Ken Loach: The ruling classes are cracking the whip

I’ve always found that the people with the most to brag about are the least big-headed. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, was one example. The late Ian Carmichael was another. And so too is the brilliant film director Ken Loach. I met Ken when we were both speakers on an anti-war platform - a more modest and unassuming man you couldn’t possibly meet.

There's a wonderful interview with Ken in today's Guardian by Kira Cochrane. There's some great stuff all the way through, but particularly powerful was this passage on the enormous damage of thirty-odd years of neoliberalism.

It seems to me any economic structure that could give young people a future has been destroyed. Traditionally young people would be drawn into the world of work, and into groups of adults who would send the boys for a lefthanded screwdriver, or a pot of elbow grease, and so they'd be sent up in that way, but they would also learn about responsibilities, and learn a trade, and be defined by their skills. Well, they destroyed that. Thatcher destroyed that. She consciously destroyed the workforces in places like the railways, for example, and the mines, and the steelworks … so that transition from adolescence to adulthood was destroyed, consciously, and knowingly.



Ken Loach is a fantastic film director. But I can't help but feel that he would have made an even better Prime Minister.

On NATO’s bogus ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Libya

Above you can watch an interview with me on Russia Today on the lies surrounding NATO’s bogus 'humanitarian’ intervention in Libya and the economic motives which lie behind it.
 
More here

UPDATE:  In similar vein, here's Peter Hitchens in today's Mail on Sunday.

The official pretext, that we are ‘intervening to protect civilians’, is lying hogwash and should be laughed at every time it is used.  In the past few days – according to reliable reports – Libya’s rebels have been guilty of indiscriminate shooting into civilian areas and the brutal and arbitrary arrests of suspected opponents.


You can read the whole of the piece here.

NATO “kept bombing the civilian targets"

We went to Libya on the 28th July and we came back on the 7th August and we found a totally different situation because NATO was bombarding civilians.



The bombings were not only carried out on military targets, but they also hit houses, hospitals, schools, television centers, and this was totally against the humanitarian reasons they said they were there for.


I believe they were doing this to bring panic in the city. That’s why they were bombing the things that people use daily, like places with food and essential utilities like hospitals.


Anyone out there who still believes that NATO’s intervention in Libya was/is ‘humanitarian’ ?


Then please watch the above interview from Russia Today with Italian peace activist Yvonne Di Vito.



More on this story here.

What Libya 'ultimately represents' to the NATO powers

Britain and France will, like the US, maintain that their motives are altruistic. But, as always, it will be selfish economic concerns that inevitably guide Libya’s fortunes.


Billions of pounds worth of oil and natural gas are what Libya ultimately represents to avaricious Western powers.


……..All this amateur army has proved is that it can fight a civil war while supported by the firepower of RAF planes and their Nato allies. But this backing is only temporary.


If Libyans are to establish true democracy, to maintain internal peace and security, to rebuild a shattered infrastructure, and to redistribute wealth, then they will have to do it alone.

You can read the whole of Nabila Ramdani's excellent Daily Express commentary on Libya here.

UPDATE: If you haven't seen it yet, there's a great piece by Seumas Milne in today's Guardian on Libya's imperial hijacking.

If stopping the killing had been the real aim, Nato states would have backed a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement, rather than repeatedly vetoing both. Instead, after having lost serious strategic ground in the Arab revolutions, the Libyan war offered the US, Britain and France a chance to put themselves at the heart of the process while bringing to heel an unreliable state with the largest oil reserves in Africa.

It's not peace but regime change, that the US is after in Syria

Above you can see an RT interview with me on the US's true aim in Syria- and why bringing international war criminals like George W. Bush, Tony  Blair and Bill Clinton to justice is a much more urgent priority than having President Assad indicted.


More on the western hypocrisy towards Syria here.

Bring Back British Rail- a surefire vote winner

This piece of mine appears in today's First Post.

Neil Clark: Labour should pledge to re-nationalise railways and put UK on a par with other Europeans.

Here we go again. Britain's train users, who already have to pay by far and away the highest fares in Europe, are to be hit with even more above- inflation increases in the New Year..........


Not surprisingly, Labour has lambasted the government, calling the price hikes "eye-watering" and claiming that they are "the direct consequence of the Tory-led government's decision to cut too far and too fast".


But Ed Miliband could - and should - do an awful lot more.

You can read the whole of the piece here.

UPDATE: You can sign a petition, addressed to the government, calling for the renationalisation of the railways here. Do try and spare a couple of minutes to sign it, and tell your friends about the petition too.

Who will save Libya from its western saviours?

What both the pro-intervention left and right share is the conviction that "we" (meaning the civilized democratic West) have the right and the ability to impose our will on other countries.

Certain French movements whose stock in trade is to denounce racism and colonialism have failed to remember that all colonial conquests were carried out against satraps, Indian princes and African kings who were denounced as autocrats (which they were) or to notice that there is something odd about French organizations deciding who are the "legitimate representatives" of the Libyan people.



……The activists who in March insisted that “we must do something” to stop a hypothetical massacre are doing nothing today to stop a massacre that is not hypothetical but real and visible, and carried out by those who “did something”.

You can read the whole of Diana Johnstone & Jean Bricmont’s brilliant piece on the far from humanitarian, ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Libya here.

Hat tip: Media Lens message board.