Brian or Lord? You may well ask. Certainly the crazy ‘troofer’ style conspiracy theorising in this clip is reminiscent of the late Brain Haw, and playing the toady for a hostile foreign regime isn’t far from Lord Haw-Haw.
Here’s the clip (extracted from the longer video, which featured Livingstone tag-teaming with George Galloway in support of their paycheque Press TV.
If you can’t bear to watch his gurning, here’s a transcript:
Ken Livingstone: “Clearly America has still got an agenda of trying to overthrow the Iranian government because it wants access to Iranian oil and I should imagine is very worried about the recent oil deal between China and Iran.”
Press TV Voiceover: “As well as [the move to close down Press TV] being an attack on Iran, Ken Livingstone believes this is a campaign by right wing forces to ensure his defeat in the 1012 London mayoral election. But London’s ex-mayor says he stands by the 24 hour news channel.”
Ken Livingstone: “The problem for Press Tv is that it’s most probably the only channel available to most people in Britain where you can see the Palestinian case fairly presented. And that is something that you have very powerful interests that don’t want that out in the public domain.
In case you didn’t get the insinuation in Ken Livingstone’s claims about unnamed “powerful interests”, the Press TV insert places Livingstone’s comments back-to-back with a spokesperson from the Zionist Federation saying he really doesn’t like PressTV.
It is notable that, back in the 1980s, Ken Livingstone used almost precisely the same argument. He implied that the reason that the Workers’ Revolutionary Party had been exposed for taking money from Gaddafi – and then used it to fund a paper that Livingstone edited – was that shadowy Zionists opposed the WRP’s support for Palestinians.
In summary Ken Livingstone acts as a tool of the clerical fascist Iranian regime, he takes their money and then uses various accounting maneuvers so he avoids paying tax on the Iranian cash – precisely the same legal dodges he criticises others for using.
