Oh no, Lee Anderson MP has offended that noted delicate flower, the London Mayor Sadiq Khan! As you may have seen – largely because mainstream media and politicians just won’t stop going on and on and on about it – Mr. Anderson has drawn flak over the last few days after going on GB News and purportedly implying Mayor Khan was under the “control” of Islamists. Anderson’s statement supposedly had the innate potential to rip apart the community fabric of Great Britain, implied his many caterwauling critics. A bit late for that! I think it’s already happened.
As relatively few people would originally have seen Anderson’s GB News interview, which in truth was pretty unexceptional and unmemorable, it could easily be argued that the ones truly responsible for transforming Lee’s words into deadly weapons to set Muslims and non-Muslims against one another were those who began decrying them in a rather hysterical manner, thereby giving them far more publicity than they perhaps deserved.
What did Anderson actually say? Chatting to GB News about a recent Telegraph article by Suella Braverman in which the former Home Secretary argued that (to use her piece’s headline) ‘Islamists are bullying Britain into submission’, Lee opined as follows:
I don’t actually believe that these Islamists have got control of our country. But what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London and they’ve got control of Starmer as well. We have seen the shocking scenes played out in Parliament just a few nights back, where Starmer crumbled. He put pressure on the Speaker to alter the rules… People are just turning up in their thousands and doing anything they want and they are laughing at the police. And I feel absolutely disgusted. This stems with [sic] Khan. He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates.
How shocking! But was this assessment really so very wrong?
Puppet Government
After he had the Tory whip removed due to his stubborn refusal to compliantly admit he was a big, thick, fat, meat-pie-headed northern racist and apologise immediately, Anderson told ITV News that, actually, the majority of messages he had since received from the general public (and, in private, from some more cowardly Conservative MPs, so he claimed) said they thought he was right to say what he did. It all depends, I suppose, on what you interpret that phrase “got control of” means.
If you interpret it in childishly literal terms, to mean that, somewhere behind the scenes, shadowy Islamist puppet-masters are pulling Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer’s Thunderbirds strings to make them do their every bidding, in a sort of Protocols of the Elders of Mecca-style scenario, then this is indeed surely untrue. Neither man is the bought-and-paid-for tool of a gigantic, behind-the-scenes, Islamo-fascist conspiracy being run from Tehran or Islamabad. But if you interpret the phrase “got control of” simply to mean that, thanks to a dire combination of violent intimidation, death-threats and sheer electoral force of numbers, Islamists have indeed exercised some form of malign partisan influence over the Labour Party and its politicians of late, then this sad assessment is actually perfectly true.
It doesn’t mean Khan or Starmer are Islamists themselves – Islamists actually believe in something, after all – but both men are still under the influence of the Islamists to a certain degree, albeit in a purely negative fashion, as opposed to being their direct, enthusiastic supporters or advocates. When Sir Keir approached the Speaker last week begging for special Parliamentary procedures to be (ab)used due to the perceived threat towards certain of his MPs emanating from local Palestine-obsessed extremists, this was a clear example of Starmer being under the influence of violent Islamists or their allies like those who (presumably) firebombed the office of the pro-Israel MP for Finchley and Golders Green, Mike Freer, last December.
Likewise, in many ways, Khan’s London, with its endless avenues of rainbow flags and absurd, nannyist banning of ‘harmful’ fattening cake adverts on the Tube, is often more Wokeistan than Islamistan. Nonetheless, while usually being oh-so-keen to condemn any kind of ‘hate-crime’, real or imagined, against most minority groups – gays, transsexuals, blacks, Muslims, blind Rastafarian lesbians in Ulez-compliant motorised wheelchairs – Mayor Khan has been curiously quiet about the weekly scheduled orgy of anti-Jewish hatred scarring the streets of the capital city he is supposed to be in charge of since Hamas’s October 7th attacks.
I don’t say this is because Khan actively supports such antisemitism himself personally (to be fair to Sadiq, he has occasionally condemned outright vandalisation of Jewish property and suchlike, at least when specifically asked to by interviewers and it would be awkward to do otherwise), but a substantial proportion of his core vote is clearly made up of both London’s Muslims and its assorted other identitarian Leftists, many of whom self-evidently are antisemitic – British Muslims have been shown to be more likely to believe in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories than non-Muslim citizens, for example.
To more easily stay in power, Candidate Khan does want and need the Muslim vote: as of the 2021 census, Greater London is now 15% Muslim, with 1,318,755 such inhabitants residing in the capital in a wonderfully diverse and vibrant fashion. Various U.K. Muslim groups now openly boast of their collective bloc-voting power. But while traditionally overwhelmingly more likely to vote for Labour than for any other British political party (unless George Galloway and his magic hat are in town), the number of Muslims showing support for Labour has recently been dropping significantly, due to the Shadow Cabinet’s vacillating failure to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The next vote to decide who will become London Mayor comes as soon as May 2nd; undoubtedly, therefore, Khan will not wish to alienate the substantial local Muslim and Leftist voter-base at the moment by doing anything so ridiculous as defending Israel or condemning all those pesky hate-marches. In January and February, Survation carried out a poll for the Labour Muslim Network, finding that 85% of British Muslims said the specific position of political parties on the Israel-Hamas conflict would help decide the destination of their vote, i.e., they won’t vote for those who explicitly support the Israelis.
It is an unpalatable electoral fact, therefore – maybe even unpalatable to Khan himself in private, I have no idea – that he does have to pander to this audience to some degree, or at least not actively offend them by, for example, condemning the many manifest excesses of the marches, or putting public pressure on the Metropolitan Police to rein them all in. Therefore, in that limited sense, Khan’s “mates” – as Anderson sarcastically put it, presumably actually meaning a substantial proportion of his voter client-base, rather than his secret handlers from ISIS or the Muslim Brotherhood – do indeed possess a certain amount of “control” over him, if by “control”, you simply mean “direct electoral influence”.
Careless Talk Costs Votes
Is this what Anderson really meant, then? According to Lee’s own account, it would appear so. Although Anderson has steadfastly refused to apologise, on the currently unfashionable grounds that he didn’t really have anything much to apologise for, he did admit the specific phrasing he used was “clumsy” and his words could have been misinterpreted in the negative way his various critics chose to view them, whether sincerely or otherwise.
In a subsequently released statement, recalling the disturbing mob-rule scenes outside Parliament last week, Anderson was quite happy to clarify his comments as follows (I’ve highlighted the key phrases here backing up my own interpretation of Lee’s words in bold):
I made some comments yesterday that some people thought were divisive. Politics is divisive and I am just incredibly frustrated about the abject failures of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. Khan called for an immediate ceasefire weeks ago with no conditions while the [Israeli] hostages are still there being held at gunpoint by a terrorist organisation [i.e., Hamas]. Hundreds of people had been arrested for racist [antisemitic] abuse on these marches and we barely hear a peep from the mayor. If these marches were about something less fashionable Sadiq Khan would have been the first to call for them to be cancelled. It’s double standards for political benefit… Seeing the words “From the river to the sea” on Elizabeth Tower made me feel sick to the pit of my stomach… Khan has stood by and allowed our police to turn a blind eye to the disgusting scenes around Parliament… My words may have been clumsy but my words were borne out of sheer frustration at what is happening to our beautiful capital city.
If Anderson’s explanation here is sincere, then perhaps he deserves the benefit of the doubt for his self-admittedly “clumsy” words. After all, when speaking off-the-cuff, just like Anderson was in his regular slot on GB News, Khan himself has made some rather “clumsy” statements himself in the past too.
Damage Control to Uncle Tom
Back in 2009, in his then-capacity as Minister for Community Cohesion, Khan did his best to help communities cohere by giving an interview to Press TV, a now-banned propaganda outlet for the demonstrably Islamist and Jew-hating Shia regime in Iran. Here, he was asked why the Labour Government of the day – of which he was a frontbench member – focused largely upon liaising with moderate Muslim groups like the now-defunct Quilliam Foundation as part of its counter-extremism strategy rather than, for example, phoning up Osama bin Laden or Abu Hamza for a quick chat about where they each might have been going a little wrong in life lately.
“I wish we only spoke to people who agree with us [like the Quilliam Foundation],” Khan replied, but “it’s about engaging with all stakeholders… you can’t just speak to Uncle Toms.” ‘Uncle Toms’, eh? Isn’t that a classic racially discriminatory term, indicating a ‘house-negro’, or racial sell-out, in terms of a biddable black man willing to do the bidding of his perceived white race-enemies?
Maybe so, because, once old footage of this embarrassing verbal slip re-emerged in the run-up to the 2016 Mayoral election, Khan’s spokesman immediately admitted that: “This was a bad choice of phrase and Sadiq regrets using it.” Khan’s excuse-spewing PR-wallah continued: “As Communities Minister at the time, Sadiq was talking about the need to engage with all parts of the community to tackle extremism and radicalisation – as he has pledged to do as Mayor.”
Khan then went on LBC radio to further explain how, when using the particular words he did, he really meant something completely different, as if he was a full-blown aphasia patient or something. Asked if the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’ was a racial slur, Sadiq agreed that “it is… and I regret using that phrase. The context was me trying to encourage everyone to get involved in Government consultations.” Ah, so context has to be taken into account when considering a person’s ex tempore verbal comments now, does it? Apparently so, at least when it is virtuous woke Left-winger Mr. Khan himself, rather than evil gammon Right-winger Mr. Anderson. Khan further wriggled that “I regret using the phrase and I am sorry. The point I was trying to make was that I wanted to talk to anyone.”
Yes, such a minor verbal infelicity is very easily done. I’m sure if Lee Anderson had given an old and newly-unearthed interview himself in which it turned out he had told leading 1980s South African television news outlet ApartheidTV that: “The white South African Government should be willing to talk with any opponents, not just complete sell-out peacenik cuck coconuts like Nelson Mandela,” he would have been immediately forgiven.
Double Standards
In other words, during a live interview, Khan once ill-advisedly and unthinkingly used some “clumsy” language – rather more clumsy and offensive-sounding, it must be said, than dumbo, bigoted old Lee Anderson. Back in 2016, Khan went on to condemn his Conservative electoral opponents of the day for trying to wrongly smear him as a racist or extremist on account of such easily-done mistakes, when in fact he had just been innocently misinterpreted. Such attacks were baseless smears, he complained.
Baseless smears against Sadiq Khan and Labour are wrong, you see. But baseless smears against Lee Anderson and the Tories are morally virtuous. Writing in the Evening Standard in the wake of the recent controversy, Khan was quite happy to condemn Lee and his higher-up Conservative Party bosses in the following terms:
More than two days on from Lee Anderson’s vile, racist, anti-Muslim and Islamophobic remarks, we have yet to hear the Prime Minister call it what it is: Islamophobic, anti-Muslim hate and racist. … This speaks volumes. It shouldn’t be hard to call out comments that are so unambiguously ignorant, prejudiced and racist. Yet those at the top of the Conservative Government are stubbornly refusing to do so. It’s a tacit endorsement of anti-Muslim hatred and can only lead to the conclusion that anti-Muslim bigotry and racism are not taken seriously. Racism is racism and should always be called out, whichever minority it is targeted against. There can be no hierarchy.
Except there is now a racial hierarchy of oppression in such matters, isn’t there, at least according to contemporary woke identitarian dogma of the kinds Khan himself continually panders to these days? And Jews are right down at the bottom of the pile in such respects, as the eternal white-skinned ‘oppressors’ of the terrorists who valiantly keep on trying to rape, mutilate, kidnap and kill them in the name of ‘justice’.
If Lee Anderson really wants to annoy Sadiq Khan, he should photocopy Khan’s cynical, self-pitying and self-serving article, cross out and replace a few words, and then re-release it to the London media as follows:
More than five months on from the start of the pro-Palestine marchers’ vile, racist, antisemitic and Jewphobic antics, we have yet to hear the Mayor of London call the movement what it is: Jewphobic, antisemitic hatred and racist. … This speaks volumes. It shouldn’t be hard to call out behaviour that is so unambiguously ignorant, prejudiced and racist. Yet those at the top of the Labour Party in London are stubbornly refusing to do so. It’s a tacit endorsement of antisemitic hatred and can only lead to the conclusion that anti-Jewish bigotry and racism are not taken seriously. Racism is racism and should always be called out, whichever minority it is targeted against. There can be no hierarchy.
Or, then again, Lee could just save his ink, and reduce the above paragraph down to a single concise sentence, if he prefers: “Sadiq Khan isn’t an Islamist at all – he’s just an opportunistic, slippery, amoral, vote-hungry hypocrite.” Those would not be “clumsy” words at all. Just true ones.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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Governments ( aside from the Swedes and the odd few other exceptions ) and TPTB never and still do not give a stuff about kids’ welfare, development or education. This is evidenced due to school closures, urging to get a toxic jab they never needed and the sexually explicit and inappropriate material ( as well as woke tosh that states you can identify as anything you want ) being taught in class. Kids are being targeted on multiple levels and the buck stops with the parents because the threat is not going to go away any time soon and it is all under the guise of ”public health”.
”The World Health Organization’s broad definition of health embraces physical, mental and social well-being. Expressed in its 1946 constitution alongside concepts of community participation and national sovereignty, it reflected an understanding of a world emerging from centuries of colonialist oppression and the public health industry’s shameful facilitation of fascism. Health policy would be people-centered, closely tied to human rights and self-determination.
The COVID-19 response has demonstrated how these ideals have been undone. Decades of increasing funding within public-private partnerships have corroded the basis of global public health. The COVID-19 response, intended for a virus that overwhelmingly targeted the elderly, ignored norms of epidemic management and human rights to institute a regime of suppression, censorship, and coercion reminiscent of the power systems and governance that were previously condemned. Without pausing to examine the costs, the public health industry is developing international instruments and processes that will entrench these destructive practices in international law.
Public health, presented as a series of health emergencies, is being used once again to facilitate a fascist approach to societal management. The beneficiaries will be the corporations and investors whom the COVID-19 response served well. Human rights and individual freedom, as under previous fascist regimes, will lose. The public health industry must urgently awaken to the changing world in which it works, if it is to adopt a role in saving public health rather than contributing to its degradation.”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajes.12531
As I’ve said all along TPTB don’t give a shit about children, infact I think the whole idea is to damage children as much as possible. Any one with half a brain cell could see the negative impacts lockdowns would have on society and yet people still want to cannonise the evil or compromised or both Valance and Witty. This is just another study for the white wash enquiry to ignore.
Another government created problem that the w**kers who promoted lockdowns now want money throwing at.
Yep, ”we’re coming for your children”, well they did warn us. I say the buck stops with the parents but the problem is when the parents are fully paid up members of the Woke Brigade themselves.
”The city council is sponsoring a five day drag camp which offers 14-year-olds the opportunity to become “divas”.
Oxford City Council is supporting a week long “Drag Camp” which offers 14 to 18 year olds the chance to “create their own daring stage persona”.
The camp, which starts on Monday on Magdalen Road, will be run by T(ART) Productions, which is a queer not for profit community events company, alongside Pegasus theatre group and Doris Field Charitable Trust.
The company promises to help children find their “drag voice” and to introduce them to the “world of drag as a performance art”.
Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend told the Daily Mail said: “Why is Oxford City Council encouraging children to participate in the world of adult entertainment?
“The aim of queer activists is clear in the blurb: to subvert and destabilise boundaries, under the guise of being empowering for children.
“Encouraging children to create a ‘daring’ stage persona means only one thing in the drag world: to push sexual boundaries.
“Blurring the boundaries between adult and child in this way is a safeguarding red flag.”
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23692650.oxford-council-sponsors-week-long-drag-camp-children/?ref=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR28kUZ0biGeQcMUHpr921MJFyAVYRuz6kXN5a8a3afwkXeHOdQM3FttJZQ_aem_ARKgzhZudJp-IHuWWqlmq017KDJYXZphsVrcAiR8JW_RrLGWiROWEsS3ItThhpqDlh0
Kids are doomed when the parents are woketards. Case in point. Presumably this is a boy;
https://twitter.com/againstgrmrs/status/1686372574467690496
Well, the report is here:
https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-07/WP202321-parental-labour-market-instability-and-childrens-mental-health-during-the-pandemic_0.pdf
Not sure what to make if it. Much of the text is given over to explaining the statistical methods used to analyse the multiple choice questionnaire responses and compute the outcomes.
Children are very sensitive to their parents’ emotions. I don’t doubt many experienced an impact on their social and emotional wellbeing. But quantifying it like this … I’m not persuaded.
I fear for children growing up in modern Britain. The COVID debacle was only one of many factors deleterious to their mental wellbeing.
Stuck record, I know, but please:
“Just as the dust begins to settle from the fallout of the Government’s response to the Covid pandemic…”
There. Was. No. Pandemic!
England and Wales, 2020-2021:
Average age at death overall: 81
Average age at death “FROM COVID”: 82!
Imagine a vaccine so safe you must be threatened to take it, to protect you from a virus so deadly you need be tested to know you have it!
When I’m with my children and the “pandemic” gets mentioned on TV or the radio, I repeat ‘there was no pandemic’. The same goes for the so called “climate emergancy” I repeat ‘there is no climate crisis it’s a scam’. Three sets of ‘oh dad’and eye rolls. I’m not going to let the constant propaganda get to my family.
I know how it’s affected me… and I’m in my late 40s. I can’t imagine the effect on youngsters. By using something so extreme on them so young, I guess it makes it easier to force ‘global boiling’, ‘climate catastrophe’ on them, because they’ve already been softened up by the powers that be.
Well they haven’t softened up our two. We are taking all of this abysmal episode in human history as a very valuable “teaching moment”.
With my 16yo (14 at the start of the plandemic) ’lockdown’ was very damaging to his development; although he was fully inoculated by his parents against bullshit and manipulation – and poisoning – it came at a point in his life when he needed routine and to knuckle down and work. Despite the fact I’m a teacher, I am well aware of the evils of state education, but the discipline and routine it brings are, I think, important, particularly for boys in their mid-teens. He struggles now to do anything reliably, and I put that down in part to the PTB shitting on his adolescent years.
Yeah. I’m 48 and I’m not as good as I used to be. I used to be super-organised. Now I find I either go like the clappers to get things done or have no energy even to read – it’s one extreme or the other. I work from home now, living like a recluse, and haven’t even seen anyone I work for since the start of 2020.
Get to your local Wetherspoons mate
That’s because you’re ‘one of us.’ How many kids live in homes where parents say the ‘anti-vaxxers’ belong in jail?
Significantly fewer than one year ago. They’re more likely to live in households where you can’t even bring up Covid because everyone’s too embarrassed!
So true! The husband of my Mum’s best friend was saying a year ago that people who refused the vaccine should be locked up. That would include me, who has cooked for him and his wife in my home and has eaten with him and his wife at theirs. When people pontificate like that – as we saw through the scamdemic – they forget the individual human face, which might be one they know!
Now my Mum’s best friend believes the vaccines are killers, in no small part due the the fact that my Mum now has a defibrillator-pacemaker in her chest because she developed a serious heart condition following the third booster jab.
I’ve got mixed feelings about all these impressive (and expensive) sounding studies.
I think they might serve to obscure rather than enlighten.
There was no pandemic. Respiratory viruses cannot be stopped by humans. We are social animals. Life must go on. Any extraordinary measures are harmful on their face – no complicated studies or cost benefit analysis required. To me this is orthodoxy – to most it’s now considered heresy, I think to this day.
Can you imagine if the human race behaved like this when TB was still an issue? We’d still be in the pre-industrial era!!
Seems like some people want us to go back there…
Shock.
And all to protect the poor vastly underpaid bloody teachers. How many actually “caught covid” from kids and died.
Long gone are the days when they actually cared about kids.
Didn’t they realise all they had to do was chop 6″ off the bottom of the doors to Stay Safe.
Cowardly and selfish doesn’t even begin to describe the majority of them.
Supermarket workers, delivery men etc. kept working
Ah yes, the vaccine that only works if others get vaxxed too. It’s always been the unjabbed people’s fault, the scapegoats of society, despite the fact if you had a vaccine that actually worked then why do you give a crap if anyone else is jabbed or not?? You’re allegedly ‘protected’ because Fauci, Biden et al said so, and they assured us repeatedly! Same non-logic can be applied to masks. And on and on the unfunny comedy sketches would go. My philosophy was always; my immune system is 100% effective with zero side-effects and it hasn’t got me killed or hospitalized yet. I’ll take my chances!
Very similar story in the Telegraph today….”Lockdown’s severe damage to children”..this is brilliant Bob’s reaction…
Bob Moran
@bobscartoons
Thank you, @telegraph
, for firing me when I tried to defend children against those who wished them harm through lockdowns.
Great to see such ethical consistency.
LOL! …..has anyone done any studies showing the way all the green zero zealots and their ideas will affect children?….thought not…..so no lessons learned then??
This new pro-narrative, vax-pushing, fear-mongering paper is crap, and the fact it has passed peer-review makes it double crap. Not to worry. The HART team have done a stellar job of extensively taking it apart and highlighting its shortcomings;
”The usual covid high priests who have been wheeled out repeatedly in front of the television cameras to fear-monger about covid without any debate, are at it again. Several members of Independent SAGE and others have written a paper assessing the impact of covid on children over the course of the last three years. It is not the paper they wanted to write.
Imagine you were them and had got hold of the data ready to write your paper. What might you want to show? I would suggest their priorities would have been to show:
They were unable to demonstrate any of those points using the actual data, as we shall see.
The paper was published in the BMJ but it seems the peer reviewers did not actually do much reviewing. Campaigners who have repeatedly demanded children be vaccinated and who even now are demanding boosters for vaccines (see figure 1) might not be in the best place to provide a dispassionate assessment of the evidence, and indeed they did not.”
https://www.hartgroup.org/yet-more-fear-mongering-over-covid-in-children/
My brother got a new dog during lockdown. It didn’t socialise properly as a puppy and is quite aggressive with other dogs.
The Conspiracy Against The Children , Was NOT a Theory. Do NOT be Fooled that They didn’t know, enough scientists spoke up ALL of whom were accused of being ignorant or censored . THEY KNEW Lockdowns were devastating. The EVIL thing about it is that they are getting away with it at the expense of your children