Unite Members Lobby Executive to Demand that they Implement Union Policy & Oppose Israel’s Genocide

For 5 months Sharon Graham has Opposed All Solidarity with the Palestinians, Following Starmer in Refusing to Campaign Against Israel's Ethnic Cleansing

Jonathan Fluxman of Unite Doctors Criticises the Rape Narrative that Israel is using to justify genocide

 Last Monday at  midday about 50 Unite members from as far away as Birmingham, held a lobby of Unite’s national executive which was due to meet an hour later.

The lobby was noisy and vociferous and hundreds of leaflets were distributed. Drivers passing by made clear their opposition to genocide in Gaza by honking.

Jonathan Fluxman of Unite Doctors

Amandla the cry of Black South Africans when they fought apartheid

There was an open mike and a number of demonstrators spoke including Jonathan Fluxman of Unite doctors. Jonathan, who is from South Africa, condemned the false rape narrative that has been used to demonise both Hamas and the attack of October 7.

He rightly drew our attention to the way rape has always been weaponised against indigenous people as an excuse for murder e.g. in the Deep South and with the ‘Black Peril’ in southern Africa.

It is a sad commentary on Unite, which has a long history of international solidarity stretching from the Spanish Civil War, which Jack Jones a former General Secretary of the TGWU (the precursor of Unite) fought in to the support the union gave to the ANC and the fight against Apartheid in South Africa that we needed to picket a Union Executive Meeting in order that the Union extends solidarity to the Palestinians who have been slaughtered and ethnically cleansed by the Zionist butchers.

Sharon Graham, the ‘non-political’ General Secretary of Unite, has chosen to side with the Zionists and their anti-Semitism smears. As Gail Cartmail, her previous spokesperson admitted, so-called ‘anti-Semitism’ has played a role in their decision.

Graham is a Zionist sympathiser. Even before October 7 she banned, at Starmer and the Zionists’ behest, Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie from being shown on Unite premises. The far-right Campaign Against Antisemitism, an Israeli government  front, whose sole mission is to equate opposition to the Israeli state and its genocide with anti-Semitism, boasted of having entered into correspondence with Unite despite the denials of Cartmail.

The reason given for the banning was they didn’t wish to offend Unite’s Jewish members, despite the fact that Jews were prominent in the film. Clearly Graham equates Jews with Zionism and goes along with the false anti-Semitism narrative.

If the CAA is to be believed, and for once I do believe them, Unite under Graham entered into correspondence with the CAA about banning the film. The CAA claimed

Following correspondence with Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Unite union has cancelled the screening of a propaganda film about the antisemitic former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn that was due to be shown alongside a book signing and talk from Asa Winstanley.

Graham was happy to speak with Ukraine flags fluttering around her but she hasn’t been seen dead with a Palestinian flag. Unite has done absolutely nothing nationally since Israel embarked on its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

It is a disgrace that allegedly revolutionary groups like the SWP, Counterfire and the Socialist Party have acted to protect Graham rather than calling her out. Her attraction is that she supports militant action by workers in struggle, which is fine, but strikes alone do not a world change. The question is whether you challenge the imperialist consciousness of British workers who will never overthrow the chains of capitalism whilst they have illusions in British imperialism.

Counterfire’s Richard Allday, the ‘angry trucker’, dismissed the leaflet for the lobby as

negative, insulting, confrontational and counterproductive. I’ve said it before: if the intention is to get the Union to carry out Conference decisions, then let’s concentrate on that and not turn it into a slanging match which will harden the divisions which are part of the problem. 

Thus ignoring completely Sharon Graham’s obstruction of all solidarity work nationally.

These ‘revolutionary’ groups claim to be Marxist and it is therefore instructive to read what Marx wrote in April 1870 in a letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt

"The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently, he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.

He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this."

Our present day Trotskyists fetishise strikes and ignore the fact that the fight against capitalism is a political struggle not simply economic. The failure to oppose Zionism and Israel isn’t a mistake it is fundamental to opposing British imperialism and its foreign policy and thereby capitalism itself. Sharon Graham is an open British nationalist. She supports NATO in Ukraine and the United States’s watchdog in the Middle East, Israel.

Allday’s post was in response to criticism of the complete inactivity of the national leadership under Graham which has refused to have the national banner on the national demonstration and which has failed to publicise them or indeed anything about the genocide on Unite’s website.

Indeed Graham has gone out her way to obstruct the actions of others ‘advising’ Jim Kelly of the London & Eastern Regional Secretary not to speak at the national demonstration on 13 January 24. She has suspended a senior Unite employee, Simon Dubbins, who organised a Palestine meeting at the Labour Party annual conference in Liverpool last October.

On 16 October 23 Unite put out a statement which

‘unreservedly condemned and expressed its revulsion  at the recent appalling acts of violence by Hamas against innocent civilians in Israel’

But it could only ‘deplore the subsequent suffering and loss of life being endured by civilians in Gaza.’

On November 3^rd after considerable pressure from activists including an online petition Unite issued a second statement which this time called for an immediate ceasefire. The statement was however pitiably weak calling on ‘all parties to respect international law’ as if the Palestinians experiencing genocide were equally culpable as the murderers. Nowhere did the statement mention genocide.

Jim Kelly, Chair of London & Eastern Region Unite Speaking to a London Trade union Rally for Palestine

Unite has done nothing to campaign for a ceasefire such as telling its sponsored MPs that it wouldn’t continue to finance them if they didn’t support an immediate ceasefire.

Nor did the statement mention the fact that Israel had imposed a Nazi style food, water and fuel blockade on the Gaza strip resulting in starvation according to the United Nations.

On Monday there were 2 motions to the Executive. Both were problematic.

Motion 1 from the Passenger National Industrial Sector Committee talked about Israel’s genocide being in ‘retaliation for the 7 October brutal atrocity carried out by Hamas.’ An uprising of an oppressed people against 57 years of occupation was not a brutal atrocity. Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza was not a retaliation for October 7. 7 October was the pretext for long standing Zionist plans for ethnic cleansing.

Motion 2 from the Unite LE Region also calls October 7 a ‘retaliation for the 7 October brutal atrocity’. It also calls for a two-state solution.

Both motions call for a national Unite presence at the national demonstrations. That there be a prominent national speaker from Unite to speak at all future marches/demonstrations and that Unite’s website and social media platforms advertise prominently all future PSC mobilisations and that they call for Unite to urge members to join it.

The motion instructs Graham to write to all branches nationally, urging members to join these marches and that resources are in place to facilitate members wishing to travel to attend PSC marches/demonstrations.

What the motions don’t do is talk about ethnic cleansing, the Israeli state’s real aim in Gaza nor about the role of British workers in facilitating the genocide by transferring arms to Israel. The key demand, that workers refuse to handle weapons destined for Israel and better still refuse to load or unload Israeli ships, is missing.

Abram Leon, 26, leader of Hashomer Hatzair and then the Fourth International in Belgium, was Murdered in Auschwitz

Leon Explained in The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation Why Anti-Semitism Arose and Where it Came From

As readers of my book will know, during the Second World War the Zionist movement was a Quisling movement that collaborated with the Nazis and went out of its way to obstruct rescue of Jewish refugees whose destination wasn’t Palestine.

By way of contrast Abram Leon, leader of the Fourth International in Belgium, died resisting the Nazis. Where, as in the Warsaw Ghetto, Zionists fought alongside Jewish anti-Zionists against the Nazis they did so not because they were Zionists but despite their Zionism.

Jewish Partisans Captured in Warsaw Ghetto

After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising there was panic in Palestine. Dina Porat, Chief Historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem Propaganda Museum wrote that Melech Neustadt of the Jewish Agency Executive:

repeatedly implored the youth movement leaders in Palestine to save those still alive – even against their will – by issuing a directive that they were to leave immediately by whatever ways possible... The issue was whether or not the Yishuv was morally justified in instructing these comrades to abandon their communities, save themselves, and thereby stop the armed uprisings.... the numerous revolts in the summer of 1943 would ultimately deprive the Yishuv of the cream of Europe’s potential pioneering force... among the major youth movements in Palestine. Neustadt’s views prevailed and attempts to extricate the activists failed. They refused to leave. [Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David, p. 241]

A Zionist emissary arrived in Bedzin, a Nazi ghetto in Poland, in July 1943 after the Warsaw Uprising to persuade Frumka Plotnicka to leave. She replied that ‘I have a responsibility for my brethren... I have lived with them and I will die with them.’ The Zionist fighters, such as Antek Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, refused on principle to leave. One can only admire the bravery and commitment of these young fighters who, given the choice between the fight against the Nazis in the Diaspora and the Arabs in Palestine, committed what in Zionist eyes, was a mortal sin. They chose the Diaspora.

One of the Palestinian emissaries, Yudke Hellman, described how in October and December 1939 he witnessed the return of Plotnicka and Lubetkin to German-occupied Poland and how he had tried and failed to persuade them to leave for Palestine. Frumka stood up and announced that her decision to return to Warsaw was final. [Yechiam Weitz, The Yishuv’s Response to the Holocaust, pp. 218-19].

Hayka Klinger, another fighter in Warsaw, who arrived in Palestine in March 1944, told the Histadrut Executive that ‘we received an order not to organize any more defence.’ [Porat p. 242] Klinger observed that

‘Without a people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the entire people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the avante-garde too shall be annihilated.’ [Edith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 33]

Never was the ethical and moral distinction between the Jewish diaspora and Palestine’s Zionist leaders clearer.

The Zionist leaders saw the risings in the ghettos as ‘a kind of betrayal of the overriding principle of the homeland.’ [Zertal p.34] Yet despite opposing the uprisings at the time, the ghetto fighters were ‘retrospectively conscripted’ into the Zionist terror groups. ‘We fought here and they fought there’ according to Palmach commander Yitzhak Sadeh. [Zertal p.26] Except that the Jewish partisans fought against the fascists whereas the Zionist militias fought with fascists.

This is why John Rose of the SWP was wrong when he argued that Zionism was not an obstacle to fighting against fascism. Rose wrote:

It’s true that when Hitler came to power some Zionist leaders stupidly thought that they could do a deal with him that would enable some German Jews to go to Palestine.

The Zionist attitude to the Nazis had nothing to do with ‘stupidity’ nor was Ha'avara, their trade deal with the Nazis, about enabling some Jews to go to Palestine. However I digress.

Abram Leon was born in Warsaw in 1918 and died in Auschwitz in 1944. Leon had been the leader of Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard), a left-wing Zionist youth group, from 1936 till 1940 when he and 20 comrades broke from Zionism and joined the underground Trotskyist  organisation. He was arrested by the Nazis in June 1944 and tortured before being sent to Auschwitz where he died in September 1944.

Leon died at the age of 26 but not before he had written The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation, which was written whilst leading the resistance to the Nazis. It is a remarkable work, not least because of the conditions under which it was produced.

Leon’s thesis in a nutshell was that unlike the myths spread by the Zionists and Orthodox Jewry, that the Jews survived because of their religion, the exact opposite was the case. He reversed the relationship. The religion survived because of the Jews. It was the specific social and economic role that Jews played in society, reflected as it was in their religion, which kept the religion going.

It was Karl Marx who had written in On the Jewish Question that:

Judaism has survived, not in spite of  history but because of it. (p.92)

Captured Jewish Partisans in Warsaw

Indeed where Jews did not have a specific socio-economic role as with the Jewish farmers in Sicily, they assimilated to the surrounding population.

Zionism has rewritten the history of the Jews and hence the history of anti-Semitism. Zionism, with its claim to Palestine, consists of a series of myths designed to appeal to the simplest of minds.

How many times did we hear during the attacks on Corbyn that anti-Semitism was a ‘virus’, a pathological and incurable condition. As one of the first Zionists, Leon Pinsker wrote in Autoemancipation:

‘Judeophobia is then a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary, and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable.

Pinsker was a doctor so he used the term ‘Judeophobia’ rather than anti-Semitism. But if a disease is incurable then there is no point in fighting it.  At best one seeks pain relief or palliatives.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, was of the belief that the cause of anti-Semitism was the Jews themselves. Their fault was living in other peoples’ countries. The solution was therefore colonisation. In the Jewish State he wrote:

“The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.”

Leon demolishes this and other Zionist myths and shows how, as Jews fulfilled certain roles in  society – money lenders, tax stewards, usurers, traders, skilled craftsmen –anti-Semitism itself changed. Religious anti-Semitism expressed  class antagonism to the role Jews played in feudal society and was expressed as religious antagonism.

Leon’s great achievement was to situate the Jews in history. Instead of the Zionist myth of the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple, for which there is zero evidence, he showed how it was the Jews themselves who emigrated because Palestine was incapable of feeding its inhabitants.

In this the Palestinian Jews were not unique. Many people such as the Phoenicians and Armenians had followed similar paths.

Some 4 million Jews left Palestine in the first two centuries AD. Some 1 million of them were to be found in Alexandria alone, one of the great Hellenized cities in the Mediterranean. Like many people before them, the Jews became great traders and it was through trade and commerce that Jews survived.

Leon’s explanation of the Jews as a ‘people-class’ explained their survival. In the feudal era, a society based on production for use not exchange, groups who carried out particular socio-economic roles were seen as being different ethnically from the native population.

The Zionist idea of ‘eternal anti-Semitism’ is a way of avoiding difficult questions such as why the Jews survived and why there was persecution. It is really a reflection of the anti-Semitic stereotype of the ‘eternal wandering Jew’ which became a film under the Nazis.

Anti-Semitism constituted the class antagonism of different layers of feudal society towards the economic role that Jews played.

Thousands of Jews died in peasant revolts, be it at York, Norwich or at the hands of Chmielniki and the Cossacks in Poland from 1648 to 1657. However this was a peasants revolt against the role of Jews as Arendators, officials who leased land from the nobles and whose demands on the peasants were extremely exacting. 

Many of those who died were Jews but contrary to popular history it wasn’t just Jews who suffered. As Anna Reid wrote in Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine:

Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews, they [Cossacks] killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole....

But whereas anti-Semitism in feudal times came from the peasants and mendicant religious orders, with the Jews as in Poland, protected by the nobility and King, under capitalism anti-Semitism came from the State and the ruling classes. The best example until the Nazis was under the Czar whose Ministers deliberately instigated pogroms, creating the Black Hundreds for this purpose.

To the Zionists anti-Semitism was the property of all non-Jews regardless of class. Anti-Semitism existed because the Jews existed. As A B Yehoshua explained, the Jews were guests who used other peoples’ countries like hotels. [Jewish Chronicle, 22.12.89. ‘Diaspora a cancer’]

As Hannah Arendt observed

If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument. [The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 7] The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 7,

Leon’s book went almost unnoticed until it was resurrected by French Marxist Maxime Rodinson in 1968 at the height of the Paris riots.

Leon’s main argument was that the Jews formed a ‘People Class’ – that they performed specific tasks in pre-capitalist society that bound them together as both a people and a class. Under feudalism this was very common. Not just the Jews but the Gypsies, Scots, Armenians and Chinese of South Asia, who were even called the Jews of Asia, also formed castes that attracted popular ire.

Where the Jews lost a distinctive socio-economic role they assimilated to the majority. To the Zionists anti-Semitism was common to all non-Jews. As Leon wrote (p.247)

Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.[1]

In what is a short book, Leon gave a panoramic overview of the Jews historically. The book explains that the ‘Jewish Question’ was dying out in Western Europe with the advent of capitalism. The Jews no longer had any specific socio-economic role. They were assimilating to the majority population with the advent of Emancipation. It was only anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe, resulting in waves of migration by Jews westwards, that kept the Jewish Question alive.

Zionism was implacably opposed to Jewish Emancipation because they saw, correctly, that granting equal rights to Jews meant that they were no longer forced by the state to maintain a separate existence. In Israel today the fascist Lehava calls miscegenation , inter-racial sex, a holocaust. Israeli minister Rafi Peretz labeled intermarriage between American Jews and non-Jews as being “like a second Holocaust.”

Leon had but a very short life but in that very short time-span he produced  one of the Marxist classics which cuts through the mystification of Zionism in its treatment of both Jewish history and anti-Semitism .

I began by saying that Leon had started out as a Zionist in Hashomer Hatzair. In Palestine this was a political party which later became Mapam. Their strand of ‘Marxist’ Zionism had been founded by Ber Borochov, who was expelled from the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1901 for Zionism.

Borochov held that Jews could not take part in the class struggle in the diaspora because they had no relationship to the means of production. Their conditions of production meant that they were outside the class struggle. According to Borochov social structure of the Jews resembled an ‘inverted pyramid’ – too many rich Jews and not enough poor or working class  Jews.

It was only in Palestine where Jews could form their own society that it was possible for class struggle to break out. Borochov, who ended up supporting WW1 was wrong. It was precisely at this time, the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries that Jews were becoming part of the proletariat.

Marxist Zionism was always a cult that used sophistry to explain away colonialism. If Borochov is to be taken at his word then Socialist Zionists having allied with the bourgeois Zionists in order to create a Jewish State would then wage class war against them! The problem with this was that it was more likely to become part of the bourgeoisie in such a state.

We can see where this bankrupt theory has ended up. In the last Knesset Meretz, which was the descendant of Mapam, found itself in alliance with the far-Right Yisrael Beteinu and Yamina. In the 2020 elections Meretz, has been eliminated from the Knesset altogether. In 1949 in Israel’s first elections it obtained 19 seats.

The beauty of Leon’s book is that it at once provides an overview of Jewish history since ancient times and explains how and why anti-Semitism has persisted, albeit in different forms.  It demystifies anti-Semitism.

As Leon remarked in the section on Zionism and the belief in  2,000 years of exile:

In reality just so long as Judaism was incorporated in the feudal system, the “dream of Zion” was nothing but a dream and did not correspond to any real interest of Judaism. The Jewish tavern owner or “farmer” of sixteenth-century Poland thought as little of “returning” to Palestine as does the Jewish millionaire in America today. Jewish religious Messianism was no whit different from the Messianism belonging to other religions. Jewish pilgrims who went to Palestine met Catholic, Orthodox, and Moslem pilgrims. Besides it was not so much the “return to Palestine” which constituted the foundation of this Messianism as the belief in the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem.

We should not forget that Leon was writing at the height of the Nazi persecution, a persecution which claimed him in that death factory, Auschwitz. He wrote that one of the “ironies of history” was that

when the Jew was unassimilable, at a time when he really represented “capital,” he was indispensable to society. There could be no question of destroying him. At the present time, capitalist society, on the edge of the abyss, tries to save itself by resurrecting the Jew and the hatred of the Jews. But it is precisely because the Jews do not play the role which is attributed to them that anti-Semitic persecution can take on such an amplitude. Jewish capitalism is a myth; that is why it is so easily vanquished. But in vanquishing its “negative,” racism at the same time destroys the foundations for its own existence....

The irony of history wills that the most radical anti-Semitic ideology in all history should triumph precisely in the period when Judaism is on the road of economic and social assimilation. But like all “ironies of history” this seeming paradox is very understandable. At the time

Tony Greenstein

---

[1]                                 Abram Leon, The Jewish Question - A Marxist Interpretation, p. 247.

Charles III is not our King – he is the King of Truss, Starmer and the British Establishment

 Charles is Booed in Cardiff and Celtic Fans Chant ‘If you hate the Royal Family Clap your Hands’ as the Wheels Begin to Come Off the Royal Pantomime

UPDATE

A loyal tribute to Elizabeth Windsor by British singer song writer Leon Rosselson

If you hate the Royal Family clap your hands – Glasgow Celtic fans

It is often said of the Queen that she did a good job. And in one sense that is true.  She did do a good job but the question is for whom did she work? Certainly no one who lived in the colonies benefited and it is difficult to see how anyone who is poor, on the streets or working class is any the richer.

On the other hand there is no doubt, judging by the million or so fools who spent 24 hours or more to see her coffin, that the late Queen performed a very useful function for the class that she came from. A role not dissimilar to that of religion.

Marx didn’t simply describe religion as the opium of the masses but also as the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless world. Royalty performs a vital political and social function in binding the poor and oppressed to their oppressors in a sham show of national unity that is underpinned by the honours system.

The honours system itself is divided into ordinary and common OBEs, CBEs and MBEs (all of which refer to the Empire) up to the the Most Nobel Order of the Garter, of which there are only 34 at any one time, all of whom are chosen personally by the sovereign. In this way, however rich or poor you are you can identify with the monarch.

That is why virtually every business of any size adorned itself with the image of Elizabeth Windsor. The Monarchy provides social stability as well as a back stop against revolution.

Republican demonstrators greet Charles in Cardiff

Despite all this there is a growing mood of republicanism amongst the young in particular who are almost equally divided on whether or not to have a republic. However much the BBC rams the idea of an unelected monarchy down our throats it offends against democratic instincts and reeks of class snobbery and contempt.

The Monarchy is depicted as the ideal family, just like you and me however there is nothing ordinary about the monarchy from the past-times they indulge in (hunting, shooting) to the company they keep.

Despite being told that the Monarchy has no influence politically this is not true. The royals vetted at least 1,062 laws during Elizabeth’s reign in order to ensure that they didn’t hurt her interests.

Whereas it is well known that Royal Assent is needed when a bill becomes law very few people know that the Monarch’s consent is needed before legislation can be approved by parliament. The website of the royal family describes it as “a long established convention”. 

Documents in the National Archives suggest that the Consent Process enabled Elizabeth Windsor to lobby for changes before legislation was tabled. Thomas Adams, a constitutional law expert at Oxford University said that these documents revealed “the kind of influence over legislation that lobbyists would only dream of”. It gave Liz “substantial influence” over draft laws that could affect her. See Revealed: Queen lobbied for change in law to hide her private wealth

We can see their results. The Queen’s Estate will pay no Inheritance Tax unlike ordinary mortals, saving them hundreds of millions of pounds.  But there is more to this than mere corruption although there is that too.

The Monarchy in the form of Prince Charles played a large part in the canonisation of Jimmy Savile.  He was also knighted. In a memo addressed to the royals in 1989, and titled ‘Guidelines for members of the Royal Family and their staffs’, Savile claimed he was “in the palaces on a regular basis”.

Under  ‘personal observations’, Savile stated that he was ‘well-placed’ to make observations and comment on the Royal Family’s image due to the access he had inside their residences writing:

“Because I get into St James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace on a regular basis, one thing is becoming quite obvious. There is a strong movement now towards some members of the family and their staff towards an… attitude.”

The Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story showed how  

Charles had gone out of his way to seek out Savile’s advice and help in repairing the monarchy’s image and reputation. Because if there is one thing the ‘firm’ is careful about is its image.

A British horror story

In Imposed Insanity – Royalty, Propaganda And The Coming Catastrophe Media Lens remind us that

‘wherever there is royalty, there is militarism, organised religion, bipartisan political agreement, patriotism and, of course, concentrated wealth.’

The Monarchy is the symbol of all that is rotten in society. Its function being to hide the nexus of power in pageantry, pomp and mystique. It’s secret weapon is its insincerity.

A leaky pen

As Walter Bagehot argued the monarchy needed mystique. “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Charles has done quite the opposite. He allowed cameras into the accession council, where he made his oaths. He has already had two public hissy fits involving malfunctioning pens, which have gone viral. Charles finds it difficult, unlike his mother, to keep his mouth shut.

Power is exercised most effectively behind closed doors not in public. As Media Lens pointed out we are quick to ridicule countries where there is a cult of the personality –

‘those poor lost souls who glorify leaders with hagiographic portraits and statues; and militarised patriotic festivals and grand commemorative events’.

This type of thing happens in Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and Kim Jong-un’s North Korea not in Britain. Yet how does one describe hundreds of thousands of people queuing for over a day to catch a glimpse of the coffin of a woman they never knew?

The BBC naturally was determined not to be outdone in its servile, sycophantic prose. Royal correspondent Jonny Dymond wittered:

‘This is the moment history stops; for a minute, an hour, for a day or a week; this is the moment history stops.

If history stopped, then time itself must have stopped! A quite remarkable feat, even for a monarch.

The Leaky Pen and why Charles is angry with his manservant

Newspapers ran full, front-page portraits with forelock-tugging headlines:

• ‘A life in service’ (The Times)
• ‘Our hearts are broken’ (Daily Mail)
• ‘Grief is the price we pay for love’ (Daily Telegraph)
• ‘Thank you’ (Daily Mirror’)
• ‘Our beloved Queen is dead’ (Daily Express)
• ‘We loved you Ma’am’ (The Sun)

As Media Lens asked ‘Does The Sun have any idea what the word ‘love’ means?’ This is the paper that marked the death of 96 football fans at the Hillsborough Stadium with the headline ‘The Truth’ alleging that fans picked the pockets of the victims whilst urinating on the ‘brave cops’.

Nor was the Guardian any better. The day after Windsor’s death it led with 19 pages on the Queen plus a 20-page supplement. Columnist, Gaby Hinsliff, wrote a piece referring to Elizabeth Windsor’s ‘grandmotherly manner’, ‘female power’, ‘rare trick for a woman’, ‘a woman in charge’, ‘“ultimate feminist”’, ‘a legacy for women’, etc.

Hinsliff’s unctuous prose managed 14 retweets and 72 likes.

Not to be outdone Sir Keir Starmer, Knight Commander of the Order of Bath and Leader of the ‘Opposition’, declared:

‘For seventy years, Queen Elizabeth II stood as the head of our country. But in spirit, she stood amongst us.’

One wonders just how many homeless people felt her spirit as they bedded down for the night. Perhaps those weighing up how to heat their home immediately felt her presence besides them?

Not content with this nonsense Starmer told us that:

‘as the world changed around her, this dedication became the still point of our turning world.’

How many of you felt that your world revolved around Liz Windsor?

But all this servile nonsense aims to enable the new King to emerge, as if by magic, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. And history therefore has to be rewritten. It is no accident that the BBC Panorama Interview with Princess Diana has been suppressed. 

The BBC have pretended that Diana was tricked into the interview, even though she herself declared at the time that she was happy with it. The BBC is asserting its copyright to prevent it being shown anywhere. There is nothing like censorship to help change the narrative. However you can still see it on my blog, at least for the moment!

As Andrew Morton, whose 1992 book Diana: Her True Story exposed Charles adultery with ‘Queen’ Camilla said:

"It is a supreme irony that it is her son who has led the calls to posthumously muzzle Diana, to silence her, to prevent her from being heard, from saying what she spent her life trying to articulate"

As the BBCs former Director-General Tony Hall admitted:

The first investigation we did before Christmas under Tim Gardam talked to all the people concerned and produced a letter where she said very clearly that she had been shown no documents by Martin Bashir, she was not made aware of anything by Martin Bashir that she didn’t already know and she had no regrets, underlined, by the interview. It is quite interesting that Lord Dyson himself says that an interview of some sort would probably have taken place anyway. At that point in our inquiries, in our investigations with Tim Gardam, we came to an end that there was no case to answer.

In now trying to silence what her mother wanted to reveal, Prince William is acting with contempt for her. But that too is part of the price to be paid for keeping the royal show going.

See The reason the BBC wants to bury Diana’s Panorama Interview has nothing to do with fake bank statements – it’s about protecting Charles

As for Andrew, the death of Elizabeth Windsor has been quite fortuitous in his attempt to achieve rehabilitation. Instead of mourning in private, Andrew was one of the 4 royals who formed the vigil around her coffin. In full military uniform it might be added.

Expunged from memory are the stories of Prince Charles with carrier bags full of notes donated by a kind Qatari politician. And why, in this age of Internet banking, did Charles not have the money sent electronically?  Guess it was his addiction to all things old-fashioned!

Also forgotten is how Charles protected the serial child abuser Peter Ball, Bishop of Lewes, who eventually served half of a 32 month prison sentence after the Police originally let him off with a Caution. Charles wrote to him after he had been cautioned saying that

“I wish I could do more. I feel so desperately strongly about the monstrous wrongs that have been done to you and the way you have been treated.”

There is no record of Charles having expressed any sympathy for Neil Todd, one of Ball’s victims, who killed himself in 2012.

In classic Establishment understatement, the Official Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse described Charles’ support for Ball and the Duchy  of Cornwall buying a house for him to rent as ‘misguided’.

Why are you strangling me?

Charles maintained a correspondence with Ball for more than two decades after Ball’s 1992 caution for gross indecency. Charles told the inquiry that he did not realise the truth behind allegations against Ball. Most people understand that accepting a Caution means accepting one is guilty. But not Charles. That child abuse offences were dealt with by a Caution suggests Police complicity and cover up.

Charles explanation as to why he corresponded with Ball was that it was the “polite” thing to do but the inquiry found the replies were “suggestive of cordiality rather than mere politeness”. Charles explanation, that he did not know the exact details of the allegations, was not believed by the inquiry which found that he did not try to find out.

All this however will be hushed up and forgotten because it’s now a case of ‘God Save the King’ and the Establishment of which he is such an integral part.

Or as the old saying goes ‘Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.’

Tony Greenstein