State propaganda and corporate media are wasting no time in promoting their candidate for leader of the pretend opposition: Chuka Umunna. He ticks absolutely all the right boxes. Private school educated, grandson of a High Court judge (which did not hold back his career to become a multi-millionaire lawyer) and entirely London based. Umunna has only ever moved out of the M25 on an aeroplane.
And connoisseur of gallery vernissages.
Umunna – Born Sneering
What is more he really is very right wing. His admiration for Michael Heseltine, which drew attention during this election, dates back years. He openly declares his heroes are Heseltine, Mandelson and Blair. Blair reciprocates by making known Umunna is his preferred successor. Blair has been doing this for years too.
Small wonder that the London “elite” promoting Umunna has slipped into overdrive quicker than Jeremy Clarkson. He has a long piece in the Guardian today, and was given a major guest slot on the Andrew Marr show to promote his leadership bid. His message in the Guardian is “We need an approach in which no one is too rich or too poor to be part of our party”. Which is an interesting example of the rhetorical device of false equivalence, as rich people are not excluded from Westminster politics, they monopolise it. As Umunna is himself stinking rich, he somehow evaded this exclusion. He argues that “we allowed the impression to arise that we were not on the side of those who are doing well.”
Nobody could accuse Umunna of creating that impression. Umunna is so much on the side of those who are doing well, that he joined a special social network for them called A Small World, an invitation-only club for millionaires that studiously excludes the working classes. This website offers
“Access more than 100 events around the world each month: intimate cocktails, gallery vernissages, gourmet suppers, and extraordinary weekends.”
As well as upgrades, for example from an executive suite at the Las Vegas Mandarin to the Presidential suite. Though I am sure Chuka is more into the gallery vernissages. Well, Chuka Umunna posted on A Small World to ask his fellow millionaires what venues he could go to in London which did not let in any “trash”. Just in case anyone had not understood him, he specified that what he wanted was a “trash-free weekend”.
A spokeswoman for Umunna stated that this was a joke.
I don’t know what replies he got. Evidently nobody told him to avoid parliament because of the paedophiles. Maybe they said he should stick to those gallery vernissages. Not many trash there.
Anyway, it is obvious to all our betters in the metropolitan elite that Chukka is the man for the job, so who am I to argue? I don’t even know what a gallery vernissage is. And doubtless he will rescue the party fortunes in Scotland, where core voters who deserted Labour in the schemes of Scottish cities undoubtedly feel that gallery vernissages hold the key to a brighter future.
The Labour party is dead as a political force, and this election has been the final nail in the coffin.
What we need is a real center of left party. I know John Goss & Co do provide an alternative, but it’s way too far left for the UK in its present state.
I’d vote for John G & Co, but the fact is that most people in England won’t.
Howabout a “People’s Party”? Left of center, anti-austerity and not so radical as to frighten the horses?
I believe that such a party would breeze into power.
What’s coming under this new Tory government (which most people didn’t vote for) will likely result in widespread civil unrest. It will make the 1980s look like a walk in the park.
I predict that this new Tory government will fall within two years.
Hang on to your hats, folks.
Breaking: Ian Duncan Bastard Smith is back in Work and Pensions, Dan Jarvis has ruled himself out of Labour leadership contention – good and probably principled move. Mandelson is now exuding slime re need for Labour to become party of hedge funds. Well, you know what he means.
Phil, Spoorfugger
Many thanks for the article. I think I will hold off reading it until I have re-read the exchange.
I must say that Harris displays a touching faith in Bill Clinton’s alleged belief that the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory was used by al-Qaeda to produce chemical weapons. Curiously, as I recall (and I would need to go back and document it), one person who never believed that for a moment was Harris’s New Atheist contemporary Christopher Hitchens, who hated Bill Clinton and believed he used bombings to gratify some weird sexual deviance.
Kind regards,
John
When that civil unrest comes (IDS can be relied on to accelerate it) don’t expect any help from Europe:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/10/michael-gove-to-proceed-with-tories-plans-to-scrap-human-rights-act
Christ. Here come the undead.
“The example of the SNP is better employed as a model for our own regional parties, reflecting our own allegiances and requirements. This could take a while.”
Yeah, good point.
Dammit, the report linked to says he hasn’t posted on that site since 2006. Should have checked myself.
“Ian Duncan Bastard Smith is back in Work and Pensions.”
There is no more potent symbol of the government’s detachment from the lives of the poor than Iain Duncan Smith. This man is a psychopath:
“Mr Duncan Smith, whose bedroom tax is forcing thousands of people out their homes on the grounds that they have one more room than they need, lives in the 17th Century Buckinghamshire manor his wife’s family has owned for six generations. I don’t know how many bedrooms it has, but according to the Mirror there’s a swimming pool, a tennis court and five acres of gardens. It is, that paper says, part of a family estate which incorporates 1,300 acres of farmland and much of a village.
Mr Duncan Smith did nothing to earn this good fortune, apart from marrying into inherited wealth. Yet he is deployed by the government to police Britain’s poorest people, punishing those it calls “skivers” and rewarding those it calls “strivers”….
“….[This] highlights the hypocrisy of a government of millionaires which arraigns the profligacy of the poor. It dramatises the character of a government which, insulated by inherited wealth, accuses people living on a few pounds a day of suffering from a “culture of entitlement”.
http://www.monbiot.com/2013/04/04/stunt-man/
“Neil McGowan, 7.37 p.m. I have been regularly asking about the elusive WMD for about six years now. Given the high spookage ratio even in 2008 in Brit Rags-increased tenfold over the last couple of years-no-one has ever come up with any believeable argument for their existence. I guess it was all bullcrap.”
There is much speculation that the WMD were three atomic bombs built by South Africa and Israel which went missing in 1989. It’s said that David Cameron and Dr David Kelly were both involved in their loss. There’s loads about it on the net some of it plausible.
@John Spencer-Davis – re Chomsky/Harris ……
John, I don’t mean to sound like I’m testing you on it 😉
I’ll have to read it again too.
First of all the general tone –
Not sure if it’s the contrarian in me, but on reading over it I got the impression that Harris had the worse attitude? :
Harris :
He immediately continues :
How d’ya like them apples?!
Harris doesn’t seem to notice the irony of behaving exactly as he claims Chomsky does.
So much for maintaining a “collegial exchange”.
I got the impression that Chomsky was a bit frosty ( as he often appears) but that Harris was the bigger arse 🙂
Craig: What an entertaining strategy you are following, even if it is high-risk. You set out Chuka Umanna’s qualifications and experience so deftly, that the Labour eavesdroppers into your website will smell a rat, deduce that your are really worried that he will be an outstanding political leader and therefore they should vote for him.
Spoorfugger
10/05/2015 10:31pm
If you like. I have to discount for my own bias, and I also have to bear in mind that perhaps I am seeing what I expect to see.
There’s no doubt that Chomsky employs contempt in his writings. He says so himself, somewhere: that “persuasion and contempt” are needed weapons against “experts in legitimation” (Gramsci).
I’m guessing your personal sympathies are with Chomsky rather than Harris, and therefore, that if I want to criticise Chomsky I will have to be jolly sure of what I am saying. I’m also conscious that this is pretty off-topic. Please, forgive me if I do not enter into further debate on this now, I will come back to you another time.
Kind regards,
John
CanSpeccy. You mean like this?:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article187529.html
Daniel
Surely that should have been dignified to ‘de Bastard’ for the honorary gentleman?
All ye old Blairite yuppies who were still at school when full blown Tory government was last in power, this is the real thing. You who have dragged yourselves up from nothing through your own cleverness and infinite wisdom. This is the meaning of Cameron’s Big Britain.
You will climb out of your corporate BM to investigate a body slouched by the roadside, and you will get them to the hospital and you will use your credit card to get them in.
BTW I voted Green.
The magic trough that is always full.
Now for the £11.5m golden goodbyes! Every ousted MP can claim redundancy package – and Ed Balls is entitled to £88,000 payout
MPs who have lost their seats or stood down are entitled to up to £11.5m
The share of the public money is a ‘golden goodbye’ for around 170 MPs
Ed Balls, Vince Cable and Esther McVey are among those who will benefit
Figure set to exceed £10.4m claimed after the last election despite reforms
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3075453/Now-11-5m-golden-goodbyes-ousted-MP-claim-redundancy-package-Ed-Balls-entitled-88-000-payout.html
Sounds perfect for Labour, as I understand it from Canada. I hear the bad guys got in again – no doubt pulling all the ugly stuff they so love, as they continue to do (until this Fall) here. We may get NDP, following the NDP landslide in Alberta, but I doubt it. I suspect we will continue to be ruled by Herr Harper. Or, should I say, by Mr. Obama.
Craig, in your last post you rightly complained about the speed of the MI5 trolls. What about Mr JerkChicken himself? He is going to have to eat sleep and dream MI5 if he is elected as leader.
If inner city, highly aspirational multi-ethnic communities are the now majority core of the New Labour vote, they need a man like themselves to lead them.
The irony of the election is that it was Tory policies that brought about the crash in 2008 and Gordon Brown policies of QE that stopped people’s entire livelihoods going down the drain, once he realised his own stupidity in trusting the Tory policies.
Clegg has been shredded for betraying us to Tory rule in 2010. Miliband has been shredded for covering up Gordon Brown’s stupidity as Chancellor and then PM in accepting Thatcher banking freedoms.
I am absolutely delighted that my own MP Liam Byrne will not get his evil hands on the War Game machine.
IDS is of course the establishment’s successor to agent Cameron – the man who reformed the British welfare system. We cannot stop the fraud. We are too divorced from each other to succeed; too conciliated.
IDS the creature that hauled the family of a disabled child through the appeal courts in an effort to overturn a ruling on a spare bedroom a spare bedroom
Yes we put up with that – take it on that huge chin – “Do put a bun in it, there’s a good chap”.
Maybe this grungy piece of Work and pensions paper that’s left the out-tray might stir up the works.
Cameron £12 billion Secret Plan – statement “Britain can no longer afford welfare state”
1. Bedroom tax raised and expanded
2. No housing benefit for age under 21/25yrs
2(a) HB reduced for singles aged 25-34yrs
2.(b) HB deducted for other adults in property
3. Tax on PIP which replaces DLA
4. Child benefit limited and means tested
5. No social fund for emergences
6. Council Tax Benefit stopped.
5. Max benefit capped at £23,000
6. Tax credits reduced by £3-4 billion
7. Universal credit-5 week wait for money – 1 million lose £137/week
8. Bedroom Tax expanded and raised.
https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/BenefitsDelayed2014.pdf
The surge of the Labour Party to the right to accommodate people like Chuka Umunna is why we have aligned ourselves with the US model of no choice. When I was young, just after the Second World War, there were ration books to make sure we did not eat too much, or get to much coal to warm ourselves, and people, the bulk of people were honest. There were sayings like “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves” and “Save for a rainy day.”
We children had accounts with the Yorkshire Penny Bank and used to think it was great that the money we had saved accrued interest. I think I might be the last person in England to still believe that an honest system devoid of greed and excessive profit would be good for all. They should not cap council spending. They should not cap workers’ wages. They should cap profit.
I know that money and profit are some people’s God. But Robert Tressell has pointed out how economic systems work with his chapter entitled “The Great Money Trick”. It is all anyone needs to know about economics. Yet here we are a country in debt. Nearly all countries are in debt. North Korea and Iran are not among these debt-laden countries. Neither were Iraq and Libya.
Look at this clock of US debt.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
You might think the important thing is that the Gross Domestic Product (GNP) is less than the National Debt. It is important. It means the US is bankrupt. It has spent money it does not have and one day it will have to take toll. Where does it get its debt rescheduled? From the Federal Reserve. The most important aspect of the clock to my mind is the trade deficit which is huge. Nearly half of it is to the advantage of China. All the US can do to try and improve this situation is to print money (quantative easing). What that means is the dollar becomes less valuable.
China also owns much of the US debt in the form of treasury bonds. It has realised the mistake here and has been gradually reducing its holdings.
http://www.treasury.gov/ticdata/Publish/mfh.txt
BRICS countries have realised that the dollar is about to pop its clogs and do not want to be taken down in that predictable scenario. The only way the US can keep its role as world monetary leader is to ensure that all countries are in debt to the US, wage war wherever there is a challenge or install a puppet state. And try to create a challenge to BRICS which thanks to Wikileaks we now know is the TTIP, putting power into the hands of corporate entities that have already stolen our savings
Anywhere like the former Libya, the former Iraq had to go because they could not be bought. Iran and North Korea would also need eliminating for continued US global domination. Whereas the larger countries that pose an economic threat like China and Russia who have vast combined resources and growth must be problematic. No point in saving. It just pour your real money down their big drain!
No means no.
http://news.stv.tv/scotland-decides/news/1320035-prime-minister-david-cameron-says-there-will-not-be-another-referendum/
I’m wondering how many votes Salmond saying he would write the Labour budget gave the Conservatives.
Craig is wrong to write that Chuka Umunna’s father was a high court judge- as Mary’s link to the Mail article suggests, he was a dodgy import/export wheeler-dealer who made a pile trading with his homeland while based over here.
The high Court judge in the family is the maternal grandfather-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helenus_Milmo
He was also a wartime spook.
God, it’s like being force fed regurgitated vomit. And they decry protest? Against this arranged “government”.
No i’m not ‘coming back’. But I just wanted to mark how useful stuff like this is. I won’t stop reading, sharing, etc.
I can’t last forever can it, I mean, how long can they hold two conflicting ideas simultaneously, working in the interest of a tiny minority can never be democracy.
It’d be wrong for me to say this for others, but i’m kinda glad the labour mask is off. I hope young black revs etc, see past this guy…….. Shut up Ishmael you have work to do *shudder* “Build me an army worthy of the Green party”, *shudder*
Myself i’m gona push for some of those Green smoke bombs, like at the protest. Great for political meetings as well as defiance. *puff* “And emerging for the green mist…The Green Party!”…Joining the alliance. Hell yes it’s a good idea.
And they accuse me of humiliating them. I replied quite simply. I do not do that..I encourage and motivate people..I do not humiliate anyone..but was motivated to write this…so I did…sorry if you don’t like it..it just happens to be the truth.
You never really know if you are any good..except when you have done absolutely nothing wrong in front of a few thousand people..alone..and you get arrested by the police,,and they all see what is going on…and then there is quite a large number of people surrounding us..and they all think FFS why have you Arrested Tony (me) I wasn’t drunk – I had no drugs..Yes I do have a Muscular Disease..I was born with it..I can’t help that…
And my wife didn’t see it..but finds out from her friends and forces her way to the Front Of The Crowd…And Demands From The Police
Why Have You Arrested My Husband?
They Accused Me of Taking Photographs of Children…
I said I haven’t taken any photographs..They are All Videos Of The Bands on Stage..and They Asked Me…
So they asked me to show them..and so I did..on my camera..
Instead of Arresting Me…Shouldn’t You Be Watching The Bands
So they Let Me Go.
If I had been alone..i would be fcked..thrown into the back of their meat wagon and carted off to jail..The Police Have History…..
Yeh well it was his kid wasn’t it..and what did I do the year before..I gave him the video – of his kid..The Chief of Police…That is Your Kid on Stage,,and To Be perfectly Honest..These Kids are fkin Good..
I expect thanks..I do not expect to be arrested..I think my daughter may have being going out with him..she definitely had been round their house.
Tony
@Giyanne:
CanSpeccy. You mean like this?:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article187529.html
Yeah, more or less. And like this:
http://irishsavant.blogspot.ca/2015/05/in-passing.html
And like this:
Richard Nicolaus, Coudenhove Kalergi: Practical Idealism
The man of the future will be a mongrel. Today’s races and classes will disappear…
The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its outward appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.
(Or how the claimed liberal-left love of diversity provides cover for the genocide of the European people by the suppression of indigenous birth rates through mass slaughter of the unborn, promotion of non-reproductive sexn, combined with mass immigration of highly philoprogenitive Africans, middle-Easterners and Asians.)
http://balder.org/judea/Richard-Coudenhove-Kalergi-Practical-Idealism-Vienna-1925.php
The project was kicked into high gear by Tony Blair and New Labour as revealed in 2009 by Blair advisor Andrew Neather:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html
And after New Labour, the genocidal program of mass immigration to the UK has been pursued by the liar Cameron who promised before the 2010 election that the immigrant flow had to be “gripped.”
Then there’s UKIP. A huge majority of the British population are opposed to large scale immigration, both net and gross, yet Farage, who claimed to represent that section of public opinion, repeatedly expresses his enthusiasm for immigration and advocates an immigration policy based on that of Australia, a settler state with less than half Britain’s population but a territory 30 times as large.
Moreover, Farage has repeated indicated his preference for Commonwealth immigrants over East Europeans, i.e., Asians and Africans over white people, whereas the public preference, given no zero immigration option, would most likely be for mass immigration of Romanian pick-pockets over Africans and Asians.
UKIP, in other words, looks like a re-run of the BNP scam: a fake national party designed to fail.
Out if interest, can anyone give an explanation to how Chukkers is a millionaire?. By my calculations based on his age, he could only have been a practising city lawyer for 4 years after completing his training contract. I know a few city Lawyers, and none of them were millionaires after 4 years!. He seems to reguarly be referred to as a ‘millionaire city Lawyer’ in the media,as if those two always go hand in hand, but I find it really difficult to believe you could get to that stage in 4 years, which suggests there was something else going on to make him a millionaire.
Fred 10 May 10.27p.m. Thanks, Fred, for that. I was aware of that, but probably had discounted it when I shouldn’t have done. Anything is possible in our strange world. As you say, some of the info may be made up. What has always worried me is-where the hell are the 3 nukes now? Different sources say different things.
Out if interest, can anyone give an explanation to how Chukkers is a millionaire?
Rich daddy. How else?
Umunna’s daddy shone at property speculation. But:
(his) will, which went to probate in September that year, reveals that — for tax purposes — he left an estate valued at a mere £307,283.
Exactly how that figure was so low is unclear. But last year, it emerged that the family’s home, in which his widow Patricia still lives, was financed via a Jersey-based trust called Vona which helps ‘high net worth’ individuals to ‘plan for and mitigate tax liabilities’.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2308381/Voters-dismissed-trash-1m-Ibiza-villa-called-White-House-credibility-crisis-threatening-Labours-Obama-Chuka-Umunna.html
Oborne -the voice of reason:
http://www.politico.eu/article/labour-recovery-uk-election-blair/
On May 9, another Blairite cabinet minister, Alan Johnson, called on the Labour Party to learn the lessons of Blair’s three consecutive election victories.
Several more of Blair’s cabinet ministers, including David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, have called for Labour to recapture the centre ground.
Their prescription is curious after a general election in which the three parties which rejected the centre ground — the SNP, UKIP and the Greens — made the biggest gains in the popular vote.
Meanwhile the party which made the greatest claim to the centre ground — the Liberal Democrats — was virtually annihilated.
Fact and truth, however, have rarely interfered with any New Labour narrative.
(written before Blair, today, added his voice to the ‘appeal to the centre’ mob.)
There was a picture of Umuna with a good-looking girlfriend in today’s Metro. At least Craig, you don’t have to envy him that, after the photo of Mrs Murray that you’ve shown us!
“A small world” looks like a club for very lucky people. Good luck to them. Their good fortune is none of my business. I don’t spend time thinking about people who live in palaces, because it’s fantasy world. I saw Elvis’ private plane with its gold-plated washbasin several years ago, as a tourist only!
Chuka Umuna and the other Blairites are making sense of Labour’s debacle: they failed to appeal to people who are neither well off nor poor, and got flattened, so there’s a political moral there.