Left Right! Left Right! Left Right!

Poor old Kier Starmer, he doesn't stand a chance against the big boys - and girls.  Just over a month ago the Labour Party took the reigns from the 'progressive' long term favourites, the Conservative Party (conservative in all but policies),  with promises of radical change that could possibly bring about the demise of the Great British divide .... rich and poor.  As always within the Labour Party, their priorities are with the down trodden, those who don't stand much chance of a better life under the leadership of a 'conservative' government.

Who can realistically disagree with such a principle?

Why, the rich and powerful of course, those who have the money, power and influence to dictate the rules of life on earth.  Nothing unusual here, it's been going on since time immemorial but somehow more intense in this age of advanced technology, the information super highway where the rich get richer and the poor get nothing!

Where are the morals, the desire to care for fellow humankind, to help one another towards a better life?  To rid the lands of poverty, starvation and sickness?  It's so easy to sit back in the comfy chair with a fat belly and all the mod cons to hand half watching the terrors on earth by way of a 50" screen strategically placed, whilst sipping the chilled Moet and Chandon - why should you care about the plight of those before you, perishing in intense heat or cold, who haven't even got clean water to drink or food to eat or a roof over their head!

Where is the fairness - don't you even care?

Despite what they might have you believe the underbelly of society, the rich and powerful, only care for themselves.  They strive to rid the world of the great unwashed, those who don't conform to the strict criteria of pure white middle class and above thoroughbreds - their own kind!  Those with the ability to achieve their objectives leaving humanity behind to rot in their own filth!

Just look at the key players - in isolation if you prefer, whatever they all have the same objective and use what they see as society's plebeians as a means to an end, to fight their battles for them!  It's no different from any form of war or conflict, the power sits behind a desk pushing the buttons whilst the minions do the fighting, invariably not even knowing what, why, when or where!  In medieval age it would be known as mass hysteria or mob mentality.

There is nothing to be gained, only destruction, destruction of the very lands they purport to be fighting for.  Where is the sense in that?

The current civil unrest spread across the UK and destroying everything in it's path, a situation built on lies and hatred, could be viewed as an anti-Starmer plot in isolation or just an excuse to fuel an already festering discontent about anything and everything but this time around, fueled by that dangerous facility now so close to hand .... the internet!

If you read press comments submitted by the public you will quickly realise the political bent, they will support the party no matter what - but this isn't (or shouldn't be) about a party name or leader, it's about what they do, how when and why they do it!  It's not about 'two tier Kier' (how childish) it's about how he is trying to control civil unrest quickly and effectively, a situation he inherited from the previous party in power.  You don't need to support the Labour Party to acknowledge the facts before your very eyes, you don't need to support any other party when their apparent tactics are happening before your very eyes, or right under your nose if you prefer.

All the while you will find the 'alternative news' platforms spitting venom with words but no sign of any way forward with positive action.  For example, it's all very well saying 'you' (?) will push boats full of immigrants back into the channel or the lorry loads of dead bodies back from whence they came but this is an international problem, thus needs to be solved internationally.  Little England doesn't have the wherewithal to resolve such an escalating global problem, not without international aid which they won't find forthcoming if they continue to try and make it alone.  Too many centuries have passed that dictate the now.

The civil unrest across the UK will not benefit the people, it will only benefit those who are pushing the buttons.

You know who else should be on trial for the UK’s far-right riots? Elon Musk

Jonathan Freedland

Fri 9 Aug 2024 15.36 BST

Direct guilt sits with those who brought violence to our streets, but their hatred was inflamed by lies spread on X



One man is missing. Of course, it’s good that so many of those responsible for a week of terrifying far-right violence are facing an especially swift and severe form of justice – but there’s one extremely rich and powerful suspect who should join them in the dock. If the UK authorities truly want to hold accountable all those who unleashed riots and pogroms in Britain, they need to go after Elon Musk.

To be sure, direct guilt belongs to the culprits on the ground, those currently being fast-tracked in their hundreds through a usually glacial court system – moving from arrest to charges, trial, conviction and (heavy) sentencing in a matter of days. Guilt belongs to those who surrounded hotels housing migrants and refugees, attempting to set them on fire and threatening to kill those inside. It belongs to those who saw fit to trash and loot not only shops, but also libraries and advice centres, many of them lifelines for those who have next to nothing. It belongs to those who smashed and threatened mosques, terrifying those within and whole Muslim communities beyond with a kind of menace many will have heard about in stories passed down from parents or grandparents, but which they will have hoped belonged to a long ago past.

And yet, consider how all this happened. It began as it always begins, with a lie – in this case, the lie that the wicked stabbing attack on a children’s dance party in Southport, which left three little girls dead, was the work of a Muslim migrant who had come to Britain on a small boat. I say “always” because this kind of lie has been told for the best part of a thousand years.

In 1144, it wasn’t Southport but Norwich, and the victim was a 12-year-old boy called William. When he was found dead, the accusing finger pointed instantly – and falsely – at the city’s Jews. Over the centuries that followed, the defamatory charge of child murder – the blood libel – would be hurled against Jews repeatedly, often as the prelude to massacre.

There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that, so far and thankfully, these riots have not killed anyone – although given the attempts to burn down buildings with people inside, that seems more a matter of luck than mercy. But the common element in events nearly a millennium apart is that lies can wreak havoc when they spread. And that spreading now takes seconds.

News of the murders in Southport had barely broken when that false claim about the alleged killer’s identity began coursing through the veins of the internet, advancing virally across social media. It was not organised by one of the official groups of the far right, which remain tiny and fragmented. Nor is there much evidence that it was directed by a malign state actor, with a shadowy facility in St Petersburg pulling the strings. Its method, and that is the wrong word, was different – and much more effective.

“This was individuals, acting individually and anonymously,” says Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate, which has long monitored the far right. All of them were doing their own thing, but the overall result was collective movement in one direction, “like a school of fish”.

What gave the phenomenon scale were the “super-sharers”, big-name figures with large online followings who act as “nodes” for the dissemination of lies. Witness the role of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson, and Andrew Tate, both of whom amplified the initial bogus claim. Thanks to them, it was seen by millions. As Mulhall notes, these are people capable of making the weather: “One individual can create a mass panic.”

It has become a habit to speak of social media generically, but the core of the problem is more specific. It’s X (previously Twitter). That’s where “Robinson” has nearly a million followers. When he was banned from X and other mainstream platforms, he had to make do with the likes of Telegram, where his reach was more limited. “He was in the wilderness,” says Mulhall. Now that he’s back on X, he can find his way into the phones of tens or even hundreds of millions of people at a stroke. And what happens online carries over into the real world, as we saw at the end of last month, when Robinson addressed a crowd estimated to be in the tens of thousands at Trafalgar Square – and saw again this week.

Let’s remind ourselves who brought Robinson and a whole slew of far-right agitators back in from the cold, thereby putting X out of step with the likes of YouTube and Facebook. It was Musk, of course. He decided to make X a safe space for racism and hate almost as soon as he bought it. The effect was instant. One analysis of tweets found a “nearly 500% increase in use of the N-word in the 12-hour window immediately following the shift of ownership to Musk”. The same study also found that posts including “the word ‘Jew’ had increased fivefold since before the ownership transfer”, and something tells me those tweets weren’t tributes to the comic style of Mel Brooks.
Social media is a problem, Keir, but so is life for too many in Britain. I’d deal with that first

But Musk has not just ushered in the super-sharers of the far right: he is one himself. It was he, on his own X account, who shared with his 193m followers a fake Telegraph headline, falsely claiming that Keir Starmer planned to create “detainment camps” for rioters in the Falkland Islands, and doing it by quote-tweeting the co-leader of the ultra far-right Britain First organisation. It was Musk who inflamed an already incendiary situation by tweeting of the UK, “Civil war is inevitable”.

What’s the answer to this problem? Ideally, all politicians, journalists and influencers would defect en masse from X and use somewhere else as the global exchange for instant news and opinion. So far that’s presented a collective action problem: even governments who loathe X don’t want to leave while it remains a central forum.

It’s clear that schools should be teaching information hygiene, so children learn to avoid fake news the way they would avoid poisonous food. Clear, too, that we need online safety legislation with teeth and if, as Sadiq Khan has suggested, that means toughening up laws so new they are yet to be fully implemented, so be it. I like the idea of fines for social-media companies that don’t honour their own declared standards, though many are so rich they won’t feel it: better to fine the directors of those companies, hitting them in their own pockets. And, as Lies That Kill, a timely new book by Elaine Kamarck and Darrell West argues, given that this is a global problem, it will require a global solution: which “means that countries need to negotiate with each other on ways to cooperate in the fight against disinformation”. If 2025 sees Starmer sit down with a President Kamala Harris, this should be one of the first items on the agenda.

For now, though, there needs to be clarity on the nature of the problem. Lies can indeed kill and, though there are of course many others, one of the world’s most prolific enemies of truth is Elon Musk. He is surely the global far right’s most significant figure, and he holds the world’s largest megaphone. As he may put it, a battle to defeat him is now inevitable – and it has to be won.

   Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/09/uk-far-right-riots-elon-musk-x

This is the voice of a recently elected MP spoken on a useful news channel..

FURY over Britain's 'gigantic HOAX' as nation 'falsely' prepared itself for an 'evening of violence'

Nigel Farage PUNISHED In Polls Following Far Right Riots



11:32 minutes

3 hours ago

Nigel Farage v James O'Brien - Interview In Full - LBC



19:36 minutes

Tom Swarbrick is also a very good LBC presenter.

A Britain proud of its present and realistic about its past is taking shape: with the angry right trailing behind

Nesrine Malik

Mon 9 Sep 2024 06.00 BST

Research shows a public less nationalistic, less ideological, with its own sense of national pride – and a media and political class out of sync


Illustration: R Fresson/The Guardian

Once again the gap between politics and media, on one hand, and the general public, on the other, continues to be revealed in its scale. Survey after survey bring us the news that things are changing. That the British public is becoming more progressive in attitude towards refugees and asylum seekers, immigration, unions and industrial action, net zero targets and, most recently, British history.

The National Centre for Social Research’s British social attitudes survey shows a country that has become less nationalistic and jingoistic and, most sharply, less “proud” or “very proud” of British history. Along with that, there were also declines in pride in Britain’s democracy, its political influence and its economic achievements. The only two spheres where pride remained constant and high were sport, and art and literature.

Some of these changes are demographic, or the result of “generational replacement”, according to the survey. Younger generations’ idea of Britishness revolves around a “civic identity” rather than an ethnic one. And while 70% of people over 65 feel “it is important for someone to have been born in Britain”, only 41% of those under 35 feel the same.

There is an ethnic angle as well, with younger, more diverse generations being less likely to be tethered to historical notions of Britishness as a deposit of empire or ethnic heritage that needs to be preserved. And some of these changes can be attributed to the increasing connective tissue between people that has replaced shared uniform notions of national identity. Instead, there is an emergence of new shared references and experiences that create civic notions of belonging, relatability and kinship : the sort of art, literature and sport that score so highly on the pride barometer.

Reading surveys is like reading tea leaves – because we have results rather than reasoning – but it is difficult to imagine that, even after factoring in generational replacement, the raising of questions about empire, history, enslavement and the legacies of colonialism by an entire cohort of writers, academics, media organisations, cultural institutions and researchers has not played a part in many divesting from history as a source of national pride. They have had to face down not just backlash and condemnation from triggered members of the public, but from the media and the political sphere. The new Britain that is emerging is one that has come about organically and over time, but it is also one that has been dragged there.

In that process, the contest is framed by critics of reappraisal as one between those who want to see only the bad in British history and those who also want to recognise the good. In reality, the contest is between those who look for sources of identity in notions of supremacy, and those who do in markers of equality. In other words, overreliance on history, defensiveness about it and an insistence on seeing it as something that says something special about British character betray a lack of confidence, a fragility and a resistance to less hierarchical conceptions of identity. If we dispense with a definition of national character that has been expressed only in terms of exceptionalism in the past, then what replaces it?

Once that question is asked and treated as legitimate, all manner of risks are introduced. If we look to our current nation, one whose features are expressed so strongly in the survey, then one has to reckon with all sorts of uncomfortable realities that some want to deny. That postwar immigration and the diversity it has resulted in have changed the nation’s racial and political character irreversibly. That ethnicity alone is no longer a guarantee of status. And that our place in the world is undermined by overlapping economic crises and community fractures. Modern life, in short, is atomising and anxiety inducing. All the more so when subject to the sort of austerity that weakens public spaces and services, and creates an existence that one increasingly has to navigate rather than thrive in.

For the sort of pride that rests in our historical political and economic prowess, one has to search very hard in a present where reality for those other than a privileged few is increasingly about managing the rising cost of housing, transport, energy and food, and the state of the NHS and schooling, all while contending with Brexit-induced political instability, the recklessness and diminution of the political class and widening economic equality.

It’s not a mystery, then, why English rightwing politicians and the media focus so hectically on “woke” assaults on British heritage and history. It is why such panics about universities changing curriculums or the acute threat to memorials and statues are regular features on GB News and in rightwing newspapers. The right has desecrated the present and so must sanctify the symbols of the past, depositing in its performative protection all its fear of a new country where its influence, demographically and ideologically, is waning. And it’s not a mystery why Labour has broadly abdicated the job of channelling the transformation in public attitudes on race, immigration and history, choosing instead to focus on a “patriotism” that it neither defines nor promotes in any meaningful way. It has internalised that confected panic, and is still beholden to the view that Britain is conservative at heart and must be pandered to, not provoked. The result is declining pride in the country’s democracy and political accomplishments.

And the result is an absence of open contest over who we are: where a dangerous, destabilising minority – egged on by a right overrepresented in our public discourse and media – runs amok. The growing progressive majority, meanwhile, is advocated for, at great peril and cost, by those individuals and institutions outside the political sphere. And as referee is a government gone awol that intervenes only to crack down and mop up when violence spills out on to the streets.

What is being precipitated is not the much-feared confrontation with the forces of reaction, but the alienation of new progressives who do not recognise the country they live in as presented in their media and politics.

The holdouts are loud, powerful and well capitalised, and their assault is allowed to continue, despite all the signs that tell us their constituency is getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror – and that the country is leaving them behind.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/09/britain-proud-past-national-pride