An article that I first published on my WordPress blog exactly two years ago.
Jardine Crescent, Tile Hill, Coventry, a shopping area in a suburban council estate, sometime in 1997 or thereabouts, around the time that His Toniness became Supreme Leader. I approached a table where a bloke had a petition. Would you like to sign here to save the NHS? Well of course I would, so I did, subsequently ending up on a mailing list, a real mailing list, not an e-mailing list for the Socialist Party or whatever name that it traded under then. Personal Computers were still expensive back then, even the Central Library had yet to have any for a couple of years and I had no personal e-mail address.
I got him talking about environmental issues, which I knew then as now that the political left only play lip service to. I even explained my being a vegan. He told me that he knew Jill Phipps' mum, with whom she had lived in a council flat in Hillfields, Jill Phipps herself having being crushed by a lorry at Coventry Airport in early 1995, when it reversed over her, whilst she had been protesting against exports of live calves to the continent for slaughter. She became a martyr to many in the animal rights' movement and a local heroine. Even the greasy spoon in Bull Yard would make soya milk available on Jill's Day, the anniversary of her death when protestors would turn up at the airport, whether or not they also went into town.
Late January or it could have been early February 2003. A freezing cold evening. Stood on the corner of Corporation Street and Upper Well Street, near the Belgrade Theatre. A small protest against the likely bombing of Iraq with maybe no more than a dozen other people. How I found out about this I can't remember. I recognised no-one else there let alone knew any of them, so I felt conspicuous, but I felt that I had to do something. One other bloke looked a bit out of place and detached, but he was someone whom I met subsequently. Somehow I found out about coach transport to London that would be available on Saturday 15th, for the protest that turned out to have about a million people and from which I took the above photo.
I can't remember whether it was before or after then that there was an anti-war meeting at Methodist Central Hall, which I often think of as a legacy of Coventry being a puritan provincial place beneath the 'multi-cultural' exterior. On stage was Dave Nellist, 'Brother Dave' to his fellow travellers who resent his local celebrity. He had been Labour MP for the former constituency of Coventry South East from 1983 to 1992, having been deselected prior to the latter general election for being a supporter of the Militant Tendency. Now he was doing his Arthur Scargill finger-pointing routine, at all those in what passed for the Labour Party at local and national level. The female minister who had been at the back of the hall hurried forward. You can't do that Dave; and harried him off the stage. It would have been comical had the subject of the meeting not been so serious.
I found out about anti-war meetings taking place at the Koko Building, well-known in left-wing circles, in the Arches Industrial Estate, Spon End. Coventry Trades Union Council was based in this building and could have been the ones who organised the coaches down to London. These meetings had been organised by the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), though I only became aware of that from the first meeting that I attended. In addition to them was the two-man contingent from the local Marxist Party and others besides myself who were non-aligned. Dave Nellist and his Socialist Party (SP) colleagues were holding another anti-war meeting in a different room, such was and remains the rivalry on the political left.
The SWP crowd seemed OK and I went to a short meeting of the two principal organisers, who were partners, at their house where the main task was in putting together leaflets and placards for future protests. They lived in a part of town that I used to and was very familiar with. We held a small evening protest meeting on the Cathedral steps then around the city centre to the Godiva statue in Broadgate. We also did some suburban leafleting around the top-end of Coundon, from where you get a good view down the hill to Coventry's three spires. It may even have been my suggestion. When posting some of these leaflets I remember a girl of about sixteen, who must have lived in that area, telling me that she agreed with the campaign to oppose the war. Does any degree of political awareness exist amongst that age group today?
At the first protest in London, just because of the scale of numbers of protestors, the police were courteous. By the time of the next protest five weeks later the atmosphere had changed. There were fewer people, with a greater visibility of Stop The War Coalition and Socialist Worker placards and a somewhat hostile attitude from the police. I had also picked up a sense from attending the anti-war meetings in Spon End that the SWP were looking to control opposition to the war in Iraq and one of their main organisers, the bloke who chaired the meetings, admitted to me that he wanted to get recruits out of it. I told him that my politics leaned more towards the Green Party. His response I think was along the lines of I know you're not a socialist but ... or something to that effect.
By the time of the third London protest that I attended I had a feeling that the issue was a lost cause owing in large part to the hard left having hijacked it. This is something that I believe Maajid Nawaz has subsequently discussed. Not only that, but the hard left were 'gaslighting' Muslims, pretending to care about them, but again trying to recruit from them. The late Rob Windsor (who died in 2012 at the age of 47), former Socialist Party councillor for St Michael's Ward, had a chat with me whilst we were waiting for the coach to London, that the SP had tried selling their paper outside the city's two mosques, but received short shrift from one of the imams. Although Rob Windsor struck me as being more sincere than those in the SWP, the imam in question was no doubt wary of the SP's intentions (though that didn't mean that he supported the Iraq war).
I can also recall being in town on a Saturday, outside the Council House, with the SWP handing out leaflets; and my trying to get people interested in a Robert Fisk article from The Independent, that I had photocopied for distribution. I gave one to a Muslim lad of about eighteen, who was in a group who had turned up to show their opposition to the war, but who tended to keep themselves to themselves. The older generation were more outward going and didn't share the reticence and suspicion of those who were younger. The younger ones maybe sensed what the older ones didn't, that Muslims were being used by the SWP to further the latter's agenda.
It was after that third London protest held three weeks following the second that I dropped out of going to the meetings at Spon End. How long they continued for I don't know. My manager at work and some of my colleagues were aware of my opinions on the Iraq war, but not of my activism. Many of them shared the scepticism about the 'dodgy dossier' claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (if indeed he had any) being able to attack British military bases in Cyprus in 45 minutes. To my knowledge, none of them became politically active, unless they were doing as I was and not making it known at work.
The above ten paragraphs were intended to be a preamble, to place context on what has happened over the past nineteen forty-three months and counting. For myself, I only became aware of any organised opposition to lockdowns, other restrictions and what may have come to follow, in August last year 2020. It was the mandate the previous month for mask wearing that made it obvious that normality would not return any time in the foreseeable future as indeed it hasn't. I attended a Freedom Rally in Victoria Square, Birmingham, for which a short summary can be found here on a different blog that I have written. Conspicuous by their absence, as they have been ever since, were the political left.
By an odd coincidence, at the edge of that rally, I came across the very same bloke that I had met on that freezing cold evening in Coventry more than seventeen years previously and at the subsequent meetings in Spon End; although both of us have greying hair we recognised each other. I had only seen him once in the meanwhile at a local garden centre. At this rally he was handing out what appeared to be home-made mask-exemption notices. As he was not a member of the SWP, SP or Marxist Party, maybe he is similar to me in only getting involved in certain political issues on an individual level. I told him that I had dropped out of anti-war meetings as the SWP had hijacked the issue for their own ends. They were running it all along, is what he told me.
The reason for this absence by the left is that belief in the concept of personal freedom is considered by them to be 'right-wing', whereas every authoritarian measure that has been put in place and continues to be, has further empowered the state, for which many of the political left work in local government. It appears they have found that the journey from supporting socialism to national socialism, from communism to fascism is a short one. Whilst the political left like to play the 'diversity' card, they don't genuinely believe in it as it reeks of freedom and goes against their collectivist mindset. Freedom Rally protests, such as the one in Centenary Square, Birmingham shown below, have been genuinely diverse in terms of people's backgrounds and views on other subjects. Added to that, many of the political left work in academia and prefer the life of working from home and zoom teleconferencing; or they are employed somewhere in the many bureaucratic layers of the 'health service' such that it is. So for this latter group, ramping up the fear factor of 'Covid' was a way to get more attention and hence more taxpayer funding.
Thus it has not been in the interest of the political left to challenge the totalitarian 'Covid' agenda, even where this agenda hugely profits the pharmaceutical companies. The political left of course despise the notion of bodily sovereignty as it reeks of individuality, of personal freedom, of rejection of the notions of mass systems of thought. Where this relates to adopting a vegan diet should be quite obvious. Every one of us who have done so, even if health wasn't the main reason, will by default most likely be healthier than those with an omnivorous diet. This also applies to keeping physically fit. And for that reason, the rejection of personal freedom, the political left couldn't give a toss about the livelihoods of those who are self-employed, or about supposedly 'non-essential' private sector businesses, when in reality many of the public sector roles in which the political left are employed are anything but essential. Not even having the arch warmonger Tony Blair as the most vociferous supporter of 'vaccine passports' is enough to energise opposition amongst the left.
Indeed, such proof of 'vaccination status' was not just required for the recent Labour Party conference but the fringe meetings of Momentum, the political left's main vehicle; whilst the Corbynista wing, including Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana, of what is now called UK Labour, have been pushing the experimental 'vaccines' just as hard as all other MP's have. The one and only feint glimmer of hope that I experienced recently is almost going back to the beginning. A few months ago I got talking to a bloke running a stall in Coventry on behalf of the whatever the Socialist Party's current incarnation is. He is of similar age to me, told me that had hadn't had the 'jab' and believed that 'vaccination' should always be a personal choice. But, assuming he was being sincere and not just trying to get me on side, are there any others on the left who share this view?
Under the guise of 'mitigating health inequalities', ethnic communities have felt the hard push of coercion to get these experimental 'vaccines'. A few Muslim blokes from Small Heath in Birmingham came to our local Stand in the Park in Leamington several weeks ago and I discussed this issue with one of them. They are in their mid-to-late thirties and of the same generation who were correctly suspicious of the motives of the political left back in 2003. They had decided to stand down their own Stand in the Park for four weeks in order to visit some others. They understand full well what is going on, they are being 'gaslighted' again as they were in the run up and during the Iraq war, by people on the political left to further the latter's agenda, in this case for coercive 'vaccination'; supported by the left to enhance the societal role of the so-called 'health service' and to increase state control over the individual. A example from Leamington can be found in this recent tweet from the local NHS Trust. The political left also want to be seen as saviours, encouraging those from ethnic communities to take the 'vaccine' for their own supposed benefit.
The highest health risk faced by those of South Asian or other 'BAME' background, leaving them susceptible to respiratory viruses, is that of Vitamin D deficiency, as summarised by Drs David C Anderson and David S Grimes in their book published last year in July 2020 on the subject. They highlight that by listing doctors of 'BAME' background whose deaths were attributed to COVID19 during the Spring of last year 2020. Vitamin D deficiency can even affect fair-skinned people like myself during the Autumn and Winter months. It is surprising therefore that the political left have not called for Vitamin D supplements to be made available free of charge, with priority to those of 'BAME' background. They are cheap and therefore the cost to the NHS would be far, far less than the cost of the experimental 'vaccines', the Big Pharma manufacturers of which will be the prime beneficiary of the forthcoming rise in National Insurance contributions.
Given that I have mentioned Muslims in this blog post, it is possible that I could be accused of 'gaslighting' them by mentioning the concerns that one of the blokes from Small Heath discussed with me. He felt that for twenty years they had been treated as 'terrorists' and now they are being treated as 'virus carriers'. I realise that there is a massive animal welfare issue with regard to Islam in terms of the ritual unstunned slaughter of animals which is more cruel than stunned slaughter, though the latter is hardly 'cruelty free' let alone compatible with vegan ethics. The recent murder of David Amess, the MP for Southend West, allegedly by an Islamic radical, is going to lead to more pressure being placed on Muslim communities where the low uptake of the experimental 'vaccines' may be labelled by the mainstream media to be another form of 'terrorism', i.e. 'anti-vaxxers' as 'terrorists'.
Returning to the protests and other activism against the Iraq war, these were undertaken by only a small minority of the population, even allowing for the one million or so people that attended the first protest in London. Some people who were opposed or were just sceptical did not take it any further, such stoicism being one of the worst aspects of the British character. Most of the mainstream media were in support, as of course were some of the population. But there was also a great deal of apathy and some hostility towards people who dared to protest. Thus displaying yet another one of the worst aspects of the British character, that we should all know our place, that everything will turn out OK because 'the government will sort things out' and that we should never kick up a fuss. Given the disaster that the Iraq war turned into, many of those who supported it back in 2003 may have later claimed that they didn't.
Essentially not much has changed since then, except that whilst the Iraq war was in a distant place, the restrictions that we have all lived under cannot be put to one side. Again, there is apathy and some hostility towards protestors against coercive 'vaccination' and 'vaccine passports'. In this case the hostility is more vehement as those who have taken the 'vaccine' believe that they have 'done their bit' for society and should be duly rewarded; whilst those haven't taken up the 'offer' of experimental medical treatment that they don't need have somehow 'shirked' a responsibility, through their unwillingness to sacrifice themselves to Big Pharma and should be duly punished, by exclusion from employment and all other participation in society. Though a society populated by vaxx junkies isn't worth participating in anyway. We need to build our own new society in which the influence of Big Pharma has been eradicated.
With the Coronavirus Act 2020 having been extended by another six months without even the pretence of a parliamentary vote, it is now blatantly obvious to anyone who may have had any doubts that all of the Parliamentary Labour Party, including the supposedly left-wing parts of it, support the tyrannical agenda that has been enacted for the past nineteen forty-three months; indeed the only criticisms that the political left have levelled at the authoritarian Johnson regime is that it hasn't been authoritarian enough. The reason is that the political left support the totalitarian agenda of the state having total control of every person's life, including that person's bodily sovereignty.
The political left must also be aware that when (not if) the NHS gets fully privatised, the notion that any form of medical treatment can be considered a matter for anyone other than the individual making that decision in a private capacity will also be lost; and that is something that the political left are afraid of. Personally, before this whole 'Covid' scam started, I would have been resolutely opposed to the NHS being privatised, but as it is now nothing more than a front for Big Pharma, if those companies take over NHS Trusts and GP surgeries, it will only put an official stamp on what is already the case and those privatised NHS Trusts and GP surgeries will have millions of vaxx junkies as regular paying customers, including those on the political left who bought into the 'Covid' scam. The rest of us already know what the answer is.
