John Woodcock Brings Labour Into Disrepute

[Update at end of post]

As I noted recently, semi-detached Labour MP John Woodcock has given the impression to politics watchers that he is on his way out of the party, and perhaps even out of the Commons. He has never been able to accept Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, instead embarking on a very public show of petulance. But how he would maximise the damage on The Red Team was not at first clear - until this week.

Events in the past few days have revealed that someone can be expelled from the Labour Party for bringing it into disrepute. Suddenly all became clear, especially when Woodcock struck a very public note of sympathy towards embattled Home Secretary Amber Rudd, telling anyone who would listen “Amber Rudd has screwed up big time, no question. And there is now clearly a significant question mark over her competence. But Labour has more common ground with her than so many of her potential successors - we should be careful what we wish for”. Labour has common ground with Ms Rudd?

Common ground with a Home Secretary who has misled Parliament so many times that many observers have lost count? Common ground with someone who was happy to see British citizens rounded up and deported, just to meet departmental targets, until she got caught? Common ground with a politician happy to dump on the weak and powerless?

It’s odds-on he didn’t run that one past David Lammy first. And a racing certainty he didn’t mention it to Diane Abbott or Dawn Butler. One Labour supporter reminded him “Labour has the SAME amount of common ground with Amber Rudd as ALL of her potential successors - NONE. You're in the wrong party mate. Have been for years”.

Tom London added “you constantly amaze me. Rudd has presided over a cruel and racist policy. She has lied to Parliament. Any Labour MP should be demanding her resignation. It is really as simple as that”. And Owen Jones responded “Reminder that if Labour’s old guard were in charge, the party would be throwing lifeboats to the Tories even when they were sinking”. The idea that Labour should make common cause with her was bizarre.

Peter Stefanovic spelt it out: “The Labour Party I know & belong to has NO ‘common ground’ with anyone who would preside over, promote, implement or enforce policies which have inflicted inhumane treatment on its citizens, denied them medical treatment, imprisoned them & deported them”. And there was more.

“You have brought the Labour Party into disrepute with that tweet.  You think Labour has common ground with Rudd when she has presided over unlawful deportations of British citizens, loss of livelihoods, denial of healthcare, welfare etc?  Do you understand what has been going on?” Ah right. So perhaps there is method to this.

After all, Woodcock has apparently been reported by his own constituency party, which recently came together to endorse … Jeremy Corbyn. So all he needs to do now is to keep on provoking that party into landing him with a disrepute charge and thereby giving him the opportunity for public martyrdom - along with plenty of press commissions.

Then he can mosey off to a well-paid think tank sinecure, and laugh all the way to the bank. It would be utterly deceitful - but no-one would be surprised if he did it.

[UPDATE 29 April 0935 hours: Woodcock now finds himself splashed across the front page of the Sunday Mirror over yet another allegation that he has brought his party into disrepute.

The allegation is that "A Labour backbencher known as an arch-critic of Jeremy Corbyn is facing claims he ­sexually harassed a female aide ... John Woodcock will be the subject of a hearing before the party’s National Constitutional Committee later this year ... It is alleged the MP sent inappropriate texts and emails to a former staffer during the two years she worked for the party ... And it is said the woman felt uncomfortable and left her job. She claims that Mr Woodcock continued to contact her even after she had quit, sending regular messages and emails ... Mr Woodcock, 39, last night refused to discuss the ­allegations, said to date from 2014 to 2016".

The rest is for Woodcock and the Labour Party to resolve. But there is one point about this latest revelation that many observers have thus far missed.

Usually, the right-leaning press are all over claims of misbehaviour by Labour MPs. But on this occasion, they have been silent. Why should that be?

This speaks once more to the idea that John Woodcock is on his way to a berth in the London media set after he ceases to be an MP. I'll just leave that one there]

Milo Yiannopoulos’ Empire IS FINISHED

Last year, columnist Tanya Gold spent some time observing man-baby Milo Yiannopoulos as he went about his business, such as it was, in and around New York City. She told Spectator US readers how “I was in New York to report on his attempted comeback after a spring when he fell, swiftly and dramatically, down a hole. A few months earlier, a recording was released in which Milo appeared to endorse sex between ‘younger boys and older men’ … and he was dropped first by his publishers Simon & Schuster, then by his employer Breitbart. He was disinvited from the Conservative Political Action Conference”.

But by the time Ms Gold encountered him, Yiannopoulos proclaimed “Now I’m roaring back”, saying of his book Dangerous, which S&S declined to publish, “This isn’t the biggest book of the year … this is the biggest book of the decade”. It wasn’t. No surprise there.

He claimed to have “outgrown” Breitbart, and couldn’t understand why anyone would dislike him: “Sarah Silverman has said worse stuff about Jews … Joan Rivers said worse stuff about everyone. I haven’t really said anything that awful. The thing I’m most closely associated with is ‘Feminism is Cancer’, which isn’t even an insult”.

After Breitbart came Milo Inc. This was Yiannopoulos’ “talent factory”, another venture which featured his ability to spend significant amounts of other peoples’ money, a habit that Zelo Street regulars may remember. He did it with The Kernel. He did it with the Telegraph. He did it with the Mercers. And now he had found another sucker.

It was further proof that Yiannopoulos was right when he told Ms Gold “I spent thirty years powerless and dependent and miserable and alone, and then I discovered that I had this hold over other people”. The Mercers had bankrolled him, but then, after the paedophilia revelation, that funding stream was abruptly terminated. So he found another one.

Banking heir Matthew Mellon was to have been his latest mark. But Mellon died unexpectedly from what appears to have been a drug overdose earlier this month. So the business is now imploding, with Politico reporting “Running out of money and down on his luck, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos laid off the small staff of Milo Entertainment Inc. earlier this month, according to three people familiar with the situation”.

Joe Bernstein of BuzzFeed also had the news - “heard from four good sources that Milo Inc. - Milo Yiannopoulos's post-Breitbart ‘talent factory’ - has gone belly up”. When the only talent on offer is to extract money from others to maintain an undeserved lifestyle, this was inevitable. Bernstein added “Milo is notorious for living beyond his means and funding was scarce after the Mercers dumped him for associating so closely with white supremacists”.

And Eliot Higgins merely observed “Milo is the Alan Partridge of the far right”. Without someone to pay his bills, Yiannopoulos is rapidly regressing to become the nobody he was before Steve Bannon picked him up out of the gutter. It is a richly deserved reckoning.

Alfie Evans And The Stateside Sickos

No parent wants to say the last goodbye to their own children. The loss of a child who never had the chance to grow up, and experience life as most do, is the greatest of tragedies. This week, that tragedy consumed Tom Evans and Kate James, whose 23-month-old son Alfie Evans died early this morning at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool. The toddler had an incurable and degenerative brain condition.

Kate James and Tom Evans - ordinary people consumed by tragedy

Little Alfie had been in a semi-vegetative state for more than a year. The hospital argued that further treatment was not merely pointless, but inhumane. Then the Stateside pro-life movement rocked up and began to use the child’s plight to further their own ends. The case became an opportunity to attack so-called “socialised medicine”. The pejorative language, the abuse, and the flagrant dishonesty has been jaw-dropping.

And the resultant outpouring of misinformation should concern any health care professional. Take, for instance, “If you ever want to be truly horrified: 1. Make sure you haven’t eaten 2. Go to your favorite web browser 3. Search ‘Liverpool Care Pathway’ ‘Alder Hey’ ‘newborns’ 4. Read 5. Pray THIS is a top notch pediatric hospital in a nationalized healthcare system”. Nationalised healthcare system.

Frightening people on the back of the Alfie Evans case? You got it: “Read this thread from a parent who recounts an attempted #medicalkidnapping by the Nanny State. In America. Happens all the time”. Medical Kidnapping. And Michelle Malkin is a well-known pundit.

There was much worse: “I hope Alder Hey Children’s Hospital is remembered with the same fondness as Auschwitz”. Likening Alder Hey to Auschwitz. Alfie’s parents put out a statement trying to calm some of their fans. The response? “Shut up or we kill your kid. Right, @AlderHey?” Allegations of blackmail against the hospital.

On it went. “An English royal baby finally gets a name and it is trending all over twitter instantly...I still have yet to see #AlfieEvans trend and the same country has been trying to kill him for nearly a week now”. Country trying to kill him. “Government says baby must die Government stops parents from caring for their own child Government locks parents in hospital to watch baby die Government won’t let parents seek treatment in other countries Government threatens anyone who doesn’t agree with them with prison”.

Government paranoia (and several untruths). This tendency spread to those in positions of responsibility in the media: “The more we learn, the worse this moral horror becomes” told Brit Hume, a senior political advisor to Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse), who was quoting a wildly exaggerated and misleading source. Moral horror.

Mike Huckabee, a former Governor of Arizona and wannabe Presidential candidate, was no more knowledgeable: “On the very day Brits celebrated the Royal baby, the UK government removed life support system from 23-month-old Alfie Evans and stationed a line of police to keep his frantic parents from moving him to another hospital that would grant him care. A royal shame!” Government removed life support.

And Laura Ingraham, another Fox News host, and under fire for viciously smearing students who have protested against school shootings, was equally ready to show some responsibility. Or maybe not: “Tonight @realDonaldTrump could perhaps save the life of #BabyAlfie — @10DowningStreet, do you have no shame? Starving a child to death”. You read that right. 10 Downing Street starving a child to death. And manipulating a tragedy to talk up Combover Crybaby Donald Trump. On Rupert Murdoch’s cable news outlet.

That two ordinary people have been consumed by tragedy, and are now consumed by grief, has been lost in the tsunami of misinformed anger and righteous hatred. Alfie Evans’ parents have been mere pawns in an ideological game. That’s how sick it has become. Farewell, Alfie Evans.

Amber Rudd - Shopped By Her Own Team

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has so far resisted calls to resign, to take the hit for the chaotic mess that is the Home Office and its attitude even to British citizens. The scandal of those from the Windrush Generation who have been stripped of their citizenship and threatened with deportation has put her on the edge. But even yesterday it looked as though she might hang on. After the latest leak, she might just not.

Ms Rudd “told the home affairs select committee this week that the Home Office did not have targets for removals. She had to backtrack when it emerged there were localised targets, but she said she was unaware of them”. Then “on Thursday, she admitted there were operational targets but said she would be abandoning the policy”. She “told reporters she had ‘not approved, seen or cleared any targets for removals’, and suggested any targets that did exist were regional rather than national”.

This was too much for someone in her own department, who has now taken the decision to shop her to the newspaper most likely to publish - the Guardian. The paper has been passed a six-page memo, “prepared by Hugh Ind, the director general of the Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement agency, in June last year and copied to Rudd and Brandon Lewis, the then immigration minister, as well as several … special advisers”.

And the contents? Well, it “says the department has set ‘a target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18’ and boasts that ‘we have exceeded our target of assisted returns’ … It adds that progress has been made on a ‘path towards the 10% increased performance on enforced returns, which we promised the home secretary earlier this year’”. Amber Rudd was copied in. So was Brandon Lewis.

The language used in the memo will only fuel calls for Ms Rudd to go. Take that used to describe “assisted returns”, those whose passage has been paid by the Government (something Enoch Powell might have applauded): “Typically these will be our most vulnerable returnees … We have exceeded our target of assisted returns. We set an internal target of 1,250 of these returns for 2016-17 … we delivered 1,581”.

Did no-one involved bother to stop and think that these were individual human beings who were being discussed as if they were so much air freight? Whatever the answer, the Guardian’s Home Office source is clear who is driving this stance: “These programmes are being run by civil servants, but the policies are being driven by politicians … The pressure comes from the top, and Amber Rudd is at the top. She is the one cracking the whip”.

The memo even “outlines measures being taken to identify the NHS trusts in England and Wales where people in the country illegally might try to receive treatment”, telling its readers of a “memorandum of understandings with 16 of these trusts … [to] prevent upfront access to healthcare to which illegal immigrants are not entitled”.

It’s a Daily Mail executive’s wet dream - denial of rights, denial of the right to medical treatment, repatriation, kicking out more of those that frighten the curtain-twitchers.

And it’s got Amber Rudd’s fingerprints all over it. This time she has got to go.

Wembley Sale - Now The Wind-Up

Wembley Stadium is for sale. And as the BBC has reported, there is someone prepared to buy: “Fulham owner Shahid Khan has made an offer, thought to be worth £900m, to buy Wembley Stadium from the Football Association. It is understood Khan would pay £600m for the stadium and the FA will continue to run the Club Wembley hospitality business, valued at £300m. The FA board discussed the approach at a meeting on Thursday”.

So who is Shahid Khan? Well, as the Beeb has also told, “Pakistan-born Khan has a current net worth of $7.2bn (£5.2bn) and is the 217th richest person in the world, according to the 2018 Forbes rich list”. He already owns Fulham FC, as well as NFL side Jacksonville Jaguars. But, yes, he is one of those Scary Muslims (tm), and so today’s reporting has tried to hint at that, without crossing the Islamophobia line.

The Murdoch Times had merely referred to Khan as an “American tycoon”, while even more downmarket sister title the Sun has offered readers “THEY THINK IT’S Y’ALL OVER … £1bn NFL deal for iconic England HQ”. It has been left to the former Desmond titles to get sniffy, with the Express hinting “IS NOTHING SACRED?’ [Religious angle - geddit?!?] and the Daily Star sneering “A KICK IN THE [balls]”. The Star doesn’t do subtle.

But the greatest opportunity for spectator sport is not - yet - on the Wembley pitch, but the inevitable outrage of the far-right. Selling things is fine, but when it’s a Pakistani Muslim - oh dear, oh dear, the Wall Of Gammon (tm) isn’t going to take kindly to that.

And the wind-up value of the news was not slow to be realised, with Paul Evans kicking off with “By the sounds of it, the new owner of Wembley could be a Muslim. Just imagine the fit that'll give Tommy Robinson, Jayda Fransen & Paul Golding”. Gammon Points offered “Wembley's getting sold to a Muslim. We're not leaving the single market. Royal baby has a French name. A Muslim is the top scorer in football. Worst time to be a gammon since Prince Harry hooked up with a mixed race woman”. There was more.

“Shahid Khan, a Muslim, buying Wembley will wind all the right people up. I welcome these developments … Shahid Khan the Pakistani born Muslim billionaire owner of Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham FC is purchasing Wembley Stadium from The FA. Go on my son!! Ohhh, Tommy Robinson’s vein is gonna pop when he reads this news. Will take my prayer mat to wembley next time … Just waiting for Tommy Robinson or Britain First to say Muslims at it again  this time taking over Wembley stadium … A Pakistani Muslim owning Wembley would leave the EDL-types fuming and that would be FANTASTIC”.

Rahul Verma looks to have meant it when he asserted “The outrage of right wing papers (I won't link, it's the usual suspects) to Shahid Khan buying Wembley can be translated as 'A Pakistani Muslim invader is colonising our national stadium and the home of football’ … I bloody well hope he succeeds”. And one Tweeter captioned a photo of Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson, with “When you want to go to the England game but remember Wembley stadium is owned by a Pakistani Muslim”.

Shahid Khan must be a sound bloke. He’s already winding up all the right people.

Liverpool Smear - Express Deception

Earlier this week, Liverpool FC hosted AS Roma at Anfield in the first leg of a Champions’ League semi-final, winning the tie 5-2 and setting up an intriguing second leg at the Stadio Olimpico. Sadly, the match was marred by some Roma fans indulging in outright thuggery outside the ground, as a result of which one Liverpool fan is now in hospital with a serious head injury. Police have charged two Italian men over the disturbance.

(c) Liverpool FC

That much was bad enough, but then came a column in the Express which asserted “No one is suggesting that the violence that erupted on Tuesday night was solely the fault of Liverpool fans … But there are suggestions that the reputation of Liverpool supporters had gone before them and Roman yobs had simply decided to get in first, and with such awful consequences. It’s not right, but it does again highlight a common denominator”.

The author of the piece, Colin Mafham, went on to ask “Why does trouble seem to follow them like bees round a honey pot?” and, just in case he hadn’t put the boot in enough, added “That’s why I urge Liverpool Football Club to condemn, rather than giving succour to excuses like ‘it’s society’s problem’ and ‘all the world’s against us’”.

Now has come the apology from the Express, which, as the Liverpool Echo has told, has conceded “Yesterday a comment piece by a freelance journalist entitled 'Liverpool must take serious action after Roma violence or risk further trouble' was published on this website. This article was ill-informed and wrong. It did not, in any way, reflect the views of the Express. It should never have been written and was very quickly removed”.

And, as Jon Stewart might have said, two things here. One, the idea that this was just the work of some freelance loose cannon untutored in the ways of the Express is total crap. As both Journalisted and LinkedIn confirm, Colin Mafham may technically be a freelance, but he has worked for the Express for more than eight years. He is effectively their main man for top flight football opinion pieces. And it gets worse.

And Two, the Express was in the most part responsible for Mafham’s column getting through - because during the reign of Richard “Dirty” Desmond, the paper did away with sub-editors and so hacks effectively self-published, with lawyers checking out the result. But a legal eagle would not have pulled the offending article, as it was not personally defamatory of anyone, and in any case it was an opinion piece. No subs, no backstop.

Then there is a Three: Colin Mafham, before he arrived at the Express, was a night editor at the Murdoch Sun. That’s the same Murdoch Sun that viciously and unrepentantly smeared the memories of the 96 fans who died as a result of the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989. The same Murdoch Sun so long reigned over by the disgraced and deeply unpleasant Kelvin McFilth. What the Express isn’t telling you.

The Express’ hand-wringing is a master class in deception. Their removal of sub-editors set up the possibility of a hack going rogue and getting his copy through. By taking on someone from the Sun, they made that possibility a likelihood. And by letting Colin Mafham have a free rein for more than eight years, they turned the likelihood into a racing certainty. Their lame excuses are not worth a cent.

For 29 years, the refrain has been “Don’t buy the Sun”. Now the Express is in there too.

Windrush Fiasco Snares RAF Family

The Tories’ ill-advised tightening of the immigration laws in 2014 has highlighted the crass insensitivity of Theresa May and Amber Rudd, as well as giving Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters another opportunity to tell the world that their man warned what would happen well before the stuff hit the fan. But what is not well-known is that this mess does not just mean problems for those born in the West Indies before 1972.

That would affect those aged over 45. But John Ingram is just 39. And he can’t get a passport because the Home Office will not accept his birth certificate as proof of identity. So he can’t prove, to their satisfaction, who he is. He has not yet been threatened with deportation, but give them time, and all that. In any case, where would he go?

Ingram “was born in Germany while his parents were serving in the RAF”, but “his birth certificate was rejected when he tried to get a passport for a trip to Spain … he was born in a British military hospital in 1979 where his parents were serving and only spent two months in Germany. He has lived in the UK ever since and has never held a passport”.

Why is there a problem? “The Home Office rejected his birth certificate as proof of identity as it was issued by the British Consulate … the Home Office had wanted a German birth certificate as proof of his identity. But as he was born in a British military hospital he said ‘it doesn't exist, because I am not German … They keep moving the goal posts, they keep saying whatever I give them is not good enough’”.

Sound familiar? While the BBC has reported that “Mr Ingram said he had contacted his MP and had complained to the Home Office about the way his case was being treated, which has since been escalated”, their report also notes “His story comes amid the Windrush scandal, where some immigrants who came to the UK from the Commonwealth decades ago have been threatened with deportation or refused jobs or healthcare”.

John Ingram - can't prove he's British. Yet

There must be scores more service families whose children have been born while they were serving in Germany - or, indeed, elsewhere. Likewise consular staff and their families. But our immigration laws are clearly so screwed that being born in a British military hospital that happens to be in Germany renders someone liable to be refused a passport because their papers don’t enable them to clear the Home Office’s high bar.

In the meantime, the clock is ticking down for John Ingram: “with the holiday approaching in June he says he is running out of time to get the situation resolved. ‘It cost us a lot of money and she [his partner] doesn't want to go unless we can all go together, but how do you prove you are British?,’ he said”. Meanwhile, Amber Rudd is still clinging on.

That’s what happens when you make policy at the behest of the Daily Mail. I’ll just leave that one there.

Telegraph Anti-Semitism Hypocrisy

The increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph has used its front page today to claim that the Labour Party is deep in anti-Semitism, homing in on Union boss Len McCluskey and his clear disdain for the deliberate attempts by a handful of MPs to undermine the party leadership. But while the Tel is pretending that it’s all Labour’s fault, what they are not telling is that they have been dabbling in anti-Semitism themselves.

Splashed across the page we see “They will be held to account … As the Labour anti-Semitism row deepens [!], union baron [!] threatens five MPs who challenged Corbyn on the issue”. McCluskey is quoted as saying “I look with disgust at the behaviour of the Corbyn-hater MPs”. Sadly, though, the impact of this attack has already been dulled.

We know this because the Tel has been indulging in anti-Semitic dog whistling so bad that even sham press non-regulator IPSO has declined to wipe its arse. After the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (itself no stranger to the endorsement of bigotry) complained about an online article titled “What’s missing? The countries with no airports, railways, trees and World Heritage Sites”, IPSO had no option but to find against the Tel.

Why should this be? This is what the press regulation people found: “The article was published in the publication’s travel section. It contained a number of lists of countries apparently lacking a certain characteristic. For example, it contained a list of 5 countries without airports, 15 countries with no mountains, and 9 countries without rivers. Under the subheading ‘no banks’, the article stated: ‘Only three countries on the planet don’t have a central bank owned or controlled by the Rothschild family’, and listed: Cuba, North Korea, and Iran.” Rothschild, like Soros or Globalist, is code for Jews or Jewish.

So it was no surprise that “The complainant said that the claim that these three countries are the only countries which do not have a central bank controlled by the Rothschild family, was inaccurate, and a modern version of the antisemitic myth that this particular Jewish family are behind the word’s ills, and part of a global Jewish conspiracy”.

The Telegraph was caught bang to rights peddling anti-Semitic tropes. Its excuse was utterly lame: “a regrettable error, arising from momentary carelessness”. Not momentary interest, then? And it’s not the Tel’s first foray into using anti-Semitic tropes to flog a few more papers: in February they brought us the infamous blaming of the non-existant “plot to thwart Brexit” on George Soros - another anti-Semitic dog-whistle.

Then, the paper summoned hacks for an all hands meeting at which senior staff told that the splash was not anti-Semitic, honestly. Nick Timothy, the man who lost Theresa May her majority, dismissed claims of dog-whistling, demanding withdrawals and apologies. Timothy has, after he was caught lying in his attempts to defend Theresa May over the Windrush débâcle, seen his reputation go down the pan.

The Telegraph is making a habit of peddling anti-Semitic material. And trying to tell readers to “look over there at Labour” is not going to help its cause. What a bunch of bigots.

Toby Young’s Ego Destroyed Our Schools

The Mirror has brought its readers another tale of woe from the much-vaunted Free School sector, telling readers “A brand new £4.2 million ‘free school’ set up to train the sports stars of tomorrow is to close after being branded inadequate by Ofsted, just 16 months after its grand opening. Tory School Standards Minister Nick Gibb toured Plymouth Studio School and cut the ribbon on the taxpayer-funded, state-of-the-art facility in December 2016. But today the Department for Education today agreed ‘in principle’ to shut the school down, at the request of the trust that runs it”. There was more.

“Parents had already raised serious concerns about the school before Mr Gibb visited … The school will be the 19th of its type to fold since they were introduced in 2010 … The Ofsted report … is understood to grade the school as inadequate, and identifies a string of teaching and safeguarding concerns … had three headteachers since it first launched”.

None of this will surprise Zelo Street regulars. There was the scandal of IES Breckland, a shambolic mess promoted enthusiastically by the loathsome Toby Young and his pal Fraser Nelson. And the Perry Beeches scandal in Birmingham - schools that had been endorsed by Young Dave and Michael “Oiky” Gove. Discovery New School near Crawley had set the ball rolling by shutting its doors in 2014. All wasted taxpayers’ money.

And it was the advocacy of Tobes that had driven the propaganda - telling anyone and everyone how wonderful Free Schools were. Except the budget for such schools had quickly spiralled out of control, going well over £1 billion over target by the end of 2013. By last year, the situation was so bad that then Education Secretary Justine Greening was having to raid other budgets to keep local authority schools going.

The waste was mounting up: the Independent told last May “Tens of millions wasted on free schools that closed or never opened amid 'unprecedented' funding crisis … At least £138.5 million spent on opening 62 free schools, university technical colleges (UTC) and studio schools that have either closed, partially closed, or failed to open at all”.

It got worse: the Guardian revealed that most of Ms Greening’s new cash for mainstream schools would “come from an unidentified £600m of new cuts to the central Department for Education budget”. And then came the giveaway: “A further £200m will come from the free schools budget by building 30 out of a planned 140 as local authority schools instead”.

In other words, building new local authority schools is better value for money than new Free Schools. More than £6.5 million per school better. You were told that Free Schools were better value for money than local authority ones? You were told a whopper.

And who has led the propaganda push for Free Schools? Step forward Toby Young, who has effectively admitted that a significant part of his motivation to set one up was because he couldn’t afford school fees for his four children but wanted them to go private.

What the Mirror has just reported is only the latest example of the waste that the Free Schools programme has produced. So while local authority schools have to beg money for essentials from parents, just remember whose vanity caused this mess.

The involvement of Toby Young in education policy has been a disaster. That is all.

Fawkes Antisemitism - We Have To Talk

The perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog have recently been pushing the idea that the Labour Party is some kind of hotbed of anti-Semitism. This is despite the grim Fawkes record on the subject, as Zelo Street has pointed out - mere hypocrisy doesn’t put The Great Guido off his stride.

So Fawkes readers have been regaled with “Producer Of Labour’s Race Row Election Video Tweeted About ‘Jewish Kapos’”, a Labour candidate who allegedly talked about “Jewish Money”, a full transcript of the JLC and Board of Deputies’ response to a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn, and a characteristically spurious claim that Len McCluskey had threatened Labour MPs who spoke out about anti-Semitism.

But the reality is that when it comes to racism is general, and anti-Semitism in particular, the Fawkes blog has no room to get righteous with anyone else. The comments, which are supposed to be moderated, have been a sewer of hate for years now, showing that, when it comes to getting clicks, The Great Guido is not too fussy about where they come from.

We know this as an enterprising Twitter account called Guido Fawkes Hate Exposed has just been set up, showing the crude anti-Semitism which the Fawkes rabble allows through the comment moderation process, such as “‘Is is good for J3ws’ That is the only question that matters so far as J3ws are concerned … They never really integrated did they … Diaspora J3ws are all anti-nationalist multi-culturals until it comes to Israel”.

There was more: “just why do the Jews believe they have a right to pull the strings [!] of the main political leaders of this country? Is it just because they are ‘God’s chosen people’ or to put it another way, the ‘Master Race’? … You are not a separate race, dump your primitive religion and become human!” All passed moderation.

This torrent of bigotry has not merely restricted itself to anti-Semitism: homophobia is another subject with which the Fawkes moderation régime is more than comfortable, with one prize example asserting “I don’t want to stick my willy up a man’s bottom and I don’t want a man to stick his willy up mine … As much as they find it their right to express their love of buggery and sodomy - I have just as much right to condemn it”.

Such pleasant people. And don’t get them started on the Windrush scandal. That precipitated characterisations of black Britons which talked of “stabbings, blowing up their own apartments … unlimited handouts on housing” and “So the Windrush came over and the passengers bred like rabbits … and most of south London became a third world slum”.

Only after Guido Fawkes Hate Exposed began to call out Staines and his pals for effectively inciting hatred was the moderation tightened up, with commenters protesting “Looks like my post has been flagged because I mentioned a certain religion” … “Forget the books, Guido has gone ‘comment burning’” … “So much for free speech Guido” … “To be honest Guido you might as well just get rid of the comments section altogether”.

The Fawkes rabble give every indication that they were using racism to drive traffic - and that, as can be seen, included anti-Semitism. No-one with brain engaged should be taking lessons from this shower on that subject. Full stop, end of story.