All posts filed under: UK

NO LEAVE to REMAIN

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by W Stephen Gilbert Last Christmas, as you do, we received the usual batch of greetings cards from people we’re only in touch with at that time of year. Almost without exception, these cards included a message to the effect: “isn’t it terrible about Trump and Brexit?” As we are perceived as (ex-)metropolitan, enlightened, middle class professionals, we obviously must subscribe to all the views prescribed for that demographic. My partner can speak for himself. But I voted to leave. This is an outrage that many of my friends cannot understand and find difficult to forgive. They tolerate my intolerance of that ugly, specious, coined term that Theresa May likes to use twice in one mantra. But by my vote they think I’ve taken leave of my senses or become a class traitor or revealed myself as a closet fascist. Bracketing Trump and the 2016 referendum result is thought a legitimate summary of a year that was in many ways the most ghastly anyone can recall. It’s almost as though the leave campaign was implicated …

Celebrating the Birth of the NHS

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Today is the 69th anniversary of “The Appointed Day”. On July 5th 1948, the Labour government under Prime Minister Clement Attlee, launched their revolutionary National Health Service. In the 69 years since the service, though regularly undermined and underfunded by Tory and New Labour governments, has saved millions of people’s lives, and provided vital support for injured, disabled and chronically ill people who – in any other era of human civilization – would have been forced to live in ruin or die in the gutter.

General Election 2017 – the Tories “won” but spectacularly lost

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Despite the two-year long rabid anti-Corbyn propaganda from the Murdoch tabloids, traditional Tory press and establishment at large. Despite the  shamefully lukewarm  and last minute semi-endorsement from the Guardian.  Despite the opinion polls that apparently predicted an increased Conservative majority and a collapse of the Labour voteTheresa May and her colleagues achieved the near impossible and contrived to be so incompetent, blundering, arrogant, vitriolic, greedy and estranged from reality they ended up with a tottering minority government, no mandate and – as a bonus –  a complete moral victory for Corbyn and his team and a rout for the Blairite wing of the Labour party.

Sticking Your Neck-and-Neck Out

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by W Stephen Gilbert Now we dare to hope. If the rain isn’t too relentless on Thursday…If the Momentum activists do their stuff and all those who’ve volunteered to phone voters with the free-to-use app do so…If whatever low stunts have been pulled by The Sun, the Daily Mail, The Times and The Daily Telegraph on Thursday morning can be laughed off…If nobody has a seriously damaging last-minute gaffe…And if the ever-unreliable opinion polls are a day or two behind the trend… Who imagined that this was possible seven weeks ago? Well, I did. Jeremy Corbyn’s galvanising candour and cool have worked miracles before. We saw it last year and the year before. Alone among Tories, Ken Clarke warned of its power two years ago. But a sense of righteous entitlement has misled smarter people than Theresa May. She never credited the possibility of failure. If he becomes Prime Minister on Friday or after a week or two of haggling or after a second election in the autumn, it will be Corbyn’s triumph way beyond …

Terror in Britain: What did the Prime Minister Know?

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by John Pilger The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy. Critical questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review”. The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years. The LIFG is proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organisation which seeks a “hardline Islamic state” in Libya and “is part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida”. The “smoking gun” is that when Theresa May was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered across Europe and encouraged to engage in “battle”: first to remove …

VIDEO: The Naylor Report – Tories Plan to Sell the NHS

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YouTuber Chris Holden’s video on the Naylor Report and Theresa May’s plans for the NHS has gone viral in the last week. Deservedly so, he’s done the hard yards – reading an interminably dull report – so we don’t have to. His summary is concise, revealing, and very worrying. “In an interview with Andrew Neil, Theresa May slipped out a single line about the NHS; she’s made the 2017 election all about her, strength and stability and Brexit. In half an hour, this was all she had to say about her plans on the NHS – “we support the Naylor Report”. It sounded so tediously dull, it couldn’t possibly be of any interest.” Featured image from Evolvepolitics.com, who have an excellent write-up on the Naylor Report here.

MSM trying damage control as May is mocked all over social media

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by Catte Last night’s televised “Battle for No. 10” proved a cataclysmic disaster for the Tories. Before the debate even ended #TheresaMayGIFS was a trending hashtag on Twitter, representing her perceived failure in animated form. But this hasn’t stopped the establishment trying to rewrite history to turn defeat into victory In last night’s TV “battle” aired on Sky News and Channel 4 (it wasn’t a debate since there was no direct interaction between the two party leaders), Corbyn was competent. Not brilliant, but competent, but he effortlessly outshone May, because apparently bare competence is a thing she can only dream of. Even after the Tories sent pre-scripted talking points to all their members with instructions to Tweet them during the debate, and even after the famous Tory Jeremy Paxman made an exhibition of his bias by hectoring and screaming at Corbyn while allowing May to ramble and stumble uninterrupted for as long as she chose, the end result was a car crash, and #TheresaMayGIFS is currently a trending Twitter hashtag celebrating her grandiose and absolute …

Britain’s history of collusion with terror

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from The Crimes of Britain When Britain’s collusion with death squads across the ‘Middle East’ and Africa is mentioned it falls on deaf ears. The only time you’ll hear of Britain’s open collaboration with these forces are when they are branded ‘moderates’ or ‘rebels’ by the British media. Firstly, what do I mean by death squad. I use this term to refer to a wide range of forces, namely Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda affiliated groups, Islamic State, the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force), UDA/UFF (Ulster Defence Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters), RHD (Red Hand Commandos), LVF (Loyalist Volunteer Force) and the British Army’s very own units such as the Military Reaction Force, Special Reconnaissance Unit and the Force Research Unit. Loyalist death squads in Ireland were an extension of the British state. They worked hand in hand with British intelligence, British military and the colonial police (RUC). In 2012, the De Silva Report revealed that 85% of the intelligence the UDA received had been supplied by the British security forces. The UDA was not proscribed as a terrorist organisation …

Manchester Bomber Was Product of West’s Libya/Syria Intervention

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by Daniel McAdams, for RPI Here’s what the media and politicians don’t want you to know about the Manchester, UK, suicide attack: Salman Abedi, the 22 year old who killed nearly two dozen concert-goers in Manchester, UK, was the product of the US and UK overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya and “regime change” policy in Syria. He was a radicalized Libyan whose family fled Gaddafi’s secular Libya, and later he trained to be an armed “rebel” in Syria, fighting for the US and UK “regime change” policy toward the secular Assad government. The suicide attacker was the direct product of US and UK interventions in the greater Middle East. According to the London Telegraph, Abedi, a son of Libyan immigrants living in a radicalized Muslim neighborhood in Manchester had returned to Libya several times after the overthrow of Muamar Gaddafi, most recently just weeks ago. After the US/UK and allied “liberation” of Libya, all manner of previously outlawed and fiercely suppressed radical jihadist groups suddenly found they had free rein to operate in Libya. This is the …

‘Sorted’ by MI5: How UK government sent British-Libyans to fight Gaddafi

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by Amanda Thomas-Johnson and Simon Hooper, with contribution by Areeb Ullah, for Middle East Eye Fighters say government operated ‘open door’ policy allowing them to join rebels, as authorities investigate background of Manchester bomber The British government operated an “open door” policy that allowed Libyan exiles and British-Libyan citizens to join the 2011 uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi even though some had been subject to counter-terrorism control orders, Middle East Eye can reveal. Several former rebel fighters now back in the UK told MEE that they had been able to travel to Libya with “no questions asked” as authorities continued to investigate the background of a British-Libyan suicide bomber who killed 22 people in Monday’s attack in Manchester. Salman Abedi, 22, the British-born son of exiled dissidents who returned to Libya as the revolution against Gaddafi gathered momentum, is also understood to have spent time in the North African country in 2011 and to have returned there on several subsequent occasions. British police have said they believe the bomber, who returned to Manchester just a …

ISIS Terrorist Attack in Manchester? 17 Days Before Crucial UK Elections

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At the end of a pop concert by US singer Ariana Grande in Manchester, an enormous ‘controlled’ explosion killed at least 22 people and injured 59, as reported by British media. Many of them are children and adolescents, as most of the concert-goers were young people. The singer is unharmed. The concert hall accommodates 21,000 people. After the blast, panic broke loose, resulting in a mass stampede. It is not clear whether people were also killed in the stampede.

British elections are planned for 8 June 2017.

Who goes home?

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by W Stephen Gilbert It’s true that opinion poll failings – and poll successes in anticipating election results more or less accurately have been thin on the ground – are apt to underestimate votes for right wing candidates (Tories, Trump) rather than any other kind. Nevertheless, the Tory landslide projected at the outset of this election period would be a surprising outcome, given the tendency for campaigns to assist the opposition parties by allowing them far more coverage than they usually enjoy. In the case of the 2017 election, the Tory pitch has been so dire that if a substantial narrowing of the gap did not materialise, one would be entitled to suspect foul play. It’s a measure of the job that the media have done on Jeremy Corbyn, obediently reproducing the lines fed out by Tory propaganda chief Lynton Crosby, that the BBC go on finding vox pops to declare that Corbyn is “an idiot” and indeed that “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him”. Even Corbyn’s most convinced opponents …

The Future of Our Children: Jeremy Corbyn’s Speech on Education Policy

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from Another Angry Voice AAV compares the standing ovation Corbyn got for this speech with Theresa May’s lamentable performance on the Andrew Marr show, where she could be seen “evading questions” and offering “robotic repetition of her ridiculous “strong and stable” mantra, refusing to admit that nurses relying on food banks to survive is wrong,” and “trying to whitewash the ongoing Tory electoral fraud investigations”. It’s a reasonable point. May is a blank-eyed automaton with all the charisma of a cornflake. She couldn’t sell water in the desert. The question is, in a country that supports the NHS and needs good schools, why do the polls suggest this ghastly person and her corrupt horde of greedy idiots are going to win hands down? [Introductions] … It is a great honour to address you, leaders of one of the most important professions in our society, those who look after the education, the wellbeing, and the future of our children. That is why Labour is making our children’s education one of the cornerstones of our General Election …