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As I write, with over 75 percent of all yesterday’s English local election results in, Labour has a net gain of 55 councillors compared to the high water mark of the 2014 result in these wards, while the Tories have a net gain of one seat against a 2014 result which was regarded at the time as disastrous for them, and led the Daily Telegraph to editorialise “David Cameron Must Now Assuage the Voters’ Rage”. Yet both the BBC and Sky News have, all night and this morning, treated these results, in which the Labour Party increased by 3 percent an already record number of councillors in this election cycle, as a disaster. What’s more, they used that false analysis to plug again and again the “anti-Semitism in the Labour Party” witch-hunt. Of course, it was the continuous exacerbation of this mostly false accusation by Blairite MP’s that… deliberately on their part… stopped the Labour Party doing still better. The Blairites are all over the airwaves plugging this meme again today. What’s more, Labour achieved this result despite the complete collapse of the UKIP vote, which collapse pundits expected to boost the Tory Party. In fact, the net loss of over 100 UKIP seats hasn’t resulted in overall net gains for the Tory Party, even though those ex-UKIP voters demonstrably did mostly split to Tory. The very substantial UKIP voter reinforcements simply saved the Tories from doing still worse. The Liberal Democrats are showing some signs of life.
Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and the tendentious media misrepresentation of the election results reminds me why I couldn’t get excited about it. A media with the extremely concentrated ownership we see in the UK can never be free, and certainly does not represent a wide spread of political opinions. Even the views of the official Leader of the Opposition are almost entirely outside the Overton window. In Scotland, the Scottish government is subject to unreasoning media attack, day in and day out, which contrasts strikingly with the treatment of Westminster ministers and issues.
There’s a seriously worrying example from Leeds of the decline of free speech, where Leeds City Council disgracefully banned a meeting discussing the bias of the corporate and state media because of its content. We aren’t allowed even to get together to discuss media bias. Retired Ambassador Peter Ford, Professors Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward, Vanessa Beeley, and Robert Stuart were to address the meeting at Leeds City Museum entitled “Media on Trial”. I can’t sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it’s right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers because it questions the government and Establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead.
Truly, British society has changed fundamentally if a former British Ambassador to Syria is banned from speaking in public premises on his area of expertise. What’s still worse is the tone of this sneering report from Huffington Post, now firmly a part of corporate media, in which Chris York libels the speakers as “Assad supporters”, interviews none of the speakers and nobody to make the argument for free speech, but does manage to interview the “founder” of the jihadist “White Helmets”. In terms of banning dissent whilst simultaneously ramping up the official narrative, York has won himself top Establishment brownie points. The man… and I use the term loosely… is unfit for polite company.
4 May 2018
Craig Murray
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/37463/
Voices from Russia 
18 October 2018. I Wrote This Four Years Ago… It’s Truer Today Than It Was Then
Tags: 2018 US mid-term election, elections, extreme right, Far-right politics, GOP, political commentary, politics, Republican, Republican Party, Republican Party (United States), Republicans, right-wing, Right-wing politics, United States, US elections, US Republican Party, USA, wingnuts
This is from six years ago… and it still has tread, too. Bain Capital loaded up Toys r’ Us with debt and looted the store before it folded. Trump & Co chortle at this and applaud it. Vote against the Republican Party, for your very life depends on it.
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Editor:
With Trump & Co loudly calling for cuts to Social Security to finance giveaways to the deadbeat Affluent Effluent, what I wrote four years ago has more resonance today than it did then. The Republicans hate you and wish to rape you for the benefit of their rich paymasters. The Democrats hate you as well, and love the rich just as much, but they’ll leave us with more than what the Repugs would. Ordinary people have no option this year. As bad as the Dems are (and they ARE filthy promoters of neoliberal crapitalism), they’re better than the GOP, who’d leave us with nothing.
BMD
With all the chest-beating on the part of the American rightwing… let’s utter a home truth. American cosmonauts have to fly Russian spacecraft to the ISS as the reckless Republican filth wasted the USA’s treasure in useless land wars in Asia that didn’t advance the cause of national defence one iota and on gigantic tax cuts to corporations and to lazy wealthy scummers. That’s a fact, jack…
If you vote for the Republican Party, you vote for anti-patriotism (exporting jobs abroad and nominating cowards who refused to do military service), you vote for anti-life programmes (gutting the social safety net that unwed moms need to raise kids instead of having abortions), and you vote for Might Makes Right (bullying smaller countries and handing the country over to the Country Club Affluent Effluent Set). If you vote against them, you just might have Americans flying American spacecraft again. After all, the money for warmongering and coddling the rich has to come from somewhere…
IT COMES FROM YOU… IT COMES FROM YOUR KIDS… AND THEY DON’T GIVE A GOOD RUBY-RED GODDAMN.
Vote against the Republican scummers… God will bless you for it (and so will His Holiness… he’s a Red, and don’t you forget it!)…
BMD