently need to know who’s funding him, and Farage and others like them!
Mike, re your comment about genetic origins.
The science of Genetics after the discovery of DNA, has told us a lot recently.
We know that we as a human species evolved in Africa, and then various groups migrated eventually around the world. In that sense, we are all Africans!
We know that all humans alive today share a single ancestral mother, and separately a single ancestral father. Note that these distant ancestors can change over time, if a line of inheritance dies out.
We know I am white because my ancestors moved to higher latitudes earlier than others, and it is a relatively minor evolved response to the lack of sun at higher latitudes, and does not in any way make a species difference.
I should add that this is my understanding of the science, and of course, being science, it is just the best current explanation of observations, so is unlikely to be perfectly correct, but just the best theory we have at the moment.
We also know that we share about 30-40% of our DNA with a lettuce 🙂 I will leave you all to ponder what that means about our last but 2 PMs.
I have never forgotten an incident that occured one night when I was working in the Ryder Trauma Center in Miami. I had just arrived on the night shift when a heavily sedated trauma center patient was handed over to me to take to CT. I think that the man had suffered a serious blast injury, thrown some distance with possible internal injuries as well as severe burns to both arms. Large areas of his skin had been peeled away as if a superficial layer of dark brown paint had been scraped aside! Fine, crumpled, like torn tissue paper, it exposed the raw, pink flesh below; as raw and as pink as any other trauma victim.
I was shocked, incredulous: was that really all there was to dark skin, a layer tissue paper thin, that stirs so much mindless prejudice? Despite a sound knowledge of anatomy, I was taken aback by the reality: the pathetic lack of substance to that crude excuse for such venomous hatred. How could anyone who saw what I witnessed that night ever justify their unwarranted bigotry? I was frequently aware of racism when I lived in the US. I have three younger siblings whose mother is from Ghana and I was concerned how they might be treated if they visited me in Baltimore.
Thank you
Race is real but it’s not genetic:
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/is-race-real/
I do not think politicians have ever wanted to understand the real nature of Britain; preferring a hagiography of the country and its history. This is not to say what we have seen is a major proportion of the country; but it is a long established presence, and deep-seated, and long ignored – or exploited. In addition fourteen years of austerity and appalling, ignorant and incompetent Conservative Government, and the propaganda it has used, has had its effects. The only people taking no responsibility for all this – are the politicians, and the press. They need to have a good look in the mirror, and at the politics and government of the last twenty plus years. Politics has consequences.
The irresponsibility of fascist politicians made manifest:-
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/05/nancy-pelosi-reveals-struggle-with-guilt-after-husbands-attack-i-was-the-target
This country needs new laws to clamp down on “hate talk” and its dissemination. We need a “DunBlaming” movement.
Here is an illustration of the political pantomime. Two Conservative MPs, both ex-Cabinet Ministers in the worst British Government since WWII (and that is saying something), both vying for the Conservative leadership, have now weighed in to scold the PM for acting too slowly, and lecture him about what they would have done. The blatant opportunism is in neon lights. The comic absurdity of two senior political failures, whose culpability as part of the disaster that largely brought us here is hard to avoid, if you are outside the Westminster bubble.
Here is what Patel and Cleverly need to do, in the best interest of the British people is simple. Undertake a regime of silence for several months as recognition of their own deplorable failure. Second join the rest of the generational cohort of current Conservative politicians, do us all the courtesy of giving up politics. They are a national embarrassment; and if the Conservative Party possessed as spark of decency; it would liquidate itself, and depart public life. Of course it hasn’t a spark of decency (but at least in Scotland the Scottish Conservatives now know the current institution is unelectable to Government; ever).
There is organisation and funding behind these clashes/riots and unrest. Yaxley-Lennon and his lot are involved and are stated to have funding from the US far-right and others. Even our parliamentarians – Farage (de-Reform), Braverman et al are likely somewhere to be found behind the scenes, at least stoking discontent.
Starmer has been heavy handed, let’s see if he waits for this ‘to blow over’ or what his response is, I suspect to limit such gatherings to three persons as an early response.
My hope this will die down soon, but I suspect if you’re not of “native European people” these fascists will target you. Think of all the teenagers going to university for the first time this year and the parents’ worry if you’re not of the “native European”. And these fascists are emboldened to threaten anyone – your success RM has been noted. Please keep up your critical thinking and commentary.
Totally agree, should we not be arresting these politicians and TV pundits for inciting the riots which they’ve been doing for years. I also think those internet accounts that are spreading misinformation should be closed down,and where riots are taking place the internet should be switched off. Lastly politicians should stop playing politics over immigration and put forward policies that halt immigration until housing etc is sorted out.
Derek, great post until the last sentence. Halt immigration? How and why? Unless you actually believe that immigration is the problem and not facism.
Thank you, Tony.
Please see my comment on today’s other related post.
“your success RM has been noted”
RM = ????
Moi
Sorry Richard! I am five hours behind the UK and have not had my required three pots of coffee.
The vitriol contained in that comment is horrifying.
I’m sorry you have been on the receiving end of such malice.
John – see my previous post.
If they investigated this properly you would never be allowed to find out who the instigators and funders really are. I imagine it would be the same crew who supported BREXIT.
Instead, in some posh members club in London somewhere, a polite meeting over drinkies and fois gras would be held and a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ arrived at to stop hostilities.
The working class on the frontline of course would all end up in jail as that is the capital order.
We know that billionaires fund the main political parties. Is it beyond our imagination to consider who else the elite like to give their money to for a bit of fun? For a bit of ‘sport’.
Should we rephrase the question?
What has caused people to have the capacity to be exploited like this?
Well, there are the usual human frailties such as our capacity for discrimination, usually racial.
But at the heart of the matter is that we live in an evil world where resources are not equally divided up. And this has been going on for a long time and it seems that those meant to govern and who are supposedly meant to deal with that have no inclination at all it seems because they are funded by those who are good at allocating resources to THEMSELVES.
This self allocating elite is the problem in my view. And they have the political parties in their pocket.
As Aurelien says in his superb essay ‘No Left Turn’ (July 31st) ‘Workers and peasants, your elites don’t need you. Just shove off and don’t make any fuss about it.’
Unless of course the self allocating elite are getting a bit bored and want to dabble in (say) making things a bit more difficult for a new government just to make sure that Starmer knows who is really in charge of this septic isle?
Thank you for the shout out. Aurelien, an Essex lad turned Foreign Office diplomat turned Paris based author and academic, will appreciate it.
What’s Left…… And What’s Left? Another interesting essay from Aurelien – though it’s conclusion is depressing. “I am very much afraid that the real Left may turn out to have been an unrepeatable phase in the evolution of political societies.” He then predicts that Liberalism with it’s “inherent incoherence” will be “shoved aside by the first organised force that confronts it”. He wrote this in 2023 and I wonder if, now, in the UK, we are seeing the beginnings of an attempt to undermine the status quo. Aurelian argues that this force “will be a kind of radical populism, perhaps notionally identified with the Right” and that the notional Left will “refuse to have anything to do with it” – thus making “the victory of the Left impossible and the victory of the Right inevitable”. Unless I have completely misunderstood, he seems to be suggesting that the Left should make common cause with the likes of Reform – a prospect I find quite frightening. I can’t easily give up the hope that an acceleration in raised awareness of the state we’re in and why we’re in it is taking place and that this will lead to a renewed demand for a fairer society. This Blog and it’s related content and outlets are contributing to this and I would sooner pin my hopes on a steady groundswell of peaceful but determined protest than be associted with a violent populism and it’s dubious leaders.
Thanks
Thank you for alerting me to the Aurelien essay.
Depressingly illuminating.
‘No Left Turn’ is a must read.
I share Aurelien’s contempt for ‘form’ over ‘substance’; and respond to his preference for ‘engineering’ over ‘ideology’, and much else. The crucial point I wish to focus on, however is his development of the idea of the control of power, notwithstanding the form of elections, of the ‘elite oligarchy’. He describes this as ‘The Party’ (more socialist than I, he is following Orwell here). My interpretation of that in a British electoral and political context is close, but nuanced (vocabulary is important, the fake appearance of ‘change’ is vital);
Aurelien’s elite oligarchy in Britain is the Single Transferable Party. It is in seamlessly in power now; and people see through it. I have been ‘banging on’ about here, often enough.
Richard,
With your Youtube forays, your use of Twitter (I can’t stand the hi-jacking of the alphabet – Musk doesn’t yet own the language, but he and the ‘elite oligarchy’ is trying hard enough), TikTok etc., shows you wish to embrace a fast changing world of communication, which has left most of politics behind. Closer contact and links with such as Aurelien to widen the output further, in interesting ways, might prove interesting?
Maybe….
Clive Lewis MP is asking for Parliament to be recalled, the point being to pass emergency legislation to hold social media platforms responsible for incitement. Reform MPs will in all likelyhood rejection any legislation. But the part the BBC, Sky news etc in trying to both sides this, calling rioters “protesters” has to be questionned too and the recommendations of the Leverson inquiry now have to be enacted. The Cameron coalition government refused to so this.
It’s rumoured that before the general election Stamer did a deal with Murdoch to drop Leverson 2 in return for a good press and Culture, Media and Sport secretary Lisa Nandy has said Labour have no plans for Leverson 2. A big mistake, Leverson 2 is long overdue, having been dropped by the Tories in 2017, rags like the Dail Fail fuel anti foreigner sentiment on a daily basis with impunity. The state of the UK media is dire the consequences of that, we are now seeing.
There is no accountability, this has to change.
Thank you, Jeanette.
Starmer can’t afford his domestic and, as DPP, professional issues to get an airing, so he won’t go ahead with Leveson II, media ownership reform, wealth taxes and a rapprochement with the EU, in that order of priority for the oligarch media.
I’m afraid it is geopolitical and NOT local to England. It is just the next stage of further draconian police and state powers being imposed as we are taken to an increasingly open war against the new multipolar world order.
We are being conditioned as a Collective West (15% of world population) to maintain the financial and military hegemonic status as the unipolar makers of the Rules Based World. The imperialist order which is daily more rejected by the majority of humanity (85% of current humanity) for a more ‘equal and fairer’ Law Based Order – that applies equally to the hoary old Western controlled Anglo European imperialists and our institutions of control (IMF, WB etc)
It is why so many nations are rushing to join the BRICS+. The G7 is on its last legs. The failure of the collective western ambitions in the MENA and West Asia and increasingly in Africa means that the Agenda 2030 and the planned new NWO is endangered.
Starmer is given the circumstances to proceed at full speed with the purpose he was selected for. To lead that charge. The US is in the election cycle so it is unable to lead at the moment – but they have sent an awful lot of their Naval groups to the Middle East! There are many intelligence and miltary assets in action.
Starmer is require to marshal the U.K. population towards that tub thumping mindset and there is no better tried and trusted manner then the classic ‘enemy within’ techniques; as Goebbles described : Nobody wants to go to war – first you have to tell the people they are being attacked and if they don’t do something about it they are traitors…etc.
It is clearly about a greater and more open state fascism.
I know that it is difficult to acknowledge. That this is not about our local communities, or the atrocity, so far unexlained with any actual information except an astonishing individual judges decision to release the name and history of the teenage perpetrator!
It appears however to be ‘useful’ to our deep state, as a means to use agitprop cadres of young thugs, recruited mainly from the estates of garrison towns, where they have always remained indoctrinated as a pool of such mindless rent-a-mobsters and reliable recruits to the military.
The group they are ‘members’ of was ‘founded’ in 2011, as The English & Jewish Defense League. Its ‘leader’ the scoundrel comically pseudonymed as ‘Tommy Robinson’ – Yaxley-Lenin, has even admitted that the reason for these riots is not the stabbing attacks, but anger over October 7th.
What and Who’s anger?
Thank you, DG.
I did not want to put Richard at risk by saying as much.
If readers want to read more, please read my comments on today’s Naked Capitalism post about the Middle East. One of my comments is in moderation and elaborates.
While you may not want to investigate yourself due to being busy, you could possibly share the IP address and email it arrived from and someone here could do some digging.
But how did such a vile email make it through to even being read, I wonder.
I mean certain words and phrases can be blocked surely? e.g. “Core inflation”, “Swifty community” and “TBI”
The spam filter did not remove it
I am certain the police will not look at it
Thank you, Richard.
That is appalling.
Please look after your family and your good self.
I notice the comments you attract from the Starmer only fans on X.
I ignore the comments on X
My following is declining slowly as the Starmer diehards quit
I can live with that
This was apparently in Liverpool yesterday. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It looks like some/small proportion of people feel they can do whatever they want because they are… white, British and entitled to do it.
https://x.com/RespectIsVital/status/1820095633190973936
But this has been brewing for 15 years now. All the dehumanising language towards big parts of the population from the mainstream politics, islamophobia, MSM pretending far-right doesn’t exist in Britain and that far-right Tory faction and different Farage’s parties are just another party and not calling them out for what they are.
Even now they are trying to find an equivalence between climate protesters and these far-right thugs. Even when the police came with the full force on completely peaceful protesters and seemingly just accompanied those
My father is a Slovenian-speaking Austrian and my mother a German-speaking Austrian. During the Brexit referendum time I was spat at on the bus for speaking German on the phone and told to go home after someone heard me speaking Slovenian. I could brush that off as just a single idiot saying it. How are all these people targeted now going to carry on with their lives after this? Are they going to keep looking who’s there to attack them? Will they trust the police if they failed to protect them?
It’s also time to speak about teenage boys I think. A vast number of them is radicalised on-line and are against women’s rights, racist and homophobic. I teach an A-level class and can’t believe the difference between my generation in the late 90’s and the proportion of boys today. Sometimes I feel as if I had been transported to the 50’s.
The last is the most worrying
On June 24th Starmer referred to Bangladesh specifically as the origin of un-deported immigrants, causing the resignation of a senior Labour councillor. He should clearly not be in a position of responsibility.
The Whig theory of “progress” never worked. It took two world wars for even a semblance of sanity to bring about any change in Europe, or Britain. Long, long forgotten; regression seems to work much better, and so we regress.
The problem is we do not recognise how much of the life we live is entirely unconscious, guided by unconscious causes and not subject to conscious reflection. for every generation, we start all over again; but we take it for granted, because we assume it is easy to appeal to conscious reason. It isn’t, and it doesn’t work. As Hume understood, we are not rational.. We forget that at our peril.
@Peter D
Thank you for sharing your experience.
I have always asked many of friends that complain about US immigration, what will happen after you get rid of all the non-Christians and people of color; who will you turn on next?
I think you answered my question.
I have mentioned this several times on here. I teach A Level in a school 6th form and warned in late 2022 officially (CPOMS) of radicalisation of teenage boys by Tate and other far right. It was played down,, despite several incidents in school e.g.”make me a sandwich” aimed at female teachers. I and a couple of other teachers repeated our worries at the beginning of the academic year….. ‘tumbleweed’. Comments about immigrants keep surfacing, to the embarrassment of the non white in classes. A foreign student from Chile remarked on how racist and misogynist some students were.
During the election, there was a school mock election for year 9-11. Reform came level with Labour on 40% each.
Reform was all over TikTok and other media. Online games playing is a portal for far right tropes. 14-25 age group, males mainly, is the target of the far right. They are gaining ground.
Thanks
I hear this from other teachers
Deeply worrying
My wife had a similar experience when out with her sister once when they were told they should learn to speak English or go home. They were speaking to each other in their mother tongue – Gaelic! And they were in walking down a city street in – Scotland!
Whatever happens the authoritarian state gets closer. We’re pretty close as it is.
I think the trend to authoritarianism has already proved irresistible to both economic and political interests. Power does tend to corrupt.
Orwell was heavily influenced by a James Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” in 1941 which suggested that it would not necessarily be the state which evolved into more authoritarian forms but that there was a technocracy running a managerial revolution which imposed its rules with progressive vigour.
This was of corporate origin, with a merger between industrial enterprises with state agencies and bureaucracies being progressively dominated by a new ruling class of managerial professionals pursuing their own interests.
That western governments have been captured by corporate capitalism, with its natural tendency to monopoly and oligopoly was then highlighted by JK Galbraith in “The New Industrial State”.
I think there is very little doubt that self styled western industrial societies are now more western plutocracies.
Control over the wider population is largely financial, and maintained by creating competition between groups for artificially scarce resources, such as work, and then social provisions like health care, as well as driving wages down via austerity.
Wages have been successfully suppressed so that the shares of collective wealth are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the technocracy and a few oligarchs.
I sense a general feeling of helplessness across large numbers of people, and between dispareate groups, a mindset long cultivated by the ruling elite.
MMT informs that there are other options, and plenty to go around, so this resource scarcity becomes a manifestly obvious political tool for wider control.
Reeves’ “We can only do what we can afford” has the subtext that only she decides what is affordable.
A 21 year old graduate with £50k of debt is already a prisoner of the system and unlikely to protest and agitate over much for system change and egalitarianism.
We then have the criminalising of protest against environmental degradation and even people associating peacefully to express an opinion.
This is authoritarianism at the political level and aims to suppressing alternative opinion, and especially dissent.
Interestingly, I speculate that Aurelien’s technocratic, credential driven oligarchy, consciously or not is at least partly borrowed from Burnham.
The problem with traditional, ideological politics is that it can’t cope with inconsistency and contradiction; but, and here is the rub; humans are irrational, life depends on unconscious functioning, and therefore they cannot cope with consistency, and the avoidance of contradiction. Burnham, for instance was a walking contradiction.
I like that …..
Oh yes, Burnham was very much a loose cannon. More polemicist than anything, but useful observer in his journey from Left to Right.
The Nazis burnt liberal and left wing and Jewish books in public.
The burning of a library in Liverpool was probably not part of deliberate anti-book policy but it was symbolic of the values of the Far Right.
In the US the Right go in for banning them rather than burning but if Trump is elected and Project 2025 implemented, it may come back.
Richard, I was not sure if this is appropriate for your blog. If not please delete. But it is good see some push back. Some are raising money to replace the books. my son says £50,000 has been raised so far.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/books-for-spellow-lane?fbclid=IwY2xjawEdiBpleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHU-aMvQujQ4CONztRpOM9R4UYBznRph6NhL7STFwbtrnwoIxexNHgEYQgw_aem_FC5JZstFKBi-s3mIvO2iHA
The public burning of books seems to go back as long as there have been books and there have been fascist regimes to burn them.
In China this dates back to at least the short lived Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE). The earliest account we have of this, by the Han dynasty Grand Historian, Sima Qian, is probably greatly exaggerated, but most scholars agree it is based on actual events. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars
Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure caused such a stramash that one bishop burnt a copy. (I read somewhere that Hardy said he burned the book because he couldn’t actually burn Hardy). He gave up novel writing on account of the controversy and concentrated on his poetry.
It didn’t do that to me…
But I haven’t read Hardy for many years and don’t much like his poetry
I share this uncomfortable family episode if only to help shed light on wider events………
Reflecting further on this, I visited my brother in Ireland this summer and it did not end well.
You might recall that a while back there was a mini-riot in Dublin over a violent incident redolent of that in Southport.
Well this time I got the full on diatribe about immigration from my younger sibling and we nearly came to blows. We were brought up in an inner city area of Nottingham you see where if you wanted credibility you had to use your fists. Let us call it ‘The Dale’.
Well, there was an old saying around our way which went something like “ You can take the boy out of The Dale, but you can’t take The Dale out of the boy’. This might explain my rather bellicose use of language at times that gives Richard problems – sorry.
Anyhow, I was glad but sad to go home.
He was too angry to hear my appeals to Look Up. He said that if it was political, so what could he do? He seemed to want to take his frustration out on something tangible, something he could see – in this case the immigrants.
All I got from him was the ‘gishing gallop’ when I tried to engage, then what emerged was an adherence to a form of facist ‘ victim culture’. You were not allowed to disagree because he had suffered so much apparently.
My brother is an intelligent professional man. I know him as someone who would give you the shirt off his back if he thought it would help you. But like his mother (who was also a generous old soul, and a left winger to boot) who died thinking Nigel Farage was the second coming, he is yet another working person ground down by an economic system that is left to exploit and a political system that shrugs as it sees this going on. He has worked all his life, learnt new skills, paid his way, been independent and what exactly has he got from all of that? Struggles with money.
Thatcher was not kidding when she said she wanted to change the British people. And her objectives are still alive in politics in the UK and Ireland.
Niggardly benefits, identity politics, perma-austerity and fascist political science has all undermined social solidarity. Add to this the hyper individualisation we see in markets and marketing, we begin to see our suffering as individualised and just belonging to us (victim-think) or those like us and forget that our suffering is shared, universal across as
all human experience and maybe together we’d sort it out, because there ARE more of us than the elite.
But maybe the elite knows that, and playing games with fascism is just one long mass distraction exercise from the establishment playbook? And what fun eh, as they look down on us..
As I said to my brother before I left for Dublin Port and Holyhead beyond “For God’s don’t look left or right LOOK UP! All you problems are up there man”.
Anyway, we shall see……….
Ye gods! Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 is featuring the riots and is discussing with all and sundry how mass migration is the cause. I know Vine is an establishment thicko, but surely the editorial team must be looking for some kind of balance.
I can’t help pointing out that it would appear all the rioters are men and boys. We are so used to expecting bad behaviour from them. Yet it goes unremarked.
Stop the blokes, I say
Except, there were definitely women present
Women troublemakers are just as bad as men or at least they are in the USA.
That’s even more depressing!
And, of course every man has a mother…..
Looks like Mark Rowley of the Met Police has had his bottom well and truly skelped. Tempers must be running high in the Labour government.
He came out of a COBRA meeting this morning with a face like fizz and wrenched at a mic held by a journalist who’d asked him a question about two tier policing. He seemed to damage it a bit.
I think he only pulled off the wind shield but the Met Police Commissioner really should not be seen to be partaking in an act of wanton vandalism.
The media has picked up on the “two-tier policing” line that the right has been peddling for some time. It seems to be sticking too and could cause damage to the new government. Starmer (and the police) are going to have to find a way to combat it.
In olden times your offensive and threatening, but cowardly, correspondent would have had to put their thoughts down on paper, gone to a post office, bought a stamp and put their hate mail in a post box. Now they just type something nasty and it’s delivered instantly. It’s too easy, virtually unregulated and with little chance of being caught. And you can organise a riot almost instantly and spread toxicity everywhere, spreading disinformation and conspiracy at the push of a button.
Are these social media companies too big to regulate? Too powerful, too profitable, too intrusive and too uninterested in old fashioned concepts like social responsibility?
Shoshana Zuboff exposed their data harvesting business model, surveillance capitalism she called it, and reckoned it undermined democracy. Maybe now is the time to start breaking up these behemoths that are too big to regulate (along with some of the other price-gouging virtual monopolies).
That’s the subject of a recent report by Nicholas Shaxson and Claire Godfrey for the Balanced Economy Project. They argue that the biggest most powerful monopolistic companies have captured regulation and it’s now time to reconsider “forced breakups”.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/65c9daef199ea70aa66592fe/t/669fbd0c2eb5af1a35e127c8/1721744673541/Breaking+Up+the+Giants+of+Harm%2C+Balanced+Economy+Project_July+2024.pdf
I agree with them….
The US broke-up Bell telephone, and the oil industry; but modeen Big Tech, from Google to Microsoft has largely escaped. Something happened to the character of US anti-trust activity.
I suspect the ‘elite oligarchy’ model; manned by a newer type of professional; Aurelien’s insecure, credential-led technocrat, means that the problem is now different. They not only do not represent or defend the public interest, and specifically the public’s interest (now quite different from the public interest, but there to distract or mislead the public); but the technocrats are essentially over-promoted functionaries, machine minders; they lack backbone. Credentials do not deliver a spine. they do not stand up to monopoly business power. They know their place; and it isn’t taking difficult decisions over businesses bigger than most States.
The proof of that is the far right having a field-day with big social media platforms. Big business and politics will not notice, until it is too late. It never does. We know that only too well from European history.
I agree, it’s not professional.
I don’t understand why he would be so angry after the meeting. The riots, as far as I am aware, have not reached London.
So why his reaction. It’s a bit strange.
Very strange
Excceedingly unprofessional and obviously deliberate
All this is deeply worrying as, in the extreme, we all know where it will end.
The trouble is finding a workable solution. A couple of hundred years ago there was transportation. But now….what? Put 6 people in a room to discuss and decide what to do, they won’t even agree on the root cause. Yes, individuals can be punished with gaol; but sentences end. However, the ideas and thoughts they espouse will live on in the community. If the numbers of disaffected individuals is small, the trouble may die away. But, it seems that the disaffection is already far more wide-spread; it seems unlikely to just die a natural death.
The problems haven’t, in my view, been caused by this government; it all goes back many more years, decades. (Assigning blame is a pointless exercise now). Individuals who behave in this sort of way, have given up on our society’s ability to provide them with an acceptable life. Having got to the point of rioting, their minds are already made up. Changing their minds will be very difficult. These individuals won’t listen to our courts, or prisoner re-education programmes. They are tuned in to a different creed that, for the vast majority, is unacceptable in this country.
As most readers and contributors here will recognise, there is a need to change our economic system; it needs to happen rapidly. I suspect that this government won’t realise the need to ditch the rules that needlessly hog-tie the budgeting process.
If there were a hot war now that the UK was directly involved in, money would be found to enable us to have a chance of winning. But, will the government realise that they need to have a paradigm shift in their thinking?
I just see this as a different kind of war. It needs to be treated as such.
Stupid prejudice flourishes when government allows social problems to grow.
I suggest the Labour government counter this with efforts to provide services for everyone but also puts out information programs about people of all colours being British, that Islam is not inherently dangerous, and tell the facts on how immigration is needed and there is not a lack of space. The proportion of immigrants is not high.
Public information should be used.
The marches and protests in support of Gaza and Palestine have drawn a barrage of criticism from the Tory right and their media friends. They are described as hate marches and anti-semitic despite being overwhelmingly peaceful.
Those same people are remarkably subdued when we have massively violent and explicitly racist and Islamophobic ‘protests’ from their supporters on the far Right. Long standing Tory Islamophobia (which Saida Farsi has pointed out for years) and anti-immigrant language from the likes of Patel and Braverman and many others has directly contributed to legitimising this behaviour.
I would like to hear Starmer call them out in no uncertain terms.
So would I
To bring a different idea to the table that comment felt like a bot generated comment, to me. I have experience with blogs and was plagued by seemingly innocuous comments which hid adverts/links for sex related activities and viagra. This content is a development in a different direction.The comment itself mentioned Europeans, who themselves have endured predjudice and discrimination. So it’s not coherent. But why would it be? Unless there was more which Richard has protected us from there is nothing in it to identify Richard at all. The bot controllers have had a field day spawning and sharing in a scattergun approach.
But it engendered some great thinking and sharing, so thank you all for that.
I have no idea what you are responding to when moderating this and you have not linked to it
The email used is an expendable one
This might be a bot comment in that case
(Accidentally posted to older thread)
How come I can’t find any information online on who is funding these far right groups? I mean the grassroots groups as well, that we’re seeing in Ireland as well as the rest of the UK.
Normally when I try to research who is funding a group or organization, it’s easy to find good information – but there seems to be a widespread and distinct lack of trying to ‘follow the money’ among journalists, where it comes to the grassroots level far-right/fascist groups?
Where are they getting their money from? Who funds them?
I don’t think that is known, for obvious reasons
As immigration lawyers are targeted by the far right thugs, a reminder that Tory MPs and ministers including Sunak blamed those lawyers.
They should be called out.
https://www.ft.com/content/7a98b644-7257-43b7-aa99-fabe618fa894