‘UK govt. on mission to afflict poverty’ - Press TV

Originally published at: http://www.presstv.ir

Press TV has conducted an interview with Lee Jasper, with the Black Activists Rising Against Cuts from London to shed more light on the topic of the program.

‘UK govt. on mission to afflict poverty’

This government is on an ideological mission to restructure Britain into a low wage poverty economy that ensures that the rich remain rich and the poor are driven further down into poverty.”

An analyst tells Press TV that the Tory-led government of the United Kingdom is on an ideological mission to restructure the country into a “low-wage poverty economy” to guarantee the interest of the rich castes of the society.

A coalition of leading churches has accused the British government of pursuing a program of “unjust” cuts in welfare payments targeting the most vulnerable in the society. The "bedroom tax," which is due to be introduced in April, refers to a cut in housing benefit for claimants whose home has a spare room. On Sunday, thousands of people took to the streets across more than 50 towns and cities in Britain to call on the Tory-led government to axe cuts in housing benefit for those with spare bedrooms.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Lee Jasper, with the Black Activists Rising Against Cuts from London to shed more light on the topic of the program. He is joined by Gabriel Talmain, professor at the Glasgow University from Glasgow. What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Mr. Jasper the UK’s austerity program initiated, we know, in 2012 and a lot of people are saying that it has had few tangible results and it has, rather, led to more debt and mounting public complaints.

So why are we seeing this policy adopted again even to a more strengthened level and extreme level, is that going to help tackle the debt?

Jasper: Well, the deficit and the debt have been used as a flag of convenience and the reality is that the Tories are seeking to use it as an excuse to make also sort of an ideological attacks on the very poorest in our community.

And so we are seeing the bedroom tax which is essentially an attempt to reconfigure the inner cities where there is huge Muslim, where there are huge black and minority communities that resolutely refuse to vote for Tory.

They are seeking to socially reengineer those areas; releasing housing to more wealthy individuals in order to gerrymander the general election and to improve their chances of securing electoral success but all throughout the country we are seeing expenditure on ... nuclear submarines, we are financing wars with our army in places where we have no business like Iraq and Afghanistan; we are looking at corporate tax evaders who are getting away with paying less tax proportionately than some of our poorest people in work.

This government is on an ideological mission to restructure Britain into a low wage poverty economy that ensures that the rich remain rich and the poor are driven further down into poverty.

Press TV: Mr. Jasper, would you agree with what Mr. Gabriel Talmain said?

Jasper: No I just think that is Neoliberal tripe. At the end of the day the reality is that the government is making political decisions where it chooses to raise the money to reduce the deficit.

The fact is if we brought our troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, if we canceled nuclear submarine...., I mean the guest said raising taxes from the rich is pie in the sky; well it cannot be morally justified that Starbucks and Amazon pay zero tax on multibillion Pound profits just because a clever legal arrangement we [have] managed to procure through high expensive lawyers allows them to escape their duties in this country.

The whole argument about any government would have to do this, is absolute nonsense.

Just up to the war, we had a higher percentage of debt in terms of ratio to GDP than we have ever had; far in excess of what we have now and when we dragged ourselves out of that Postwar depression, we did it by building schools, hospitals, building roads, infrastructure, the NHS, the education system and social housing.

So to suggest that the fourth richest economy in the world cannot simply restructure itself in order to have a more equitable tax system that can cut the deficit is in itself a lie of monumental proportions and there is a bear scrutiny when you compare it to the facts.

Press TV: Mr. Jasper what do you say to these kinds of comments? To those who are saying that there are unnecessary expenses here and that it’s the time for people to sacrifice at these difficult conditions?

Jasper: The reality is that today the Tory government has given 13,000 millionaires, a 40,000 Pound tax cut; that is an additional 40,000 Pound to people who are millionaires in this country, who do not need the money.

So far from getting more money from the rich, this government is giving money to the rich.

And let us deal with the issue of the bedroom tax. The bedroom tax is paid to..., the majority of that money, is paid to working people; people already in work, who are getting assistance from the government to pay for rents in cities like London and elsewhere where the rents are absolutely stratospheric. No reasonable person can afford anything more than a doghouse in a capital like London; such is the level of rent.

So this notion that these are lazy people is completely fallacious. They are working people to the factor of 85 percent of those bedroom tax are for working people and the notion that the rich cannot pay any more, is fundamentally undermined by the reality that this government is giving tax cuts to the very rich rather than seeking to use that money to offset some of these drastic cuts that we are seeing.

And in relation to the army, this notion that this little country that is now on the down slope of the empire building project of the last 80, 90 years that has been forced to confront its minor relative scale; should have an army the size that we have, is ludicrous.

We should be a small player in a world which is now dominated by other powers and we should reconcile ourselves to that and cut the budget accordingly. Bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghnistan and we save billions of Pounds each year.

Press TV: Mr. Jasper if you could quickly tell us why do you think that it is realistic to get money out of the rich? Our guest there was saying that it is, actually, not possible.

Jasper: We are the fourth richest nation in the world. There is plenty pf money amongst the rich and the wealthy and the corporate multinational companies to be able to balance the books and have a more equitable and just society. This is the Tory Poll Tax, it is the equivalent of Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax .

Your commentator was absolutely right, it is fundamentally unjust and so what if the rich have to leave? We would rather be a poorer country with more equitable justice rather than be a richer country where inequality and [in]justice reign.

Let us live with less and have more equality rather than have more money and greater levels of inequality. That is a fundamental question confronting the Western economies ... as they are on the downside of a global economy where power is shifting to the East, increasingly they will have to get used to.

MY/HN

Davey D interview with Lee Jasper on racism and austerity in the UK

Originally published at:
https://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/tag/lee-jasper/

Black Folks Are Catching Racist Hell Throughout the UK & Europe as Austerity Kicks In

This week on our daily show, Hard Knock Radio we talked with long time political activist and former senior advisor to the Mayor of London Lee Jasper.. He alerted us to some disturbing news about the plight of Black folks living in the UK and throughout much of Europe as so-called austerity measures kick in..

For many it should not come as a surprise,  but Black folks are catching major hell as they are being scapegoated for the economic hardships many are experiencing.. For example in places like Greece, Black folks are literally being chased out of the country by uniformed goon squads.. White supremacist, Neo-Nazi hate groups and far right reactionary political parties are on the rise with Blacks and other immigrants as primary targets

We are now seeing the fallout of misguided foreign policy which has complicated this situation. Ongoing conflicts in Mali and in Libya which has resulted in thousands of Black folks fleeing Africa to various ports in Europe only to be turned away. The irony here is that its NATO/ and Western foreign policy that has led to this mass displacement..

During our conversation Jasper went into great detail about the types of policy measures taken to keep Black folks disenfranchised and in economic peril. He also noted the widespread police brutality many are experiencing. He noted whats been going on in France with many Blacks and the out of step perception put forth by popular artists like Jay-Z and Kanye when they did their song N–as in Paris and how that contrasted with the reality that Black folks in this fabled city who are treated like ‘N–gas in the worse possible way..Jasper noted

Lee also updated us to whats been going on since we saw the massive uprising in the UK two years ago and in Paris 6 years ago..

Lee has a wealth of information and will update us again in the near future. In the meantime.. Peep the insightful Hard Knock Radio interview by clicking the link below..


You can also read an indepth report of what’s going on in Greece as Black folks are being attacked.. Go to the link below
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/return-of-the-far-right-greeces-financial-crisis-has-led-to-a-rise-in-violent-attacks-on-refugees-8551798.html?action=gallery&ino=1

Here’s Lee Jasper speaking at a recent political rally giving folks the lay of the land
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L1fFrhd_v0

Boris Johnson Interview: Laugh I nearly cried.

Seen the roasting given to Mayor of London Boris Johnson by BBC journalist Eddie Mair? It’s definitely worth a watch!

Mair’s questioning of Boris reminded me of the late great Bruce Lee’s famous, one-inch punch. It didn't look much at the time, but the effect was devastating. Mair was questioning Boris as a trailer for the BBC 2 programme: “Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise”, to be aired at 9pm tonight. 

 Boris normally, the consummate media operator, slick funny irreverent was reduced to a bumbling wreck.

 He was asked a series of questions relating to his integrity as a potential British Prime Minister.

 The first question was about Johnson being sacked as a trainee reporter for The Times for making up a quote from his own godfather, Colin Lucas.

 Clearly shaken, Boris ummmed and ahhhed, so Mair moved on and asked about the fact that when, he was Tory leader; Michael Howard had asked Johnson if he was having an affair. He denied it. However it later transpired he was lying and Howard sacked him. “Why did you lie?” pressed Mair. Boris looked ashen and could not respond.

 Next was a question relating to the now famous telephone conversation Johnson had in 1990 with his buddy Darius Guppy. He asked Boris to supply him the address of a fellow journalist, so he could dispatch some goons to go and beat him up.

 As Boris flustered, Mair bludgeoned him further, "You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?"

 Mair’s final hammer blow came in the form of a statement rather than a question, “even your friend Conrad Black, a convicted fraudster, says he doesn't trust you completely.”

 This morning on LBC radio Johnson’s father, in a nice paternal touch, came out swinging in an attempt to defend his beloved son.

 “I thought Eddie Mair's interview was about the most disgusting piece of journalism I've listened to for a very long time,” Mr Johnson said. “The BBC sank about as low as it could.

 He then went on, in a statement of simply breathtaking hypocrisy, to add,

 “If grilling people about their private lives, accusing them of guilt by association and openly abusing them is a legitimate interview, then frankly, I don't know where we are coming.”

 Chutzpah indeed, particularly when one recalls the campaign run by the Evening Standard during the Mayor of London elections of 2008 led by the then editor Veronica Wadley and Andrew Gilligan, of which I was the principal victim.

 Smear, innuendo, massive intrusions into my own private life were all characteristics of that campaign orchestrated by Boris’s campaign manager Lynton Crosby (now running Cameron’s 2015 election team).

 Of course despite an intensive and grossly intrusive five-month onslaught, I was eventually completely exonerated of the 143 specific charges leveled against me by Gilligan and Wadley. As you can imagine the personal cost to my family, and me has been immense.

 So it was with a wry smile that I saw these events unfold over the weekend. It was the late Rev Martin Luther King who said,

 “The moral arch of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

 As an additional slice of irony, the guardians of the sacrosanct right of the “freedom of the press” are today, denouncing the Mair Johnson interview as unfair.

 This is laughable almost surreal.

Boris should know by now, that there is an immutable law of karma in politics as there is in life, what goes around, comes around baby.

Lee Jasper

 NB: Both Veronica Wadley and Andrew Gilligan are today employed by Boris Johnson. 

Immigration: The wailing banshee of racism haunts the land where even the Queen is an immigrant.

Photo: guardian.co.uk

Immigration is the poisoned cup from which politicians in trouble love to sip.

In Britain of late we have seen the beginning of the race towards the bottom of the barrel on this issue. All parties and most disgracefully, the Labour Party have now decided that whipping up sentiment against immigrants is a price worth paying for electoral success.

Ed Miliband first “apologises” for Labour’s mistakes on immigration, followed swiftly by Nick Clegg on visas, and now the Prime Minister muscles in wanting to get his snout in the trough.

We hear of his intent to implement laws and policies that will result in the denial of welfare benefits, access to public housing and most bizarre given the public health implications, access to NHS treatment.

Lynton Crosby. Photo: Guardian.co.uk

I recognise this tactic as it has Lynton Crosby’s fingerprint all over it and I can tell after being a victim of his during the 2008 London Mayoral election where he unleashed a frenzied and racist media campaign: the man has the scruples of a hyena when it come to race and immigration. He is the Godfather of “dog whistle politics” and the calculation made by the Tories is he may, using the same tactic, do for Cameron what he did for Boris in 2008. He specialises in the politics of smear, fear and hate. It is going to get very nasty between now and 2015.

 When you examine the statements of all three party leaders all are roughly similar in tone and content. We will “crackdown” and “get tough” on “immigrants who abuse our goodwill”. This type of rhetoric reappears regularly on the British political landscape from time to time, but of late these calls, have become increasingly more bellicose.

Nigel Farage. Photograph: Telegraph.co.uk

 We could just blame this as being largely as a response to the dangerous rantings of Nigel Farage UKIP party. But there is an even more critical failure at the heart of British politics that explains this shift to the right.

The fact is the public is being conned, mugged by the deceitful and disingenuous, neoliberal consensus of mainstream parties, who have conspired to protect their friends, the bankers.

In doing so they have sought to deflect, downplay and brush aside any attempt to pin responsibility for our economic crisis where it belongs, to the voluminous backside of the fat cat bankers.

Immigrants work harder, set up more business are less likely to be involved in crime, are more likely to be educated and less likely to claim benefits than most in Britain

Yet that’s not the reality the politicians want you to hear, preferring to play to popular misinformed prejudices, so they can protect their robber barons bankers.

Why you may well ask? Because they are in league with them, in short, Miliband, Clegg and Cameron share the same economic interest.

They know that if the real truth were known, about the extent to which their friends and colleagues have robbed the country blind, they would be unable to protect themselves or their plutocratic friends from the wrath of the people. 

So in the current economic crisis, with people casting around for people to blame, each of these social democratic parties lines up the vulnerable and the weak to act as a human shield for themselves and their rich tax avoiding friends in the city.

It’s the fault of the 'feckless poor', 'disability benefit cheats', stay at home mums, foreign students and now, the immigrants.

In this context and in the absence of a clear leadership from the left, the British public have taken this poisonous bait, and fingered immigrants as the authors of many of Britain's problems.

The rise of UKIP says as much about the failure of the left as it does about the right. With nowhere to go the majority in the country are left disillusioned uninspired and simply don’t vote.

At this moment in time, UKIP are talking about Bulgarians, but we all know the sub text and the real political and social dynamic behind such sentiments. Black people have in built radar for this type of double speak: we recognise these subliminal messages.  It is an ability that comes as part of our historical DNA enabling us to smell racism, to taste it when its stench begins to first putrefy the social atmosphere. UKIP are Neo Powellites.

The Windrush arriving in England from Jamaica 1948.
Photograph: www.voice-online.co.uk

And as Black people let us not fool ourselves. Far too often of late, I hear our own people exposing similar views, conveniently forgetting our own history of racism and oppression. They forget that their parents fought the same fight and they are the recipients and beneficiaries of that struggle.

 

Any black person who supports Labour, Tory or Lib Dem policies on immigration are akin to turkeys voting for Christmas. They are quite literally black people who have lost their conscious minds.

The truth is, those that are hostile to foreigner’s, are hostile to black people, are hostile to Muslims, are hostile to lesbians and gay people. They are  the UK Twitter Tea Party Tendency, for whom every problem, jobs, wages, housing shortages, crime, the deficit, can be laid at the door of “immigrants” or Europe.

Let us remind ourselves that the UK was built on the backs of immigrants. Every piece of infrastructure, rail, roads, and bridges, our national institutions such as the NHS or education, our great cities and small towns were all built through the forced contribution of slavery and colonialism followed by wave after wave of economic migrants.

Let us not beat about the bush here; even the Queen’s family are all descendants from immigrants. Britain is a nation of immigrants and any notion of a pure indigenous Briton is today, a dangerous fiction.  
We are a mongrel nation.  

Our historic and contemporary contributions to the making of modern Britain are immense and beyond calculation. We work hard, we contribute, we start business, and we make Britain a better place to be.

Notwithstanding this, we face constant discrimination from sections of the press, criminal justice system, housing and the labour market, in public life and elsewhere.

The increasing rabid rhetoric on this issue has changed the mood music for Black people and immigrants in Britain. We no longer dance to the same beat in this country. The politicians think there are few consequences to beating the racist drum, other than short term electoral success, but the long term damages such venomous racism causes, goes to the root of British society.

There are few mainstream politicians who consistently speak out on this issueOur friends in the House of Commons such as MP’s George Galloway, John McDonald, Jeremy Corbyn and Keith Vaz are rare exceptions; the silence of the rest is deafening.

Of late a leading Labour Shadow Minister has added her valiant voice of concern to the debate. It is to Diane Abbott MP’s, credit that she has recently warned her party about the dangers of “pandering on the issue of immigration” and she is right. One wonders where are the voices of MPs Sadiq Khan or David Lammy?

Unfortunately her party has bad form in this area. We can all remember the dark days of Margaret Hodge MP, Barking and Dagenham and Labour’s disastrous capitulation to the then rising BNP.

On a personal note Diane, I don’t believe, that a leader such as Ed Miliband, who singularly fails to recognise the injustice and racism, faced by Palestinians on the West Bank, Gazza is likely to understand, or frankly care about stigmatising immigrants at home.

Blue Labour, the new inheritors of the Blair’s New Labour projects are in the ascendency. 

South Africa during apartheid. Photograph: creativeroots.org

The resurgence of anti immigrant sentiment, xenophobia and racism will mean that anyone assumed to be a migrant will be stigmatised. If you’re Black you better start walking with your passport, as once these restrictions come into to force you will be assumed to be an illegal immigrant. You never know maybe they will issue immigrants with a “passbook” as used in the days of South African Apartheid. You can see where this is going right?

Black South African showing his passbook issued by the Government.

The message for the left in general and, more broadly, the anti austerity movements is clear and unambiguous. We have to be radically, uncompromisingly, anti racist and pro immigrant if we are to successfully challenge this unholy consensus. That requires demos, campaigns and opposition to the inevitable social victimisation of immigrant and citizen alike.

 In the fight against austerity we are all immigrants now. I do hope we are ready because given the size and scale of this crisis God help us if we are not.

Lee Jasper