I Intend To Escape ......................And Come Back

The Spell Cast by the Hijab

The air of liberal desperation over Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain is reminiscent of the fuss when a fan was spotted in a hijab at the Bradford City v Aston Villa league cup semi final in 2013. The normally composed journalist Jim White declared that this sight was the 'key to the future of the game'.

As with that case, and the better known international furore over Malala Yousafzai, Nadiya Hussain's spell is cast solely by the hijab, and liberal dreams of a progressive, integrated Islam. Without it, she serves no purpose in terms of political utility. If she took it off, for liberal elites the effect would be the same as the clock striking midnight in the story of Cinderella. Can anyone imagine Angelina Jolie visiting Malala if she started wearing jeans and a baseball cap whilst chasing boys in Birmingham?

A more inclusive Britain? Only providing Nadiya Hussain remains in her designated role can liberal Britons keep convincing themselves that everything is going to be alright. That you can have more and more religious sections of our cities, and at the same time have a high degree of personal freedom, social cohesion and integration. The desperation with which some launch themselves at Bradford fan Amina Qureshi, Malala Yousafzai and now Nadiya Hussain are signs of weakness, not strength, of hope over experience. It is not Britain that liberal elites are trying to convince - it is themselves.

Edward Snowden Joins Twitter

For those who use social media sites, the former NSA contractor turned whistle blower Edward Snowden appears to have opened a twitter account.

Within four hours of his first tweet earlier today, he had 488,000 followers, but was following just one account himself - the US National Security Agency. When I did a twitter search under the single word 'Snowden' the first account which came up, was not that of Edward Snowden, but the account of the NSA. Big brother works in mysterious ways.....

Death of a Gentleman Reviewed

Having been left all dressed up with nowhere to go last week when the Corby Cube's showing of Death of a Gentleman was cancelled, I am delighted to report that the excellent Errol Flynn playhouse in Northampton stepped in to offer me a complimentary ticket for their showing. This review comes courtesy of their generosity.

Death of a Gentleman opens, deliberately, in as cliched a manner as possible, with the sound of bird song and the sight of cricket on the village green. The opening words stress, correctly, that cricket is about values, and those being interviewed throughout the film articulate the association of the game with integrity and a moral code for living. In English we deploy terms such as 'that's not cricket' for a reason - that they betray our unease or anger at behaviour that is improper or unprincipled. I disagree with the film makers that cricket is a unique sport in this respect - I think you will find the same approach within several martial arts, certainly in Muay Thai and Judo - but in the context of the cricket playing nations, to play cricket means to associate with core values.

Although a total of seven people appear to have been behind Death of a Gentleman, the two we see on camera are cricket journalists Sam Collins (English) and Jarrod Kimber (Australian). They quickly explain both their love of the game and its size - whilst a long way behind football in terms of global adherence, cricket is the second biggest sport in the world. If that surprises you, just remember that cricket is the summer sport in the British Isles, the national sport in Pakistan and Bangladesh and the national sport in the second most populous country in the world - India.

The film's narrative begins in 2011, with the realisation that test cricket, described by Ian Chappell as the peak of the game, is questioned and imperiled as never before. These concerns are not necessarily new - Death of a Gentleman does not engage with the long term concerns that one day cricket is or will undermine longer forms of the game, a debate within English cricket that is at least forty years old. Instead its focus is on the latest variation, 20/20, and in particular the Indian Premier League, portrayed here as being as much about Bollywood as sport.

For all the glitz, razzmatazz and dancing girls of the IPL, cricketers still enter the game wishing to play test cricket at the highest level. The story of Ed Cowan, an Australian opener, given his cap at the MCG in 2011, is cleverly used to demonstrate the emotive appeal of ambition. No schoolboy grows up in Australia dreaming of playing for a franchise in Chennai - they still want to earn a baggy green cap, a point emphasised by the obvious pride shown by Ed Cowan's father in several short interview clips.

This is very much a film of interviews holding together a central narrative, and for me a core component of that narrative is provided by Gideon Haigh, who asks a fundamental question of cricket in the era of 20/20 - does cricket make money in order to exist, or does it exist to make money. In this, we return to the association between cricket and values, and as the film develops it becomes increasingly obvious that in the era of 20/20 cricket exists to make money. The bigger question perhaps is where that money goes, as seven test playing nations are virtually bankrupt, whilst three - Australia, England and India, make money. How can this be?

Any film needs a villain, and as Simon Heffer illustrates in his review of Death of a Gentleman, here we have Giles Clarke, formerly Chairman and now President of the English Cricket Board (ECB). Awarded the CBE for services to cricket in 2012, Clarke is one of those men who always seems to be pictured with his nose slightly raised in the air, like a deer nervously sniffing for the presence of any predator. In terms of power though, cricket is dominated not from its historical base at Lords and the MCC, but from India. It is the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) which controls the International Cricket Council, and Indian money which matters. An all too brief interview with the former Indian all-rounder Ravi Shastri in effect declares 'we are the masters now'.

If power can corrupt, absolute power can corrupt absolutely. The 2012 report by Lord Woolf into governance in cricket established a sport characterised by a lack of any financial transparency, a potentially deadly failing given the predominance of gambling in the Indian sub-continent and the power of bookmakers. In this part of the world, some two billion pounds can be bet on major matches. However for English cricket it is not match-fixing that brought its most shameful hour, but the ECB's association with Sir Allen Stanford, an American financier who had bought up large parts of Antigua, and introduced 'winner takes all' 20/20. Collins and Kimber resist the temptation to dwell on some of the less salubrious aspects of Stanford's fifteen minutes of fame, and instead use the issue to attack Giles Clarke's jugular. Here Clarke is at his most belligerent, combining detachment and aggression in his response, insisting that he does not talk about Stanford but equally that it is all history. But not of course for those ripped off by the now plain Allen Stanford, serving a 110 year jail sentence for fraud.

The demise of Stanford meant that in financial terms, the IPL developed a monopoly. Here the film's second bad guy emerges in the ponderous persona of Indian concrete magnate N Srinivasan, the President of the BCCI. The sections of the film devoted to the internal politics of cricket in India are perhaps the least appealing to English viewers, but they matter, as the ultimate ICC agreement, to keep TV revenues primarily among the three biggest earning nations - Australia, England and India, shapes all else in the game. The 2019 Cricket World Cup will accordingly be limited to just 10 teams, rather than the previous 14. Given the development of the game in recent years in countries as diverse as Ireland and Afghanistan, this is nonsense. International development, the centre of any sports health, is retarding, something Gideon Haigh correctly castigates as bizarre. Although a majority of ICC members wish to see cricket as an Olympic sport (which would release government funding for the game in China, and other nations) the ICC will not countenance this.

With Srinivasan installed as head of the ICC, despite accusations of his family being associated with match fixing in India, the future prospects for Test cricket, as opposed to the faster, looser and more profitable brand of 20/20 appear grim. When Collins and Kimber manage to get themselves into an ICC press conference in (appropriately) Dubai, a picture of CLR James briefly appears as part of the ICC backdrop on the wall. A Trinidadian born Marxist who spent much of his life in the US and England, James wrote one of the most important cricket books, Beyond A Boundary. One wonders what James would make of an IPL fixture between Sunrisers Hyderabad and and the Chennai Superkings. We probably have a pretty good idea though of what he would make of men like Giles Clarke or N Srinivasan - those who live to make money, rather than making money to live, and to uphold the values of the game.

If Death of a Gentleman ends on a positive note it is by returning to Ed Cowan, and the values of those playing the sport for that sense of individual, team or national pride. Nothing about that tendency remaining however, guarantees its survival. Collins and Kimber ask us to visit the website Change Cricket, and to resist the games drift. The interviews in the film though with IPL players such as Kevin Pietersen (the first post-national, post-modern cricketer?) and Chris Gayle remind us that when it comes down to a choice between domestic and test cricket, or the IPL, the big bucks of the IPL will always turn heads. We should not necessarily be pessimistic, but we do need to be realistic. Cricket is not in good health, and the Death of a Gentleman illustrates that all too well.

There are screenings of the film scheduled across the country for the remainder of September and going into October. Some cricket venues, most noticeably Lords, have declined to show the movie, for fear of upsetting the ECB. That makes it all the more important to get out there and see it, before hopefully it becomes available on DVD.

What Solzhenitsyn Tells Us About Crimea and the Ukraine

Of of all the Russian writers in the last fifty years, few can have been as well read in Britain as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His critiques of the Soviet system, which brought the Nobel Prize in 1970, must surely mean hardly anyone in Britain's political elite will not have read him.

And yet for all those copies of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, few seem to have grasped how Solzhenistyn viewed post-Soviet Russia. Perhaps the primary source for this is his 1990 'Rebuilding Russia'. Whilst there is much to say about that book, I pick below some of the sections on Ukraine and Crimea.

Solzhenitsyn appears to have been happy to allow nearly all of the Soviet republics to pursue independence, but considered there to be special ties between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Of the Ukraine, he declares:

"To separate off the Ukraine today would mean to cut across the lives of millions of individuals and families: the two populations are thoroughly intermingled; there are entire regions where Russians predominate; many individuals would be hard put to choose between the two nationalities; many others are of mixed origin, and there are plenty of mixed marriages (marriages which have indeed never been viewed as "mixed"). There is not even a hint of intolerance between Russians and Ukrainians on the level of the ordinary people" (p.20).

The point is also made that historically Donbass and Crimea had always been part of Russia (p.19).

And yet less than twenty five years later the British government seems to have been surprised when Putin refused to accept the overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected (and pro-Russian) leader, Viktor Yanukovych, and the Ukraine's attempted turn towards the EU and NATO. This provoked the secession of Crimea. Indeed Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond was still complaining about the Crimean referendum a year later.

Perhaps British politicians need to read more. There is also a more general failing among western hawks on Russia - Edward Lucas and Anne Applebaum are perhaps the two most prominent - to take a rounded approach. They are quite happy to take the bits that they like from Solzhenitsyn - the anti-Soviet elements in his writing - but turn up their nose at the sections which advocate Russian as opposed to 'western' interests. Such cheery-picking does them little credit, and does little to inform others on events in eastern Europe.

The Death of a Gentleman

I had set aside some time today to write a review and comment on the cricket film, Death of a Gentleman, which I was due to see yesterday at the Corby Cube.

Events intervened - shortly before I was due to leave home, the Corby Cube phoned to tell me they had not received the film (!) had been unable to download a copy in time, and they were very sorry but I could have my money back. It was all very professionally done, but did rather leave an empty void.

For the uninitiated, Death of a Gentleman tells the story of how three countries - Australia, England and India - have shifted the axis of cricket's governance to reward themselves, at the expense of the other cricketing nations, and the games grassroots. But I can't say much more than that, as I never got to see the film. Simon Heffer, who did get to see it, still seems to be recovering from the apoplexy it invoked in him - his review should inspire others to action.

One In, All In

I have spent a lot of time this summer reading some of the burgeoning literature of feminist critiques of Islamism - writers such as Meredith Tax, Melinda Cooper and Karima Bennoune. My paper to the 2015 Critical Terrorism Studies conference "Feminism or Islamism: Critical Terrorism Studies Develops a Blind Spot" largely covered their interventions.

You might not think much humour emerges in such circles, but it does. Consider Bennoune's 'Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here' and its report of a 2009 protest in Sudan against the flogging of journalist Lubna Hussein for the crime of wearing trousers in public:

"One of the protesters was an older, heavy-set woman from a generation which had known life before such restrictions. Young soldiers came to drag the protesters away and threw them one after another into a truck. When they got to the older woman, they could not lift her, so they told her to go home. Outraged, she hired a taxi to follow the other arrested women to jail."

Karima Bennoune, "Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories From the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism" p.82

Let Richard Seymour Sleep Soundly In His Bed

Back in the late 1980s, I traveled to the old Ayresome Park ground to see Manchester United lose 1-0 at Middlesbrough. The game was awful and the experience miserable - as soon as you left the coach the police forced the visiting fans into the ground, and it actually seemed colder inside than outside. About the only thing I remember of the game was noticing the Falklands War veteran Simon Weston on the terraces with the United fans. I looked over once, and then decided someone who has had severe facial burns probably does not want people staring at him all day.

Simon Weston is back in the news after making a minor intervention in the Labour leadership debate, arguing that Jeremy Corbyn could lose the Falklands Islands to Argentina, via some form of joint sovereignty. This would be a very difficult thing for a Corbyn government to do, not least because the islands display unanimity in the view they wish to remain British. Given the suffering they experienced during the Argentinian invasion and occupation in 1982, there is no love lost for their former enemies.

Weston's comments seemed to particularly infuriate some of Jeremy Corbyn's cyber army, including the prominent socialist writer Richard Seymour, who blogs as Leninology, and contributes to the Guardian's Comment is Free. According to Seymour, no one cares what Simon Weston thinks, and if he knew anything, he would 'still have his face'. Nice sentiments (captured below in a screenshot by James Bloodworth):

Stay classy, 'Lenin'. pic.twitter.com/bdHD2bPMEm

— James Bloodworth (@J_Bloodworth) August 30, 2015

In Richard Seymour's world, a working class man who joins the armed forces at a young age, and receives serious injury fighting a fascist military dictatorship occupying a peaceful British territory, is to be condemned as knowing nothing. He is then mocked with regards to the injury he received. How far some contemporary socialists stand from the class they claim to represent.
It is apparently a myth that George Orwell ever wrote “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” But let Richard Seymour sleep soundly in his bed tonight - the real world will carry on without him. And his ideas.

Hamza Tzortzis, Segregation and ..... Ashley Madison

Perhaps the most high profile Islamist organisation on UK campuses in recent years has been iERA, the Islamic Education and Research Academy, headed by Hamza Tzortzis. It was iERA who caused the extremely damaging argument about segregation by Muslim students at universities, when, back in 2013 they attempted to segregate men and women onto separate sides of the room during a public meeting at UCL.

In a worrying sign of their attitude, at the time iERA pictured its male rota of speakers on their website, but portrayed the females as faceless hijabs - an indication no doubt, of their role in iERA's vision for our society. Today the same approach applies, with the men on iERA's 'Meet Our Speakers' page featured in all their glory, the women, listed last, recorded only by their names. Welcome to British Islam?

News emerges though, that Hamza Tzortzis may not always be so keen to keep women at a distance. In a sheepish post on his Facebook page, iERA's leader reports that his name, address and bank details appear in the leaks from the Ashley Madison site - a website dedicated to enabling no strings sex for married men and married women seeking an affair. This, we are told is an 'obvious case of fraud' even though he had carried on paying for membership of the site over several months. So busy was Mr Tzortzis doing Allah's work on campus, he neglected to notice his bank statements recorded regular fraudulent payments to a dating site with the by-line 'Life is short. Have an affair.' Easily done!

It is certainly possible however to think that the great man is hedging his bets a little, when he declares:

"My whereabouts and activities, both private and public are traceable and recorded, and there is without any doubt that I have not pursued such immoral acts that the site promotes (this includes permissible acts, for instance the endeavour to find another halal wife [who can also be a non-Muslim] who wanted to be with a married man, which is allowed in Islam)."

With the demise of the News of the World, that familiar staple of our Sunday reading, the tabloid sex scandal, could have become a thing of the past. For reasons of nostalgia, it is comforting to see that conservative religion and its inherent hypocrisy can still provide a chortle or two over our Sunday morning cornflakes. Those iERA tried to separate into different halves of the room at UCL in 2013 will certainly afford themselves a wry smile.
But simply laughing at groups like iERA is not enough - as the Council of Ex-Muslims illustrated in their report 'Evangelising Hate - the Islamic Education and Research Academy' - iERA present some real problems and dangers. Lets laugh at them now, but make sure that they are not the one's laughing tomorrow.

Libraries Need........ Books

Once children were considered to be in poverty - be it absolute or cultural - if they had no access to books. But now, access to books is increasingly considered old fashioned or unnecessary, for both children and adults.

It is not cuts which have undermined or destroyed public libraries. Birmingham's new library cost an astonishing £189 million, a project of breathtaking ego and waste. Instead it is the faddish approach to knowledge and naivete towards new technology which have turned library after library into a pale shadow of their former selves.

An artists impression of Birmingham's brave new world of learning

Librarian Carol Honey had a superb letter in the i of 18 August 2015 which best described this reckless abandonment of book based learning:

As a librarian and frequent visitor to Birmingham, I looked forward to the opening of the new library with eager anticipation, but when I made my first (and only) visit I could have wept. At the entrance you are greeted by a large cafe, reception and shop - no hint of the type of building you are in. The signage is confused with floors described as 'Knowledge' or 'Discovery'. What is wrong with Fiction, Non-fiction or Reference?
Two huge neon-lit escalators to the first floor were full of schoolchildren chasing each other up and down and screaming loudly. I couldn't blame them, it looked like a shopping mall. When I eventually found the book stock, I was appalled at how poor it was. Disappointed doesn't begin to describe my feelings.

Carol Honey

To Succeed Corbyn Would Have To Leave The EU

Our politics could be about to get really interesting.

Today's business section of the Sunday Telegraph has a hit piece against Jeremy Corbyn, alleging 'Corbyn's policies would reduce Britain to 'Zimbabwe-style ruin'. So far, so standard. But the detail is what makes Peter Spence's article worth reading and re-reading. The title of the online version indicates the underlying nature of the subject matter 'Jeremy Corbyn's 'People's QE' would force Britain into three-year battle with the EU'

After getting in the immediate dig that Corbyn would turn Britain into Zimbabwe, Spence writes:

"Key parts of the Labour leadership frontrunner's plans would fall foul of EU laws intended to avoid runaway inflation, and consign the UK to a three year legal battle with the European Court of Justice"

So, vote Corbyn, vote for what is being styled as 'People's quantitative easing' - and get the European Court of Justice. That is not acceptable. The economic policy of the UK - whether free market, socialist or a thousand shades in-between, is a matter for you and me as British citizens. Not judges overseas.

Rather than focus on the political nature of what he has just outlined, Spence turns to the economic consequences (as you might perhaps expect in the business pages). Economist Tony Yates, and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney are wheeled out to predict the descending of plague and pestilence upon us all. Several paragraphs through, Peter Spence gets political again:

"Mr Corbyn's proposals would clash with Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty. which forbids central banks from printing money to finance government spending. Lawyers warned that a lengthy fight with the EU would be a certainty, and could mean that infrastructure projects end up incomplete."

The Lisbon Treaty, readers may recall, is the one Labour declined to have a referendum on. David Cameron demanded one in opposition, and committed himself to it in 2007, before changing his mind.

Long term tax campaigner Richard Murphy of Tax Research LLP has emerged as somewhat of a guru in recent months on the issue of taxation, and a potential change of economic direction under Mr Corbyn. I do know that some of those behind Notes from the Borderland magazine, who worked with Mr Murphy in the past on the issue of the UK's tax havens, were less than impressed with him, a matter which I am sure NFB will turn to on another occasion. On 'people's quantitative easing', Spence declares:

"Richard Murphy, named as the architect of People's QE, said that some fiddle would be required to get round Article 123."

Syriza tried that type of approach. Brussels said no. And were prepared to destroy Greece in the process. For Corbyn's policies to have a chance of implementation, Britain would either have to leave the European Union, or negotiate some special dispensation to be allowed to develop truly independent economic policies. How likely is that?

If you are wondering why Nigel Farage and UKIP have avoided the Conservative and New Labour attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, it is for a simple reason. You can't have socialism, and the EU. You can't for that matter have capitalism. Only corporatism. And the more Corbyn's supporters learn that, the more people will be questioning exactly what Britain is committed to in the European Union. Many will then be voting No in the forthcoming EU referendum.

Class War, Red Action and The 'Lost Left'

The new issue of the academic journal Twentieth Century Communism has published my paper on how Class War and Red Action responded to the rise of multi-culturalism and identity politics on the wider left. It appears in a special issue 'The Cultural Turn' which considers the development of cultural politics among revolutionaries.

The article is based on a paper I gave to the Communism Specialist Group at the "Communism, Class and the Cultural Turn" conference in Durham in January 2014, and has the very long winded title "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: two responses on the British left to the rise of identity politics - the cases of Class War and Red Action".

Its argument is explained in the following abstract:

The 1980s may be seen as an era where a profound shift occurred on the left. The anti-racist and multi-cultural approach of Ken Livingstone’s GLC, and that of a series of local authorities, was accompanied by a developing women’s movement and the positioning of questions of gender, race and sexuality at the centre of left wing politics. In cultural terms Marxism Today was perhaps the most profound example of this new focus.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This paper focuses on two revolutionary organisations emerging in this period – Class War within the anarchist movement and Red Action in the Marxist tradition. Both developed broad intellectual justifications concerning the overwhelming primacy of class and as such serve as important footnotes in any historiography of twentieth century left politics in the United Kingdom - a 'lost left'.

Whilst Red Action were to go on and produce some of the most valuable critiques of multi-culturalism to emerge from the left, certainly in the early days of New Labour, the road for Class War was at times a lot more rocky. The concerns which emerged within Class War that its focus on class politics meant it was marginalising issues of race and gender is perhaps a further example of the maxim that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

To order the Twentieth Century Communism journal, follow this link. You can also download the article from my academia.edu page.

Where Corbyn Gets It Right

I am not a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. My opposition is due to the deep relationships he has developed with Muslim Brotherhood leaders in north London over the past decade, including running constituency surgeries out of the Ikhwan's Finsbury Park Mosque. A Corbyn Labour Party would give Islamists the greatest boost they have had in this country since the invasion of Iraq.

But Corbyn has real strengths. In talking politics, and giving straight answers to straight questions, he has presented a clear alternative to the Tweedledee and Tweedledum candidatures of Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall (who she?). I can't help thinking that inside Andy Burnham there is a normal bloke occasionally struggling to get out. But he was long ago eaten up by the New Labour party machine - its now a little too late to be shouting from inside the belly of the beast.

In his refusal to launch counter-attacks when brickbats are thrown, Jeremy Corbyn has risen above the fray. There is something faintly noble in his words to the latest criticism, this time from Yvette Cooper:

"We’ve used this campaign to put forward policy issues on the economy, the environment, arts policy. We’re the one putting forward ideas, so I don’t do personal, I don’t do reaction, I don’t do abuse. Life is too short and it devalues the political process. I think we should try and enhance the democratic life of this country, not reduce it to that level.”

The wheels could yet come off. Those who wish the Corbyn campaign well would be well advised to get him as far away as possible from the Muslim Brotherhood's Middle East Monitor (MEMO) event in London on 22nd August. To appear on the same panel as the anti-Semitic cartoonist Carlos Latuff is a bit much, even in the left's current Islamist friendly climate.

Such problems aside, Corbyn is the only candidate presenting political ideas, and seeking a constructive debate. For that alone he should win.

Gang War Author Peter Walsh, Plus More on Paul Massey

Following the murder of Paul Massey, Russia Today had an interesting interview earlier this month with journalist Peter Walsh, author of the book 'Gang War: The Inside Story of the Manchester Gangs".

 

Walsh comes across as quite balanced, if cautious. He is certainly correct to point to the loyalty Massey inspired in others, but he does not dwell on the reality that the Massey family had enemies in the city. For example his cousin, Constance Howarth was convicted of being the lookout in the failed attempt to murder Salford's David Totton in 2006. The man convicted for being at the centre of that plot, Bobby Spiers, was a director of Paul Massey's security company, PMS.

On Paul Massey's politics, the final post on his twitter feed indicates he was planning to stand again for Mayor of Salford, where (as Walsh contends) he received a decent vote last time. This could have been as an Independent or perhaps with Bez's Reality Party - if Bez got round to registering it with the Electoral Commission. I don't think Massey would have won, but a vote of 10%+ was certainly possible.

Interestingly Paul Massey's twitter feed suggests that he took a different approach to national elections - a 7 May tweet called for a UKIP vote in the imminent general election.

Who should I vote for in the General Election 2015? These 12 questions will help you decide http://t.co/WYF6izLY7b vote ukip pm Salford

— Paul Massey (@paulmassey19601) May 7, 2015

Perhaps a policy of Reality for Salford, UKIP for the country?

Failing to attach Paul Massey to UKIP must be the first time Hope Not Hate have missed an opportunity to attack the party!

Manipulating the News: A Follow Up

I received a lot of positive feedback and support on social media for yesterdays post, on the manipulation of the news in the case of the stabbing of school teacher Vincent Uzomah. 

A few brief updates. Firstly the Guardian's Helen Pidd confirmed that the judge in the case did NOT order any withholding of the ethnicity of the attacker. This confirms that those news outlets who did not report he is a British teenager of Pakistani heritage, opted to do so of their own volition. 

 

@MrPaulStott @chrishanretty the judge specifically allowed reporting of the ethnicity of the offender

— Helen Pidd (@helenpidd) August 11, 2015

Secondly neither Show Racism the Red Card nor the Today Programme replied to me on social media, where I levied the question as to whether their interventions in this story properly reflected events. Laura Pidcock of Show Racism the Red Card also failed to comment, despite being sent a link to these criticisms.

An unexpected development during the course of yesterday was Matthew Weaver of the Guardian, somewhat bizarrely, picking up on Show Racism the Red Card's intervention on Radio 4, and deciding that in and of itself it was worthy of being a news story. Indeed at one point yesterday it was the ninth most read article on the Guardian site. This illustrates the nature of modern media websites - the need to produce endless layers of content that fit readers preconceived ideas means a highly partial and indeed disingenuous discussion on a radio show can, two hours later, become a news item.

And that serves as a further example of how liberal elites manipulate the news.

The Manipulation of the News

When reporting on matters of race or racism, we cannot even rely on liberal elites to report basic matters of fact. 

Yesterday a 14 year old boy was jailed for 11 years for stabbing his teacher, Vincent Uzomah, in the stomach whilst he was teaching at a secondary school in Bradford. Mr Uzomah had told the boy off for playing with his mobile phone. Mr Uzomah, who is black, was racially abused by the boy, who is British of Pakistani heritage, during the incident. The lad later boasted about it on Facebook, receiving 69 'Likes' for his actions. 

Listening to the BBC radio 4 coverage of the sentencing yesterday evening, there was no mention of the attacker's ethnicity, although plenty of the fact that this was a racist attack. An approach which was continued in the BBC and Channel 4 news internet coverage. Many following such 'analysis' would simply have assumed this was another case of a white racist lashing out at someone from an ethnic minority. That impression would certainly have been absorbed by the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme this morning. Here a discussion ensued between Laura Pidcock of anti-racist group Show Racism the Red Card and Sagheer Azfal, a supply teacher who reported he had experienced racism from pupils at secondary schools. 

Here, the Today Programme seemed to be attempting to bowl a googly from a fast bowler's run-up. If a black man is stabbed by a British-Pakistani racist, it seems a little strange to ask a British Asian to talk about their experiences of racism? Would a report on a black person stabbed by a white racist bring in the comments of a white teacher with negative experiences of some black children? I dare the BBC to try it........Whilst Laura Pidcock eagerly presented a series of familiar left complaints, for example about alleged racism in the media coverage of migrants, there was no attempt by anyone to comment on the elephant in the room - that poor old Mr Uzomah's attacker was not a white racist at all. 

In the media coverage I have seen in the past eighteen  hours, Helen Pidd, the rather impressive Northern editor of the Guardian, is one of the few journalists with the backbone to report the racist aspect of this case fully, both on social media and on the Guardian's website yesterday. I have asked both Show Racism the Red Card and the Today Programme if their comments this morning fully reflect the nature of this incident. I don't expect a reply.

For liberal elites - and BBC journalists and educational groups working in schools such as the government funded Show Racism the Red Card are textbook examples of liberal elites who form and shape opinion - cases like the stabbing of Vincent Uzomah are pre-determined. The problem is racism, and racism is about white people saying critical things about or doing nasty things to black people. If a case emerges that undermines this script, the details are subtly disguised so the expected impressions can still be digested by the general public. That is why we are not told the attacker's ethnic heritage. To reinforce wider political concerns, activists like Laura Pidcock are brought in to attach media coverage of benefit claimants and asylum seekers in Calais to a specific attack, and for additional absorption of the core message, an actual victim of white racism, Sagheer Azfal, used. 

And that, in one simple case, is how liberal elites manipulate the news. 

British Jihadism: The Detail and the Denial

I am reliably informed that apart from your examiners, nobody ever reads your PhD. In the unlikely circumstances that someone wants to battle through 99, 000+ words on British jihadism, you can download my doctorate via academia.edu here. The abstract below gives an overview of my arguments, approach and some of the detail which I hope makes the thesis unique. 

Since the early 1990s British Islamists have been fighting, killing and dying in a succession of conflicts across the world, beginning with the Bosnian Civil War of 1992-95. A decade later this violence reached the United Kingdom, with a series of deadly attacks on the London transport system in July 2005, the first suicide bombings in Western Europe. 

This thesis provides a historiography of the involvement of Britons in global and domestic jihadist struggles at home and abroad across three decades. It catalogues and records their actions, and bring into a central document the names and affiliations of both British Islamist combatants, and those from jihadist organisations who have settled in this country. The ever increasing number of Britons travelling to the Islamic State does not come as a surprise when the scale of past involvement in such causes is considered. 
This thesis deconstructs the religious objectives intrinsic to these trends, and emphasises that in British Jihadism it is the goal, as much as the message, which is religious. 

The reluctance of British Muslim representative organisations to address early examples of these developments, the ‘denial’ – is analysed herein. The development of a religious terrorism which often targets women and minority groups may have been expected to face critical examination from academics, in particular from within the critical terrorism studies school. Regrettably such rigour is found to be lacking. Indeed it is within the academy that some of the most sustained attempts to deny any religious influences behind contemporary terrorism have been found. Detailed feminist critiques of Islamist practice are deployed to advocate a new approach – one that leads to a critical terrorist studies which critiques not just government responses to terrorism, but terrorist actors also.

 

The Decline of Labour and the Rise of UKIP

The Fabian Society has published a pamphlet 'Never Again: Lessons From Labour's Key Seats' which examines constituencies the party either lost, or failed to win despite expectations, at the 2015 general election.

As so often in life it is during recriminations that the really interesting facts and argument tend to emerge. Perhaps the most significant lines are from Rowenna Davis, who lost the marginal of Southampton Itchen to the Conservatives. The potentially terminal mess the left has got itself into over race and immigration, and consequent loss of influence to a non-racist alternative in UKIP,  is clearly established (I choose the word non-racist deliberately, as anti-racism per se is now such a farce). Davis writes:

We had been told by senior figures in the party that UKIP was a boon to Labour, splitting the right of the country, but not for marginal seats like ours. In these white working class communities, particularly on the coast, UKIP tore our vote apart. The safer, older council estates in areas like Weston and Thornhill that used to be solid Labour were now significantly disillusioned. No matter how hard we worked these areas, significant national differences, particularly on immigration, meant that we couldn’t stop the tide.

Without wishing to disrespect the excellent work of my colleagues campaigning in Southampton Test, I believe we managed to hold Itchen’s neighbouring seat because the demographic simply had more liberal, middle class, student and immigrant voters to win. This loss of the white working class vote is a crisis for our party, not just because we lost, but because it raises an existential question about who we represent. We have always won by uniting working and middle class people in England. Without that first half, you have to question why we’re here and where we’re going to go.

Rowenna Davis, "The Need for Strength" in "Never Again: Lessons From Labour's Key Seats" (Fabian Society: London, 2015) p.16

Nothing I have heard from any of the four Labour leadership candidates comes even close to addressing the 'existential question' raised above. However Davis herself ducks addressing an important issue locally - the closure of the city's Ford Transit plant in 2012. She writes:

The likes of Ford, Pirelli and Vosper Thorneycroft which used to provide dependable, respected work for huge numbers of people in the city, have now disappeared, to be replaced with more white-collar, unstable work (p14)

Certainly with regards to Ford, that is only half the story. The local factory closed following its transfer to Turkey with an £80 million loan from the European Union.  Whilst there is some recognition in the Fabian pamphlet that Labour was wrong to oppose an EU referendum, the intellectual re-configuration required to accept that the EU may be bad news for working class people, and the country as a whole, is almost certainly a step too far for Labour. 

The Delusions of British Liberalism and Multi-Culturalism

I wrote the small piece below in response to an article on The Guardian website by Emine Samer on 27 July. This reports that the final member of the 'Pompey Lads' believed to be fighting for the Islamic State in Syria, Asad Uzzaman, has been killed. The Guardian, and especially its Comment is Free section, has a tendency to remove my comments, so I thought I would duplicate them here. 

The most telling thing about Emine Samer's article is part of its title - "How the Pompey Lads Fell into the hands of ISIS."

Perhaps the Pompey lads took a rational decision that ISIS broadly met their beliefs, and the caliphate was an ideal worth fighting for?

It is remarkable how readily good liberal journalists can now infantalise people from ethnic minorities in a way we would never see with others. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, did we ever talk of young Catholics in west Belfast 'falling into the hands' of the IRA? Or young unionists who joined loyalist paramilitaries in such terms?

Its the same with the woman and girls who have traveled to live in the Caliphate - they are always 'groomed' or 'lured' . Despite every one of them being over the age of criminal responsibility, we are asked to pretend nobody ever takes a rational decision.

I wonder if the war in Syria, the emergence of the Islamic State and British Islamist support for it actually tells us more about the crisis of liberalism and our staunchest advocates of multi-culturalism, than it does about the state of British Islam. Whatever you want to say about British Muslims, they are certainly not as prone to deluding themselves as our liberal media....

Paul Massey and Politics

Paul Massey was shot dead at his home in Clifton, Salford on Sunday 26 July, aged 55. Unusually for a figure associated with organised crime, he had a background on the left of politics, and for a time in the Anarchist movement. This article covers some of the political campaigns and activism he was around, and issues which arose from them. 

Paul Massey was involved in the UK Anarchist movement for some years, most notably in the Ordsall Class War group in Salford in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the funeral of Salford Anarchist Ken Keating in 2011, he gave the oration and was of one of the pall bearers.  He had more recently stood (unsuccessfully)  in the election to be Mayor of Salford in 2012, gaining 2000 votes and according to local news sheet the Salford Star, was intending to run again at the next elections. His involvement in organised crime in Greater Manchester was hardly a secret, and was detailed in the book Gang War - The Inside Story of the Manchester Gangs, by Peter Walsh.

 

That book, heavily dependent on Greater Manchester Police sources, threw some light on a period in our history when Britain's spooks, seeing an emerging peace in Northern Ireland and working before Osama Bin Laden began to directly threaten the West, decided to diversify. Their interventions against organised crime lack a serious published analysis, but I hopefully go some way to addressing that void in a 2004 review of Walsh's book 'The Mancunian Way'.  That Massey was targeted by the security services is evident, and aspects of his trial for a stabbing in 1999 appear distinctly unsatisfactory. A case perhaps of the authorities framing a guilty man? 

 

Ordsall Class War's campaigns against gentrification, Greater Manchester Police and hard drug dealing were featured in the following issues of the anarchist tabloid Class War:

 

Issue 37 (1989) p.8-9 "Dirty Lazy Numbskull Bastards". This centre spread contains a picture of Paul Massey with the police tracking device he had discovered in his car. 

Issue 38 "It's War" p.5 

Issue 40 "Don't Rob Your Own" p.10

Issue 41 "This is Salford Calling" p.12 all 1990. 

 

Their campaign against the Criminal Justice Act as the "Salford Firm" is reported in issue 66 'The Firm' (1995). There is also an article "Salford Calling" in the Class War book "Decade of Disorder" (London: Verso, 1991, 62-3) and some online analysis by Class War founder Ian Bone here.  

 

Unfortunately I don't have any pdfs of the Class War articles. The main resource in the UK for cataloging anarchist material, LibCom, has always taken a determined sectarian position of holding as little Class War material as possible, except for that on the groups attempted dissolution in 1997. If anyone is aware of where pdfs of the above may exist, please let me know and I will publish them here. 

 

Looking back through some of the articles about Salford, the main issue which stands out is the feeling that Salford was changing, but paradoxically not changing with or for the people who lived there. Resentment at the Salford Quays development ran high. The BBC and other corporate entities is perhaps the first thing people now think of when they hear the word 'Salford'. The life, and death, of Paul Massey is a reminder that another Salford has always existed. 

Unwelcome Political Artithmetic

From Frank Field's letter today in The Times about the Labour leadership contest, where he defends endorsing Jeremy Corbyn's nomination:

"The other candidates have shied away from confronting the brutal political arithmetic that no government in recent times has been able to raise more than 37-38 per cent of GDP in taxation for more than a single year, and yet these governments spend at least 40 per cent of GDP fulfilling promises made to the electorate".