Showing posts with label IDS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IDS. Show all posts

10 July 2018

Sam Matthews, Labour’s Witch-finder General has found a new victim – disabled member Marianne Tellier

Marianne's offence? Comparing the Tories policy towards the disabled under Ian Duncan Smith with the Nazis



Letter from Sam Matthews suspending Marianne Tellier

Page 1 of Solicitor's letter to Sam Matthews
On 29th March 2018 Sam Matthews, whose title is Head of Disputes, wrote to Marianne Tellier, an autistic member of the Labour Party, to inform her that she was administratively suspended.  This is the same Matthews who suspended Carl Sergeant, a Labour Minister in the Welsh Government.  Shortly after being suspended, having been given no reason for his suspension despite a letter from his solicitors, Carl Sergeant took his own life.  Given the callous way that Matthews has treated victims of Labour’s witchhunt it is difficult to understand why he has not been suspended for gross misconduct.
Was IDS antisemitic for saying Work Makes You Free?
It is part of the atmosphere of fear and the intolerance of political debate in the Labour Party, to say nothing of the chilling effect of the false allegations of anti-Semitism, that any mention of the Nazis immediately brings accusations of anti-Semitism.  Especially if the person concerned is a supporter of the Palestinians.
Disability campaigner
When I grew up it was common amongst claimants to call the DHSS (Department Health & Social Security) as the DWP was then, the SS.  We didn’t literally mean that those who ran Britain’s social security system were Nazis but that their attitude to the unemployed bore a similarity to fascist ideas of the work shy.
Likewise the students in Paris in May 1968 when they were confronting the riot police chanted CRS-SS.  No doubt Matthews and his fellow witch hunters consider that too was anti-Semitic!
Disabled People Against the Cuts regularly use the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei in their campaigns against the attacks on the disabled - to call this 'antisemitic' is a product of the Labour Party's parallel universe
The phrase that someone was a ‘little Hitler’ also used to be common.  It was part of an anti-fascist culture.  Today, with Zionists defining anti-racists as anti-Semites, such comparison are considered ‘anti-Semitic’.  This of course is from people who openly support a state where ethnic cleansing is official government policy.
Marianne committed the cardinal offence of comparing the policy of the DWP under the hated Ian Duncan Smith, to that of the Nazis’ with their slogan ‘work makes you free.’ She retweeted an image of the Job Centre Plus sign replaced by Arbeit Macht Frei. This  image is common amongst disability campaigning groups but is deemed ‘anti-Semitic’ by the political terrorists of the Jewish Labour Movement.
Marianne Tellier
Apart from anything else it would seem that Matthews and his fellow apparatchiks are also suffering from a sense of humour failure. They don’t seem to understand the power of irony or exaggeration when making a political point.  These humourless creatures, whose sole activity is monitoring what others say for any signs of deviance, forget that campaigning groups or political activists use all sorts of rhetorical devices when constructing an argument including analogies with the Nazis. Satire is something that is entirely beyond them.
At the entrance to Nazi concentration camps there was a sign Arbeit Macht Frei, (Work Makes You Free). The assumption of the tiny minds that run Labour’s witch-hunt is that any comparison of this slogan with anything today is anti-Semitic.  Thus the whole Nazi and fascist period is completely divorced from the circumstances in which it grew up.
Presumably Fawlty  Towers, Basil and Manuel would have been condemned as anti-Semitic for the phrase ‘Don’t mention the War.’ 
I visited Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the early 1990’s.  It was the second concentration camp after Dachau and opened in 1936. It is situated to the north of Berlin. It didn’t house Jewish prisoners primarily but socialists, communists and other political prisoners.  It housed Pastor Martin Niemöller of the Confessing Church.
In fact IDS did say, without a trace of irony, that ‘work makes you free.’ Far-Right US academic Laurence Mead, who IDS brought over to Britain to advise him on ‘reforming’ the benefits system complained of the allusion to the Nazis. Mead whined that.
"Hitler was non-democratic, whereas work requirements claim a popular mandate. There is something wrong when because of fascism we have to solve every problem with freedom and benefits."Does getting tough on the unemployed work?
In other words although Tory and New Labour attitudes to the unemployed are similar to those of the Nazis it is unfair to make a comparison since those who persecute the unemployed might take offence. There is nothing ‘democratic’ about those who make the unemployed a scapegoat.  Whipping up hatred is no more democratic than when Hitler did it.  The fact that the unemployed aren’t sent to concentration camps (although in America they can be sent to boot camps) is irrelevant.
What this nonsense is about is the fear of Israel’s supporters and Zionist groups that people will compare Israel’s practices to those of Nazi Germany. Matthews and Labour’s regional mafia run scared of any attempt to locate the Nazis in the context of society. This fear is part of the intellectual terrorism that Zionism has successfully engaged in.
I'm not sure whether this image is anti-semitic or not - it probably is since it is clear that disabled people tend to use Hitler comparisons
The ideas behind the Work Capability Assessment that New Labour introduced and IDS refined and its implementation by private firms like ATOS does indeed bear comparison to the Nazi treatment of the disabled.  Although the disabled were not exterminated as happened in the T-4 (Euthanasia campaign) the attitudes, that they are a burden are not dissimilar.  There is also no doubt that the policies of the DWP, presided over by IDS, led to the deaths of thousands of disabled people.  The stories of cancer victims and other severely ill people being labelled as fit for work are legion. See Thousands have died after being found fit for work, DWP figures show
IDS has a history of links to racist and fascist organisations. In 1995 he was happy to meet with senior figures in the French National Front at Westminster. Le Pen’s deputy, Bruno Gollnisch MEP, later said of IDS and other Tory MPs that they were “sympathetic” to their views:
IDS was once leader of the Tory Party before MPs removed him as a liability. The  vice-president of his campaign team in Wales was  Edgar Griffin    the father of BNP leader Nick Griffin. Edgar later said the reason he was not a member of the BNP was because it was “too moderate” for him.
The ex-deputy of the British Ku Klux Klan, Bill Binding – who later joined the Tories – was also a fan of IDS. see Iain Duncan Smith’s historic links to the  far-right
Marianne Tellier
Marianne is 57 years old and a carer for her 17 year old son who is autistic.  She is herself autistic.  In other words the ideal target for Sam Matthews and his bullying henchmen. Marianne was brought up on a council estate, went to my local comprehensive school.
She was always opposed to social injustice and any form of racism which is why she supports the Palestinian people. As she wrote ‘I'm certainly not anti-Semitic in any way.” But in the present atmosphere in the Labour Party anyone who expresses support for the Palestinians is automatically suspected of ‘anti-Semitism’ whereas someone on the Right who has never lifted a finger for anti-racist causes is considered an opponent of ‘anti-Semitism’ like for example John Mann MP, who is a bigot and an anti-Roma racist.
Marianne became involved in feminism as a young mother, joined the Labour Party and supported the miner's strike. With the advent of Blair she left the Party like many of us.
She became a midwife and having had a child who was autistic she gradually realised that she was also autistic which is why she finds her suspension so difficult to deal with or come to terms with.  But for scum like Matthews, the disability of a victim of his witch-hunt is, as far as he is concerned, a bonus.
Marianne’s disparate tweets are a reflection of her personal history but she became the target of vicious trolls Zionist trolls who are the associates of ‘gnasher Jew’ and they focussed on her weaknesses. Having played the role of agent provocateurs they then reported her for things like accusing them of being supporters of Apartheid (that too is a sign of anti-Semitism!).
Marianne was attacked by Zionist trolls like @Karen_E_Leon, a friend of @GnasherJew. She called her as an apartheid denier and that's where the anti-Semitism allegations began. 
After Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014 she became more active on Twitter. With the election to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn she rejoined the party and became secretary of her local branch.
As she said If an individual blatantly denies the existence of apartheid in Israel then that individual is an apartheid denier. David Baddiel took issue with this and the attack on me escalated.’ David Baddiel himself is someone who has a history of making racist remarks and disparaging and mocking Black people, including Blacking up.
Marianne was criticised in particular for retweeting the image of a job centre sign with the words 'arbeit macht frei'. It is an image that has been widely used by disability campaign groups for several years.
 It is not anti-Semitic to criticize the Tory government's use of this fascist ideology whilst they preside over the needless deaths of one hundred and twenty thousand poor, vulnerable, ill and disabled human beings from cuts to benefits and unjust sanctions.”
It takes pretty sick individuals, people like arch-Zionist Luke Akehurst (who has been booted off his Oxford Labour Party Executive) to draw the conclusion that comparison between the DWP and the Nazis is anti-Semitic.
Marianne tweeted the job centre/arbeit macht frei sign on several occasions over the past year because ‘We have a government that thinks those words are worth repeating to poor & disabled people. I abhor the use of those words in that context. I used it as a response to a 'work hard-get nowhere' meme.  It is a criticism of the Protestant Work Ethic and a criticism of capitalism in general. I'd like someone to explain to me exactly what they think is anti-Semitic about my use of this image. It isn't anti-Semitic. Quite the opposite.’
It is a sign of the poverty of intellect of Sam Matthews and those around him that the comparison disabled people make between the DWP and the All Work Test and the Nazi attitude to the unemployed is considered anti-Semitic.  This at a time when the Israeli government is inviting the anti-Semitic leader of the Hungarian government, Viktor Orban, on a state visit.
‘art belongs to it's audience. To be received & interpreted by them. I've never come across this image being used in any way other than to criticize our right wing government & capitalist ideology.  If our evil Tory government are using the words 'work sets you free' I feel that we should be shouting it from the rooftops.  No aspect of this is anti-Semitic.’
Marianne’s local councillors and her MP, Louise Haigh, have been particularly unsupportive and their criticism has been completely ill informed.  Marianne was also invited to apologise by the Chair, of Sheffield Heeley but she declined this since she didn’t feel that she had said anything she needed to apologise for.
As she said ‘Some of my tweets may be in 'poor taste' but surely taste is in the eye of the beholder. ‘She has also been told that her manner is often very direct and to the point but this betrays the middle class nature of the Labour Party apparatchiks who don’t understand that this is quite normal in working class communities.  As she says ‘I am also autistic and my communication skills are often lacking.’  Under the regime of Sam Matthews, this too is a crime.
Comrades in her constituency have been supportive. ‘My constituency comrade, Stuart Gibbins made this statement at the last constituency meeting.’
 ‘On the satirical news programme 'The Day Today' there was a sketch in which a Jeremy Paxman type TV anchor man is interviewing the foreign secretaries of Britain and Australia. To begin with it's all very amicable with the two politicians congratulating themselves on a trade agreement that's beneficial to them both. Then, the interviewer manufactures a disagreement between them and within seconds he has forced them into a corner in which there's only one logical outcome to what they've been coerced into saying, to declare war on each other.   It's war, shouts the interviewer and immediately the studio around them begins to be turned into a war studio.
I've been reminded of this sketch a lot recently with regard to the antisemitism issue in the Labour party. How disturbingly easy it is for those with power and influence to manufacture an issue, set up a few straw men and to top it all, succeed in enlisting a substantial portion of the party they are trying to undermine to do their bidding for them. 
Marianne Tellier, the branch secretary for Park and Arbourthorne, has been suspended from her role in the party pending an inquiry. Her misdemeanor? Using satire to highlight the callousness of the government towards people who are unfit to work. She RE-tweeted a picture of a job centre sign in which the words had been changed to read ' work sets you free ', the slogan on the gates of Auschwitz concentration camp. 
Set aside the question of taste here or the quality of the satire for a moment and consider who the target was? Emphatically, it was the Tory government. That much was obvious.   Which makes it utterly astounding that an unnamed senior Labour party official described the tweet as being antisemitic in EVERY sense. This was not antisemitic in ANY sense. Precisely the opposite. 
For all those who are prepared to call this antisemitic I suggest they look up the meaning of the word and think about the intention of the satire and then try, honestly, to draw even a smidgen of a correlation between the two. But the accusation has been made and as a result, a committed party worker has had her life turned upside down and must be feeling an inkling of the sense of the kind of claustrophobic, impotent dread that people must feel when they are falsely accused under totalitarian regimes
On the subject of taste you could make a legitimate point that the picture had the potential to cause distress to those whose relatives died in the holocaust. That's possible and no decent human being could waive that away as an irrelevance. It's also possible that there will be a Jewish perspective on this which accepts that the freedom to employ satire is an intrinsic aspect of living in a free society and that the basics of satire is exaggeration and that an unwritten rule is that the best satire punches upwards, not down. The job centre mock up was definitely punching up.
The difference that this indicates demonstrates the difficulty of the taste issue, which is endlessly problematic and subjective. It's not an issue on which you can easily make unequivocal statements. The arguments surrounding it are nuanced and shaded, which is an inconvenience for a world that seems to increasingly demand that all argument is reduced to a thumbs up or a thumbs down, a like, or a dislike.
In the light of all this I would like to think that in future our spokespeople will be a bit more circumspect if a similar issue crops up and resist the temptation for a knee-jerk condemnation that has so disfigured this present case.’
I couldn’t put it better myself!
email from LP Investigator Dan Hogan complaining that Ms Tellier hadn't responded to his letters.  Hogan didn't of course think that Ms Hillier's autism might have played a part in her lack of response

Below are the different tweets being used as 'evidence' against Marianne - this kind of pathetic, tawdry and grubby material, scraped from Twitter is seen as proof of 'antisemitism' by Matthew and his fellow McCarthyists


One of the many tweets used in evidence - Marianne is taunted and provoked by Zio trolls and her responses are used against her
Doris the cat, not a Jewish name, reports 'antisemitism' for being called a supporter of apartheid






sharing this is 'antisemitic'
Apparently this article from my blog is also 'antisemitic' - opposing the false antisemitism witchhunt is apparently antisemitic
It's nice to know that Sam Matthews and his scummy friends are such avid readers of my blog!
I imagine that the above posts from my blog infringed multiple rules such as don't criticise Owen Jones, don't defend the 'antisemitic' Corbyn mural
Remind people that the Board of Deputies told Jews NOT to oppose antisemites in 1936 is probably antisemitic too - but I can't quite work out why yet

sharing this is 'antisemitic'

21 May 2014

IDS - The Tory's version of Scrooge


The Contemptible Ian Duncan Smith
Is there anyone more despicable than Ian Duncan Smith? He puts Scrooge to shame for the latter’s generosity. This is a man who spent £10,000 of public money having his portrait painted.
After being sacked as Tory leader he went on a mission of salvation to Easterhouse in Glasgow where he appeared to befriend the poor and unemployed. Little did they realise that he was rehabilitating his career and dissembling.
 
ALL of IDS’s ‘welfare benefits, i.e. cuts to the poor and unemployed have been supported by the Lib Dems and New Labour, whose Rachel Reeve promises to be tougher on welfare reform than the Tories. This is Reeve’s idea of Opposition.
 Bedroom Tax Protest - Scotland
There have been a battery of measures – forcing Incapacity Benefit claimants into Job Seeker’s Allowance, paying £27 pw less. The benefits cap, workfare, abolition of Council Tax Benefit Or the changes from DLA to Personal Independence Payments, whose openly declared aim is to cut £2 billion a year from the benefits bill. Reduction of Housing Benefit, the introduction of starvation sanctions and of course the Bed Room Tax. Dressed up as the Spare Rooms subsidy it is nothing of the kind. Houses are rented as an entity, not room by room. A ‘spare’ room is often used for children coming to stay, elderly relatives, carers and, horror of horrors, friends. The only effect of the Bedroom Tax is to drive people out of their houses or see them evicted because they cannot afford to pay with their rent. There are also the cuts to Tax Credits, the very people IDS claims he is seeking to benefit.
The net effect of all this is that people cannot afford even a hot meal for their children. The growth of food banks run by the Truscott Foundation is testimony to this. But to IDS they are simply a political gimmick. Surprise, surprise the Daily Mail has done its best to undermine them with an ‘exclusive’ about how their reporter obtained cans of food. ‘No ID, no checks... and vouchers for sob stories: The truth behind those shock food bank claims.’  From supporting Hitler to supporting IDS is quite understandable.
 
Bedroom Tax Protest, Trafalgar Square
And there is the new universal benefits scheme, which no one understands and which the computer systems implementing it cannot do it. IDS’s malevolence is only trumped by his incompetence.
If IDS is queried as to why people have committed suicide with anxiety It has led to people taking their lives such as mother-of-two Stephanie Bottrill – who suffered a crippling illness – committed suicide after realising she couldn’t pay the Bedroom Tax.  IDS has a standard answer. He is being fairer to those in work and he is trying to ensure that "people find work always pays"
IDS (and the coalition’s) primary aim is to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich. Under this government the commitment to reduce child poverty has gone into reverse (though IDS fiddles the figures to show the opposite). Britain's richest 1% have accumulated as much wealth as the poorest 55% of the population put together, according to the latest official analysis of who owns the nation's £9.5tn of property, pensions and financial assets 
Whilst the poor suffer cuts, the richest 1,000 people in Britain has seen fortunes rise by 15.4% according to the Sunday Times Rich List. Their wealth has now reached a new high of £519bn
The Sunday Times described this as an 'Astonishing' year for richest Britons sees fortunes rise 15.4%, according to Sunday Times Rich List 
 
Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Sheffield University, has charted the share of national income going to the richest 1% since 1918, the end of World War I. After falling for more than half a century, Prof. Dorling says, the share of Britain's richest 1% started rising sharply and inequality is now on course to return to what it was in 1918. This is the full measure of IDS’s ‘welfare reforms’ which are justified by trying to divide those who work from claimants.