Responding to the media furore over the potentially racist comments by new Reform MP Sarah Pochin (after all, quite a few of us find the current fetish for beautiful black models in every advert somewhat patronising, and in no way indicative of a wider success in vanquishing racism or representative of the average black person’s life in Britain), the proven racist (zionist and British imperial supremacist) Wes Streeting was quick to jump in and claim ‘antiracist’ and simultaneously ‘patriotic’ brownie points.
Because of course jingoist flag-waving and antiracism go together perfectly …
Being ‘patriotic’ and waving the Union Jack is very much in vogue amongst British career politicians right now. The campaign to promote this activity is presented as being a ‘response’ to ‘popular sentiment’ and the ‘threat of Reform’. But in fact, this is all part of a major effort by the ruling class to reassert imperialist values that are being increasingly questioned; to strengthen ties between exploiters and exploited in Britain that are weakening by the day.
The Labour health minister told the press: “Reform is a party who thinks that our flag only belongs to some of us who look like me, not all of us who have built this country, built its success.”
Where to begin with this jumble?
If Britain has “success” – ie, wealth – it is built upon the exploitation and wage slavery of its working population, and also upon the bleeding – the superexploitation, looting, drug running, chattel slavery and wage slavery – of its colonies and neocolonies. It is a success that has been built upon the blood, toil and misery of literally billions of human beings, going back many generations.
In that sense, Britian belongs to all of us. Those whose work and untimely deaths created its wealth and fuelled its rise to “greatness”. It belongs to the immigrants whose homelands and peoples have been robbed and impoverished, who have struggled to find some place of peace in which to live and work – and yet find none on our shores.
Meanwhile, the wealth that was created by the sweat and suffering of untold millions over the course of centuries – the billions of capital and investments owned by the corporate elite, the land and global asset portfolios, the transnational corporations and the politics that serves them – all belongs to the ruling capitalist class alone.
It is that bloodthirsty and malevolent class that “our flag” really represents. And in that sense, the Butcher’s Apron belongs to none of us.
Labour’s racism
Labour has always been a party of empire. From its inception in 1900, through the first world war, through the post-WW2 suppression of India, Malaya, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, northern Ireland etc … all the way to the present day.
When a Labour government proposed “virginity testing” Indian women coming to join their husbands in Britain, that was racism.
When a Labour government sent the Special Patrol Group of police to beat Indian workers in Southall, that was racism.
When those same police beat the young Blair Peach to death for his antiracism, that too was racism.
If Labour were interested in stopping racism they could start with themselves. They could, for example, stop promoting the false narrative that all Pakistanis are members of paedophile grooming gangs and that sexual offences are the product of “immigrants’ culture” (rather than being embedded in the dominant culture that emanates from the very top levels of our society).
Labour could stop promoting the lie that poor people arriving on the coast of Britian in small boats are somehow the agents of all our misfortunes.
Labour’s leaders in general, and prime minister Keir Starmer in particular, could stop making comments like the one he made to the Sun during his election campaign: “At the moment people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed because they’re not being processed. I can remove them. I’ve done it before, and I can do it again.”
If Labour were really interested in “stopping racism”, it would break all relations with and end all military support for the racist, supremacist, apartheid state of Israel. It would stop equating anti-zionism with antisemitism. This is a state that accords different rights to the people who live there depending upon their ethnic background (Arab native or European settler) and their religion (jew or non-jew). It is a state that is based on ethnic cleansing and genocide – as all the world now sees only too plainly.
But Labour is not interested in any of this.
Racist hounding of Dr Rahmeh Aladwan
Meanwhile, the double-jeopardy kangaroo-court proceedings at the Medical Practice Tribunal Service on 21 October against young orthopaedic surgical trainee Dr Rahmeh Aladwan was called for directly by Mr Streeting and his zionist-extremist friends, on wholly political and frankly racist grounds.
Dr Aladwan had already been cleared by the MPTS of posing any ‘antisemitic threat’ to her patients. But the Labour government and the imperialist state it serves have clearly decided that Dr Aladwan will be their test case – the one that lays the groundwork for forcing the zionist IHRA definition of ‘antisemitism’ onto the entire NHS. That is: onto every medical practitioner in the country.
This is entirely illegal. It is the most glaring infringement of civil and employment rights. It is the most obscene misuse of a professional body (the General Medical Council), whose role is supposed to be ensuring patient and staff safety and ethical practice in the delivery of treatment.
Dr Aladwan, who is a young British woman from a Palestinian family, has been repeatedly doxed by imperialist media. She has been selected for this high-profile campaign because she is unrepentant in expressing her support for the rights of the Palestinians to resist their occupiers and genocidaires.
Her position (that the Palestinians have the right to resist their occupiers, the right to struggle for freedom and sovereignty, and the global community has the duty to stop the genocide that is murdering her people) is, in fact, the official position of the entire global community and of international law. Yet that is the position that the British government is trying to criminalise with its heavy-handed use of anti-terror legislation and its weaponisation of the concept of ‘antisemitism’.
Even if there were no United Nations resolutions or international conventions to point to, resistance would still be the right of an oppressed people. But in fact, this right has been affirmed by the UN general assembly on several occasions over many decades. It has been affirmed not only in broad general terms, but also specifically in the case of the Palestinian people’s long struggle for liberation.
The genocide convention, which the UK signed up to in 1970, says that individuals as well as states have the duty to act to prevent genocide in whatever way they can. Which of course means by using their supposed ‘right to free speech’ to publicise genocidal acts and build movements that are strong enough to force reluctant governments to take action.
In short: no one is buying Mr Streeting’s hypocritical gibberish.
The truth is that Labour’s role in not just facilitating but actually taking part in the present genocide in Gaza has been laid bare before the world. And this revelation may well prove to be the final nail in the Labour party’s coffin.
Labour, the party that has for over a century been the principal social prop of imperialism in the working-class movement, is dying.
We must finish it off for good, and dismantle the stultifying bureaucracy it has put in place to control our organisations and derail our struggle.
