Repelled by the lot of them

A friend running for Parliament has piqued Julie Burchill's interest in the UK election.

By JULIE BURCHILL
candidates311 (photo credit: AP)
candidates311
(photo credit: AP)
For the first time ever, I have a friend standing as a putative member of Parliament in the forthcoming general election in Britain; not just an acquaintance, but a proper friend – Suzanne Moore, the Independent for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. I’ve known her for more than 20 years, am godmother to her three gorgeous daughters (Scarlet, Bliss and Angel) and actually gave her the green light to take up with my second (Jewish) husband shortly before I dumped him. “Why don’t you ‘comfort’ poor Cosmo?” was the way I phrased it, to her slightly repelled fascination. Didn’t stop her, though!
This alone has piqued my interest in what otherwise promised to be a very uninvolving election for me. Raised in a strict Labor trade unionist family to whom not voting Labor was a crime akin to child abuse, I now find myself repulsed by the antics of New Labor. Oh, it’s not the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that most Labor turncoats cite; to me, anyone who’s against them is actually saying that they would prefer Saddam and the Taliban still tucked up tidy in power and torturing their wretched citizens with complete freedom.
No, it’s the shocking lack of adequate funding for the armies fighting there which turns my stomach – up to 55 percent of soldiers in Iraq are believed to buy their own boots and other equipment because the standard issue is so inferior; less than half in the same poll expressed any confidence in it.
Alongside this abandonment of the brave men and women battling various shades of Islamofascism stands Labor’s sickeningly unparalleled cozying up to the filthy rich over the past 13 years of Labor government, first under Tony Blair and now under Gordon Brown.
This is often put down to the influence of the most prominent Jewish architect of the New Labor game plan, Peter Mandelson (whose father was advertising manager of the Jewish Chronicle), forever living it up on the yachts of plutocrats and busying around at Biderberg – a sort of cross between Machiavelli and Liberace.
New Labor has also been responsible for introducing an open-door policy on immigration from Eastern Europe, principally Poland, thus creating an endless pool of cheap labor which has undone all the hard-won progress the British trade union movement made since World War II in earning a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. (Not surprisingly, the bosses’ organization, the CBI, is just about the only voice in favor of uncontrolled immigration.) Many Eastern European immigrants have brought with them a racist attitude to Jews, blacks and Asians, which has further added to the pressure-cooker atmosphere of many inner-city multicultural schools.
ADD TO this Labor’s ceaseless pandering to the growing Muslim vote which has led it to give thousands of pounds of government money to organizations which may support extremism. This at a time when British synagogues are regularly graffitied by Islamists. There’s no way I’m going to be putting my cross in the Labor box.
What about the Tories then? Margaret Thatcher loved the Jews and promoted so many that one chilly Tory grandee remarked that her cabinet contained “more Estonians than Etonians.”
Sadly, under the leadership of old Etonian David Cameron, there has been a complete reversal of this good fortune, and the shadow cabinet now contains more in-bred upper-class twits than you could shake a cane at.
Personally I believe that masochism should be catered to within the confines of the bedroom and selected fast-food outlets – it has no place in the voting booth. And anyone not of the ruling class who knowingly votes for the ruling class to tell him what to do is displaying all the pride and backbone of a twice-used teabag.
What about the Liberal Democrats, the plucky little David to the other parties’ Goliaths? Well, there’s no point in being an outsider if you echo all the worst points of the establishment – that is, being anti-trade union, anti-minimum wage, anti-Israel. In his statements, leader Nick Clegg has drawn parallels between Israelis and Islamic terrorists, specifically in a piece for The Guardian in January 2009, “We must stop arming Israel,” which condemned your country’s quite reasonable response to Hamas attacks, and in effect called for the EU to isolate and even sanction you. The Lib Dems are basically bed-wetting Tories in Birkenstocks, with a few anti-Israel nutters chucked into the mix for variation.
AND THEN there are the Greens, the most high-profile of whom is Zac Goldsmith – one of those blond-haired, granite-jawed Jews who are produced by parents of Hebrew origin once they move into the top tax bracket. (His father was the billionaire Sir James Goldsmith.) I have to say that I find the idea of Green Jews – Goldsmith, George Monbiot, David de Rothschild and the rest – so funny; modern Jews are by nature urban, super-bright and self-made, the opposite of Green. So what happened to them?
When one’s family makes their pile, does their rich (dim) side take over from their Jewish (smart) side and simply render them as any other beneficiaries of inherited wealth?
Whatever, it seems to me extraordinary for a British or indeed EuropeanJew to be dewy-eyed about the good old days, which would have seen thembarred from further education in this country, or indeed found themchasing a skanky chicken around a shtetl back in the land of theirfathers. When they weren’t being pursued to the death by Cossacks onhorseback, of course.
And let’s never forget that the Nazi Party was the first political party to cleave to Green principles.
Oooh, Suzanne just got back to me with her position on Israel: “Stopsettlements, stop the siege of Gaza and accept division of Jerusalem.”
That’s another one off the Hanukka card list, then.
The writer has been a journalist since the age of 17 and an admirer ofIsrael since the age of 12. The television adaptation of her teenagenovel Sugar Rush won an International Emmy in 2006.