A gloomy preamble to a gloomy blog
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity …
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the second coming is at hand…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
From “The Second Coming” by WB Yeats
Background notes to this blog
There has been no letup in the intensity of the political struggles within the UK political parties in recent weeks. The pundits ponder interminably in print and on the airwaves about which event is more likely to come first – the next general election or World War 3.
Other issues competing for our attention include racialism, anti-
Semitism, Muslim activities, the increasing gap between rich and poor, democracy – the list is endless – and there is confusion everywhere.
In this blog Holdenforth will comment on these and other issues. We make no pretence to be impartial or independent but we will do our utmost to adhere to the central Orwellian principle of sticking to the truth.
To get our show on the road Holdenforth asserts that the UK is a national Augean stable.
What, I hear you ask, is the meaning of Augean?
Augeus was the king of Elis in ancient Greece, and he had a problem. His problem was that he owned 3,000 oxen whose stalls had not been cleansed for 30 years. If you do the calculation, you will see that Augeus had on his hands a lot of bullshit.
Let us continue.
Holdenforth accepts that we need to state to our readers what we would actually do were we to find ourselves in a position to do it.
We also plead guilty to the charge that we disagree with almost everyone about almost everything, that Holdenforth is a grizzling griping grousing grumpy old timer. And we assert that on most contentious issues we have been in the right.
Don’t say that you have not been warned.
Israel, Gaza and Anti- Semitism
There is strong competition for the title of the most worrying conflict in the world as I write 6. For Holdenforth, the most worrying conflict is that between Israel and Hamas that has been raging for the past five months.
Holdenforth notes that around 200 hundred innocent civilians – mostly women and children – are being murdered in Gaza on a daily basis as the various academic debates continue about the rights and wrongs of these murders.
We pose the question to Israel in general and Netanyahu in particular – how many more innocent people are to be murdered before you call off the dogs of war. Possibly the most harrowing event now taking place anywhere in the world is the treatment by Israel of the two million inhabitants of Gaza, a tiny narrow strip of land – approximately 45 square kms -to the south and west of Israel.
It is in this tiny area that Hamas operates and in which the October 7 attack was planned.
In the 5 months or so that have elapsed since October 7 Israeli forces have inflicted huge casualties on the civilian population.
In our time there is no shortage of extremely effective propaganda machines.
To illustrate the point the Israelis rightly and raucously highlight that Hamas is a terrorist organisation but they are quite reticent on the terrorist organisation that brought Israel to power, namely Irgun.
Other critics of Israel point out that the Balfour /Lloyd George declaration in 1917 was conceding land to the Zionist Organisation that was not theirs to dispose of. That consideration would not have weighed heavily with Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour.
“In Palestine there was irreconcilable conflict between Arabs and Jews.”
English History 1914 to 1945, AJP Taylor
“The Balfour Declaration was abandoned after 20 years of attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. It was no doubt unreasonable that the Arabs of Palestine should pay the whole price of what was a world problem, anti Semitism.”
Extract from English History – AJP Taylor
Where does Holdenforth stand on the most worrying issue of today – the conflict between Israel and Palestine – or, or many refer to it- the conflict between Israel and Hamas?
As I write the media – official and social – are replete with details of the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
For its part Israel has vowed to inflict retribution on those responsible.
Back to Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour
In Year 2 of the first world war – 1915 – Lloyd George, in his capacity as Minister of Munitions, was concerned about the acute shortage of explosives.
He contacted Professor Weizmann, an accomplished chemist, to explain the problem to him and to seek his help. Professor Weizmann quickly solved the problem and his achievement was a most important contribution to the British war effort.
Lloyd George asked him how he, Lloyd George, might reward Weizmann for his work.
To quote Lloyd George, “Weizmann explained his aspirations as to the repatriation of the Jews to the sacred land they had made famous. When I became Prime Minister in December, 1916, I talked the matter over with Mr Balfour – the outcome was the famous Balfour declaration in 1917.”
This declaration read:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
During the next 28 years the collective mind of the Jewish Diaspora was understandably pre-occupied with the murderous activities of Hitler in pursuit of his final solution of the Jewish problem.
In post war Palestine the British Government attempted to maintain peace between Jewish immigrants and existing Palestinian communities. This was not an easy task and the UK sought to relinquish the mandate.
One feature of this phase was the emergence of Irgun, a Zionist group roughly equivalent to Hamas in Gaza today.
In the years from the end of WW2 to 1948 Irgun proved to be masters in using terror to secure their aims. Given the scale and severity of the terror the British Government of Mr Atlee wished to be relieved of the mandate.
The Irgun Group wrote the textbook for terrorism that has been imitated around the world to this day.
It is ironic that the “terror” tactics employed by Hamas are taken out of the Irgun textbook.
The State of Israel was established in the summer of 1948.
Events in Palestine since 1948 have seen years of the steady expansion of Israel at the expense of Palestine and others.
Israel continues to occupy and even extend illegal settlements, a point noted in the last week by Mr Gutierrez, the Secretary General of the UN despite the opposition of the United Nations.
“All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a pepper corn which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again and it will surely the same fruit according to its kind.”
From “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens
In the above extract Dickens was making the simple point that the horrors of the French Revolution arose from the suppression of the people by the ruling class in previous years.
- Thus – The French Revolution
- Thus the emergence of Hamas
The terms and conditions of the Balfour declaration have drifted down the years away from Palestinian claims and in favour of Jewish claims.
It is not easy to predict a civilised lasting settlement to this frightening conflict, the origins of which go back into the mists of time.
For our part we hope for the best but we fear the worst as the daily toll of deaths mounts.
We would go further – Netanyahu, the most powerful figure in the Middle East, sadly combines the mendacity of Goebbels, the viciousness of Himmler, the arrogance of Goering and the humbug of Mr Pecksniff – an unedifying combination.
A few words on the conflict between the free world and Mr Putin being waged in the Ukraine
This conflict is now well into its third year and there are few signs that the war will end any time soon.
Holdenforth would like to rewind the tape of history back to the Crimean War waged between France and Britain on the one side and Russia on the other side in 1854.
“If there was a moral to be drawn from the Crimean War (1854 to 1856) it would be this: in a war between Russia and The West, it will be the Powers which keep out who will be the real gainers”
From “Crimea: the War that would not boil”, an essay by AJP Taylor.
Does the verdict of AJP Taylor on events which took place almost 200 years ago have any relevance today?
Holdenforth thinks that it does.
The outcome of this conflict today – Putin versus The West – is difficult to predict despite the daily detailed accounts about what is happening.
Holdenforth is mindful of the advice of Orwell that “all propaganda is lies”
Holdenforth follows this advice and tries to be wary about swallowing the information fed out by both sides.
Thus:
We accept that the NATO net is tightening to the north of Russia.
Russia is tightening its grip in Eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine is experiencing a shortage of munitions as its suppliers become increasingly anxious about throwing good money after bad.
It is reported in some quarters that some supporters of the Ukraine cause are dubious about the performance of Zelensky as a latter day Kitchener.
Others have been comforted by the suggestion of Mr Macron that now might be the time to put western boots on to the ground and into the fray, a suggestion that did not meet with universal western approval.
The careless work of the German Intelligence Department in allowing The Kremlin to listen to sensitive conversations about what NATO was planning to do next did little to bolster the confidence of the beleaguered Ukrainians in the day to day conduct of the war.
Just a thought – Mr Zelensky has been strident that Putin and his henchmen be brought to justice once Ukraine has emerged victorious.
Where does Zelensky stand on the conflict in Gaza? At what level of fatalities might he say that enough is enough?
The death of Mr Navalny.
The available evidence suggests that Putin is as contemptuous as Netanyahu about the murders that he is prepared to authorise in order to secure his objectives and strengthen his position.
Just as Netanyahu follows the Irgun rule book so Putin is prepared to follow the example of Stalin in his pursuit of Trotsky.
Gosh – Trotsky again in an Holdenforth blog. We are merely reporting and have no links with Momentum.
Notes on democracy
Many Western commentators on the prospects of WW3 breaking out rightly stress the importance of democratic safeguards in their various institutional arrangements.
What then is democracy?
“Democracy is that system of government under which a great free people having 35 million people to choose, pick out a Coolidge to be head of state. It is as if a hungry man set before a banquet prepared by master cooks … should stay his stomach by eating and catching flies.”
Thus HL Mencken on Coolidge in 1927.
What are we to make of the selections of Biden and Trump respectively in 2024?
“The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote”
From “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” by Joseph Schumpeter.
Holdenforth is happy to second this definition.
It is quite easy to spot the difference between regimes which abide by this definition and those which don’t.
All those living in Europe and North America will testify to the ferocity of the competitive struggle for the people’s vote.
Mr Putin pays lip service to the principle but those contemplating participating in the struggle in Russia are understandably uneasy about the hazards posed by joining in the competitive struggle.
Holdenforth is ready to acknowledge the strong democratic credentials of Israel – the opponents of Mr Netanyahu in Israel are only too ready to expatiate on his weaknesses.
In defence of Nigel Farage
For Holdenforth aka John Holden – what follows will not be easy to write but our claim to be honest and fair must be demonstrated.
Holdenforth has disagreed with Farage’s tireless efforts in the past decade to urge the cause of Brexit and we have said so in numerous blogs. He could accurately be described as the Founding Father of Brexit.
On the credit side in Farage’s favour we gladly acknowledge his successful campaign to expose the shabby tactics employed in the financial sector to refuse banking facilities to those deemed on flimsy grounds or on no grounds to be unsuitable.
Farage has to be congratulated for his successful campaign to expose the pitiful attempts by HMG to control the steady flow of illegal immigrants from Europe into the UK. His key point has been that all these immigrants are breaking the law because they are already in a safe country and therefore at no risk.
And Farage has led the fight to highlight the sheer absurdity of seeking to transfer those whose applications have failed to Ruanda – a costly embarrassing failure. All small boat arrivals are criminals because they are NOT at risk in France.
Farage has been and continues to be right.
There – we said it.
Defence of the realm
Holdenforth has been shaken by the catalogue of serious failures in recent months about the reliability of some of the key sections of our defence arrangements. Erratic missiles and poor maintenance performance of key ships come to mind.
I recall that many years ago there was a rumpus when a half-eaten pork pie was found in the sharp end of a British missile.
We had assumed that such sloppiness had been rooted out but evidently that has not been the case.
When the time comes – to go over the top – do we seek a postponement until our repairs are completed?
The Post Office scandal
We have had our say in previous blogs about this interminably protracted scandal
Right now, we will limit ourselves to insisting that the criminal proceedings to be taken against senior post office managers be speeded up.
This action and the proceedings carried out by Win Williams are not mutually exclusive.
Gorgeous George
George Galloway and his tirades against Keir Starmer – a damp squib or a real threat to the electoral prospects of the Labour Party in 2024?
Holdenforth would like to contribute to the Galloway debate but his most recent visit to Rochdale was to watch a Rugby League match between Rochdale Hornets and Warrington in 1954. This gap of 70 years may make our awareness of what is happening in the town a little dated.
Getting On
We referred earlier to the probable contest between President Biden v Mr Trump in the November Presidential election.
Holdenforth is confused about this prospect.
On the one hand we are delighted at the confidence shown in octogenarians by the political machines of the Democrats and Republicans.
On the other hand, Holdenforth will be 84 in a few months’ time and he is only too aware of the validity of the jibe by Shakespeare on this theme:
“And then from to hour we ripe and ripe
And then from hour we rot and rot
And thereby hangs a tale”
Speaking as an octogenarian – but NOT claiming to represent old timers – I am relaxed about aged fingers on nuclear weapon triggers – but I would not be relaxed if I were still on the ripe and ripe section of life.
Two observations
*Holdenforth noted the comedy aspects of the group photo which included Queen Camilla and Vanessa Redgrave . The former has been a tireless worker to secure promotion from the slightly unseemly role as the mistress of the Prince of Wales to the rather more exalted title of the Queen of England.
Dame Vanessa Redgrave was at one time a ferocious member of the Trotsky movement dedicated to the overthrow of the existing social order.
If you can’t beat ‘em then join ‘em!
* “Junior City lawyers in line for £2m pay packet”
Headline in the Daily Mail, February 27th
One sector of the national economy that is running counter to the national trend is the professional legal sector where affluence can be found in abundance. They flourish not only in advising on issues within the UK but also internationally as obscure disputes are brought to the UK to be resolved usually in painfully protracted proceedings.
“ It appears that there’s gold in them there courts.”
Notes by the editor
The editor would like to respond to a couple of the points made in Holdenforth’s latest epistle. The first concerns Mr Zelenksy’s public utterances (or lack of) on the conflict in Gaza. I would diffidently suggest that there are at least two possible reasons for this, which are not mutually exclusive: both are equally plausible. The first is that Mr Zelensky has not provided his hot take on Gaza, or the Anglophone conflict in Cameroon, or the Boko Haram crisis, or the Schleswig-Holstein question, or United’s chances in the cup, because he has other priorities, such as dealing with a Russian invasion. The second is that, what with said Russian invasion taking its toll on national resources, he is anxious to maximise the number of potential allies who might be willing to contribute in whatever way to the war effort: history is littered with national leaders who have been obliged to hold their nose in this way.
The second concerns the blanket assertion that “all small boat arrivals are criminals because they are NOT at risk in France”. My response here will take a little more of your time, and will take in (amongst other things) a Fellowship in Leeds, the mendacity of the populist right, the Chichester Park Hotel and the assiduous research of Dr Matthew Sweet.
In the latter half of the 1990s, I was engaged by the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds to read the newspapers for a living. There was a little more to it than that: if I came across an article pertaining to immigration, asylum seekers, racism, xenophobia or right-wing extremism I was then obliged to log it in an Access database under an extensive coding scheme. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a little more to be logged in the Mail or the Sun than in the Guardian, but as a proportion of the whole, across all newspapers, not many articles needed to be logged. I would venture to suggest that were the exercise to be repeated in the current climate, those proportions would be far higher: for the past decade or so, the Daily Express in particular has devoted many of its pages to particularly unpleasant diatribes about foreigners (indeed, its front pages in that time seem to include pretty much nothing else, apart from perhaps the Royal Family and wholly erroneous long-term weather forecasts).
The Express (and its broadcast media equivalent, GB News) have sought to inflame the debate with dangerous, misleading rhetoric which should not go unchallenged.
Firstly, the notion of ‘first safe country’ is not to be found in international law; The 1951 Refugee Convention does not require a person to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach and explicitly states that asylum seekers should not be penalised for irregular entry into a country in which they intend to submit an application for refugee status”. This point has been reaffirmed on numerous occasions both in international law and, in 1999, by a British court.
So: not criminal, which is Holdenforth’s main objection. However, I think we need to dig a little deeper. There are those (not, I would emphasise, Holdenforth) who might then ask, “Why are they coming here, guv? Why don’t they just stay in France?” Without bothering to look at facts, those asking the questions typically satisfy themselves that the answer is (a) benefits (b) taking our jobs (c) raping our women (d) conducting terrorist activities or (e) all of the above.
Let us try and answer that question.
To begin with, if the asylum seekers have a smattering of a second language, it tends to be English rather than French. Secondly, France receives far more asylum seekers than the UK, and only a very small proportion of those (albeit a significant number) can be found camped out in atrocious conditions in ‘The Jungle’ settlement at Calais. Thirdly, it should be observed that the far right in France is well established; many politicians have built careers on the back of racist, Islamophobic and indeed anti-Semitic public utterances; its police can be trigger happy with the pepper spray and the tear gas: in short, France can be unpleasant if you are Black, Jewish and don’t speak French. Fourthly, those seeking asylum in the UK may have family members living in the UK, or else will be seeking support from the wider diaspora based in the UK.
Next, it is important to emphasise that many of these individuals are not economic migrants, but have been displaced by internal conflicts (often instigated, at least in part, by Western interventions). They are fleeing death, torture or sexual assault. They are desperate. Many are easy prey to the gangs who extort considerable sums of money from them, in return for allowing them – allowing them! – to risk their lives in a perilous Channel crossing.
Many of those that do succeed would be more than happy to take any jobs that are available, particularly in the informal sector: crop picking, car cleaning, working in fast food restaurants. Indeed, in crop picking, they are essential to the sector’s viability. They are not coming for the benefits (which, in France, are slightly higher).
Nor are they here to rape our women. There have recently been demonstrations (primarily consisting of extremists bussed-in from outside the area) outside the Chichester Park Hotel, now used as temporary housing for asylum seekers. The fact that those asylum seekers are overwhelmingly women and children has not deterred the demonstrators from insisting that there are sexual predators on their doorstep. (Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that asylum seekers are any more likely to commit sexual offences than the population at large.)
But the Express or GB News will not have this, because whipping up anger is their game. The latter does this by riffing on populist (primarily xenophobic) fears while encouraging a raft of ludicrous but potentially highly dangerous conspiracy theories. The writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet has devoted considerable time and energy to exposing their mendacity; I would just like to dip my toe into these unpleasant waters by highlighting a few of them:
- The channel regularly features Neil Oliver, who spends most of his time making false claims about the COVID-19 vaccine (e.g. that it causes new kinds of blood clots) and fictional “turbo” cancers or else claiming that the Jews are planning to impose a “one-world” government. In January 2024, he agreed with an interviewee who claimed that “a mysterious group” (whom she named elsewhere as the Jews) had a plan to turn us into cyborgs.
- In 2022, it included several interviews on the Mark Steyn programme with Naomi Wolf, who described the vaccination rollout as “mass murder” and compared it to the actions of doctors “in pre-Nazi Germany”. (Steyn himself delivered misleading monologues about the rollout before leaving the channel after it decided to make him personally liable for any future Ofcom fines. Wolf has since gone even further down the rabbit hole, insisting that “they” are enabling time travel and putting chips in our arms via the vaccine.)
- This week GB News has complained that a gentleman called Sam Melia was imprisoned for two years for distributing stickers that read “It’s OK to be white”. Melia, a former member of a proscribed far right group, was actually imprisoned for plastering anti-Semitic stickers outside Jewish schools.
The channel has also provided a platform for far-right groups such as Voice of Wales (now banned from mainstream online outlets) and former members of proscribed organisations such as For Britain.
And behind all this nonsense, this poison, sits Farage the ringmaster, the peerless populist always staying just the right side of the legal line so that he can avoid charges of outright racism while playing to his audience with a concoction of half truths and plain lies, deftly fomenting discontent. It remains to be seen whether he will return to front line politics with Reform UK; if so, it is unlikely that he would risk standing for Parliament again, because that is a game he might well lose. Rather, he will be Reform’s cheerleader from the sidelines, hoping that after the Conservative Party’s probable demolition at the imminent General Election that Reform, bolstered by the rump of the Tory right, might be in a position to push for power further down the line.
Like Trump, Farage has blossomed in the unfiltered post-Twitter world, where everything, even the obvious truth, can be dismissed as “fake news”. However, it is important to challenge those dismissals, and to ensure that facts – cold, hard, facts – are presented are such, and xenophobia called out for what it is.
Holden Forth 