A government which claims the right to kill its own citizens with no judicial process on the basis of the vote of 24.4% of the qualified electorate, legislates that workers cannot strike without the support of 40% of their qualified electorate because strikes can inconvenience people. Not as inconvenient as being sliced to pulp by flying metal, I should have thought.
David Davis, a decent Tory, said that some of the provisions of the Trade Union bill are Francoist, and he was not exaggerating. You can read the dispassionate official analysis of the bill by Parliament staff here. One of least publicised yet appalling aspects of the bill is the arbitrary power given to an anti-strike witchfinder, the Certification Officer. He is specifically given the powers of the High Court to compel individuals to give evidence or produce documents, and to make arbitrary judgements.
That extreme authoritarian stance is reflected throughout the bill. It is more publicised that notice must be given of picketing, with names reported to the police and identifying armbands worn, with letters of authority from the union to be there which the Bill states must be produced not only to the Police but to anybody who asks on request. This gives employers a whole new avenue of harassment of strikers.
The provision that 14 days notice must be given of any strike is obviously designed to reduce the effectiveness of strike action. The right to bring in agency staff to replace agency workers is not in the Bill, but the parliamentary staff analysis indicates it is intended to bring that in under secondary legislation – power delegated to the Secretary of State. That obviously is designed to combine with the 14 day notice to make strikes ineffective. The regulation of what individuals say about the industrial dispute on social media is so repressive as to verge on the incredible.
It is obvious the Tory government serve the agenda of corporatism, pure and simple. But it is perhaps surprising they are so entirely open about it. If you do not have the chance to withdraw your Labour, you are a slave. In the days of real slavery in Jamaica, foremen or gangmasters were generally slaves themselves (as opposed to the southern United States where they were generally poor whites). Very often the black gangmasters were extremely brutal to the slaves under them, imparting floggings with gusto to try to cement themselves in the favour of their white masters.
That is the function that token Muslim Sajid Javid plays in this Conservative government, flogging the workers with more gusto than his Old Etonian masters would dare to do. Plus they wouldn’t want to get blood on their trousers. Javid is a most enthusiastic Uncle Tom determined to tick all the establishment boxes. He certified the Trade Union Bill as compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, when it is plainly in contravention of Article 11. But his most spectacular effort to fit in with his Tory masters came at the Conservative Friends of Israel where ignoring completely the terrible suffering, humiliation and repression of the Palestinian people, he declared
“Mr Javid, who described himself as a “proud British-born Muslim”, announced that if he had to leave Britain to live in the Middle East, then he would choose Israel as home. Only there, he said, would his children feel the “warm embrace of freedom and liberty”. For him, only Israel shared the democratic values of the UK.”
Sajid Javid promotes measures rightly called Francoist because he is a person it is perfectly reasonable to call a fascist.
Sajid Javid Hankers After “Israel’s Warm Embrace”
whose nick, I think, was ‘Afriend’.
pretty sure it was “afrend” or a similar mis-spelling
it was introduced by: Afrend on 7 Jul, 2014 at 9:31 pm, as https://greasyfork.org/scripts/246-habbabreak
er, I told you I was a news junkie
er, told you it had been deleted…
tho’ I think the ‘selective poster visible script’ was first seen in 2012 – internet archive has no copy yet found
We can expect more of these incidents while Europeans remain wilfully blind to the bigger picture.
http://www.thelocal.dk/20150916/danish-teen-who-killed-mum-inspired-by-isis
Aha. I have seen a clue elsewhere. The removal of Habbabreak may have been a copyright issue. An instance, perhaps, of a commercial script being adapted for a purpose for which it was not entirely intended. Allegedly. M’lud. It would certainly account for an objection being raised to one of my posts on the subject. In which case adapting it further for use on the CM server might present legal implications. Which need not stop a Java geek from starting from scratch to solve the problem outside the realm of copyright.
Is there a tool somewhere to filter out all these off-topic conversations about filtering comments?
Jemand
16 Sep, 2015 – 5:05 am
You talk a lot of sense, there.
Have you read Nicholas Carr’s “The Glass Cage”? – A very incisive and extensively researched exposition on the far-reaching (and frightening) consequences of automation, both in the here and now (it is already in a hyper-developed state, beyond what most people would even imagine possible) and the very near future (a vision of which makes one feel desperately sad for the youth of today, given the world they will inhabit in their late adulthood).
Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” is also a truly astounding read.
I’m sure his “The Big Switch” (which I am about to read) will be just as brilliant and visionary.
Is there a tool somewhere to filter out all these off-topic conversations about filtering comments?
No, but I’m working on one to filter out off-topic comments about filtering out all these off-topic conversations about filtering comments.
A few points.
1) “to anybody who asks on request.”
Cue Pinkerton-style action by Group 4.
2) Whoever’s behind this Bill probably loves to see themselves as “Francoist” (which reminds me of New Labour Jonathan Powell calling himself a “Bonapartist”), but the term can only be applied by people who are ignorant of industrial relations under Spanish fascism. It’s as if any authoritarian label will do so long as the brand ain’t viewed as tarnished and Jewish money won’t object – the exception being Alan Clark who was known to view himself as a national socialist and worshipped Hitler.
Under General Franco, the only legal unions were part of the fascist apparatus. On one hand, strikes were illegal, as they have been in Britain in the past. On the other, it was very hard for the employers to sack a worker from a given enterprise, and on a macro level the government’s policy was one of full male employment.
It’s far more than just European blindness, Jemand.
You are overlooking NATO, its European Dialogue, and the individual states not knowing what is really going on.
Just look at the submarine and air hunts in and over the Baltic which has changed Swedish attitudes about Russia significantly, reminiscent of how the covert war against Sweden was carried out at Olof Palme’s expense, culminating with that non-nuclear showdown with the former USSR in March 1986.
Thanks for the plug about The Local, though, where I can and do post whatever I want.
There is a specifically British type of fascism, and many Tory Party members and supporters have lived much of their lives straining at the leash, just itching to smash the fuck out of working class people – and of ‘trendy’ middle class people too , whom they view with almost equal contempt – not just using birch and noose but using detention camps and firing squads and compulsory sterilisation too.
Their hero isn’t Francisco Franco.
Their hero is the English exterminationist reverend, Thomas Malthus, the ‘intellectual’ among those who view the lower orders as vermin.
Looks like Yatsenyuk was a real hands-on war-criminal and torturer in the Chechen War. I never liked the weasel-faced slimeball.
http://southerncrosstalks.com/2015/09/09/ukrainian-prime-minister-mr-yatsenyuk-from-terrorism-to-the-government/
N
You have bought into the cartoon characterisation of Malthus’ beliefs. You should try reading him.
I haven’t read Malthus, but am aware of this characterisation. Perhaps that is what a section of the Tories have bought into? Unfortunately it plays quite well, electorally: some people love looking down on their neighbours.
Donald Trump is showing every day that publicity — whether good or bad — doesn’t do him any harm.
I suspect that “left-wing” is no longer felt to be a term of opprobrium by many people, after years of austerity following the collapse of 2008 exposed the bankruptcy of neoliberalism.
@
Mary
Suhayl Saadi
David Halpin FRCS
YouKnowMyName
Ba’al Zevul
Comments for all the above (from me) at the bottom of “The BBC Is Irredeemable” post.
(That post seems to be dying now, but just wanted you to be aware. Forgive the O/T intrusion!)
Donald Trump shows every day all the behavioral and facial symptoms of a seriously isturbed person who should never have control of WMD.
Cleese and the two Ronnies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2k1iRD2f-c
🙂
I mentioned Trump to demonstrate the truth of the assertion that for some people all publicity, however bad, is good publicity.
Thanks for message Pan.
~~
Shocking scenes at Hungarian/Serbian border. Tear gas and water cannons are being used on the refugees trying to break through. Inevitable as our dear leaders here and in the EU Schengen zone have failed to deal with the situation.
@Craig – Well thanks for the one-line putdown, but you’re wrong.
I’ve read Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population – both the first edition, published under a pseudonym, and the 6th edition.
He had to tone some of his material down because of the Irish famine.
Perhaps you’ve been conned by his tongue-in-cheek averral (once the reverend admitted who he was) that what he was really seeking to do was to promote famine relief and other sorts of amelioration of the living conditions of the poor?
The work is a prolonged expression of contempt and hatred towards the lower orders, dressed up in places as a sort of ethnographic or naturalist catalogue. His argument is about as wrong as wrong could be.
What do you make of it? I’d like to hear.
I’m not sure whether you meant “caricature” rather than “characterise”. Nothing wrong with characterising something, so long as you do it right.
The book pushes two ideas which are canonical for the British ruling class:
1) the poor smell
2) the poor fuck like rabbits
But there’s more to Tory hatred than that.
I’m telling you that the attitude of Tories towards the archetypal (for them) “single mothers in social housing” is of a far uglier kind than the attitude displayed by right-wing Scandinavian, French or Irish right-wing bourgeois towards the same group.
I would call it fascist but it is sui generis British.
I have met ‘respectable’ middle-aged and older Tories who, if they say only a single thing about workhouses or the criminal justice system of the 19th century, they will make sure that it’s about how absurdly soft those institutions were.
I have met Tories who within about a minute of talking to you will be sounding off about how disgraceful it is that prisoners in today’s Britain get “three good meals a day”, how that is practically an offence against nature.
I have met Tories who have said how they would love to take part in the mass murder of uppety proles and foreigners.
Not all of your commenters speak from the top of their heads.
Malthus’s book is utter pap, and to think it was written at a time of such great industrial advances too. What an idiot.
Another classic for our enemies is Francis Galton’s equally stupid tome, Hereditary Genius. Galton was a complete plonker who thought he’d proved something about nature when he found out that judges, generals and cabinet ministers are more likely to be children of those who have ‘achieved’ eminence than to be the offspring of chimney sweeps or day labourers. Galton, by the way, inherited a fortune.
I don’t know whether you call yourself a socialist, but if you do, you should recognise that these ideas are the exact polar opposite of what is sensible, humane and true, and lie at the core of our enemies’ mindset.
And I mentioned Trump because he is most dangerous, thanks particularly to all the gratuitous publicity he is getting, to us all.
How about this latest from Peston? Planting the seed? Pour encourager les autres?
Will Blairites cross floor to Osborne?
Robert Peston
Economics editor
5 hours ago
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34267886
‘Osborne mixes in the same modish London *metrosexual and metropolitan elite circles as them. He takes their calls, responds to their emails, and is fully abreast of their current agony.
And they admire him. More than once I’ve been told, by a couple of their gang, that Osborne is the most impressive politician of the moment.
Naturally it would be quite a coup for the Tories if the ascent of Corbyn led to Labour defections to their ranks.
As is well known, both Osborne and Cameron were great admirers of Tony Blair, almost his disciples – and they both believe elections are won from the centre of politics.’
* the origin of the word
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrosexual
Scottish Government may defy trade union bill if it becomes law.
The PCS in Scotland has urged the Scottish Government to defy the Conservative Trade Union bill if it becomes law. PCS, the trade union for civil servants and public sector workers made its call as the TUC voted for a national day of action to protest at the UK Government proposals.
Already at least two councils in Scotland have said they will defy the bill by continuing to collect trade union dues through payroll, also known as check-off, and by not cutting down on time off for union activities.
http://www.thenational.scot/politics/union-tells-scottish-government-to-defy-planned-tory-laws-cutting-workers-rights.7646
I heard some woman ‘expert’ on BBC Radio 4 today say that by allowing refugees onto its territory without a more prolonged process, Croatia was “breaching the Geneva Convention”.
I didn’t make that up.
She’ll go far.
I wonder if Craig will be speaking?
Saturday’s Hope Over Fear rally in Glasgow to mark a year since Scotland’s historic independence referendum boasts some impressive speakers.
A wealth of musical talent is lined up to entertain the crowds, along with speakers from a variety of political parties and organisations.
Why don’t you come on down and join in the celebrations.
http://www.thenational.scot/politics/profile-hope-over-fear-rallys-top-speakers.7621
“I have met ‘respectable’ middle-aged and older Tories who, if they say only a single thing about workhouses or the criminal justice system of the 19th century, they will make sure that it’s about how absurdly soft those institutions were.”
No they don’t. They say it about today’s criminal justice system.
“I have met Tories who within about a minute of talking to you will be sounding off about how disgraceful it is that prisoners in today’s Britain get “three good meals a day”, how that is practically an offence against nature.”
No they don’t. They sound off against such things as open prisons and television/video games for prisoners.
“I have met Tories who have said how they would love to take part in the mass murder of uppety proles and foreigners.”
B0llocks you have.
You’re a complete raving nutter, N_
I haven’t read Malthus for 30 years, but my recollection is that his basic thesis was unexceptional – that unlimited population growth is undesirable, and too large a supply of labour leads to depressed wages and poverty, and pressure on the land. In a sense it prefigures some of the arguments of environmentalists today. He was arguing about birth rates rather than migration, but the argument about over-population depressing wages is frequently heard today about migration. He was a clergyman 200 years ago, and social attitudes much what might have been expected.