It's a long time since we've had an article from any columnist providing quite such a superb, albeit unintentional, exemplification as did Yasmin Alibihai- Brown in her Independent column of 17th August of the futility of engaging in arguments about whether a given politician/columnist/commentator "is antisemitic" or not.
Alibhai-Brown sets out to demonstrate why it's utterly wrong to call British Labour Party lead candidate Jeremy Corbyn "an anti-Semite".
Hilariously, the subhead, which she may not have written or approved, states
"Some of the people the left-wing hopeful has been closest to are conscientious and ethical British Jews".
It may have escaped the Indie's sub-editors that that's a po-faced politically correct reformulation of "some of his best friends are Jews".
The right sort of Jews, not those sloppy and unethical British Jews who are not his best friends. And of course as utterly irrelevant to the issue of whether an individual embraces and promotes antisemitic ideas as it was when Sir Oswald Mosley, Leader of the British Union of Fascists used it to deny that he "was antisemitic", whilst having his Blackshirts march through the streets chanting, "The Yids, the Yids, the Yids! We've got to get rid of the Yids!"
And Corbyn himself resorts to another variant of "innocent by association" in the interview with Cathy Newman in the clip above. In response to her challenges about his associations with major promoters of antisemitic ideas, Corbyn indignantly tells us that his mother took part in the Communist Party organised Cable Street demonstration against Moseley's fascists in 1936, as if what his mother did almost eighty years ago had any bearing on what he does now.
It's interesting that a very familiar group of "AsAJews" have just produced a round robin letter slamming those who raise the question of Corbyn's associations with promoters of antisemitic ideas as "guilt by association".
Yet their hero's first resort to such questions is a defence of "innocent by association."
She's particularly skilled at condemning the antisemitism she's happy to acknowledge as antisemitism ( basically, that of the far right and any that can be found amongst the Tories), whilst writing paragraph after paragraph playing the "zionists call legitimate criticism of the state of Israel and its robotic hard line defenders antisemitism".
She also plays a very nice skilled variant on the "not an antisemitic bone in his body" line (always good, since who has ever found antisemitism embedded in the human skeleton?). Alibhai-Brown's version is "if he's antisemitic, I'm a white supremacist"-- with total subtlety reminding you that she's NOT WHITE.
That's her shtick...
The real trap here is to attempt to rebut her by agreeing to play this debate as a question of whether Corbyn IS or ISN'T antisemitic.
This is a completely wrong headed approach, as it's basically an issue about what's inside Corbyn's head. As it is about the head of anyone spouting or circulating antisemitic ideas, which is being presented or felt to be best addressed through an IS/ISN'T antisemitic debate.
The Torah teaches us that we judge people not by attempting to second guess what's in their heads, but by their acts-- what they do and what they say. And Torah assumes people have free will and the obligation to take responsibility for their actions.
In fact, we've just entered a month where we're expected to review our actions and speech over the last year and put right any wrongs we've done.
Queen Elizabeth I, like so many Elizabethans, knew and understood Torah a lot better than many of today's Jews and Christians. Not surprising, because the astonishingly beautiful translations into English by Coverdale and Tyndale of the Hebrew Bible were still new and exciting. Torah language and wise counsel, was adopted into every day language, and would be even more embedded in the language and speech habits of the ordinary English people with the publication of the King James bible after her death.
The words of the Torah in English electrified both the common people and the great poets and playwrights of her day. Shakespeare is saturated with phrases and sentiments directly taken from the English translations of the Hebrew Bible of his day.
Like Shakespeare, she used the language and the thought patterns of the Hebrew bible much more than she did the Greek-originated Christian New Testament.
She is reputed to have said-- in perfect Latin-- on unexpectedly succeeding to the throne of England
This is the Lord's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.
She also said, in one of her greatest speeches:
Though God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my reign, that I have reigned with your loves.
I have ever used to set the last Judgement Day before mine eyes, and so to rule as I shall be judged to answer before a higher judge.
Queen Elizabeth I was faced every day with a great issue of her times in England-- were there covert Roman Catholics working, like today's Islamist entryists, to subvert English religious freedom and the Protestant direct relationship with HKBH and return it to the dire rule of the Roman Catholics?
For if those people succeeded, that would mean handing over control of the minds of the people of England to the scrutiny of the Jesuit jihadis, ever ready to seek out new heretics to burn. It would return England to being a state under the ultimate rule of the Pope, as her sister Queen Mary had done.
And one of the most heinous sets of acts of murder in the name of religious purity Queen Mary supported was the burning to death at the stake of the translators, printers and publishers of the first English translators of the Bible, William Tyndale, John Rogers and Archbishop Cranmer amongst them. Needless to say, the English Bibles were also burnt.
Queen Elizabeth I's wise words-- which she insisted should guide policy were:
I have no desire to make windows into mens souls
I think we would do well to follow her example and resolutely refuse to enter into discussion into whether Person X or Person Y "is anti-semitic".
We could only know that via a window into their soul.
We should say, as I now always do-- I am not interested in the issue of whether someone "is antisemitic" or not. We can't know what sits in a person's head. The only thing that matters is-- do they say, endorse, circulate or excuse antisemitic ideas, explanations and images?
People who do that should be called out by having the antisemitic elements they're using or recycling pointed up and condemned for what they are.
We should point out also where such ideas, explanations and images incite and stoke up hateful and irrational behaviour, regardless of what the person responsible for invoking them claims about their own motives and inner moral purity ((or the person who uses the antisemitic content).
I've found that when I do this, the astonished and righteously indignant circulator of antisemitic ideas always tries to drag the discussion back to "I am not antisemitic/Are you saying I'm antisemitic/Honest Jeremy Corbyn, The People's Money Printer does not have an antisemitic bone in his body.
I always refuse and insist on pursuing the issue of pointing out the antisemitic content and its contribution to validating and stoking antisemitism.
This is an effective way to combat the most common straw man argument being used to defend the circulation of antisemitic ideas, posing as acceptable antizionism, in the UK today.
On 24th October, Tom Watson MP made sensational allegations, speaking in the House of Commons under the protection of Parliamentary privilege, of about evidence of a past paedophile ring linked to an aide of "a former Prime Minister" and a "powerful paedophile network" linked to No 10 at that time. In his blog, he added that the person in question was not Sir Peter Morrison, now dead and beyond the threat of libel actions, but unmistakably linking the accusations to Margaret Thatcher's Premiership.
Until that day, there had been a series of sensational allegations and disclosures, day after day, about Jimmy Savile's abuse of children and young people at the BBC and in NHS hospitals and care homes.
Since then, acres of front page press coverage have been given to stories trumpeting the supposed existence of a Tory paedophile network, hinting at the name of a peer alleged to have been involved
Meanwhile, in Labour Rochdale, centre of a major child abuse scandal involving the abuse of young women in care in the town is currently under scrutiny in Parliament.The HoC Home Affairs Select Cttee in the very week following Watson's intervention grilled the senior Social Services professionals in Rochdale, and their bland "I didn't know, I wasn't told, I did everything I should" responses were remarkably similar to Entwistle's just before he resigned as Director-General of the BBC. What were the Labour MP and Cllrs doing during the period? Meanwhile, a Rochdale health services worker claimed that the abuse is still continuing, yet this astonishing testimony got little national coverage with the "Tory high-up paedophile" scandal running at full tilt.
A high profile by-election imminent is in the Labour seat of Rotherham, which manages to combine an almost identical running child abuse of girls in care scandal like Rochdale's, but where the by-election is happening because the Labour MP Denis McShane was forced to resign after being found to have fraudulently claimed thousands of pounds of expenses. The latter item was beginning to gain traction in the press just as Watson dropped his bombshell. McShane's misdemeanours sank into the back pages once "Tory paedophile rings" got taken up as the main story by media and BBC.
Another of the by-elections is in Middlesborough, caused by the death of Labour's Sir Stuart Bell, notorious for having led the fight in the last Parliament to have MPs' expenses kept secret on a range of grounds such as "security", and to have those who leaked them prosecuted. Bell also got a lot of stick in the last few years for ceasing to hold MP surgeries for constituents in Middlesborough. It was widely claimed that this was because he was living in Paris. Bell also achieved huge publicity by going after the child protection medics in the Cleveland child abuse scandal. He could not have known whether the allegations were true or false, but got huge newspaper and BBC coverage with his claims that the allegations were false.
There are elections for Police Commissioners in all areas outside London.
Also happening within a fortnight of Watson's bombshell. Margaret Moran, ex Labour MP goes on trial for £53,000 worth of fraudulent MPs' expenses claims. She will not face a full trial (and therefore a prison sentence) because she has medical certification stating she is not fit to stand trial.
Fraser Nelson at the Spectator thinks Tom Watson's motives are unrelated to anything else other than his siincere desire to unmask child abusers in high places, all coincidentally in Tory high places. Tom Watson has not raised any questions about or even hinted at any Labour folk in high places who have been alleged to have been involved in child abuse.
Nelson Jones at the New Statesman is equally convinced of Tom Watson's sincerity, but suggests that he's working himself towards becoming yet another conspiracy theorist:
Watson seems to be demanding a virtually unlimited inquiry into establishment paedophile networks that he has already decided must exist, and into a shadowy establishment cover-up that he is also presupposing. He had already issued an open letter to David Cameron, in which he vaunted his "experience of uncovering massive establishment conspiracies" and condemned "decorous caution" as "the friend of the paedophile". He came close to suggesting that Cameron himself might have reason to be part of a cover-up: "Narrowing the inquiry equals hiding the truth. That is the reality and it is not what you want."
This is the language of the witch-hunter, the conspiracy-theorist, or the architect of a moral panic down the ages. Is it really the language of a serious politician?
That's an impressively well-informed viewpoint. On the other hand.....it's remarkably helpful, no doubt, to the Labour Party that the words "paedophile network" now seem linked in the minds of a large proportion of the electorate to the words "high placed Tory".
Are his current efforts on associating highly placed Tories with paedophilia, at a time when Labour constituencies with upcoming elections are mired with scandals associated with corruption and child abuse, a distraction from or a masterly development of his role as Labour's by-election supremo?
Be careful before you rejoice over the Hollande victory. His magic wand politics is based on selling the idea of socialism in one Eurozone-- based on getting all the other EU countries' populations also to vote socialist so they can set up a superKeynsian programme where the whole of the EU happily prints money and hands it out for whatever benefits the good citizens have become accustomed to.
Thus, he promises an instant end to austerity, job creation a la carte, restoring cuts in pensions public spending etc.
This is very appealing to electorates feeling the pinch and hating the austerities of getting rid of deficits for years ahead.
Imagine if Hollande is able to sustain this illusion for 2-3 years as first the Eurocrats indulge him in order to ensure the Eurozone doesn't break up.Then a whole series of other EU states also vote in magic wand Eurozone keynsian socialist governments, Apparently even in Germany, the votes for the Social Democrats are soaring. So then what happens if these magic wand programmes are voted for across the EU (including in the next EU elections)?
Come 2015 we could be facing Ed Miliband offering a UK version of Hollande's magic wand programme, with crowds of happy deficit fuelled populations across the EU as examples of how well the magic wand works. It means signing up to the new socialist print-as-much-as-you-want Euro. So Ed Mili is right behind an EU referendum, only this time on a "free money, end to austerity, magic wand" embrace-the-Euro programme. The Lib Dems will be enthusiastic supporters
The Tories and UKIP would then be the only parties opposing this glorious magic wand socialist vision. They'd get their referendum. But guess what? They'd lose it hands down, because the euphoria of the free money vision would be far more appealing than the Sturm und Drang of leaving the EU and yet more austerity.
If you doubt this, remember that until Livingstone dreamed up his Fare Deal magic money offer, he was hopelessly behind Boris in the polls. Once that was offered, his popularity soared. Had Andrew Gilligan & Guido Fawkes not exposed his tax avoidance and matching hypocrisy, people would have accepted his promises as credible. Once the tax evidence was out (including Livingstone's failure to deliver on his promise of publishing his accountant-certified tax records) and widely exposed, people stopped believing in the magic beans fare reductions. Boris' popularity and credibility recovered, but the gap between him and Livingstone never went back to what it was before the launch of the Fare Deal promise.
Even so, over a million people voted for Livingstone's magic wand, magic beans, free money programme and for him, knowing that he was an habitual liar and serial promise breaker.
Botis and his reality programme only just --just-- won. And a major reason for that was the strength of Boris' personality and personal appeal compared with the very negative features and track record of Livingstone.
At 3:16 minutes into this clip, you'll hear Ken Livingstone, speaking in 2009 in Tower Hamlets, push this anti-semitic conspiracy smear against Labour MP Ivan Lewis and a Jewish "they" who he says conspired to keep the voice of the elected representatives of the Palestinian people silenced by keeping it out of the mainstream press.
Here's my transcript of the key section:
A character called Ivan Lewis who- I discovered- I'd seen hanging round the House of Commons, and he's saying- I'd assumed he was a lobbyist for the Israeli government- I'd no idea he was a Labour MP! [laughter] And he'd been given a job, because he’s one of that small group of Labour MPs who only ever seems to talk about the defence of the state of Israel, and denounce any Arab that may have a different point of view! And he came out and said, I had made a huge mistake in having this interview, and publishing it, and I assumed avalanche of denunciations and outrage, and how someone like me should never stand for mayor again or something! And then, it went completely quiet – a little bit in the Jewish Chronicle in the next week – and of course! – the last thing they wanted to do, was, they realised this-- a lot of denunciations would mean people would buy it! More of them would read it!
I wish there had been more denunciations! I wish great extracts of it, had been published in the Sun! And the Daily Mail! And the Express! They’re not gonna do that. So, do get hold of copies of that, and just take a few photocopies and circulate it amongst your friends, groups at work, in your community, so more people get to see that. The silence spoke volumes, of how they don’t really don't want the Palestinians to express themselves through their elected leaders.
What Livingstone doesn't say is that Ivan Lewis’ statement was made in his capacity as a then junior Foreign Office Minister of State in Gordon Brown’s Labour government. It was issued by the Foreign Office in support of the official and continuing foreign policy of the UK, of considering Khaled Meshaal to be the head of a designated terrorist organization. It’s still on the Foreign Office web site to this day.
Here, Livingstone contrives to misrepresent and spin this story using some modern classic anti-semitic conspiracy stories.
Firstly, Lewis supposedly did nothing in the House of Commons but speak for Israel, and in such a way that he could have been assumed to be a lobbyist of the Israeli government. Not only that, but on that basis he'd been "given a job".
Lewis had in fact been a junior Minister in the Blair and Brown Labour governments going back to June 2003, when he took on a succession of roles in the Education ministry, going on in 2005-2006 to being a junior Treasury minister , to May 2006 when he was given responsibilities for Care Services in the Health Ministry. He was then promoted to a junior role in the Foreign Office as Parliamentary Secretary of State for International Development by Gordon Brown in October 2008 and further promoted to the Minister of State role in June 2009.
Whether Livingstone's reference to him being "given a job" was to Lewis' former role as Vice Chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, or to his Ministerial role at the time is unsurprisingly, given Livingstone's reputation for political evasiveness, unclear. If it is the latter, the smear implies that he got his job as a Minister because he was a lobbyist for Israel.
Whichever way, there is no way Lewis could have made the statement he did out of personal animus, let alone, as Livingstone suggests, as a mouthpiece of the Israeli government or some shadowy "they" Jewish lobby.
All UK government ministers, however junior, are required to make only statements which are fully in line with the UK government policies and priorities of the day. The Foreign Office will only publish statements which conform with those policies. And the policies include condemning Israeli settlements over the Green Line as being illegal, as well as supporting radical anti-zionist Palestinian groups protesting against Jewish purchasers of homes in the overwhelmingly Palestinian-inhabited quarters of East Jerusalem and Hebron. Any Minister who uses his position to voice the view of any lobby group great or small which conflicts with government policy will find himself, quite rightly, instantly relieved of his office and sent back to the back benches.
In fact so far was Lewis from being in any position to impose his views on the government of Gordon Brown that in 2008, he was regarded as having had his personal reputation deliberately undermined in a classic Gordon Brown coterie revenge attack job, because he'd had the temerity to publish a highly coded criticism about the Brown administration's need to refresh and renew itself.
Then we come to Livingstone's portrayal of Lewis as the mouthpiece of the unspecified Jewish “they,” who then conspired to make no further condemnations of the propaganda coup Livingstone gave Hamas, because "they" wanted to see the interview kept out of view. This was supposedly because "they" realised that "they'd" end up drawing the attention of ordinary British people to his very rosy presentation of Damascus resident and Hamas terrorist group leader Meshaal, who he pushes as those of the elected representative of the Palestinian people. Khaled Meshaal was incidentally never elected to the leadership of Hamas by the Palestinian people; it's difficult to find any evidence that he ever reached any position through any election, let alone a free one involving the Palestinian electorate.
Livingstone conveniently makes no reference to the more damning reasons Lewis cited in his Foreign Office condemnation of Livingstone's action in choosing to fly to Damascus to interview Meshaal and use the entirely supportive interview as the big central feature of his guest edited New Statesman:
It is therefore particularly regrettable that he learned the wrong lessons from history by handing a propaganda coup to the leader of a terrorist organisation.
Hamas has not only breached international law by firing rockets at civilian populations in Israel but continues to violate the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza“.
I posted a couple of weeks ago on the significance of the role the New Statesman played in 2009 in Ken Livingstone's campaign to rebrand himself from tired dinosaur far left has-been to contest-winning candidate for the Labour Party nomination for the London 2012 Mayoral election. I included a link to this fisking of the interview and the way Livingstone conducted it.
The New Statesman gave Livingstone the opportunity of a lifetime by inviting him to be a guest editor, with carte blanche to determine the main features and most of the content of the magazine, at the crucial period just before the Labour Party Conference of that year. And it's clear that in making the speech to the Tower Hamlets PSC back late in 2009, long before the Labour Party nomination for its candidate for the Mayoral election 2012 was decided, Livingstone saw the Hamas interview as central to securing the nomination in mid 2010. He fantasises about a goal of the imagined conspiracy of the Jewish "them" to being to prevent it.
It's not clear why the New Statesman did so much to help Livingstone on his way to the nomination. Martin Bright, the most high profile NS Political editor in recent years had left early in 2009. He had played a major role with a series of articles and contributed to a Channel 4 TV programme in exposing Livingstone's far left coterie and manipulation of his then Mayoral office, which contributed to his defeat by Boris Johnson in 2008.
It's not clear whether it was the new editor and management of the NS who first decided to given Livingstone the guest editorship, or whether it was the result of an initiative from Mehdi Hasan or some other key NS staffer.
It's very curious that although the New Statesman WIkipedia site lists the people who have been offered guest editorships of the magazine since the start of 2009, there's just one left out. And that's Ken Livingstone.
In the New Statesman in the week following the Foreign office statement, the anonymous “Staff blogger” quoted the statement, whilst dropping in the additional information that Lewis was formerly chair of Labour Friends of Israel (in fact, he was actually Vice Chair).
However, the “staff blogger” did not attempt to suggest Lewis was still actively acting as a Labour Friends of Israel spokesman, since he would have had to relinquish that position on being appointed to the Foreign Office.
No such reservations held back Muslim Brotherhood-supporting Islamist mouthpiece for the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawallah, writing in the Guardian that same day in September 2009> He's always been a routine promoter of tropes about ” traditional zionist tactics” of attempting to “silence critics of Israel”. Here’s what he wrote about Ivan Lewis’s statement and his affiliations:
It is worth noting that Lewis did not appear similarly outspoken during the visits to the UK of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli PM, and Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, despite the very credible reports of Israeli war crimes perpetrated in Gaza during the Israeli bombardment and invasion in December 2008/January 2009 as documented by Amnesty International, the Israel campaign group Breaking the Silence and, most recently, by the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict.
Indeed, while the bombing of Gaza was going on earlier this year, Lewis attended an Israel solidarity rally in Manchester, where he declared: “It is essential that we send a clear and responsible message from the great city of Manchester that this community stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel.”
Just as Livingstone left out the key contextual information in his speect, Bunglawallah didn’t mention in his article that at the time of all those events, Lewis was not a Foreign Office minister, so would have had no official role in making statements about visits by Israeli politicians and the events of Cast Lead.
It also makes it all abundantly clear whose politics Livingstone was following then and now on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And they certainly weren’t those of the Labour Party then or now.
The UK's Co-operative Group has announced that it's going to ban imports from Israeli companies which export or deal in produce from the West Bank or otherwise beyond the Green Line.
Hilary Smith, Co-op member and Boycott Israel Network (BIN) agricultural trade campaign coordinator, was quoted by The Guardian as saying that the Co-op "has taken the lead internationally in this historic decision to hold corporations to account for complicity in Israel's violations of Palestinian human rights. We strongly urge other retailers to take similar action."
The Co-op has fallen over itself to announce that, no, they're not actually boycotting Israel, you understand. Just any Israeli companies that deal with produce from not just the West Bank, but any from over the Green Line. So that will include all the wines from the Golan Heights, and matzos and other religious goods baked or made in the Old City of Jerusalem but also all the produce that's exported from Gaza. And of course all the produce which Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights produce.
You see, Palestinian Arab farmers are completely dependent on the high-tech logistics and technologies of the Israel-wide exporters like Agrexco, Mehadrin and all those other companies the Co-op's decided to boycott for the fast processing, refrigeration, air transport, EU certification and marketing. Without those companies exporting their produce to the UK, guess what? Those Palestinians will lose money hand over fist, if they're not driven completely out of business, by the loss of their currently very efficient Israeli exporters. There aren't any other local non-Israeli companies they can turn to. Try Jordan or Egypt? Not a chance.
Here's the viewpoint of a Gazan woman producer whose business and family was hit by the closing of the route to Europe via Agrexco after the Israelis shut the Keren Shalom checkpoint after an outburst of Hamas terrorist action.
Um Hajjar Al-Ghalayini, 46 years old, owns half an acre of sandy Gaza land that produces two tons of strawberries every season. Since her husband died two years ago, the crop is the sole means of support for her nine children, mother-in-law and widowed sister, so every one of the bright red berries counts.
Last year, she had no choice but to sell her produce to the local market. That filled the Gaza markets with fruits and vegetables to the benefit of consumers, but for growers like Um Hajjar it was a disaster. Her earnings dropped by more than half and the family had a tough year economically. This week, as Israel took another step in easing its economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, Um Hajjar delivered her strawberries to the Kerem Shalom checkpoint on the Israel-Gaza border, their first leg of a journey to the more profitable markets in Europe.
“Now I can say that things are getting back to normal, if not on the right track,” she told The Media Line.
Just last week in London, Livingstone declared himself against boycotts of Israeli goods and services at a meeting with Jewish Londoners. His Deputy Mayoral candidate running mate Val Shawcross proudly declared herself a member of the Co-operative Party.
The Co-operative Group is formally affiliated with the Co-operative Party which although nominally independent is an organization whose sole party political link is to the Labour Party. Co-operative Party election candidates stand for election as Labour candidates.
So, apart from Livingstone and Val Shawcross, there's a long list of 29 Co-operative Party MPs, who include many who are usually supportive of Israel and strongly opposed to boycotts. Those MPs include Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger, Stephen Twigg and Mike Gapes amongst others. And quite a few of them are London Assembly members, too, like Nicky Gavron and Murad Qureshi.
Are they in favour of boycotting the produce of Palestinian farmers? Do they think kosher wines from the Golan Heights and matzos baked in the Old City of Jerusalem should be boycotted?
Will the Labour London Assembly members be pressing for Palestinian and Israeli produce exported by Agrexco, Mehadrin and the other companies fingered by the Co-op to be banned from the GLA's premises?
"We will not finance any organisation that advocates discrimination and incitement to hatred."
The right to freedom of speech underpins the values of a democratic society and individuals and organisations should be free to express their views or beliefs. However, 99% of customers who participated in the review supported the bank's decision to withhold finance from those extremist organisations that advocate not only discrimination but hatred.
Can Livingstone, Val Shawcross and all those Co-op MPs and London Assembly members let us know whether they support the Viva Palestina project of collecting funds which are given to Hamas regime officials? Can they also explain to us how they are satisfied that the Co-op Bank is not contravening its own policies in allowing itself to be used to collect and pass wads of used banknotes to and through Hamas, which has a stellar record of suppressing free speech and inciting hatred of Jews and Israel, not least through its own Charter?
If they think the money is just going to charitable work and is untouched by the Hamas hate machine, what are the processes they have used to monitor that?
Oh, and by the way, that's bankers in the spotlight again, isn't it? Only somehow, I can't quite see Ed Miliband getting up on his hind legs to fulminate about this at Prime Minister's Question Time, can you?
On Tuesday 24th, there was an open meeting organized by the London Jewish Forum, backed and co-organized by the Jewish Leadership Council, at which Ken Livingstone spoke and answered questions from London's Jewish community. about his Mayoral bid and his past and present views.
The introduction given for Livingstone by the meeting chair Adrian Cohen, the very aimiable non-elected Labour loyalist who chairs the LJF, came across as an astounding piece of straight advocacy. He spent over five minutes presenting every possible positive piece of information he could dig up to show how positive and supportive Livingstone is and always has been towards the Jewish community. The repeated controversies and tensions were alluded to in the briefest of euphemisms. It was in contrast to the introduction he gave at the equivalent meeting for Boris Johnson, which, although friendly, warm and suportive, did not compare, did not amount to advocacy, and was nothing like as long and gushing.
Here's a YouTube clip of Adrian Cohen’s gush
Adrian Cohen's introduction confirms the case I’ve made here. What’s supposed to be a genuinely representative body for the whole Jewish community is now controlled and unacceptably biased to serve the political priorities of a Labour Party/liberal left and Peace-Now oriented unrepresentative group of millionaires, billionaires and party activists who do not reflect the political outlook of the Jewish community as a whole.
In the case of the London Mayoral election, it's as if they set out to do everything possible to window-dress Livingstone’s image, airbrush out and explain away his long established record of Jew-baiting and invoking anti-semitic allusions to attack Jews he doesn't like, and present him as a much misrepresented warm friend to the London Jewish community.
I don't think Adrian Cohen himself is a part of that inner group. He has honourable intentions, and like some other supporters of the present direction, may well have believed that he should do everything possible to avoid presenting a hostile or aggressive Jewish community face to Livingstone, and that his role was to help the audience take on board that Livingstone should not be regarded as a pantomime villain, and the fact that his record does include some positive actions towards the Jewish community recognised. There was an alternative, of course, which was to be polite and welcoming, to acknowledge some of the few high notes of Livingstone's relationship with the community when Mayor and then act as a facilitator.
It does say something about the dangers of an inward-looking largely non-elected politically highly compatible insider group holding the reins of access to dialogue between the Jewish community and local and national government that he could consider as acceptable an introductory speech instantly labelled by audience members other than myself as "a Party Election Broadcast", "ridiculous" and "unbelievable". Those were all spontaneous comments I heard from others I'd never met before who walked downstairs or stood outside with me after the meeting.
In my view, it represents a sort of political myopia which can be paralleled with that of Livingstone, except that his is malign, where theirs is misguided and unjustified, given their status should derive from genuinely representing rather than trying to manipulate the views of the wider Jewish community. Above all it springs from an unrepresentative and largely unaccountable group being able to take decisions about how to deal with challenges to the Jewish community, and opportunities to influence policy without having to subject their plans to scrutiny. Behind that, they've a shared belief that, at best, they know what the community wants, or at worst, they know best and it's a utopian fantasy to operate any other way.
There are those who take the view (and I'm told that it's a view amongst some of those who ran this meeting) that Livingstone will win the London Mayoral election, and it's therefore important to have a Jewish community group who can speak to Livingstone rather than further promoting the widely perceived view of the organized Jewish community being hostile to him. But in my view, that's a self-serving and highly misguided argument, based on an either-or choice of two extremes. It would have been perfectly possible to have a policy of engaging with Livingstone and inviting him to meet the Jewish community, whilst adopting at least the same level of stringent neutrality to him as a candidate as would be expected of a broadcasting service. In a very close election, being seen to have been leaning over backwards to present a highly controversial candidate in the best possible light is totally unacceptable for a supposedly whole-community body.
In the course of the discussion in the video clip at the head of the post, there's a question asked about why Livingstone’s so called “apology” to the Jewish community included the astounding statement that Jews are a people, not an ethnic group or a rellgion. The response by both Adrian Cohen and by Livingstone was that this was what the Jewish Leadership Council and London Jewish Forum strongly pressed him to write, so he wrote it. In other words, not only was the ‘apology” not his own sentiments, but Adrian Cohen and his colleagues openly acknowledge their role in helping draft it. Adrian Cohen appears to see the statement as perhaps the unfortunate consequence of his attempts to explain to Livingstone the nature of Jewish peoplehood, but it does not account for Livingstone having written that Jews are not a religion and are not an ethnic group.
Again, I find it difficult to stress sufficiently how utterly out of order this bit of partisan spinning and lobbying is for a whole Jewish community representative body to have indulged in, and how utterly cynical it shows Livingstone to be when in pursuit of votes.
Livingstone consistently presented himself as a mild-mannered friend to the Jewish community, in favour of a two state solution, against suicide bombing anywhere, and ahead of his time in seeing the way to Middle East peace before the Jewish community and Israel.
You'll hear in the clip at the head of this post Livingstone's repeated assertions that he "doesn't agree with" the extremist hate preacher Qaradawi's strong support of suicide bombings and killings of Jews of every age in Israel.
But consider this. At least two young British Jews were murdered in Israel since the Hamas campaigns of bombing buses and stabbing lone Jews took off.
Shmuel Mett, a Mir Yeshiva student about to be married, was stabbed to death walking through the Old City back to his Yeshiva in Jerusalem circa 2007.
Yoni Jesner, a promising 19 year old university student spending the summer on a Bnei Akiva youth movement visit, was murdered in a bus bombing in Tel-Aviv.
Many London Jews knew one or both of these young men personally.
Bnei Akiva is the largest and most popular youth movement of the mainstream Orthodox and Yoni Jesner was a well loved and admired young leader in the movement.
Shmuel Mett was the son of a former teacher at the Hasmonean High School, and studied at the Mir Yeshiva, which is the most revered and prestigious of the great Charedi Yeshivas in Israel, where many strictly Orthodox and mainstream orthodox young men from London choose to spend a period of study.
As you can hear on the clip, Livingstone was repeatedly pressed about his embrace of Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s hate preacher who advocates suicide bombings and murders of Jews in Israel as a religious obligation.
But look at what he said at the meeting when repeatedly pressed to give an assurance that he would not be inviting Qaradawi or any other hate preachers to London again if elected Mayor:
“I won’t ask Qaradawi to drive the 210 bus”
That’s how aware of and sensitive he is to London’s Jews, and how seriously he takes their feelings about Israeli suicide bus bombings.
And in case you think I'm making too much of an unfortunate foot-in-mouth moment, Livingstone expressed amazement at what he said was the audience's "obsession with Qaradawi. He also said,
"It's only Jewish Londoners who ask me about Israel. No-one else ever mentions it."
Livingstone carefully avoided saying anything about any other hate preachers, which he was repeatedly questioned about, gave no undertakings, despite being repeatedly urged, not to invite or welcome more of them, and maintained his line that he knew nothing but good of Qaradawi when he invited him. And he's still unwilling to accept the repeatedly and widely documented record of Qaradawi's misogyny and homophobia, as well as his anti-semitism should mean he revises his original opnion to one of condemnation.
The wish to improve the reach of the 210 bus route, by the way, exercises many in London’s most orthodox Jewish communities, because it’s the nearest route to a direct connection between Stamford Hill and Golders Green, the two largest centres of Charedi Jews in London. Only so far, it involves having to get off the bus and change at Finsbury Park Station.
If anyone has any doubts about what a totally dishonest performance the whole thing was, here's my transcription of what Livingstone actually said– with a degree of passion and intensity of feeling that was wholly absent fromTuesday’s performance– about his real feelings about Israel, at the Trafalgar Square Gaza rally in 2009.
Let’s send a message directly to the Israeli government: if you think you can win votes by the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children, you are wrong.
That is what is happening. In an attempt to outflank the even more abominable Netanyahu, they are prepared to unleash this terror.
And this has to end. When we campaigned here and many of these faces—Tony Benn, George Galloway and many others, were here in this square were here again and again to demand an end to Apartheid, demand justice for black South Africans. And that was crushed in just over four decades.
The Palestinians continue to suffer now into a seventh decade of oppression and near-slavery.
What we see in Gaza is a ghetto. A ghetto in which people cannot achieve their potential. A ghetto in which death rains down. This is obscene.
And if it was any other conflict, world leaders would be queueing up to denounce it.
But there’s a double standard at work. And that double standard is wrong.
I heard Gordon Brown denounce Apartheid year by year by year.
I want him to denounce the oppression of the Palestinian people. I want our government to say, “If you behave like savages, we will not send an Ambassador to Israel. We shall be withdrawing our Ambassador. We shall be convening a meeting of European Union leaders to say, “Why should we tolerate the importation of goods grown on stolen land, whilst the people dispossessed from that land look on from the camps where they’ve been incarcerated for over sixty years. “”
In the same way that Apartheid was doomed to fail, the attempt to deny the Palestinian people their right will fail as well, because it’s an injustice that screams out to be rectified.
And although so many world leaders seem to be frightened to condemn the Israeli government, when I did my radio programme this morning, the calls supporting Palestine as opposed to Israel were three or four to one in favour of justice for the Palestinian people.
Here in this square, that is London’s central square, know this: that Londoners by a vast majority want to see an end to the oppression of Palestinian people. They want to see justice for Palestine. This city recognises that.
I think we need to say, we will not tolerate year by year of this oppression.
Don’t complain when young men launch their rockets, when that’s all you’ve left them the right to do.
One of the most revealing aspects of the dishonesty of Livingstone's performance becomes apparent if you look at his body language on Tuesday's meeting. His whole LJF performance comes across as that of a bored machine politician. There's no passion in his voice. Look at his body language. His facial expressions are bland, but his hand gestures are dismissive, constantly flipping and brushing away. He sits as part of a solid phalanx behind the tables, like a man who's most at ease behind the platform barrier of an old-style party machine.
Contrast that to the obvious passion in his facial expressions and his voice when he's ranting on in Trafalgar Square with his real political convictions about the Israeli government as the equivalent of the South African Apartheid regime and the supposed enslavers in camps and ghettos of the Palestinians for the last sixty years.
And here's another contrast-- a clip of Boris Johnson answering questions at the equivalent London Jewish Forum meeting just a week earlier. Boris chooses to stand and engage with the audience. His hand gestures reach out towards the audience, and his facial expressions show him relishing spontaneously knocking his own official and a fellow Tory London politician--"the Councillor from Barnet" as well as enjoying some opportunities to make jokes at Livingstone's expense.
Livingstone has rightly said that the Mayoral contest isn't about electing a chat show host. But it is about electing a Mayor who seems genuinely interested and engaged in interacting with people outside the party machine, who responds with more than just the entirely predictable line, and who seems ready to acknowledge their own shortcomings and say openly when their own administration isn't serving the voters well enough.
Make your own judgement between these two candidates as to who's more engaged and responsive to the what the Jewish community says it's concerned about, and who's more concerned to explain to that community why their perceptions are mistaken and their concerns about anti-semitism and hate preachers aren't worth worrying about. And consider also whether the way the meeting with Livingstone was conducted really enabled Jewish Londoners to press Livingstone and get real answers to his attitudes to hate preachers and taking their concerns seriously.
By the way, there's one thing that both the London Jewish Forum and the Jewish Leadership Council deserve huge credit and applause for. That's the quality of the spreads they provided for both the breakfast meeting with Boris Johnson and the meeting with Ken Livingstone. I don't know which kosher caterer they hired, but the food was good enough to have been served at an upscale wedding reception. And perhaps it's only at a Jewish community event that a free spread of that quality would be served in abundance for all comers.
In the summer of 2009, Ken Livingstone was pitching to be selected as Labour's candidate for London's 2012 Mayoral election. It was very helpful to reinvigorating his then has-been public profile that he was invited to guest-edit the September 21st issue of the New Statesman, the UK's leading left-wing weekly. No such opportunity was given to his main opponent for the candidacy, Oona King, a Blairite former MP who was defeated in Bethnal Greeen, a constituency with a high Muslim electorate by George Galloway of Respect in the 2005 General Election. Respect and Galloway targeted her support for the invasion of Iraq, in a campaign which repeatedly harped on her Jewish ancestry and sloganized Islamist themes of support for "resistance" against British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So haw did Livingstone choose to make use of the opportunity the New Statesman gave him?
He made it quite clear, as the clip above shows, that his aspiration is to make London an independent city-state, with himself as its direct ruler.
But surprisingly, he chose to make the centrepiece of the issue his staging of a trip to Bashar Assad's Damascus in which he interviewed Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations, the European Union and the UK. From the discussion in the clip above, it's clear that Livingstone wanted to make his interview part of his portfolio of reasons why he should be selected as London's Mayoral candidate.
As the analysis below shows, Livingstone's interview was little more than a prompt role, feeding questions for Meshaal to promote Hamas' efforts to sanitize itself and sell itself to the West as just an honest plain old liberation movement, the victim of unfair smears and distortions of its record and intentions.
It was a completely uncritical interview. Livingstone did not mount any serious challenge to any of Meshaal's obviously propagandist assertions, particularly those in which Meshaal presented Hamas as taking action purely in response to unprovoked Israeli aggression.
By way of introduction to the interview, Livingstone justified it as being intended to clarify that Hamas is quite different from Al Qaeda, and that his aim was to open up the route to dialogue with Hamas by the West. He described the situation as analogous to the UK's former refusal to negotiate with Gerry Adams and Martin O'Guinness of Sinn Fein, but he did not mention that such negotiations only took place after Sinn Fein renounced armed struggle and gave up on their core political aim of using terrorism to achieve a united Ireland. In passing, he equated the leaders of Sinn Fein at the height of their terrorist campaign with Benjamin Netanyahu, the elected Prime Minster of Israel. Here's what he wrote:
In the Middle East, peace can only be achieved through discussion between the elected representatives of both the Israelis and the Palestinians - and that means Hamas, which won a big majority in the last Palestinian parliamentary election, as well as Fatah. This does not mean that I agree with the views of Hamas, Fatah or the government of Israel. Far from it: I do not. For example, I think a number of passages in the original Hamas charter are unacceptable and should be repudiated. Many observers believe that this is also the view of some in Hamas.
Yet, for too many people, Hamas as an organisation remains opaque. What they know about it is derived from a hostile media; it has no face. Most would probably think its leader is some disturbed Osama Bin Laden figure. In fact, al-Qaeda's supporters in Gaza are so hostile to Hamas that they have declared war on it.
For these reasons, I thought it important to interview the de facto leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, who lives in exile in Syria. Not every issue is clear. But at the beginning of any peace process, what matters most is engagement. Dialogue is necessary to get to clarity and mutual understanding. Sinn Fein did not answer every question at the beginning and neither does Binyamin Netanyahu today. The answers from Meshal come at a time of heightened tensions and renewed death threats against him, adding to the permanent danger of assassination bids not only by the Israelis, but also al-Qaeda supporters in the region.
I hope this interview will help to make the case for the dialogue that is needed, which I believe is inevitable. It is simply a question of how much suffering there will be, on both sides, before we get there.
The UK Foreign Office, not noted for partisan support of Israel, saw it differently. Ivan Lewis, then a junior Foreign Office Minister in Gordon Brown's Labour government, made the following condemnatory statement immediately after the interview:
Foreign Office Minister, Ivan Lewis, has responded to Ken Livingstone's interview with Khaled Meshaal (Head of Hamas) in the New Statesman.
Ivan Lewis said:
"Ken Livingstone rightly earned praise for his strong and responsible leadership in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks on London.
It is therefore particularly regrettable that he learned the wrong lessons from history by handing a propaganda coup to the leader of a terrorist organisation.
Hamas has not only breached international law by firing rockets at civilian populations in Israel but continues to violate the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza".
Livingstone used to be a strong supporter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and regularly parroted its claim to be "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people".
Livingstone today is a consistent supporter of the terrorist proxy groups which are the clients of the Iranian regime, whilst being ready to condemn Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups which are the declared enemies of Iran in the struggle to lead Islamist terrorism. Hardly surprising for someone who fronted a programme series for Press TV. But it's not so often that we see him actively using an opportunity presented to him by the UK's respectable left, not to promote ideas for improving the lives of Londoners, but to soft-sell Hamas as not an Islamist terror organization dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel and to the pursuit of anti-semitic aims, but as just another nationalist liberation movement on the way to acceptance by the family of nations.
No doubt it was no coincidence that the Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece, Anas al-Takriti, promptly ran a linked propaganda piece in the Guardian on 21st September 2009, celebrating the interview and underlining the message that Hamas is no Islamist movement, but just the Palestinian national struggle against Israeli occupation, and that any impression to the contrary was just Israeli propaganda
The Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre published a detailed fisking of the interview on 23rd September 2009.
I'm reproducing their analysis below. Readers can form their own view of whether this is just more lying Israeli propaganda, or whether it shows why the UK Foreign Office chose to issue a statement condemning Livingstone's action as handing a propaganda coup to a terrorist leader.
There are plenty of people who consider Livingstone's position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict irrelevant to the role he would have as Mayor. While it's true that he has no specific powers on UK foreign policy, he is able to make appointments and stage events and even open overseas offices which propagandize and materially assist overseas regimes and political movements. This is effectively what he did in relation to the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela.
Livingstone in any case makes no bones of his desire to run London as an independent city state. In this New Statesman interview, he gives one example of how he is likely to go about doing that.
1. Khaled Mashaal, head of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, was recently (September 17, 2009) interviewed by Ken Livingstone for the New Statesman. The interview, laced with vicious anti-Israel propaganda, represented the Palestinians as the victims of Israeli oppression, and aimed at Western readers, it evaded clarification of Hamas’ extremist ideology. Khaled Mashaal called on the international community and the Arab world to exert pressure on Israel, expressed Hamas’ willingness to open up to the rest of the world and sought “to establish good relations and conduct constructive dialogue with all those concerned with Palestine.”
2. Ken Livingstone, who conducted the interview, is extremely left-wing and overwhelmingly biased against Israel. He was Mayor of London until 2008 and a Labor MP until he was expelled from the party in 2000. He prefaced the interview by saying that peace could only be achieved in the Middle East through Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, which he said meant dialogue with Hamas, claiming it represented the majority of Palestinians. His questions and the way he conducted the interview were clearly biased in favor of Hamas and made it easy for Khaled Mashaal to market his ideology and policies to British readers.
3. Throughout the interview Khaled Mashaal used the soft rhetoric familiar from his and other Hamas spokesmen’s interviews with the Western media. Hamas spokesmen express their willingness for a sovereign Palestinian state to be established within the 1967 borders and to cooperate with the international community, obscuring or concealing the movement’s ideology, which seek the destruction of the State of Israel and openly adopt the option of terrorism. When speaking to Palestinian audiences, Hamas spokesmen make their true positions clear, as was made evident three days after the interview.
4. The interview was criticized by the British Foreign Office. Ivan Lewis, Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, expressed regret at the line taken by Livingstone, saying that “[i]t is...particularly regrettable that he learned the wrong lessons from history by handing a propaganda coup to the leader of a terrorist organization” (British Foreign Office website, September 20, 2009).
The main points of the interview
5. The most telling questions were the following:
i) Why do you think Israel is still imposing the blockade on Gaza?
Livingstone blatantly exaggerated “the difficult humanitarian situation” in the Gaza Strip, claiming that it was being “blockaded” by Israel, and that the Gazans were trapped in the largest jail in history. He asked Khaled Mashaal what part the United States, the European Union, Britain, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority played in the “blockade,” and Mashaal answered that it never would have succeeded without the “collusion of regional and international powers.” For the blockade to be lifted, he said, international law and the basic rights of the Palestinians had to be respected, including the right to live with dignity and free from persecution. [Note: Khaled Mashaal asks for international law to be respected while heading a murderous terrorist organization which systematically violates international law by deliberately killing Israeli civilians and which does not hesitate to brutally attack the Gazan civilians who oppose its rule.]
Photos and reports from the Gaza Strip do not support Khaled Mashaal’s bleak descriptions.
ii) What are the ideology and goals of Hamas?
Khaled Mashaal represented the Palestinian people as victims of the “colonial project called Israel.” After a long description of Palestinian suffering, he said that Hamas was struggling to end of the “occupation” and restore “Palestinian rights,” including the “right” to return to their homes.
[Note: When speaking to their Palestinian target audiences, Hamas spokesmen make it clear that by “rights” they mean the establishment of a Palestinian state in all of Eretz Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.]
Livingstone asked if Khaled Mashaal was “committed to the destruction of Israel.” Instead of answering a direct question, he said that “What is really happening is the destruction of the Palestinian people by Israel; it is the one that occupies our land and exiles us, kills us,... We are the victims, Israel is the oppressor, and not vice versa.”
He claimed that the issue of recognition of Israel was an excuse, because Israel refused to recognize the “rights of the Palestinians,” who were the victims of Israeli “oppression.” iii) Why does Hamas support military force in this conflict? Khaled Mashaal referred to military force as the “option” used by the Palestinian people because “nothing else works.”
[Note: At no point in the interview did either Livingstone or Mashaal make it clear that by “military force” they meant lethal, indiscriminate terrorist attacks including rocket fire and suicide bombing attacks targeting Israeli civilians. However, the word “terrorism” was never mentioned by either Livingstone or Mashaal.]
He claimed that the Palestinians preferred to resolve the conflict with Israel through peaceful means. He claimed that if the “occupation” were to end and the Palestinians were able to “exercise self-determination” in their “homeland,” there would be no further need for the use of force.
[Note: That is, if Israel were to evaporate of its own free will, as Mashaal demands, there would be no need to employ “military force,” i.e., terrorist attacks, against it...]
Mashaal added that the nearly 20 years of peaceful negotiations had not restored “Palestinian rights.”
[Note: He was careful not to mention that the “peaceful negotiations” were accompanied by mass-casualty suicide bombing attacks in the major cities of Israel. The objective of the attacks, led by Hamas, was to sabotage any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement by killing as many Israeli civilians as possible.]
iv) Do you wish to establish an Islamic state in Palestine in which all other religions are subordinate?
Mashaal said that Hamas was a “national liberation movement” which saw no conflict between Islamic identity and its political mission. He claimed that Hamas’ first priority was to end the “Israeli occupation” of the Palestinian homeland [i.e., to destroy Israel] and only then would the Palestinian people define what type of government the future Palestinian state would have.
In a statement clearly intended to please Western audiences, he said that Hamas did not believe Islam could be imposed on people, but that Hamas would campaign, in “a fully democratic process,” for “an Islamic agenda.”
[Note: Representing Hamas, which has enforced a totalitarian regime on the Gazans, as planning to employ the democratic process, is an absurd fabrication meant to mislead the Western target audience. The nature of the Hamas-style “democratic process” is all too evident to the residents of the Gaza Strip, who are personally experiencing Hamas’ imposition of Islamization on all facets of their lives.]
v) Was Operation Cast Lead (“the bombing and invasion of Gaza,” according to Livingstone) the [Israeli] response to repeated breaking of the ceasefire by Hamas and the firing of rockets into southern Israel?
Khaled Mashaal claimed that Hamas “fully abided by the ceasefire” between June and December 2008, while Israel only partially observed it by not fully opening the crossings. He also claimed that toward the end of the ceasefire Israel “resumed hostilities.”
[Note: A deliberately incorrect representation of the facts. During the six months of the Hamas so-called “lull in the fighting” the terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip fired 223 rockets and 139 mortar shells into Israeli territory, most of them during the last six weeks. The lull arrangement, which was systematically violated by the Palestinian terrorist organizations, expired with the announcement made by Hamas and the other terrorist organizations that it would formally expire on December 19, 2008. Once the announcement had been made, Hamas and the other organizations began a series of rocket attacks against Israel which peaked on December 24, when 60 rockets and mortar shells were fired, most of them by Hamas, at the Israeli cities of Sderot, Ashqelon and Netivot, and other towns and villages in Israel’s western Negev. On December 24 the Palestinians opened fire, and not for the first time, at the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings, through which supplies flowed from Israel into the Gaza Strip.
[Note: Those important crossings between Israel and Gaza Strip have always been a preferred target for Hamas and the other toes.] In addition, Khaled Mashaal made no mention – and Ken Livingstone was careful not to pressure him– about the ongoing rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip which disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians in the south between 2000 and 2009, the basic cause underlying Operation Cast Lead.]
vi) Does Hamas have a “road map” for a peaceful settlement?
In October 2007, the Evening Standard published a list of the 25 most influential people running London.[1] Livingstone headed the list which contained the names of 13 other individuals who worked directly or indirectly for the mayor, four of the people on the list were Livingstone's closest mayoral advisory they have also been members of a tiny Trotskyist party which has worked closely and discreetly with Ken Livingstone for more than 20 years.
Socialist Action is an organisation so discreet and secretive that it does not even admit its own existence and its members will not confirm they have ever belonged to the group. When I interviewed Ken Livingstone about Socialist Action for this book, he pressed me for evidence at first, before acknowledging its existence and the importance of the role played by those who had been associated with it . It has a website and it has a printing press and those who have been associated with it have enjoyed great influence over London.
By my calculation, at least five of the mayor's advisors are or have been members of Socialist Action, and there are several others who do work for the mayor or organisations with which he is associated. In 2007 they includedthen : Simon Fletcher, the mayor's chief of staff; John Ross, then Greater, then director of economics and business for the Greater London Authority (GLA); Redmond O'Neill, then GLA director of public affairs and transport (he subsequently died); Mark Watts, GLA climate change advisor; and Jude Woodward, senior policy advisor.
Others have included Atma Singh, the former advisor on Muslim issues and Professor Alan Freeman, who became prominent in the Unison branch at City Hall, and also runs the Venezuelan Information Centre - a propaganda organisation of which Ken Livingstone is president. The concentration of power by Socialist Action is the more astonishing when according to Ken Livingstone, it has probably had no more than 120 members in the last decade.[2]
On the face of it, Livingstone appears to have drawn much of his political talent from a comparatively small political gene pool. Livingstone's close association with Socialist Action is an integral part or his story. Under his patronage, the group has become probably the most successful and influential revolutionary Marxist organization in Britain. Socialist Action has long been Livingstone's guiding light, his foot soldiers, his mentors, and his political family.
It is clear that from 1985, Socialist Action set out to make itself indispensable to Ken Livingstone and to seek control, or 'hegemony' over the forces and groups making up the Labour Left. It has proved phenomenally successful. Socialist Action has made remarkable attempts to cover its tracks and even disappear altogether as an organisation, as part of the deep entryist policy adopted in the mid 1980s to protect members from any potential Militant-style purge. In part it has derived its power over the years from its secrecy and its deniability.
As far back as 1983, the group resolved to disappear from public consciousness, or as one internal document put it at the time, to bring about 'the dissolution of the public lace'.[3] Leading members of Socialist Action are unquestionably talented and highly able but they blundered in thinking they could make their organisation invisible because they have left a paper trail a mile wide. .....
John Ross was at the forefront of the internal struggle to ditch the industrial strategy and get all IMG members to join the Labour Party en masse and then seek to control the Left bloc within it. Supporting Ross was another key figure in Livingstone's political career, Redmond O'Neill. At the December 1982 conference, Ross carried the day and over the next few months IMG members joined the Labour Party. A minority who disagreed with the policy of 'deep eritryism' split away and formed its own party, the International Group which became a political irrelevance.
Despite becoming Labour members, the Ross majority still remained organised as a separate political organization. They decided to rebrand themselves as the Socialist League, and to establish a newspaper called Socialist Action. Like Militant, the group became known by the name of their paper rather than as the Socialist League. 'The.next steps towards a revolutionary party comprise a fight for a class struggle within the Bennite current,' said one discussion paper at the time. 'For this a new newspaper is necessary - one that is seen as the voice of revolutionary socialists within the Labour Party and which can thereby give political expressions to the mass struggles of workers and youth who in the next period will seek overall political answers within the Labour Party. '…
Socialist Action will fight for leadership within the Bennite Current.'[12]
The Socialist League/Socialist Action met for the first time as a central committee at the Intensive English School in Star Street near Marble Arch for the start of a two-day conference on Saturday, 22 January 1983. The official launch of Socialist Action took place the following morning[13] and it first appeared on 16 March. The group's old paper, Socialist Challenge, ceased to exist.[14] The group's overall revolutionary objective did not change, only the strategy to bring it about, as an internal document in January 1983 made clear: '...
Socialist Action believes that it will be impossible to make the transition to socialism without incurring the armed resistance of the ruling class and thereby the necessity for violent self-defence by the working class.'[15] From the outset, Ken Livingstone was clearly an important force within the 'Bennite current' for Socialist Action. John Ross and comrades identified two Bennite wings: the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, a left-wing coalition within the Labour Party comprising Chartists from Briefing, and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, CLPD. Socialist Action identified the second wing 'crystallising around forces such as the Campaign Group of MPs, Livingstone, the left of Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (LCND)... and the constituency left...'[16] Its slogans were now: 'Deeper into the Labour Party!', 'Deeper into the trade unions!', 'For a new newspaper!',[17] 'Defend socialist policies!', 'Stop the witch-hunt!', 'Remove the right-wing Labour leaders!'[18]
In September 1983, Socialist Action took the decision to disappear from public view. This meant closing down the Other Bookshop and taking extreme security measures to guarantee invisibility and deniability. Two months after the decision, Socialist Action's leadership drew up a document entitled The dissolution of the public face'. It said: 'This is a historical fact - namely that the public face dissolved itself. This requires no public announcement but all bodies of the [Trotskyist] world movement must be informed and act accordingly.'[23] Some members disagreed with the decision; one wrote: 'The September meeting took a momentous decision. It voted 23 for and one against to formally dissolve our public organisation. The decision was taken on the basis of a false prognosis: that following the Labour Party conference there will be an immediate witch-hunt of our supporters within the mass organisation.'[24]
Although the purge stopped at Militant, no one at Socialist Action was taking any chances. The paranoia was evident in a Socialist Action document marked 'top secret', and called 'Practical implementation of the new security measures in the centre'.[25] The note warned that Socialist Action had to be on its guard against any unexpected visits from the media, and that 'any undesirable material should be kept out of sight'. In addition the print shop must be just a print shop and the bookshop just a bookshop,' it added. There had to be checks on anyone entering both buildings. 'This is important,' continued the note cryptically, 'because these areas have outside visitors, although some the most sensitive visitors at present (i.e. GLC) come UPSTAIRS frequently.'[26] (← p. 261)
One big problem was the post office box number used Socialist Action, it was the same box number as for the bookshop, the newspaper and its youth wing, later called Youth Action: P.O. Box 50, London N1 2XP. 'We cannot continue with sending everything out with the same box number,' according to the security document. 'Moreover, the box number is in the name of an organization.' Comrades were instructed to consider security even when writing memos and other documents: 'It is possible to write them so they appear to those not in the know that they do not necessarily originate from an organization - i.e. writing in the third person, using more of a commentary style etc… If documents are written with security in mind, there should not be so many problems.'[27] It also meant being extra careful about what was thrown out: 'We have a real problem in that we have no idea what happens our rubbish when it is taken away by the bin persons… 'The only solution is to make the rubbish safe before it is takers a way which means we have to get a shredder.' [28]
A new cleaning rota was instituted; leading figures, in Socialist Action, including John Ross and Redmond O'Neill, took it in turns to clean HQ. [29] Leading members now started using pseudonyms: Redmond O'Neill was 'Lark', Jude Woodward was 'Lee', while another member, Ann Kane, was 'Swift' [30] Alma Singh, who was 'Chan' says, 'The reason was secrecy so as not to let people outside know who was doing what' [31] After the closure of the bookshop, members met in rooms above pubs in the local Hackney/Islington area, namely, Cedar Room pub in Islington, the Cock Tavern in Mare Street, the Lucas Arms in Grays Inn Road and Tylor's in Shacklewell Lane near the print shop. The witch-hunters did not come for Socialist Action, but secrecy and security became second nature to the group over the next quarter of a century.
During the mid to late 1980s, the group did successfully ingratiate itself with the Labour Left, For a fee, Socialist Action put its printing press at the disposal of many left-wing groups, including the CLPD and the Socialist Campaign Group for MPs. [32] At one stage, Socialist Action was losing an average of £762 a week and the press was vital for earning extra income. [33] It experienced money anxieties throughout the 1980s. .....
Trotskyist parties always inflate their membership numbers with their sense of self-importance but by the mid 1980s;.it is clear that about 500 people belonged to Socialist Action. This is made obvious in an internal document which stressed the importance of selling 4,000 copies of Socialist Action a week: 'This means an average of eight per comrade.'[34]
Later, Socialist Action members would be encouraged lo give 10 per cent of their pay to the party.' [35] Its members acquired a reputation for being intelligent, hard-working and even subservient to powerful left-wing figures, which meant they were often despised by other voices on the far left. Gerry Healy's News Line was one: 'This is how they [Socialist Action] see themselves: the chosen few, the brains trust, the-intellectual elite, the bright people with all the smart answers who are just waiting for the poor old working class to catch up. [36]
Certainly, Socialist Action considered Ken Livingstone to |be influential and clearly took time to cultivate him. In a rather convoluted reference to Livingstone's importance, one paper from John Ross showed that 'an intelligent reformism of the Livingstone type can incorporate elements of support for the oppressed. Socialist Action of course welcomes such support. But it does not represent intelligent reformism as the answer to Kinnock.' [37] Livingstone remembers being paid a visit by John Ross shortly after his falling out with the Chartists and the others on the far left over rate capping. 'He was the first in to say this was a temporary setback,' remembers Livingstone. Ross grew in importance, particularly after Livingstone became an MP. He had always felt vulnerable dealing with balance sheets, finance and economics,'[38] as Reg Race had observed at the GLC.[39] With a first class economics degree from Oxford, Ross proved to be a valuable teacher for Livingstone, who says; 'When I became an MP I employed John Ross to teach me economies, basically to be my economics advisor, and he'd turn up three times a week and we'd go through what was happening in the British economy and the world economy. He'd explain the theories behind it. This went on for two years.
And after about 18 months to two years we were asked to do a debate at a fringe meeting about the way forward and we went through it and I knew I was on top of the brief.' [40] By 1985, according to Atma Singh, a former long-term member of Socialist Action, Livingstone was possibly the most important figure on the Left; the group considered both Arthur Scargill and Tony Benn to be spent forces. 'They supported Ken Livingstone to make him as powerful as possible,' says Singh. 'Socialist Action understood that what they were after was some political power. If they couldn't see a way of getting political power, they just wanted to be the most powerful; the term they used was [to achieve] "hegemony over the Left". So they wanted to be the main group to dictate what was going on in the Left.' [41]
Socialist Action became increasingly powerful on the left of the Labour Party. Members of the group were elected to important positions in key left-wing bodies and campaigns, including CLPD, Labour CND and various student bodies, including its own, Youth Action. Socialist Action stood for many of the same issues as Livingstone: equality regardless of race, gender and class, troops out of Ireland; unilateral disarmament. It was for the miners and the Greenham Common Women, Fidel Castro and so on, and against Kinnock and his witch-hunt and pretty well everything else for which be stood.
Atma Singh says that Socialist Action was 'instrumental' in getting Livingstone elected on to the NEC in 1987 and 1988. [42] ..... Wadsworth claims that Ken Livingstone and Socialist Action now colluded to get rid of him because he would not do what they wanted, 'Socialist Action thought they could impose decisions on me including how we focused on the Stephen Lawrence campaign,' says Wadsworth. 'When I refused to go along with that they said, OK we're going to get rid of you.'
Through late 1993 and early 1994, the ARA deteriorated rapidly. A former Socialist Action member of the ARA insists Wadsworth's strategy was wrong, both in terms of the Lawrence campaign and towards the BNP by-election victory in the East End: "The correct response was to have a demo in the East End and Marc didn't want to do that so he was increasingly separating himself out from the most important issues that were going on in racism in order to pursue his own things.' [58] On 17 March 1994, Livingstone chaired a meeting of the ARA executive. [59] During the four-hour 'rowdy meeting' in a House of Commons office, Wadsworth threw a punch at Livingstone. He says: 'It was at one of these crazy meetings where he was making these rulings and telling me to shut up that I launched at him. I didn't actually hit him. I hit his hand. I was going to hit him. This had gone on for months and he treated me like a boy sitting next to him.' [60]
At another meeting, on 30 March 1994, Livingstone and the Socialist Action contingent failed by only one vote to persuade the executive to dismiss Wadsworth on grounds of professional misconduct. [61] The infighting continued for another six months as Livingstone and Socialist Action attempted to wrest control from Wadsworth.
On 23 September 1994, the Anti-Racist Alliance issued the foil towing statement: 'Ken Livingstone, supported by a faction called Socialist Action and a handful of unprincipled and unrepresentative members of the executive committee, has been waging relentless campaign to sack the national secretary. This behaviour is undemocratic and has led to unnecessary divisions in the ARA which the chair has made even worse by his repealed attacks on national office staff.' [62] (← p. 268) 'When they come for you they are incessant and they are like pit bulls,' Wadsworth says of Socialist Action. 'It's just incessant obsessive politicking.' On 30 September 1994, Livingstone went to the High Court to determine voting rights for the delegates to the ARA's forthcoming annual meeting and an out-of-court settlement was reached. At the meeting on 15 October 1994, both Livingstone and Wadsworth stepped down; Wadsworth gave way to Kumar Murshid, a future Livingstone mayoral advisor on race but not a member of Socialist Action. Murshid walked away from the job after turning up at the ARA offices to find that Wadsworth had changed the locks. ARA co
llapsed rapidly after unions including the Transport and General Workers Union withdrew support. By February 1995, the National Assembly Against Racism, or NAAR, had been established largely by Socialist Action members, namely Redmond O'Neill, Jude Woodward and Anne Kane. [63]
Former member Atma Singh says that Socialist Action was so used to splits and sectarianism that 'breaking one organisation and creating a new one is nothing dramatic for them'. [
64] Lee Jasper, who became Livingstone's senior mayoral policy advisor on equalities, was its first secretary. He had also been one of the few non-Socialist Action opponents of Wadsworth on the ARA. In 2007, the NAAR was one of Britain's biggest anti-racism groups with several subsidiary organisations, all supported strongly by then-Mayor Livingstone. Members of Socialist Action would continue to work closely with Livingstone throughout the 1990s. But they would come into their own when Livingstone became the first directly-elected mayor of London.
When I was first approached about the project I still believed Livingstone was an essentially benign figure. Like many on the left, I had been shocked when he extended the hand of friendship to the radical Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an ideologue of the extreme religious right. But I assumed this could be explained by a combination of the Mayor's ignorance of the politics of the Muslim world and a characteristic desire to shock conventional opinion.
In fact, it was a self-defeating act of political grandstanding that fatally undermined his claims to be a progressive politician. Pictures of the Mayor standing next to a man who has supported female circumcision, the execution of homosexuals and the killing of innocent civilians by suicide bombers will haunt him forever.
The more work I did on the Mayor's office and its only incumbent, the more I realised there were serious problems with the way the institution was being run. Many of these lay with the institution of Mayor itself, which was designed to be run as a personal fiefdom. But there was more to it than that: Livingstone's personal style and his tendency to surround himself with cronies from the revolutionary left on six-figure salaries meant that, in many ways, he was the very worst person to leave with such untrammelled power.
Livingstone once told me at a lunch for the City business leaders he has learned to love that he surrounded himself with people he could trust with his life and that Gordon Brown should do the same.
This is an understandable strategy for a politician with as many enemies as Livingstone. But, as Hosken explains in scrupulous detail, many of these people emerged from one tiny Trotskyite splinter group, Socialist Action. The leader of this group, John Ross, was the Mayor's chief adviser on economics who prepared himself for helping run London by working in Moscow for most of the 1990s. He returned in 2000 to join up with his deputy, Redmond O'Neill, who had been running the faction in his absence. O'Neill now advises the Mayor on transport and Islamic issues. Each is paid more than £100,000 a year. Other SA advisers included Livingstone's de facto deputy in City Hall, Simon Fletcher, and his race adviser, Atma Singh, who was purged after he objected to the cabal's dalliances with radical Islam.
As Hosken explains, Singh has since revealed that this deranged group was still planning a 'bourgeois democratic revolution' for London when Livingstone first came to power in 2000. They believed they could set up a city state, independent from the rest of the country.
In extraordinary comments, he told the Standard he will use “amazing charm and subtlety” to get New York-style independence for the capital. Mr Livingstone, 66, added: “I would actually declare independence and run the whole city. They can’t even run hospitals in London. Everything government does in London it gets wrong. If you look at the city of New York, the mayor runs the benefits system, some of the prisons even, and the healthcare and schools. “I’ve watched all my life, irrespective of which government... ministers trying to run hospitals from Whitehall. It’s just too big, too complicated. I’m in favour of devolving everything — not just in London. I think you should have strong regions as well.” The former Mayor added: “I would always say, to this government and also the next Labour government of Ed Miliband, devolve more down. I’d like to take over our NHS immediately. I would like to take over a major house-building programme, I’d like to run the benefits system.”
I think Tony Blair was the best PM this country has had in the last 50 years, and I certainly won’t be voting for the Tory candidate for the London Assembly for my area, the repulsive, arrogant Brian Coleman, so I’m not a tribalist Tory, or indeed any other sort of Tory. The vast majority of votes I’ve cast since I was 21 have been for Labour candidates. But I won’t be voting for for anyone endorsing Livingstone.
I voted for Boris Johnson in 2008 and here are the things I think he’s achieved that have made a big difference to me:
No Council Tax rises for the whole-London part for the whole 4 years he’s been Mayor. Under Livingstone, they rose every single year by socking amounts. And as my work pension is around £1,000 a month, that’s made a big difference.
No Congestion Charge imposed on West London, which Livingstone was set to do. That would have cost me £8 or now £10 every time I visited my mother (who had advanced dementia)– and on my income it would have made a difference.
Drinking abolished on Tubes and buses by Boris as one of the first things he did after being elected. As an older woman, I find drunken louts particularly repulsive and intimidating, and especially so in the confined area of a Tube carriage. I’ve really noticed the difference that’s made.
Extension of the bus pass to being able to travel on it even first thing in the day. As I most usually use mine to get to exhibitions and galleries when they first open and so avoid long queues, that’s hugely added to my ability to afford more of the blockbusters.
Ending of the stream of Jew-baiting and divisive gesture politics which Livingstone ran throughout his time as Mayor, including branding the Board of Deputies of British Jews as an arm of Mossad, the insults to the Jewish reporter, the hugging and kissing of Qaradawi who strongly supports suicide bombing of my family members in Israel, moderate wife beating of Muslim wives and the murder of gays everywhere. Ending of the need to endure Livingstone’s stream of defiance, faux-naive “he’s never said anything homophobic to me”, out-and-out lies and equivocation around his defence of such outrages till they’ve come right back onto almost daily prominence because of his candidacy.
Ending of wasting of our Council Tax money on gesture-politics festivals and events which enabled Livingstone to pour money into the maws of far left and Islamist groups and their shills in the name of promoting cultural diversity and equality. That includes the total waste of money on an event called “Simchah on the Square”, supposedly a celebration of Jewish culture which the Jewish community never asked for and which was not a “simchah” in any real sense of the word.
Ending of wasting of our money on such matters as: totally futile legal challenges to the Labour government, of which Livingstone still boasts; the notorious freesheet distributed to every London home, boasting of his achievements and the relentless “cult of personality” branding of his mug on almost every poster and visual produced by the Mayor’s office.
Ending of the use of our tax money to pay huge unwarranted sums to give jobs and huge payoffs to his Trotskyist cronies in Socialist Action and other far left and “community activists”whose main talents consisted of their tendency to dish out still more of our money out to their buddies whilst making loudmouth statements about their speaking for the black and ethnic minority communities of London. Lee Jasper was just the tip of the iceberg. Livingstone’s chief of staff in his campaign is Simon Fletcher of Socialist Action, so it’s clear enough what will follow if Livingstone gets elected, except that this time, he’ll be supporting the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime instead of the black radicals of Brixton.
Boris showed he had the guts and determination to get rid of Sir Paul Stephenson as head of the Met, hardly the action of a bumbling buffoon. It’s early days yet, but I think Hogan-Howe may make a difference. Including to the elimination of bribery and racism in the Met.
So I’m certainly voting for Boris Johnson when my postal vote arrives.
Turns out I spent most of today unknowingly queueing alongside the idiotic attention seeker anarchist who threw a shaving foam custard pie at Rupert Murdoch in this afternoon's Parliamentary Select Committee hearing.
He calls himself Johnnie Marbles, though he's clearly lost his. His real name is something rather posher--Jonathan May-Bowles. It seems he's both an anarchist and a peddler of small-time attention-seeking art and comedy stunts which reveal all too little talent at either. He was one of The Guardian's Top Ten Plinthers rated for their act on the Fourth Plinth "One and Other" project of Antony Gormley. His performance consisted of reading out texts of their secrets sent him by the audience. What on earth must the not so Top Plinthers have been like? Great Art, oh, yes.....
Funnily enough,The Guardian's write up on him this evening doesn't mention his being on their list of Top Plinthers. How odd. But it does tell us that he's a founder member of UKUncut, which is issuing vigorous denials that they had any foreknowledge of his stunt, although they seem to know he pulled another stunt incident in a BHS store and got into the Fortnum and Mason invasion.
I first learnt what great political theatre Select Committees can be years ago-- I used to go and hear Sir Keith Joseph being done over by the Education Select Committee when he was Minister for Education in the seventies. And I recently went to one of the best in the new Parliament-- Hague, Liam Fox, Oliver Letwin, Andrew WhatisisName i/c Overseas Aid being questioned by the Foreign Affairs SC, where we learnt that the new Defence Strategy consists of tiny forces barely able to cope with their existing commitments, so our overseas influence is now to be built by lots of overseas trips making friends and informal alliances with groups and countries we used to ignore or keep at arm's length. Like the Arab League and Bahrein.
So I decided that today's hearing by the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, calling Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, might just be worth an enormously long wait, hopefully on the nice green benches outside the Committee Room in Portcullis House, whilst I got on with some paperwork or reading. I got there at around 9:25, was pointed to a queue outside Portcullis House of about thirty people and found myself behind four rather alternativey looking people-two youngish couples- with a tall very smartly dressed ginger-headed man, neat trench coat and leather satchel, who seemed to be in some sort of organizational role in relation to them.
I got into small talk with them and said I'd go and see if it was possible to sit and queue inside. "If I'm not back in twenty minutes, you'll know you can queue inside-- and will you keep my place?". And Mr Ginger talked about needing to ensure that he designated one of them to queue for him. Well, it didn't work-- they weren't letting anyone queue inside (which they usually do), but soon enough the amiable Mr Ginger turned up, tried to reinforce my request to include himself, but we ended going back to the queue, where he briefed his friends and disappeared.
So in front of me through the four hour wait on the pavement outside Portcullis House were Jonathan May-Bowles (though I didn't know his or any of their names till after the event, his girl friend (that's her in the picture above, a stereotypical anarchist-looking guy, with a Tolstoyan hair and beard-- all very amiable. We exchanged bits of chit chat from time to time. Mr Ginger appeared some hours later and waved aimiably from the other side of the press queue, but he didn't rejoin us.
They let just over 30 of us into the Select Committee Hearing room, all seated on the wooden bench at the back. The security was the usual letting us into Portcullis House. Bags put through an airport type scanner. Photos taken and an electronic arch to go through. And until May-Bowles pulled his stunt, I'd never have guessed.
Reading the online reports and the tweets after we got turned out of the hearing, they don't really convey how very poorly Rupert Murdoch performed. Long, long pauses almost every time he was asked a question. Sometimes had no idea what to say. More than once I had the strong impression he'd forgotten the sentence he'd started saying. Banging the table as he spoke was weirdly out of synch with the relatively anodyne things he was saying. He often said he didn't remember, and I didn't get the impression from his tone of voice that he was covering up. I remembered his television interview clip last week when they asked him what his priority was now he'd arrived in England to sort the News International mess. "This one", he said, putting his arm round Rebekah Brooks' shoulders. It seems to me quite likely that he couldn't remember her name at that moment. James Murdoch repeatedly butted in to try to answer for him, but was batted away by the Committee members.
If I were a News Corp shareholder (a laughable concept, but still..) I'd be calling for Rupert Murdoch to have to undergo a brain scan and in depth neurological report. Seriously. I've been around dementia and mental impairment sufferers long enough to recognise the very early stages of permanent cognitive decline when I see them. I'm gobsmacked to think of him playing such a key role in a global corporation. Tellingly, he did mention that his underlings often tell him he's talking rubbish when he tries to give them ideas.
And James Murdoch? He came across like a typical organizational suit, full of the usual obfuscation and evasiveness I'm regularly encountering in my current dealings with NHS PCT bureaucrats. Paul Waugh tweeted one of his prize lines of organizational gobbledygook:
There are thresholds of materiality where something has to be moved upstream.
This was one of the few times when Rupert outstripped his son, in this case by translating the verbiage into plain English:
Anything seen as a crisis comes to me.
So this pair are supposed to be the Evil Empire, controlling the politicians and institutions of the UK? On the basis of this performance, utterly laughable. One of the few worthwhile and revealing answers from Murdoch Senior was when he responded to a rolling dramatic question about how come he'd entered 10 Downing Street via the back door when he visited Cameron after the election: "Because I was asked to. I did what I was told." And in passing he managed to list the many times he'd visited Blair and Brown and talked about Brown's and his kids playing together. And pointed out that it was people like Blair, Brown and Cameron who travelled across continents to see him at their request, not his.
But I never got to see the end of the questioning, including Louise Mensch's questions, because that's when Mr Attention Seeker Prat Jonathan May-Bowles threw his pie stunt. I must say it was startling (but not surprising) to see Wendi Deng, Murdoch's grim-looking wife, springing furiously into action, socking him and covering him with his own shaving foam. I looked back at May-Bowles' girl friend. She was sitting quietly watching, keeping her head down, so to speak. A girl, supposedly his ex girl friend, has tweeted to say she's dumped him because of the attack. All I can say is the very pleasant and affectionate girl friend he spent the day with didn't look at all shocked or surprised. She just seemed to want to avoid drawing attention to herself. The friendly Mr Tolstoyan Beard was already being held. I told the policeman steering us out that the girlfriend had been with May-Bowles all day, and they pulled her back. I also tried to tell one policeman after another that I'd spent the day sitting alongside them, that there was a group of four of them, and another, smartly dressed man who appeared to have been involved with them and organizing them, but they weren't interested. Just wanted us all out.
I told Nick Robinson. I told Nick Davies. I told as many of the other journos I could see what I knew. You should tell the police, they said. But they don't want to know, I said. I went back and had another try. No dice. The police just wanted the public out of the area. I went into the room where the journos where being allowed to wait to re-enter the meeting-- the public were excluded after the attack.
And there was Mr Ginger, who hadn't been in the Select Committee Hearing. I pointed him out to a couple of the journos I told the story to. Too busy. And then I went home.
Thanks to Mr Attention Seeking Prat May-Bowles, it'll probably mean fewer chances for the public to get into hearings like today's. And he's even managed to get sympathy for Rupert Murdoch, who may deserve some concerned focus on his health and fitness, but not for becoming a victim of an attack.
But what sort of security is it that lets a man into one of the most open buildings of Parliament with shaving foam in his bag? That could have been caustic soda, paint stripper, poison, acid....The security apparatus is showy but totally ineffective because the contents of bags aren't searched properly. These people didn't get in through having insider help, they just queued to get in, same as I did. And I've no idea what exactly was Mr Ginger's role, but this was clearly no spontaneous attack
And as for the police turning away witnesses after an attack....Met Police, there's an email at the top of my blog if you want to contact me.
