Follows Tory lead on war memorial graffiti. At least Blair paid lip service to being tough on its causes
Keir Starmer is tacking even further right than Tony Blair, with a promise on Sunday to back a Priti Patel – Priti Patel – plan to introduce 10-year sentences for ‘vandalising’ war memorials.
In other words, painting anti-war or anti-racism graffiti on a monument during the Black Lives Matter protests could see someone jailed for ten years. At least Blair paid lip-service to the idea of being ‘tough on the causes of crime’ as well when he went hunting right-wing votes.
In this case, the ’causes of crime’ would be rampant inequality, the glorification of working-class people being killed for the aims of elites – and public anger at entrenched Establishment racism.
There’s a big hint for any Labour leader, though: if it’s a Tory plan it’s a Bad Thing. But if it’s got Priti Patel‘s fingerprints anywhere near it, it’s a Very Bad Thing.
The other clue is in Starmer’s job description: leader of the opposition. Any Labour Party leader should be speaking out against the fundamental causes of anger and protest – not against those protesting for change.
The SKWAWKBOX needs your support. This blog is provided free of charge but depends on the generosity of its readers to be viable. If you can afford to, please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here for a monthly donation via GoCardless. Thanks for your solidarity so this blog can keep bringing you information the Establishment would prefer you not to know about.
If you wish to reblog this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
No need for budding Tories to join the Tory Party now, they are already full to the brim with hangers and floggers who love nothing better than dishing out authoritarianism. Just join the Labour Party, not so much competition, and you will go far, especially if you are a Zionist to boot.
About two weeks ago, a few days after Trump said he was going to designate Antifa as a terrorist organisation, I pointed out in a post that Antifa is an anti-fascist cum anti-racist group and, as such, that it would be absurd for such an organisation to be looting and burning and agitating AND giving BLM and other protesters a bad name, as such – ie messing it up for them in terms of public perception – and that it was much more likely that agent provocateures were responsible, along with thieves etc taking advantage of the situation.
Anyway, I came across this article a couple of days ago on CounterPunch:
‘Infiltrating Antifa: the Feds and Their Long History of Subversion’
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/12/infiltrating-antifa-the-feds-and-their-long-history-of-subversion/
And then there was this (about the elderly guy who was knocked to the ground), and what Trump said/tweeted about it:
Even Donald Trump got into the act. On June 9 he tweeted: “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than he was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”
Like most of Trump’s slanderous tweets, he is short on declarative statements, long on questions and conditionals: he says things without owning them: he loves “could be” and quotation marks.
Everything Trump said in that tweet was bullshit, except for Martin Gugino’s name and age.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/12/buffalo-cops-and-all-the-other-cops/
NB The irony is of course that Trump is head of by far the biggest terrorist ‘organisation’ on the planet, AND fascist to the core! And needless to say, THAT is why he’s smearing Antifa!
Hi Alan, I think people might be slowly waking up to the fact that Trump is the New Adolf Hitler, by a country mile.
@Allan Howard, I read on a blog on the BLM’s protest in London that when some protested were kettling by the police, two white men in bicycles were allowed by the police to leave the area. My immediate reaction is that these two were most likely agents provocateurs and could have been the ones that starting throwing thigs around, giving the anti-riot police an excuse to act.
Let’s see what the bloke who urinated on the plaque to murdered policemen gets,
Change the language
P.M. they are your supporters
2 Weeks
Such a flagrant Tory ass-kisser, Starmer. Which is one reason why I left the Party. The other reason was his maltreatment of Jenny Formby.
Same here.
JLS. Jennie Formby was part of the Witch Hunt brigade targeting anti-racists in the Party. She was involved in the suspension/expulsion of many good LP members.
Oh, and I nearly forgot……. came across this a couple of days ago. Yes, another lying fascist psychopath.
Jeremy Corbyn ran ‘Stalinist cabal’ – Tom Watson finally breaks silence in brutal attack
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1293037/jeremy-corbyn-news-labour-party-uk-tom-watson
And it wasn’t only in the Express
Well Twatson must be angry at JC with the refusal on the retirement Lordys all off the backs of the working-class…I think twatson was hoping to meet up with Macnicol to enjoy the plan of destroying Corbyn and a socialist labour party.coming together…Strange how Corbyn nominated both of them,for the retirement plan.,still its too late for what if?…
Confused.com
On what planet is leaving the party and cutting your nose off to spite your face a strategy
WTF was JC doing rewarding TWatson
Doug dirty deals and backstabbing are the currency of this Labour party….get used to it its been around a long time and thats politics inside the gravey traiin of the establishment of which the mps and councillors are fully signed up members with no subs to pay.
The 10 years maximum sentence appears to be in line with the existing sentencing policy for criminal damage.
Sentencing for Criminal Damage cases
In cases where the damage is less than £5000, the maximum sentence for criminal damage is six months imprisonment.
In cases where the damage caused is over £5000, the maximum sentence is ten years imprisonment.
For offences of criminal damage where there was also an intention to endanger life, either intentionally or recklessly, the maximum sentence available is life imprisonment.
Aggravated Criminal Damage
Aggravated Criminal Damage is the same offence as Criminal Damage, only there is also an intention to endanger life as well, either intentionally or recklessly.
Depending on the circumstances of the case, the maximum penalty for this offence is life imprisonment.
“There’s a big hint for any Labour leader, though: if it’s a Tory plan it’s a Bad Thing.”
Indeed, SB. Indeed. Something to *always* keep in mind.
Once again the brave sir knight wants to appear all ‘hardball.’ Typical of some simpering wee fanny who was bullied at school. (But you would have, had he been in your class,wouldn’t you?)
I’ll bet he’s no plans for increasing sentences for his westminster nonce friends though.
Perfectly good enough law exists under criminal damage , there is no need whatsoever for yet another draconian law .
Wonder what stammer’s thoughts on maximum sentences for those responsible for Grenfell are?
Let’s hear him say he’ll nail those snivelling establishment rats to the wall.
Or will he slime his way out of it by saying he doesn’t comment about ‘ongoing investigations’?
Cheap and nasty Tory party and New Labour doubled the prison population in a race to the bottom
The hostile environment that gave us the Windrush scandal was supported by New Labour
Change the language
We condemn violence on both sides, we want bad apples prosecuted, whose side are you on
A 28-year-old has pleaded guilty to outraging public decency after being pictured urinating next to a memorial to Pc Keith Palmer, during far-right protests on Saturday.
Andrew Banks, 28, of Stansted in Essex, has been sentenced at Westminster Magistrates’ Court to 14 days in custody – just one day after he was arrested
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-15/andrew-banks-pleads-guilty-after-pictured-urinating-next-to-pc-keith-palmer-memorial/
Change the language
Andrew Banks gets 10 days, is that because he is white or because he is a Conservative supporter
Doug, most probably both. Has Andrew Banks been black he would most probably got 14 weeks rather than days. Has he been black and a socialist too, it would have been 14 months at least.
I find it difficult to see how any custodial sentence could be justified for this ‘crime’.
Actually seems heavy handed. He is now a martyr for the far right.
Would have been better to sentence him to community service and have him street cleaning.
28, lives with his dad, no job. I think he’s embarrassed enough, and had the courage to hand himself in.
Suppose this would be a good time to highlight just how many public lavvies have disappeared…
Wonder if the brave knight of the realm backs Nazir Afzal, here? I doubt it, else he’d have said so before and called for a proper investigation and KEPT doing so.
https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/06/polecat-lockdown-breach-lawyers-called.html
Planning permission breaches and council tax evasion (I don’t believe there’s such a thing as CT ‘avoidance’) as well, eh?
What says YOU stammer? Gonna call for a black cloth issue?
The real affront to ‘public decency’ is that a piss-artist, about whom even the magistrate noted :
““I accept you were drunk and did not know where you were urinating”
… becomes headline news in a manufactured narrative in a control agenda. Talking of which … now – about Corona virus ….
And in other news…
Ruth Smeeth – former Labour MP exposed as a US embassy informant and ex-staffer for Israel lobby group BICOM – is new CEO of Index on Censorship (IOC).
The IOC has received $430,187 from CIA cutout – the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – in the last four years.
Part of the Jo Cox initiative. She’s been everywhere, man.
‘She worked as a policy and research officer for a trade union before working in a public relations role from January 2004 to September 2005 at Sodexo.
She then became director of public affairs and campaigns at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) in November 2005. She later worked in PR for Nestlé. From 2010 to 2015, she was a deputy director of anti-racist organisation, Hope not Hate. She has also been employed by the Community Security Trust and has worked for the Board of Deputies of British Jews.’ Wikipedia.
Booted out by her constituents in December though. Her type always find a new niche.
‘In June 2016, at the launch of the Chakrabarti Report, Marc Wadsworth, a Labour Party activist, described Smeeth as working “hand-in-hand” with Kate McCann of The Daily Telegraph, after Smeeth passed her his press release. Smeeth said that Wadsworth was using “traditional antisemitic slurs to attack me for being part of a ‘media conspiracy'” and criticised a lack of response from Corbyn or his office, calling on him to resign.
Wadsworth said he was unaware Smeeth was Jewish and that “I’ve never been called anti-semitic in my life…The Jewish people have an ally in me.” Smeeth said that she received 25,000 pieces of abuse during July and August, including 20,000 in the 12-hour period immediately following the incident,
and the police strengthened her security after she received a death threat.In April 2018, Smeeth was accompanied by around 40 Labour MPs and peers to a Labour hearing into Wadsworth’s conduct. Wadsworth was expelled for bringing the Party into disrepute.’
I can remember her smirking at that Corbyn press conference. A set up.
Copied from elsewhere on the tubes. If you stop by their website out of curiosity, be sure to check out the patrons and donors section.
Stay safe all
The Alternative Mandate:our Brexit demands
The United Kingdom has left the European Union, but this represents only the end of the first phase of the Brexit process. As coronavirus disrupts the fabric of our society and we head into another massive economic crisis, we are determined to offer an alternative to the vision put forward by the likes of Boris Johnson, Victor Orban and Matteo Salvini.
In the context of an era-defining crisis of the economy, the state and public health, we pledge ourselves to a renewed project of resistance, and we will campaign to maintain and extend our rights, protections and environmental commitments.
We launch this Alternative Mandate as our set of demands on the Brexit negotiations, in the understanding that it must be matched by a continued push for a transformed EU that can be a force for progress, and for real solutions to the problems which caused Brexit to happen.
Achieving these goals, whether over the next five years or over the next fifty, will require a mass movement that is pluralistic, and which stretches across Europe and collaborates across parties and well beyond national and continental frontiers.
supported by Clive Lewis and others
https://www.anothereurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/alternative-mandate.pdf
So what?
The polygonal-headed gobshite’s gone from 6 tests to 13 demands? Don’t see him making too many demands at the despatch box on far more immediate and pressing matters…
Just re-read Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution and the point is made that the capitalists are good at getting the right people in the right positions and with Johnson and Starmer they have a full house!
Also just reading The Benn Diaries (1977-80) and he makes an interesting point that the Right in Labour know how to use the Left to get the Right in.
He adds that “The Right know the Left have nowhere to go, and usually put up with it.”
But I don’t, I expelled Labour from my life within seconds of the Leadership result.
The Left in Labour may spend 10 years in a futile battle.
For Left Wing Democratic Socialists outside we just have to deal with sectarians, agent provacatueurs, and opportunists.
I believe Neo-Liberalism is crumbling and Left Wing Democtatic Socialism has only been temporarily halted.
As soon as this crisis is over The Left
Still In & The Left Just Out need to talk to work out the fanous road.
Exactly my point Bazza , I’ve left Labour , it’s just a political party not an ideology and it’s clear it’s no longer run by socialists .
As DS we ALL need to work together both those in the party still and those outside it , to bring about change.
Yes,exactly rob.
Good start would be to agree and back left wing slates in upcoming Unite and GMB elections
Surely more than 3% GMB members can turn out
Hi Bazza, I too, a lifelong labour voter and proud of it will not be voting for a Labour Party under Stoogie Starmer’s leadership. One thing it is not now, is a socialist democratic party.
I might be mistaken but, I am fairly certain that there are far worse offences out there that would warrant this type of sentence than defacing a statue. I didn’t see Stoogie, Bojo and others condemn citizens say, in the former USSR countries, bringing down statues, they rather praised it I think. What’s the difference?